His first plan was to use it as a summer residence and let it out to tenants in winter. He bought furniture here and there – a mahogany dining table, quantities of chairs, beds, bedding, marble washstands – and asked his brother-in-law Henry Austin to supervise the building work he wanted done.36 He told Macready he hoped that buying Gad’s was ‘the best thing I could do for the boys – particularly Charley, who will now be able to have country air and change all through the fine weather; the railway enabling him to go up for business, and come down for dinner’.37 The idea was that the house should be ready to receive friends on 19 May, when they would celebrate Catherine’s forty-second birthday with a housewarming party. This is the only time her birthday is mentioned in his known letters, and it was the last they spent together.
Walter had his sixteenth birthday, passed his examinations well and was preparing for India, where, in May, the Mutiny broke out: he was due to sail in July. Dickens and Collins went to Brighton for a freezing weekend in March. In April he was approaching the end of Dorrit, but found time to read two stories, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’ and ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, in Blackwood’s Magazine by an anonymous author, and recommend them to Forster: ‘They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.’38 They were George Eliot’s first venture into fiction and, along with a third story, were later published as a book, Scenes of Clerical Life. Also in Blackwood’s was an unfavourable review of Dorrit which upset him, appearing just before he began on the last section of the book. He was accused of bad construction, of making an unsuccessful attempt to write on social questions, and of giving ‘twaddle’ to William Dorrit to speak. He had broken an old resolution not to read attacks and told Forster he was ‘sufficiently put out by it to be angry with myself being such a fool’.39 A month later, on 9 May, the book was finished. Proofs of the last number were sent to Stanfield, to whom it was dedicated, with a tender letter saying it was ‘a little record importing that we loved one another’.40 Stanfield was in his sixties, they had known one another for twenty years, and all the sweetness of Dickens’s character is in these words to his old friend.
A good deal of June was spent at Gad’s Hill, where it was soon evident that neither the water supply nor the drains could cope with the new demands made on them. This meant troops of workmen tramping about the garden, boring holes, installing pumps, making new cesspools and digging up flowerbeds in order to lay pipes beneath the ground; then, after replacing everything, being forced to dig it all up again as further problems presented themselves. Only when they had bored to 217 feet in August did they find a sufficient spring of water, and this had to be pumped up daily by a horse. Dickens declared that when the first glassful was drunk at the surface, it would have cost £200.41 Hans Christian Andersen, invited in April by Dickens to visit, arrived in June and remained for five weeks, largely outstaying his welcome. Dickens started by liking him well enough, but his eccentricities and difficulties with the English language exasperated Georgina, Katey and especially Charley, who was horrified to be asked to shave him one morning. Andersen got on best with Catherine, who was patient and gentle, and whom he saw as the embodiment of Agnes from David Copperfield. Miss Coutts and Mrs Brown came to Gad’s to meet him, warned by Dickens that ‘he speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.’ They took him for a walk and lay on the grass while he made daisy chains, and afterwards suggested he should move on from Gad’s Hill to stay with them in Stratton Street, an invitation he accepted, to the relief of his host.42
The timing of Andersen’s visit was unfortunate because it coincided with Dickens being caught up in a new whirl of activity when he heard on 8 June of the death of his friend Douglas Jerrold, and immediately set about schemes to raise money for his widow and children. Here was his chance to revive The Frozen Deep and, knowing that the Queen was eager to see it, to arrange a performance for her. When she said she wanted it to be at Buckingham Palace, Dickens demurred on the grounds that it would put his daughters in a difficult social position at Court, and she allowed herself to be persuaded to come instead to the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street, where further performances for the public were to be staged. On 4 July she brought a large party, including King Leopold of Belgium and her son-in-law Prince Frederick of Prussia, to a performance which she found ‘intensely dramatic … touching … moving’, as she wrote in her diary. In the interval between The Frozen Deep and the farce she sent for Dickens to congratulate him, and he sent back a message to say he felt it inappropriate to meet her dressed as he was to play the farce. A second request met with the same refusal, a considerable breach of etiquette, since a royal request was considered a command. But Dickens was pleased with himself for sticking to his point, and the Queen had the sense not to hold it against him. Her secretary sent a letter conveying her fulsome praise for the piece, the acting and the moral message, and assured him, ‘Unofficially I may tell you – everything went off as well as possible.’43
Dickens also decided to give two paid public readings – the first ever – of A Christmas Carol at St Martin’s Hall in Long Acre, for the Jerrold fund. They were greeted with tumultuous enthusiasm by an audience of 2,000. Another two public performances of The Frozen Deep followed. Meanwhile the Boulogne schoolboys came home for the holidays, their first at Gad’s Hill, and saw Walter before he sailed for India. He wept as he said goodbye to his mother, sisters and younger brothers. Dickens and Charley went to Southampton to see him on board the Indus, and he was ‘cut up for a minute or so when I bade him good bye, but recovered directly, and conducted himself like a Man’.44 It was quite usual for boys of sixteen and younger to be sent off to serve in the Army and Navy, and after years of boarding school it may have seemed not much worse, but for the fact that India was half the world away.
