Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  When they left Boston on 5 February the entire management of their hotel was in the lobby to see them off, and twenty-five men who just happened to be there also insisted on shaking their hands. Even so, Boston was more pleasure than pain, and it remained his favourite city. In Worcester, Springfield and Hartford they were again greeted with rapture, and at Hartford Dickens again raised the matter of international copyright. The dinner guests said nothing, but the local paper took the view that he should be pleased with his popularity and grateful for it too, and that it was mercenary to fuss about pirated copies. Much of the American press followed suit.

  Catherine continued to have trouble with a swollen face, while managing to impress everyone with her straightforward and friendly disposition, but both were finding the demands of celebrity exhausting. They were obliged to spend two hours each day shaking hands with the hundreds who flocked to them wherever they were, determined not to miss their chance to meet the famous visitors. Dickens made up his mind to accept no more invitations after those already agreed for New York, although this was easier said than done. His good friend Felton came from Boston to travel with them by boat to New York, offering him just the sort of companionship he enjoyed. On the way he and Catherine were agreeably serenaded by the Yale students at New Haven, but also obliged to shake hands with another 500 strangers.

  New York was preparing an extravaganza, a ‘Boz Ball’, for which 5,000 people had applied for tickets and 3,000 succeeded in obtaining them. It took place the day after their arrival, on the evening of 14 February, in the Park Theater, with its stage enlarged and turned into a ballroom decorated with medallions showing characters from Dickens’s novels, and lit with hundreds of gaslights. When all the guests were assembled, Dickens appeared on the arm of a general in full-dress uniform, as the band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’, followed by Catherine on the arm of the Mayor. They were cheered as they made a grand march twice round the ballroom. Actors then presented a series of tableaux from the novels, after which food was served. Dickens sent Maclise the Bill of Fare, which included 50,000 oysters, 10,000 sandwiches, 40 hams, 50 jellied turkeys, 12 Floating Swans, 350 quarts of jelly and blanc mange, and 300 quarts of ice cream. Then there was dancing: ‘Heaven knows how we did it, for there was no room. And we continued dancing until, being no longer able even to stand, we slipped away quietly,’ he told Forster. He was amused to read in a newspaper that he had never been in such society in England as he now enjoyed in New York.14

  Four days later came the New York Dickens Dinner, at which Washington Irving spoke in his praise, and Dickens announced that he would accept no more invitations to public dinners or receptions, but would travel privately from now on. He also raised once more the subject of international copyright, and although there was support for what he said in the New York Tribune, the rest of the press remained hostile. He complained that he got little encouragement from American writers, although he did persuade twenty-five of them, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress. During the weeks they stayed in New York they saw Irving almost daily and made many visits to the theatre; and Dickens was led happily into a great many oyster cellars by Felton, who had a passion for them. He also made his rounds of the Lunatic Asylum, prisons, almshouses, police stations and notorious rough districts, all carefully written up in his notes: but whereas he had admired the institutions in Boston, in New York he found most of them to be ill-managed, dismal or intolerable.15 By 24 February he booked their return passage in June, by sailing ship this time, to avoid the horrors of their outward voyage on a steamer with its risk of fire. Both he and Catherine fell ill with sore throats and colds, and had to postpone their visit to Philadelphia, where he was to meet Edgar Allan Poe, who was a discerning admirer; Poe had sent him stories of his own, which impressed Dickens, and a favourable review of The Old Curiosity Shop.16 He and Poe had two long conversations and parted on friendly terms; but Dickens was now ‘sick and sore at heart’ at the harsh treatment he was being given in the press over the copyright question, with accusations of ingratitude and greed.17 From this point on he looked at America with an ever more disenchanted eye.

