Dickens
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The notion of leaving something unfinished distressed him. At Gad’s Hill, at the beginning of May, he attended to two necessary tasks, the first to convince his doctors to sanction his redeeming “in a careful and moderate way, some of the reading engagements, to which he had been pledged before those threatenings of brain-mischief in the North of England.” He felt an obligation to the Chappells and to himself, partly professional, partly financial. Since he did seem to feel perfectly well, Watson gave in. The readings were scheduled for early in the new year.47 The second was to write his will. If this too were only cautionary, it may have arisen from a new awareness that he could not afford any longer to be unprepared and unprotected. Having locked into his desk drawer at the office an “Important Memorandum,” he now sent for it. On May 12, 1869, he signed and had witnessed the will that he had composed himself, with Ouvry’s assistance. The initial provision gave “the sum of £1000 free of legacy duty to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square.” That it came first suggests that he was playing his obsessive game of revealment and concealment, pursuer and pursued. The bequest’s prominent position made a bold public announcement about her importance to him. But, though the amount was sufficiently large to force additional notice, it was not large enough to make the statement complete and unmistakable. More likely than not, Ellen’s finances had already been provided for, including her ownership of the lease at Houghton Place, which produced an income of about three hundred pounds a year. It is inconceivable that he would have left her without reasonable financial security.
The remaining provisions were unexceptional. To his unmarried daughter he also left one thousand pounds and an annuity of three hundred pounds, separate from her share in the division of his estate. To Georgina he left eight thousand pounds, his personal effects, and his papers. To Charley he gave his library, and, a year later, in a codicil, his interest in All the Year Round. Also to Charley and to Henry, living in the London area and in regular touch with their mother, he left a total of sixteen thousand pounds, the income from which was to be used to support “my wife during her life,” the money thereafter to revert to all his children. The remainder, and by far the bulk, of his real and personal estate, including his copyrights, were to be divided equally among his children, probably producing for each a legacy of about six to eight thousand pounds. To his “dear and trusty friend” John Forster he bequeathed his favorite watch and all the “manuscripts of my published works as may be in my possession at the time of my decease.” Georgina and Forster were to be executors and guardians of the underage children. Dickens solemnly urged his “dear children to remember how much they owe to the said Georgina Hogarth, and never to be wanting in grateful and affectionate attachment to her … their ever-useful self-denying and devoted friend. AND I DESIRE here simply to record the fact that my wife, since our separation by consent, has been in the receipt from me of an annual income of £600, while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family have devolved wholly upon myself. I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.”48
During the unusually rainy summer of 1869, he went about his tasks and his pleasures with no more self-pity or sense of imminent danger than the will expresses. His major work was to rest while also fulfilling his responsibilities to All the Year Round. “I am really all right,” he assured Wills in early May. The danger had been only topical, the railways again. He had not even really been ill to begin with. He had only “begun suddenly to be so shaken by constant Express travelling, that I might very easily have been ill. Said the Doctors: ‘take warning, stop instantly.’ I made the plunge, and became, please God, well.” He was grateful to the doctors for their insistence, and, fortunately, “rest and a little care immediately unshook the railway shaking.” In late May and June, the Fieldses and Annie’s friend Mabel Lowell visited. Entertaining them at Gad’s Hill and in London, staying at a hotel in Piccadilly, with Mamie and Georgina, in order to facilitate their day excursions and night prowling to slums and police stations, he went with Fields to visit a dockside opium den, where curls of hallucinatory smoke rose from long-stemmed pipes into his imagination for later use. One of their theatre visits had to be canceled because one of the ladies was “knocked up” and “destroyed our evening.” They went to Canterbury, evoking the experiences that had been fictionalized in David Copperfield. Ellen came to visit at Gad’s Hill, where probably she met the Fieldses. When Katie, who came soon after, heard that Ellen had participated in a game of cricket, she derisively remarked, “I am afraid she did not play the game!”49 In early June, he stayed overnight at Lord John Russell’s, an odd personalization of his cordial but distant relationship with an elderly great leader from the past.