Dickens too recovered directly, to deal with drains, rehearsals, another performance, another reading in Manchester and his plan, eagerly put forward, to create some new rooms at the Home. ‘I know my plan is a good one – because it is mine!’ he joked to Miss Coutts, but as so often the joke was meant seriously.45 Now there were builders’ estimates to be considered at Shepherd’s Bush. Meanwhile the Edinburgh Review printed an attack on Little Dorrit, accusing Dickens of unfairness in his presentation of the English civil service, and of a failure to understand the administrative system in his satirical depiction of the Circumlocution Office.46 Other objections were made which were open to rebuttal, and Dickens at once set about answering the attack, with great force and effect, writing half his article before one of his readings and finishing it the next morning, before another performance of The Frozen Deep. He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life, and what he might do about it.
A pressing request to take The Frozen Deep to Manchester now had to be considered. On 25 July he assured Miss Coutts that he was not going to do so, but a week later, after another visit to Manchester, and realizing that more money was needed for the Jerrold fund, he changed his mind. Francesco Berger was told to prepare for two performances at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 21 and 22 August. For this, given that the hall seated an audience of 4,000, it would be necessary to employ trained actresses, since the voices of the Dickens and Hogarth girls could not fill the space. It was not easy to find professional actresses to take over their parts at such short notice. Dickens was turned down by Emmeline Montague, and none had been found when he went to read in Manchester on 3 August.47 On 8 August the final London performance took place, leaving him so tired that he kept to his bed all the next day, and wrote to Frank Stone asking him to take over his part in the farce, Uncle John, in Manchester. Catherine was now also ill in bed. On 12 August he booked twenty-three rooms for the whole troupe in a Manchester hotel and the next day he told a friend he would be rehearsing with the ‘professional ladies’ at the Gallery on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 18th and 19th. Mrs
Ternan and two of her daughters had been found and recommended by Alfred Wigan of the Olympic Theatre, a friend of Dickens since he played in his farce The Strange Gentleman in 1836. Mrs Ternan, known for her grace, elegance and intelligence as a young actress in the 1820s, had had a long career and was still playing leading parts alongside her old friend Macready, as well as Charles Kemble and Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells, and her three daughters had been brought up to act from childhood. She and her two younger daughters, Maria and Ellen, had agreed to play in the farce as well as in The Frozen Deep, and were ready to learn their lines in the few days available.
Dickens remembered that he had seen Maria act as a child, and he took to both sisters and their mother immediately. The name ‘Ternan’ he pronounced Ternan, with the emphasis on the second syllable, and the youngest daughter was always Nelly to him.48 He rehearsed them at the Gallery on 18 August, and the same day wrote to Stone saying he no longer wanted him to take over his part in Uncle John but would play it himself. Dark-eyed Maria had seen The Frozen Deep performed at the Gallery, and she was to take the major part of Clara; Nelly, fair and blue-eyed, would play opposite Dickens in Uncle John.49 After reassuring Miss Coutts in a last-minute note that his daughters were not to be subjected to the ordeal of appearing in the Free Trade Hall, he set off on 20 August for Manchester with a large family party, including Catherine, recovered from her illness, and his cast, musicians and technicians.
He was in such good spirits that he had everyone playing games on the train. There was no corridor, and conundrums were passed on sticks and umbrellas through the windows from carriage to carriage, with much laughter and shouting against the wind.50 His elation continued, and in Manchester he gave his finest performances yet, reducing Maria Ternan to sobs of grief as she knelt over him while he died on stage, her tears dropping straight into his mouth and soaking into his beard.51 Her mother and sister comforted her, everyone weeping and emotions running high, before they dressed for the farce.