  Delays in Atlantic mail ships meant that until now there had been no word of the children, but on 14 March there was at last news from Osnaburgh Street, joyously read: Charley was attempting to write and Walter was weaned. Catherine had endured the long silence with perfect stoicism, and throughout the American trip she was at her very best, not only uncomplaining but always cheerful, charming and a good companion to her husband. Being his ally among strangers, with no children, friends, family or work to distract him, clearly changed the balance between them. Still more important, the simple fact of not being pregnant allowed her to be herself and to enjoy herself. The freedom from pregnancy is so striking that it raises the question as to whether it was chance (in which case, a chance that was never repeated), or a temporary after-effect of the surgery Dickens had undergone, or even whether they had a pact during the trip that they would avoid the possibility of her becoming pregnant. The affectionate delicacy of self-imposed abstinence by her husband could have pleased her more than satisfying his sexual needs. And he saw her in a better light too. He told Mitton later that she had ‘proved herself an out and outer to travel’ and even when he mocked her to Forster for her propensity to fall over and bruise herself or scrape skin off her legs, he added, ‘she really has … made a most admirable traveller in every respect. She has never screamed or expressed alarm … has never given way to despondency or fatigue … has always accommodated herself, well and cheerfully, to everything; and has pleased me very much, and proved herself perfectly game.’18 This is certainly one of the warmest testimonials Dickens ever wrote about Catherine. Even so, the tone is more what you might expect of a headmaster than a loving husband.

  Neither of them had experienced anything like the way they were living now. For the first time since she had known him he was not under the pressure of one or several deadlines, forced regularly to his desk to produce a chapter or several chapters, to go through proofs, to deal with publishers and illustrators. He was not even thinking about a book. Nor did he have any of his friends to go out with, dining, walking, looking in on a club, drinking, theatre-going, taking night-time rambles through the streets, out till all hours. For the only time in their marriage Charles and Catherine were a couple facing the world with only the other to rely on, apart from the discreet services of maid and secretary. It may be that Catherine was able to be her best self only when the pressure of his all too distracting and absorbing work and masculine social life was removed and she felt she had a significant personal role in his life. She was twenty-seven that May, and she asked Fred Dickens to drink her health on her birthday, 19 May, in a letter written in April, signed ‘Your truly attached sister KATE’.19 Her birthday is not one that gets celebrated, or mentioned, elsewhere.

  In Washington, Dickens had the bad luck to find a president who had not been elected but only taken over from the vice-presidency after the death of President Harrison a month into office in 1841. John Tyler was the tenth to hold the office, an undistinguished Virginian senator, now known as ‘His Accidency’ in political circles and backed by no party.20 He received Dickens in a private audience, commented on his youthful appearance, and Dickens thought of returning the compliment, ‘but he looked so jaded, that it stuck in my throat’.21 The President was fifty-one, Dickens made a note of his gentlemanly manners and found he had nothing of interest to say or ask, and when an invitation to dinner at the White House arrived a few days later, Dickens declined on the grounds that he was leaving Washington before the date proposed. It is hard to imagine a modern writer snubbing the President of the United States in this way.

  He was not much more impressed by what he heard at the Senate and the House of Representatives, ‘no worse than ours, and no better’ – faint praise from him.22 But he sent a polite account to his Boston friend, Sumner, describing Senat
or Henry Clay as ‘a fine fellow, who has won my heart’, not surprisingly, over the international copyright question. Still, ‘I have seen no place, yet, that I like so well as Boston … We are now in the regions of slavery, spittoons, and senators – all three are evils in all countries.’23 He found the habit of spitting out gobs of chewed tobacco on the floor, common with American men, ‘the most sickening, beastly, and abominable custom that ever civilization saw’, and his descriptions of the results, seen everywhere on floors, stairs and carpets, are so vivid and disgusting that even reading them induces nausea.