But Dickens was more visited than visiting. Gad’s Hill was comfortable, “immensely improved,” with its blaze of red geraniums and neatly cut lawns. He had in mind a further improvement, a glass conservatory extension to the dining room. With the purchase of an additional small piece of land, he now owned about twenty acres. Except for his visits with Ellen and brief excursions, he thought it best to stay put. With well-intentioned imperception, he had for months been attempting to mediate a separation agreement between Frances Dickinson Elliot and her husband. The process soon became a benign version of his own. Insufficiently self-aware and conveniently forgetful, he told her that “your repudiating your marriage on the one hand, and requiring that the Dean shall live with you at such and such times to keep up appearances on the other” is a “monstrous absurdity.” When the inevitable “miserable complications arose,” he finally begged off, “painfully reminded of the caution given me by the Doctors to add nothing, this summer and autumn, to the pressures of my own affairs.” Thomas Trollope urged him to visit Italy in the fall. No, he replied, “there is no chance of my being able to quit England this year.” When Ellen’s brother-in-law reminded him that a new year was coming, he responded, “Walk across the Alps? Lord Bless you, I am ‘going’ to take up my alpenstock and cross all the Passes, and I am ‘going’ to Italy; I am also ‘going’ up the Nile to the Second Cataract, and I am ‘going’ to Jerusalem, and to India, and likewise to Australia. My only dimness of perception in this wise is that I don’t know when. If I did but know when, I should be so wonderfully clear about it all.”50
During the summer he appeared to an American visitor to be “physically (as well as mentally) … immensely strong, having quite regained his health and strength.” In June, he wrote his brief article for the Atlantic Monthly in praise of his favorite actor, in preparation for Fechter’s American tour. In July, the news of Henry’s scholarship of fifty pounds at Cambridge gave him the longed-for opportunity to boast. “The bigwigs expect him to do a good deal there.” In late August, he gave a lengthy toast at the banquet for the Oxford and Harvard crews at the Crystal Palace, a celebrity having been persuaded to attend a celebrity event honoring the English-American alliance. In September, prevailed upon by his friend Arthur Ryland, he addressed the Birmingham and Midland Institute, of which he had been elected president for the next year. Though he entertained “the heretical belief” that “our own country … is an over-talked one,” he could not resist lauding education and denying that the age was materialistic. “The one serviceable, safe, certain, remunerative, attainable quality in every study and in every pursuit is the quality of attention. My own invention or imagination, such as it is … would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention.”
Before the end of the summer, he was at work on a new novel, at least to the extent of making publication arrangements and determining on that most necessary of all preconditions, a title tha
t he liked. After some initial hesitation, he decided not to publish it as a serial in All the Year Round but in twelve monthly numbers to be sold for a shilling each, the first to appear on March 31, 1870. Publishing in twelve monthly numbers would have the advantage of breathing room between each without the disadvantages of the length of twenty monthly numbers or the pressure of weekly serial publication. Chapman and Hall agreed to pay over eight thousand pounds for half the profits.51 His painstaking creative habits of “toiling, drudging attention” were called upon once more.
Eager to get ahead before starting his London readings, he wrote the first two numbers of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the late summer and early fall. Rummaging through his notebook, he found usable ideas, names, and character sketches. The notion of two young people having been separated for many years after having been pledged to be married had been jotted down as early as 1861, perhaps in 1857. By mid-October 1869, he was well into “the preliminary agonies” of working out the characters, situations, and events of the novel. The central plot had become less the problem of betrothed nonlovers than the relationship between the main character, John Jasper, the organist at a cathedral like Rochester’s, his ward, Rosa Bud, and his nephew, Edwin Drood. The obsessive, addictive passions of Jasper’s imagination and heart dominate the novel. It is a loving and creative heart. Also it is a grotesquely damaged, perversely destructive heart. For Dickens, writing in the detective mode, fascinated by pursued and pursuer, the plot was crucial. Jasper’s nephew, the betrothed of his ward, whom Jasper loves, disappears under circumstances that suggest that his uncle may have murdered him. Whether he is actually dead or not, though, is unclear.
