Forster was so impressed when he read The Chimes that he made a secret approach to Napier, editor of the Edinburgh Review, telling him that it was ‘in some essential points’ the best thing Dickens had yet written, and asking to review it anonymously before publication. Napier agreed, and Forster wrote a eulogy, saying that ‘Questions are here brought to view, which cannot be dismissed when the book is laid aside. Condition of England questions … Mighty theme for so slight an instrument! but the touch is exquisite, and the tone deeply true … Name this little tale what we will, it is a tragedy in effect.’9 The piece was a puff, and there were smiles when its authorship got out. The Chimes did make something of a political uproar, as was intended, but in the long run it did not approach the popularity of the Carol, and Forster himself acknowledged later that it was ‘not one of his [Dickens’s] greater successes’.10 Whether Dickens knew what Forster had done or not, the shared experience with The Chimes brought them still closer. While writing he had missed the streets of London, his usual thinking place, and he posted the first part of the story to Forster, telling him, ‘I would give a hundred pounds (& think it cheap) to see you read it.’11 Then it came to him that he could make a dash to London in late November, so that he could read it with Forster and other friends. The story was finished on 4 November, Dickens suffering from a cold so severe he could hardly see, and shedding tears over his own work.
On 21 November he set off northwards with his courier Roche. They went up the Simplon Pass by moonlight, saw the day break on the summit and sledged through snow dyed rosy red by the rising sun. Then Fribourg, Strasbourg, and a French diligence that got him uncomfortably to Paris in fifty hours. He made such good time that he arrived in England a day earlier than he had expected. He had asked Forster to book him a room in the familiar Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden, to be near Lincoln’s Inn, and on the evening of 30 November he walked into the public rooms, saw Forster and Maclise sitting by the fire and rushed into their arms. He had eight days in London, and the emotion was kept at a high level among the friends, all bachelors together for a few days, with much weeping, laughing, embracing and sitting up into the small hours.12 Leech was invited to breakfast to be thanked for his illustrations, and Forster set up a tea party in his rooms for 3 December, at which Dickens read the whole story to a select group of guests – Carlyle, Maclise, Stanfield, a number of radical writers including Douglas Jerrold and the editor and essayist Laman Blanchard, and not forgetting brother Fred.13
Maclise sent Catherine a sketch of the scene, putting a radiant halo over Dickens’s head, and told her ‘there was not a dry eye in the house … shrieks of laughter … and floods of tears as a relief to them – I do not think that there was ever such a triumphant hour for Charles.’14 And Dickens wrote to her, ‘If you had seen Maclise last night – undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read – you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power.’15 This first experience of power as a reader of his own words was so intense and gratifying that his old interest in performance began to stir in him again. He gave a second reading, and he and Forster talked about putting on plays. Meanwhile three separate dramatizations of The Chimes were in preparation for Christmas runs in London.
If he was to reach Genoa for Christmas he had to be on his way again, and on the evening of 8 December he set off. Paris was under snow, and he lingered to spend a few days with Macready, about to play Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth to the French. From Paris he wrote a heartfelt letter to Forster, ‘I would not recall an inch of the way to or from you, if it had been twenty times as long and twenty thousand times as wintry. It was worth any travel – anything! … I swear I wouldn’t have missed that week, that first night of our meeting, that one evening of the reading in your rooms, aye, and the second reading too, for any easily stated or conceived consideration.’16 The bond between them had been drawn tighter by the visit, and once back in Genoa he moved the friendship into a new phase, for the first time telling Forster something about his young life, with a description of how he had hoped and planned to become an actor; and over the next years he told him more, and gave him a written account of the whole secret story of his childhood, his father’s imprisonment and his work at the blacking factory; then suggested that Forster should become his biographer. He was able to be intimate with Forster as with no other man or woman, and so, scarcely into middle age, he fixed on the idea that this was the one person he trusted to write his life, and never wavered from that decision.