  There was worse. Going into slave-owning states so upset him for its blatant inhumanity that he decided to turn back after a short stay in Richmond, Virginia. From Baltimore he sent a great batch of letters to England on 22 March, to Maclise, Macready, Rogers, Talfourd, Fonblanque, Lady Holland, Lord Jeffrey, Mitton, brother Fred thanking him for his ‘affectionate care of our dear darlings’ and of course to Forster. It was at this point that he confessed, ‘I don’t like the country. I would not live here, on any consideration. It goes against the grain with me. It would with you. I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here, and be happy.’24 Forster received what was effectively a running journal, written every few days; he knew that Dickens intended to use his letters as a basis for the book he planned to write and so kept them carefully. They were full of description and detail, and also intimate and affectionate; for example he sometimes wondered what Forster was doing (‘perhaps you dine at the Crown-and-sceptre to-day, for it’s Easter Monday – who knows! I wish you drank punch, dear Forster …’). He assured him that he constantly carried the pocket Shakespeare his friend had given him, ‘an unspeakable source of delight that book is to me!’, and said how much he regretted their old quarrels: ‘Every little hasty word that has ever passed between us, rose up before me like a reproachful ghost … I seem to look back upon any miserable small interruption of our affectionate intercourse … with a sort of pity for myself as if I were another creature.’25 Towards the end of the trip he wrote, ‘I don’t seem to have been half affectionate enough, but there are thoughts, you know, that lie too deep for words.’26

  Late March and April saw them travelling along the Pennsylvania Canal through the Allegheny Mountains. He had much to say about the ‘follies, vices, grievous disappointments’ of America.27 After a brief stop at Pittsburgh, a place of glass and gas works, foundries and heavy clouds of smoke, they spent five days in Cincinnati, ‘a very beautiful city: I think the prettiest place I have seen here, except Boston. It has risen out of the forest like an Arabian-night city; is well laid out; ornamented in the suburbs with pretty villas … has smooth turf-plots and well kept gardens.’ There were drawbacks, for instance a temperance festival in progress, naturally disapproved of by Dickens, and a party given by a judge who introduced him ‘to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly … I really think my face has acquired a fixed expression of sadness from the constant and unmitigated boring I endure.’28 Each day it was getting harder for him to find anything to admire or enjoy in America. At least in Pittsburgh Dickens had an ‘extraordinary success in magnetizing Kate’, first into hysterics and then sleep, proudly reported to both Macready and Forster, who were told he intended to continue to treat her.

  They proceeded to St Louis along the Mississippi, ‘the beastliest river in the world’.29 In mid-April, Dickens made a dash into the prairie (‘I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie – go to Salisbury plain’) before they turned north again, hiring a private coach to take them from Cincinnati to Lake Erie. The only road was a ‘corduroy road’, made of logs, so rough that to the four of them inside the coach it felt like ‘going up a steep flight of stairs in an omnibus. Now the coach flung us in a heap on its floor, and now crushed our heads against its roof … Still, the day was beautiful, the air delicious, and we were alone: with no tobacco spittle, or eternal prosy conversation about dollars and politics … to bore us. We really enjoyed it …’30 They picnicked in the open air and slept in bug-infested log-houses. The scale of the journey they were making is astonishing, and their resilience admirable as they went on through wild terrain. Dickens complained, in one of his grand generalizations, that the country people in Ohio were ‘invariably morose, sullen, clownish, and repulsive … destitute of humour, vivacity, or the capacity of enjoyment’, and that ‘I have not heard a hearty laugh these six weeks, except my own.’ By contrast, he was moved by the plight of the native people, known to him as the Wyandot Indians, the last tribe remaining in Ohio, who were in the process of being persuaded to move west, away from their own territory, on to land provided for them by a ‘treaty’. He thought them ‘a fine people, but degraded and broken down’.31 And they reminded him of home, because they looked like the gypsies he had often seen at English race courses.

  Arrived at Lake Erie, they took a steamship to Buffalo, where they found letters from home – ‘oh! who or what can say with how much pleasure and unspeakable delight!’32 Not only was there good news of the children, Forster had sent a letter signed by twelve British authors about international copyright, which Dickens had requested and which he immediately had copied by Putnam and forwarded to newspapers in Boston, New York and Washington. But although they were widely reprinted, and even found some support, they changed nothing, and international copyright was not sorted out until 1891, long after his death.