If John Jasper has murdered or attempted to murder Edwin, under what circumstances has he done so? In addition to being an artist-musician, he is both a mesmerist and an opium smoker. In the first scene, the “Ancient Cathedral Town” of the novelist’s Kentish childhood is invoked from the curling smoke of Jasper’s hallucinating imagination as he puffs an opium pipe in a version of the den that he and Fields had visited. In its special way, Drood is as autobiographical as David Copperfield, set in a dark Kentish landscape, with shadows of death, with Dickens dramatizing aspects of himself. Taking place in sight and under the spell of the “massive grey square tower” of his childhood, the novel begins in the waning of the year, in the “drowsy city” of Cloisterham, at a time when he was young, and resonates with the autumnal tone of his premature old age. What roles would mesmerism, opium addiction, and the mysterious characters introduced early in the novel play in the development of the story? He seems to have told no one the full plot. To Charles Collins, who at his own request did the design for the overall cover, he told only what was necessary. When Collins, in ill health, was replaced by a young man, Luke Fildes, who “promises admirably” and whom Dickens liked, he told him no more than he needed to know.52
By late autumn Dickens felt ill again. The London farewells were scheduled to begin in early January 1870. In mid-December, heavy snowstorms through much of England gave an accurate foretaste of what was to be a “very long, dark, and bitter winter.” Fortunately, he had finished the first two numbers by late November, and told the printer that he wished he “could set up the whole of the book before we begin! But if I get nearly half of it ready by that time, I shall be more than satisfied.” To his shock, just before Christmas the printer told him that they were, “altogether, twelve printed pages too short!!!” He had to transpose and rewrite immediately at a time when he had turned from the book to preparing the readings.
At Christmas, he was not in good spirits. He wrote his usual end-of-the-year letters, assuring the aged Macready that “it needs not Christmas time to bring the thought of you and of our loving and close friendship round to my heart, for it is always there.” He indulged both of them in the fantasy that in the summer they would sit together in the new conservatory. It was finished in January, “a brilliant success—but an expensive one!” There was now the likelihood that Henry’s scholarship would become a fellowship, though his father had “learned to moderate” his “transports as to hopeful children.”
Reminded by the presence of a grandchild that he was something as deleterious as a grandfather, Dickens felt it particularly inopportune that his foot had become painfully lame again. Probably he worried that the inflammation would affect his readings. One evening, because “he had been ailing very much and greatly troubled with his leg,” he lay on the sofa while his guests were playing “The Memory Game.” Soon he joined in. “After many turns,” he “successfully [went] through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand.’”53
Having decided that it would be best to be in town to supervise Drood’s inauguration, he moved, at the beginning of the new year, into 5 Hyde Park Place, near Marble Arch, renting the large, comfortable house until the end of May 1870 from a well-connected acquaintance, Milner Gibson. Mary was delighted to be in London, close to Katie. The sisters plunged themselves and pulled their father, who needed some tugging, into a bustling social season. At dinner at the home of Arthur Stanley, the dean of Westminster Cathedral, he again told the story of Lincoln’s anticipation of his death. In early January, he went to Birmingham to distribute the prizes at the institute before a huge audience. The next day, with one of his sons, he visited “some of the large factories.… As we walked through the crowded rooms, perspiring, smoke-begrimed workmen kept” asking Henry, “‘Is that Charles Dickens—is that Charles Dickens?’” The effort, particularly the railway trip, tired him.