Just as he was writing the letter about his audition, Forster’s brother died suddenly, still in his thirties. Dickens wrote to comfort him. His words read like a further consecration of their friendship. ‘I feel the distance between us now, indeed. I would to Heaven, my dearest friend, that I could remind you in a manner more lively and affectionate than this dull sheet of paper can put on, that you have a Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as Nature ever forged. By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way – but to be knotted tighter up, if that be possible, until the same end comes to them as has come to these … I read your heart as if I held it in my hand, this moment.’17
Meanwhile he had a new interest in Genoa. Among the friends they had made there was a banker, Emile De La Rue, an English-speaking Swiss from Geneva, married for ten years to an English wife, Augusta née Granet.18 They lived in a pretty, high-windowed and comfortable apartment at the top of a Genoese palazzo, up many stairs and across many landings lined with antique busts, and she appeared charming and animated in society; but she was suffering from a nervous disorder – tic douloureux, headaches, insomnia, occasional convulsions and catalepsy – a list of ailments that sound very like those of the nineteenth-century women who turned up a little later in the clinics of Dr Charcot and Dr Freud and were described as suffering from hysteria. Just before Dickens made his November dash to England, De La Rue mentioned his wife’s problems to him, and he responded. He may have said something about his doctor in London, Elliotson, who used mesmerism to deal with cases of this kind, and gone on to say that he had some skill in mesmerism himself. De La Rue was so impressed that, within days of Dicken’s return, he asked him to come over and try his powers on Madame De La Rue. No doubt he was intrigued by the idea of the famous writer attending his wife, and she was willing and pleased with the attention. On 23 December, Dickens began the treatment. It was a highly unusual situation, given that he had no medical training, but he was eager to try what he could do, and the De La Rues were grateful.
Dickens was confident he could do something for Augusta De La Rue and prepared to play the doctor. He believed in Elliotson, was delighted with his own ability to send Catherine and Georgina into trances, and felt that a real patient would give him the chance to do good, and to justify his faith in mesmerism. At that time it was thought of as being some sort of magnetic force, not yet explained or even understood, and Dickens would speculate as to whether the magnetism worked on the nervous system of the patient; but very little was known about the nervous system, and it was found later that the idea of a magnetic force had no basis in fact. It was nevertheless obvious, and remains true, that some people, not necessarily armed with any scientific qualifications, are able to produce behavioural changes in susceptible people. And there is no doubt that something did happen between Dickens and Augusta De La Rue, although it is hard to say what exactly it was.
His treatment consisted of putting her into sleep-like trances and then questioning her about her experiences or fantasies. Few of his notes survive, but he told her husband in one of the letters the two men exchanged during the treatment that she talked of being on a hillside, among a crowd of men and women, and suddenly seeing an absent brother, whom she named as Charles, leaning against a window, seeming sad. Dickens asked her what made him sad, and she said she would try to find out. Next Charles was walking up and down the room, looking out of a window at the sea, still very sad: she cried at this point. Dickens asked how he was dress
ed, and she replied ‘in his uniform’. Then she said, ‘He is thinking of me,’ and after a pause explained that he believed himself forgotten, that her letters to him had miscarried. Then he was gone. She also talked of lying on the hillside and being hurt by stones rolled down by unseen people; and of a man haunting the place, dimly seen, whom she feared and did not dare to look at. Dickens decided this man was the bad spirit or phantom whom she had already mentioned on another occasion, and whom she feared greatly.
