Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  It was the least popular of his books at the time, and has remained so. Trying his hand at a historical novel, where Scott had been supreme and his friend Ainsworth successful, he was not on his own territory. The two most striking and memorable features of the story are Barnaby himself, the simple-minded hero with a pet raven, who wanders innocently through the mysteries of the plot; and the description of the Gordon Riots of 1780, when the London mob opened prisons, set fire to many buildings and caused mayhem. But the book is far too long for what it does, the villains are cardboard, the young women insipid, the plotting absurd, and Lord George Gordon himself barely characterized. Dickens moves into crude melodrama, as when Barnaby’s father, the murderous Rudge, addresses himself with rhetorical questions, ‘Do I fancy that I killed him? … Did I go home when I had done? … Did I stand before my wife, and tell her? … Did she go down upon her knees, and call on Heaven to witness that she and her unborn child renounced me from that hour …?’20 Even Forster could not summon enthusiasm, and one reviewer wrote sadly of the ‘man of genius winding himself up like a three years’ clock’.21

  Dickens knew he had to keep winding himself up to meet his obligations to Chapman & Hall. He owed them money, and his family was growing – a second son, Walter, was born the day after his own twenty-ninth birthday, on 8 February 1841. His habits were expensive, and Lord Jeffrey, visiting him in London in April, remarked on his giving ‘rather too sumptuous a dinner for a man with a family, and only beginning to be rich’.22 His brother Alfred could not get work, and Dickens was trying to find him a position in New Zealand. Their father was behaving outrageously, forging his signature on bills, which sometimes turned up at Chapman & Hall’s offices as well as Devonshire Terrace. In March, enraged by this behaviour, Dickens put a notice in the London newspapers, disclaiming responsibility for promissory notes and saying he would not discharge any debts but his own and his wife’s. He also did his best to persuade his father to move abroad, offering him a pension for himself, school fees for Augustus and an extra £40 a year for his mother should she wish to remain in England; but John Dickens refused to go.

  In May, Dickens was invited to stand for parliament as the second Liberal candidate for Reading, where Talfourd was already an MP. He would have to pay his own expenses, it was expected that the Conservatives would win, and Talfourd had already decided not to stand; not surprisingly Dickens, though flattered by being asked, turned down the request. Still more flattering was the invitation to travel to Scotland to receive the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh in June. He left an unseasonably cold London to travel north with Catherine, to a warm and enthusiastic welcome. Crowds gathered round their hotel, and over 250 gentlemen attended the public dinner in his honour; the ladies were allowed into a gallery for the speeches after the meal. John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy and formidable chief critic of Blackwood’s under the name of Christopher North, praised his originality, compared him with Defoe and Fielding, and shrewdly pointed out as his one failure his inability to create women characters. Dickens replied gracefully, speaking of Little Nell – unmentioned by North – and saying that his intention had been to soften grief and ‘put a garland of fresh flowers’ on the subject of death. Speeches and toasts went on until midnight, Dickens speaking twice more. He kept Forster informed of the Edinburgh festivities and wished he were sharing in them; and he had to ask his publishers to send him a banknote for £50 to cover his expenses. Then, guided by their friend Angus Fletcher, the Scottish sculptor, he and Catherine set off on a short coach tour of the Highlands. The rain poured down, the winds blew, the cold was intense, the inns offered only beds of straw, and they narrowly missed being drowned fording a swollen river; and as they travelled, Dickens got on steadily with the next number of Barnaby Rudge.