A few days later he began the series of twelve final readings to overflow audiences at St. James’s Hall. Though he regretted interfering with his writing schedule, he felt that he could read once or twice a week and still continue at his desk. Later in the month, he fulfilled a commitment postponed from the previous year to give a special morning reading of the murder of Nancy for professional actors and actresses. Ellen, who was present and still referred to as “the patient,” sent her regards to Wills, too much an invalid now to attend. Dickens’ ordinary pulse of 72 rose to 112 at the end of the reading. It was madness, he recognized, “to do it continuously.” Watching, waiting, Frank Beard had begun attending every performance. One night Dickens “found it impossible to say Pickwick, and called him Picksnick, and Picnic, and Peckwicks and all sorts of names except the right,” giving “a comical glance of surprise” at his family and friends occupying their usual front seats. He treated it lightly afterward. “If he attributed it to any special cause at all, [he] referred it, as he referred the disordered vision, to the effects of medicine he was taking.” Beard had workmen erect steps at the side of the platform. He told Charley that “you must be there every night, and if you see your father falter in the least, you must run up and catch him and bring him off with me, or, by Heaven, he’ll die before them all.”54
By late February, there were “only three more readings now!” “Charles is quite well, thank God!” Georgina told Annie Fields. Though eager to have the readings over, he was saddened by the notion that soon they would be over forever. “There is always something sad about—‘the last’—of anything.” He invariably found it difficult to say good-bye, as if it were bad luck. He told Georgina, though, that he would also “feel the absence of the money made by the Readings.” The small world around him quietly provided comment on his past and present. George Hogarth, his once-upon-a-time friend and father-in-law, died in February. Probably Georgina visited her sister, both in mourning. Mary and Katie visited their mother, who, on one of the only two occasions in which she ever referred to her husband in Katie’s presence, asked, “looking towards his photograph … ‘Do you think he is sorry for me?’”55
With the last reading scheduled for mid-March, Dickens was looking forward to rest and quiet. With the first number of Drood to appear March 31, he pleasantly anticipated reestablishing his old role with his audience. On March 15, 1870, tired, sad, his left foot in
pain, the exhausted Prospero made his dreaded final appearance on the platform. He read A Christmas Carol and the trial scene from Pickwick. Against expectations, finding the energy to make one last effort, he read with verve and brilliance. The applause was overwhelming, and seemed to go on and on and on. Finally, it was quiet again. In the absolutely silent hall he confessed how he closed “this episode in my life with feelings of considerable pain. For some fifteen years, in this hall and in many kindred places, I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for your recognition; and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction which, perhaps, is given to few men to know.… In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings, at which my assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.” He walked slowly from the platform into the wings, as if in deep mourning. Tumultuous applause and handkerchief waving brought him back one last time. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He kissed his hand to his friends, good-bye.56
Before leaving the public stage forever, he appeared briefly on the most sacred private stage of Victorian culture. Arthur Helps, a minor writer, upper-level civil servant, the queen’s adviser, and Dickens’ friend, manipulated an introduction that resulted in Victoria inviting the star performer of her age to a private audience. “They had known one another, though they had never met, for a long time.” She had happily attended a private performance of The Frozen Deep in 1857, though she may not have fully understood his refusal to be introduced to her then. He now pressed Helps to repeat the explanation. In 1863 she had purchased for her private library Thackeray’s presentation copy of A Christmas Carol. In February 1870, Helps encouraged Dickens to send her the Civil War photographs he had brought back with him in 1868. In return, she sent him photographs of herself. Somewhat amused and impressed by the honor, he accepted an invitation to appear at Buckingham Palace on March 9, joking that “we will have of ‘Gad’s Hill Place’ attached to the title of Baronetcy, please—on account of the divine William and Falstaff.” Apparently, though, he did not want a title or was ambivalent enough to disguise his feelings. Whether one was offered is unclear. When rumors persisted, he remarked that “I am going to be nothing but what I am.” Helps prepared the queen for the visit. “His Christian name is Charles.… One of his best works is David Copperfield; and it is supposed that it gives a … narrative of the author’s early life. Your Majesty might naturally say that Your Majesty’s many cares and duties have prevented your reading all the works of your most eminent authors, and might, playfully, ask Mr. Dickens’s advice whether David Copperfield would be the work of his which he would wish your Majesty to read next … and might ask him whether he would read to her at Windsor.”