Freud might have interpreted all this, and a modern counsellor might ask about her past experiences. Was there in fact a brother called Charles? Where was he, and what was her relationship with him? When had she begun to suffer her symptoms? Did she grieve for her childlessness? What were her relations with her husband? If Dickens asked any questions of this kind, he left no record of them. He thought the treatment was going well when she began to sleep better in January, and told him that she had been ‘pursued by myriads of bloody phantoms of the most frightful aspect; and that, after becoming paler, they had all veiled their faces’.19 But there was still the evil spirit, or phantom, who gave her orders and was hostile to Dickens. She also talked about sensations of fire in her head, which cooled under his treatment, she said. And she told him she had suffered experiences too terrible to be described. They were like fevered dreams, she said, but they had really happened to her. Her account of her experience in the Trinità dei Monti Church in Rome sounds like a psychotic episode, something that seemed real and was more powerful than real experience, and more frightening. Such psychotic episodes can stay with patients for years, as this one clearly did, leaving her devastated, so much so that she even warned Dickens not to go to that particular church when he was in Rome.20
In fact he had already arranged to go to Rome, taking Catherine. They would be leaving Genoa on 19 January. The De La Rues would join them in Rome in March, and meanwhile he and Augusta De La Rue agreed to a plan whereby they would think of one another every day at 11 a.m., relying on being able to continue the treatment in this unusual way. They attempted the method, and there was an absurd episode when he thought he was mesmerizing her long-distance from the box of the coach on which he was travelling, only to find that Catherine, also seated on the box, and knowing nothing of the arrangement with Madame De La Rue, had gone into a trance. In Dickens’s next letter to De La Rue he warned him that the ‘devilish figure’ of her fantasies was likely to drive her into madness, and speculated as to whether it had its origin in ‘some great nerve or set of nerves on which her disease has preyed’; and this is when he also wondered if the disease was being cured by ‘the inexplicable agency of the Magnetism’.21
Dickens himself was now so emotionally involved that in Rome, before the De La Rues arrived, he experienced night disturbances in which he woke up suddenly in the small hours in ‘a state of indescribable horror and emotion’. He took this to be part of the battle between the evil phantom, doing its best to drive her to madness, and his own efforts to rescue her. ‘I thought continually about her, both awake and asleep, on the nights of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday … I don’t dream of her … but merely have an anxiety about her, and a sense of her being somehow a part of me, as I have when I am awake,’ he wrote to De La Rue from Naples.22 A modern therapist would be expected to guard himself against this degree of emotional involvement, but Augusta was sending him impatient letters, ‘incoherent and unconnected … My mind misgives me that she must have had a bad attack, after this long interval.’23 When the De La Rues were due to arrive in Rome in March, he rode out to meet them, and escorted them to the hotel in which both families were staying. Shortly afterwards De La Rue took Dickens into his wife’s bedroom one night, where she was lying unconscious, having had a seizure, rolled into a tight ball. He said she had been in similar states for thirty hours at a time before, and untreatable; but Dickens, after taking up her long hair and tracing it to its roots gently to get at her head, was able to relax her into a peaceful sleep in half an hour.24 On 19 March, Dickens noted in his diary, ‘Madame DLR very ill in night. Up ’till four.’25
There were further night sessions. It did not occur to him that the situation might seem odd to anyone outside it. To Catherine, however, it was upsetting, and she made her objections known to what looked like an infatuation, or a folie à trois, in which he and the De La Rues were caught up together. She can hardly be blamed. She was pregnant once more, and must have hoped for some attention from her husband during their holiday together; but Dickens saw the pregnancy merely as ‘a coming event, which I hadn’t reckoned on … casting its shadow … in a very disconcerting manner’ – this in a letter to a man friend.26 He was fully taken up with his medical mission, and believed he was succeeding, by persuading Augusta that they were engaged in a struggle between the evil phantom intent on controlling her mind and himself, her good champion, offering her freedom and health. By encouraging her to see it as a story, a dramatic narrative, he no doubt hoped to give her something to hold on to, and that they could work on together.
She now told him about another disquieting symptom: that her phantoms threatened and beat her on the arm, leaving a physical soreness there.27 The treatments were continued throughout their return journey to Genoa, ‘sometimes under olive trees, sometimes in Vine-yards, sometimes in the travelling carriage, sometimes at wayside Inns during the mid-day halt’. If, as Catherine believed, there was an erotic element in all this for him, it was subsumed in his sense of mission. He saw himself as a rescuer, fighting for the good, and told Catherine later that he was simply following the intense pursuit of an idea that had taken possession of him, just as other ideas had done at different times.28 And although he was obsessed, he was able to extricate himself calmly when other matters needed his attention.