  Meanwhile in London an enterprising team had already dramatized Barnaby, although it was only half written, and put it on stage at the Lyceum, with the name part played by a young actress named Julia Fortescue. She was something of a hit. Maclise found her ‘transcendent’ and wrote to Dickens about her. Both had seen her in small parts in earlier adaptations of his novels, and Maclise teased him about his supposed interest in ‘the wild attractions of her legs’, her charm and beauty, her small waist, ‘woman bust’ and perfectly modulated voice. She played with such vivacity that Macready also went to see her, invited her to join his company at Drury Lane and rehearsed her in Shakespearean parts, including Juliet. He was disappointed in her progress, perhaps because she did not give her undivided attention to rehearsals. She had acquired a titled, and married, lover, Lord Gardner, Lord of the Bedchamber to the Queen and a favourite at court, and Julia was soon to bear him the first of five children. Macready did not allow her to play Juliet, and her professional career suffered from her personal situation, but several years later, in 1845 and again in 1848, she acted with Dickens’s amateurs. He knew her well and was aware of her equivocal position, and how she was obliged to be secretive about it.23

  Dickens and Maclise joked about women, and Maclise as a bachelor got plenty of teasing for his susceptibility and love-affairs. That August, when Dickens was at Broadstairs and Maclise was unwell in London, he urged him to come down for the good of his health and enjoy six weeks of sea air and rest, telling him he could eat and drink as he liked, get up when he liked and go to bed when he liked, and that, ‘There are conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live.’24 The conveniences are prostitutes, and Dickens is telling Maclise he has located them in nearby Margate. It doesn’t sound like a joke. Did Dickens go out and look for the Margate prostitutes simply to find out where they were for Maclise’s sake? Or because he took an interest in seeing them and talking to them, for whatever mixture of reasons? Was he thinking of using their services himself? He had a reason for not wanting Catherine to become pregnant, in that he was planning a trip to America and a new pregnancy might prevent her going with him. His letter to Maclise continues ‘in serious and sober earnestness’ to urge him to come to Broadstairs, but whether Maclise did, and whether they went to Margate together, naturally remains unknown.

  Dickens was unwell. He had been suffering from bilious attacks lasting for several days, and severe indigestion. He was also worried about his professional future, fearing that he was burning himself out and making himself too cheap. He knew that he had to have a break, but how was it to be financed? In London in late August for a meeting with Chapman & Hall, he persuaded Forster, who was their literary adviser as well as his personal agent, to present a further plan to them, by which they would pay him to do nothing for a year and then he would start to write a long novel in November 1842. He would be paid for each monthly instalment, get three quarters of the profits and retain half the copyright. Master Humphrey’s Clock would be closed down when Barnaby came to an end. However taken aback the publishers were by this suggestion, they agreed to it. As Robert Patten puts it, the agreement made between Dickens and Forster and Chapman & Hall was ‘a bold bet on one man’s future creativity’.25 Dickens then raised the question of his wish to visit America, which they declared themselves happy about. He told Forster he had made up his mind to go. He persuaded Catherine to go with him and was persuaded by Macready not to think of taking the children; and the Macreadys offered to keep a close watch on them during their parents’ absence. Now Devonshire Terrace had to be let and a smaller house near the Macreadys found for the children, their nursemaids and Fred, who would stay with them; and passages must be booked for Dickens, Catherine and her maid Anne.

  While all this was under way, Dickens became so ill that surgery became necessary and urgent. He was suffering from an anal fistula. The operation was carried out at home and, at that date, without anaesthetic.26 It was performed by a specialist surgeon, Frederick Salmon, on 8 October, with entire success. Macready called that evening and suffered sympathetic agonies with his friend. A few days later he brought Browning with him, and they found Dickens ‘going on very comfort
ably’. The next day he was dictating letters to Catherine.

  He was well set on the road to recovery, and intending to go to Windsor to convalesce as soon as he was allowed to travel, when news came of the sudden death of Catherine’s brother George Hogarth. It happened as unexpectedly as Mary Hogarth’s, and upset Dickens as much as Catherine, not because he knew George well but because he had been expecting to be buried beside Mary, and now felt he must give up that place to her brother. He was intensely distressed, told Forster that his love for Mary would never diminish, and that it felt like losing her for a second time.