  Canada lay ahead, but before that came Niagara Falls, where they stayed for ten days, until 4 May. Dickens responded to Niagara with intense emotion and was aroused to religious utterance: ‘It would be hard for a man to stand nearer to God than he does there.’ Dickens disliked and mocked displays of piety, but he maintained a reverential attitude towards the idea of God throughout his life. The sight of the great Falls led him to wish that Forster and Maclise had been with him to share ‘the sensations of this time’, and having mentioned God he was moved to think of death, and went on, ‘what would I give if the dear girl whose ashes lie in Kensal-green, had lived to come so far along with us – but she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from my earthly sight.’33 Whether the Mary Hogarth who inhabited his imagination bore much relation to the real girl he had known, she remained a symbol he needed to hold on to, of the flawless and unattainable beloved. Did he actually believe her spirit wandered the world visiting selected beauty spots? It seems unlikely, any more than that he believed what he wrote by way of farewell to an American friend: ‘Who that has ever reflected on the enormous and vast amount of leave-taking there is in this Life, can ever have doubted the existence of another!’34 Precise and practical in doing good in his life, Dickens sometimes allowed himself to wander into feeble fancies when he approached spiritual matters.

  In Canada they stopped briefly in Toronto – ‘the wild and rabid toryism … is … appalling’ – and took steamboats down the St Lawrence River to Montreal and Quebec, passing great lumber rafts and noticing that the French population was characterized by red sashes on the boys and wide straw hats on the labouring women.35 In Montreal he and Catherine joined in theatricals with the local British regimental officers and their wives; he threw himself enthusiastically into stage managing and acting, and she acted her part in the farce ‘devilish well, I assure you’.36

  All that remained was a last few days in New York, and a trip up the Hudson to see the Shakers, before they left America on 7 June. They were overjoyed at the prospect of getting home. After the miseries of the steamer on the way out, the George Washington, tall-masted and white-winged, carried them gallantly back to Liverpool in twenty-two days. Dickens entertained himself and fellow passengers by playing his accordion and organizing an all-male club whose members dined separately and dressed up as doctors, pretending to cure anyone who volunteered to be a patient.37 They reached Liverpool on 29 June, and were in London that night.

  They went first to the children. Charley told his mother that the reunio
n made him ‘too glad’, and he became ill, falling into convulsions so alarming that two doctors, one of them Elliotson, had to be summoned to attend to him during the night. He recovered and was none the worse for it, and the whole family was back in Devonshire Terrace on the last day of June. They had acquired a new member: fifteen-year-old Georgina, another Hogarth sister, blue-eyed, pretty, bright and scarcely out of the schoolroom. She was to have no further education but would join in caring for the Dickens children, rewarded by sharing in the life of the household, with its many pleasures and holidays. She idolized her brother-in-law, while he was delighted to have ‘two pairs of petticoats’ to go about with and made her his pet. No one could have guessed in 1842 the part she would play sixteen years later in the domestic life of her sister and brother-in-law.

  Emotional reunions with Macready and Forster followed, and Forster organized a dinner at Greenwich to celebrate Dickens’s return, for which he gathered twenty men. Edwin Landseer suggested they might have another welcoming dinner, ‘with this difference – we will take some Women with us’, but it did not materialize.38 Dickens was already at work on his account of his travels, using his own letters claimed back from friends. He wrote fast: Forster gave a reading of the chapter about the outward crossing at a dinner on 19 July. In the same month Dickens also published a circular addressed to ‘British Authors and Journals’ about the copyright situation, stating his resolution to enter into no further negotiations of any kind with American publishers as long as there was no international copyright agreement, and to forgo any profits, a decision he stuck to for ten years.39