They went through Perugia, Arezzo and Florence, where he made some visits, to the writer Thomas Trollope and to Lord Holland, British Minister to Tuscany; and arrived back at the Peschiere early in April. They found the children well and happy, and he urged Forster, who had suffered all winter from rheumatism in his knees, to come out to enjoy the roses and sunshine of the Italian spring, and to travel back with them in June. His thoughts turning to Devonshire Terrace, he asked Mitton to arrange for it to be repainted for their return, the hall and staircase ‘a good green’, a ‘faint pink blush’ to the ceiling of the sitting room, ‘a little wreath of flowers to be painted round the lamp’ and ‘the paper must be blue and gold or purple and gold … I should wish it to be cheerful and gay.’ It was to be ‘a surprise for Mrs D.’ Unluckily, Mrs D objected to the colour green so strongly when she heard of it that it was countermanded.29
He spent the last weeks before the return journey trying to teach De La Rue how to mesmerize his own wife, but without success. Dickens even went to stay with them while the preparations for departure were under way at the Peschiere. Augusta gave him presents – a purse, a pretty glass, some slippers – and just before he said his farewells she showed the intensity of her involvement by calling out to him that he must remember to magnetize her on 23 December next, at eleven in the morning, which would be the anniversary of their first session.30 He wrote to De La Rue from Zurich, and again from Brussels, expressing his conviction that she had benefited to an almost ‘miraculous’ degree from the treatment – ‘I believe it impossible to exaggerate the alteration of her Mind – where incalculably the greatest torment and the greatest danger used to lie.’ Both De La Rues sent frequent letters, and Dickens did his best to tell Emile he should not feel inadequate for being unable to magnetize his own wife, and promised that if she fell ill again, he would come to her aid again. He urged them to visit England and said he would return to Genoa, in a long, emotional letter, recalling their travels together and ‘our happy company. I can’t forget anything connected with it. I live in the Past now, in sober sadness.’31 In September he was addressing her as ‘My dearest Madame De La Rue’, and ending a long, affectionate letter with ‘What would I give to see you
…? I carry you about with me in the shape of a Purse; and though that pocket is in a very tender place – breast pocket – left hand side – I carry you about in tenderer places still, in your own image which will never fade or change to me, come what may.’32
Augusta De La Rue relapsed slowly into her previous state. By the end of 1845 Dickens was fully occupied with work he could not leave, but somehow in January 1846 both De La Rues were so convinced that he was about to visit them that they prepared for his imminent arrival, making up a room and having his favourite dish ready. They must have misunderstood something he said, or imagined the whole thing, since he neither came nor wrote to explain. They recovered from this, and she heard from him in April, when he excused himself by saying that Catherine was unwilling to revisit Genoa. The friendship survived; they kept up occasional exchanges of letters and met again in Switzerland in 1846, as we shall see. In 1853 he visited them briefly and offered to resume magnetizing; but now she refused, saying that it would be too painful to start and then stop again. He recommended Elliotson to her. She did not follow this up, having heard that he took insane patients: clearly she drew a distinct line between their condition and hers. Some correspondence continued, and in 1863, before a visit to England with her husband, Mme De La Rue described herself as ‘a ruin now’. Such meetings as there were between Dickens and the De La Rues were friendly and uneventful. He remained interested in her, and her sufferings evidently continued, but she did not descend into madness, as they had feared, and continued to live her life as before, always supported and protected by her husband. The two men kept in touch, and Dickens never failed to send his love to her in his letters, although these were for the most part discussions of Italian politics and business. After 1866 there are no further known exchanges of letters, but Dickens went on thinking about the episode, and his account of it in a letter to Sheridan Le Fanu was made six months before his death. It ended, ‘She is … a very brave woman, and has thoroughly considered her disorder. But her sufferings are unspeakable; and if you could write me a few lines giving her any such knowledge as she wants, you would do an action of equally unspeakable kindness.’33 Le Fanu did not, and probably could not, respond to this appeal. Dickens was able to do nothing more. He had only months to live. De La Rue also died in 1870, and Augusta disappears from history at this point, still presumably tormented by cruel phantoms and still without any explanation for them. No account by her of her experiences with the phantoms, or with Dickens, has been found, and it is not possible to give a diagnosis of her mental problems now. It may also be questionable as to whether any qualified doctor would have served her much better than Dickens did at that time. He offered himself boldly to help her, armed only with his ability to hypnotize, his good will and his intense curiosity about aberrant human experience and behaviour. Whether the results justified his neglect of his wife and indifference to her jealousy is another matter.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 22