  Still, he reached the last words of Barnaby on 5 November, standing up to write, and two days later he and Catherine were installed at the White Hart in Windsor. After an alarming day of pains and twitches in his back and calves and a visit to the surgeon, he was soon himself again, and they returned home. On 8 December he told Lord Jeffrey, ‘I am not at all tired with idleness … I have done nothing but walk, and lounge about, and read drowsily, all day long. – What do you think of my reading the Curiosity Shop, all through?’27 He was well enough to go and sit to the Count D’Orsay for a portrait drawing in the morning, but not to dine, ‘both because I want to hold on tight by my household Gods to the last, and on account of my health which I am afraid may suffer from too much dining’.28 Both The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge were published, each in one volume, on 15 December. There were clothes to be made for America, letters of credit to be obtained, maps to be studied, introductions to be provided, packing to be done. Then only Christmas to be got through before they said goodbye to children and friends and took the train for Liverpool, to embark on the thoroughly up-to-date Britannia, the first Cunard wooden paddle-steamer to be built.

  9

  Conquering America

  1842

  Dickens was going to America to give himself a mental shake as well as a holiday from the pressure of constant writing. He knew he could be certain of a warm reception – enthusiasm for his work among American readers ran high – and he was confident that he would be able to gather enough material from his travels to make a book. He went also intending to raise the question of international copyright and the pirating of his books in America, which deprived him of the income on which he as a writer depended, with the idea that a change in the law might be brought about: hearing of his proposed visit, Lea & Blanchard reissued all his work in twenty parts and boldly invited him to visit them in Philadelphia.1 But he had a more profound reason for making the long journey, and this was his desire to test out the hope that a better society was being established there, free of monarchy, aristocracy and worn-out conventions – to see ‘the Republic of my imagination’.2 The Americans, for their part, saw him specifically as ‘The Great Republican of the Literary World’, the English writer who was on their side, who believed in liberty and democracy, and who showed in his books that he cared about ordinary people and thought the poor more worthy of attention than the rich.3 They prepared to give him an ecstatic welcome, and at the time of his arrival the New York Herald wrote: ‘His mind is American – his soul is republican – his heart is democratic.’4

  The Britannia would take them to Boston, and from there they would progress to New York, Washington and Baltimore and into the South, then as far west as St Louis, north through Ohio, across Lake Erie to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and into Canada, before returning to New York for the return voyage in June. In all, they would be travelling more than 2,000 miles, sometimes through rough country, by railway, coach, canal and riverboat. It was a bold project. What he did not foresee was the American response to his fame, and how, after the first enjoyably triumphant week, the celebrity tour would become an irritating and exhausting ordeal, and pleasure would give way to resentment.

  In his determination to get away he had booked their crossing in midwinter. They were to leave on 4 January and the Britannia was expected to reach Boston in two weeks. Devonshire Terrace was let, and the children were moved the short distance to Osnaburgh Street, where three nurses and a governess were to look after them, and their uncle Fred would also keep a close eye on things; and each day they were to go to the Macreadys. Charley was about to be five, Mamie three, Katey two and baby Walter not yet one, all of them too young to understand that their parents were to be away for an unimaginably long period of half a year. Farewell embraces made, Dickens, Catherine and her maid Anne took the Liverpool train on 2 January, accompanied by Forster. They had arranged to spend two comfortable nights at the Adelphi Hotel, and a small group was assembling in Liverpool to make their goodbyes, including the sculptor Angus Fletcher and Fanny Burnett, Dickens’s sister, who came from Manchester. A preliminary visit of inspection to the Britannia dismayed Dickens when he saw the size of their stateroom. He complained that it was too small to admit their trunks, had bunk beds, and ‘When the door is open, you can’t turn round. When it’s shut you can’t put on a clean shirt, or take off a dirty one.’5 Catherine took a more cheerful view, and remained on board while Dickens returned to the Adelphi for a farewell banquet of turtle, cold punch, hock, claret and champagne, after which the whole party escorted Dickens back to the ship, boarding it and ‘indiscriminately shaking hands all around’ before they left, as another passenger noted drily, only Dickens himself remaining composed.6 Forster presented him with a pocket Shakespeare for his travels.

  The Atlantic crossing turned out to be one of the worst the ship’s officers had ever known. There were gales and high seas for much of the time, and it took eighteen days. Dickens and Catherine were both ill for most of the first week. On the tenth day the smokestack had to be lashed with chains to stop it being blown over and setting fire to the decks. All the lifeboats were smashed by the bad weather. Catherine wrote afterwards to her sister-in-law Fanny, ‘I was nearly distracted with terror and don’t know what I should have done had it not been for the great kindness and composure of my dear Charles.’7 She developed toothache and a swollen face, but gallantly joined in games of whist in which all the players had to keep their tricks in their pockets and found themselves flung from their seats and rolling out of the saloon doors as the ship bucketed and plunged. When they approached Halifax in Nova Scotia they ran aground, and had to wait for the rising tide to release them from the rocks. But once they had put in to the harbour Dickens went ashore for oysters and cheered up, and as the Britannia continued south he stood on deck in the clear, frosty air, looking out eagerly as the coast of America gradually came in sight.

  Boston, their first American city, seen under snow and in crisp, cold sunshine, delighted him, a place as bright and clean as a new toy, with its painted signboards in the streets, green blinds at every window, elegant white wooden houses, prim, varnished churches and chapels, and handsome public buildings. There were no beggars, and the city was run on admirable principles, with state-funded welfare institutions. Most of those who guided and befriended him were Harvard graduates, men of intellectual refinement and taste. Cornelius Felton, Professor of Greek, was firmly of the opinion that Dickens rivalled Shakespeare in his powers of invention, invited the Dickenses to dinner at once and became a friend for life. William H. Prescott, the historian, author of The Conquest of Mexico, gave another dinner for them. The poet Longfellow called, took Dickens out walking and found him ‘a glorious fellow’. Charles Sumner, a young radical republican who went on to lead the anti-slavery movement in the Senate, showed him round the city. Some Bostonians had reservations about their famous visitor, finding him ‘low-bred’ or touched by ‘rowdyism’ – their word for vulgarity – with his coloured waistcoats and long hair, but then succumbed to his charm and acknowledged how clever he was – ‘the cleverest man I ever met’ wrote the author and politician Richard Dana, a respected Boston writer.8

  A delegation from the ‘Young Men of Boston’, a group formed the previous November when his visit was announced, arrived at his hotel to invite him to a celebratory dinner on 1 February.9 At the dinner he was welcomed as Boz, w
ho could not be a stranger, and replied that he had dreamt for years of ‘setting foot upon this shore, and breathing this pure air’. He laid great stress on his message as a writer who took for his subject ‘the rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten, and too often misused’, and he said that letters from American readers about Nell, Oliver and Smike had encouraged him to come. After this he touched on the question of international copyright. This first time his remarks were politely ignored.10

  So far so good. He was able to spend a day visiting factories at nearby Lowell and was much impressed by what he saw, especially the well-educated girl mill-workers, and he wrote to Forster, ‘I have a book already.’11 He also visited the Asylum for the Blind, the House of Industry for the Indigent, the School for Neglected Boys, the Reformatory for Juvenile Offenders and the prison, or House of Correction for the State, and found them models of their kind. But it was not long before he and Catherine began to wilt under the requests for autographs and letters inviting them to visit every part of the country, the deputations, the cheering crowds that gathered when he went out in the afternoon, the ladies who tried to snip bits off his fur coat and asked for locks of his hair. They were obliged to shake hands with many hundreds of people. Painters wanted to paint him, sculptors to sculpt him. He found the hotel rooms ‘infernally hot’, and he missed his usual long walks and rides. ‘There never was a King or Emperor upon the Earth so cheered, and followed by crowds … and waited on by public bodies and deputations of all kinds.’12 America was gripped by hysteria. ‘People eat him here,’ wrote one sober Bostonian to his father in Washington.13 Dickens now sensibly took on a secretary, George Putnam, an aspiring painter of his own age, to help him deal with the situation, and he proved efficient and congenial enough to be kept on for the rest of the trip.