Back at Gad’s Hill, he wrote to Mrs Brown to say he had heard from Walter, whose ship had reached the Mediterranean, and with this news he included an account of his own unsettled state of mind: ‘I feel as if the scaling of all the Mountains in Switzerland, or the doing of any wild thing until I dropped, would be but a slight relief.’52 The next day Collins was informed of his ‘grim despair and restlessness’, with a suggestion that they go away together to give themselves a subject for a travel piece in Household Words, and because he wanted to ‘escape from myself. For, when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face … my blankness is inconceivable – indescribable – my misery, amazing.’53 In truth, he had found out that Mrs Ternan and all three of her daughters were going to be in Doncaster in mid-September, to perform at the theatre during race week, and he at once booked rooms at the Angel Hotel there for himself and Collins. Miss Coutts received a long account of Maria Ternan’s performance at Manchester, her ‘womanly tenderness’ and ‘genuine and feeling heart’.54 With Forster he exchanged letters, answering his request for ‘some confidences as in the old time’ with a bleak announcement that
Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too – and much more so. She is exactly what you know in the way of being amiable and complying, but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me.55
In his next letter he wrote of the ‘wayward and unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an imaginative life, and which I have, as you ought to know well, often only kept down by riding over it like a dragoon’. He went on to say he felt it would be better for Catherine as well as himself if ‘something might be done’, impossible as that seemed; and he conceded that there was blame on his side as well as hers. At the end of the letter he asked Forster, ‘What do you think of my paying for this place [Gad’s Hill], by reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very strongly tempted. Think of it.’56
PART THREE
20
Stormy Weather
1857–1859
Dickens’s meeting with the Ternan family in August 1857, a small professional encounter hastily set up, led to changes in every aspect of his life: the wing of a butterfly flapped, and a whole weather system was unsettled. The storm blew up, and broke with his separation from Catherine. In the wake of this, friendships were severed, publishers dismissed, and Household Words ceased publication, to be replaced by a new weekly, with Dickens now proprietor as well as editor, and run from a larger office. He parted with his best illustrator, Hablot Browne. There were no more large-scale amateur theatricals. There were no more family holidays. His charitable work with Miss Coutts came to an end. His connection with the Home at Shepherd’s Bush, over which he had presided with dedication for a decade, ceased in the spring of 1858, after which, lacking his involvement, the little community ran down, and by the early 1860s no more young women were taken in. In 1851, when he had purchased a fifty-year lease on Tavistock House, his intention had been to make it his home for the rest of his life, but now he lost interest in it, and in 1860 he sold it.1
Another great change was brought about by his decision to take up a second career as a professional reader. It was something he had thought of for several years, but a contributory reason for his decision to proceed with it was, at any rate as he explained it to Collins, his belief that the work involved would distract him from the pain of unsatisfied love – the Doncaster unhappiness, he called it.2 The readings also gave him the extra income he needed in order to finance a growing number of dependants, the Ternans among them; and the constant travel required as he toured the provinces gave him a sort of freedom, making it hard for anyone to know whether he was at his rooms in the office in Wellington Street, or travelling to a reading, or at Gad’s Hill, or somewhere quite different. His relations with the public changed somewhat too, because the Dickens heard at the readings was not quite the same as Dickens read on the page. He made his scripts from only a few of his novels and stories, dramatizing them with much redrafting, condensing and cutting, and many divergences from the originals, and the result was something simpler and inevitably cruder – highlights of comedy and pathos.3 The readings were of the greatest importance to him, not only because they brought in much needed money but because they gave him reassurance that he was loved. A huge and loyal public turned out to hear him almost everywhere he went, giving him ‘a roaring sea of response’, cheering him, nourishing his spirit and protecting him from his detractors and critics.4 It was a comfort he was to need badly.
He was always able to sparkle, charm and command admiration, but he aged in appearance now and began to look older than his years. The keen and lustrous eyes were sinking in their sockets and losing their brilliance, lines appeared across his brow and his cheeks were cut across by diagonal furrows. His hair thinned, his beard grizzled: some photographs show this clearly, others suggest he may have had them touched up on occasion. He remained an indefatigable editor, always assisted by Wills, and he continued to write both journalism and no
vels; and the core of his being, the creative machine that threw up ideas, visions and characters, persisted in its work. There was another venture into historical romance, A Tale of Two Cities, a popular treatment of the French Revolution, with a self-sacrificing hero closely resembling Wardour, the role he so much relished in The Frozen Deep. After this came a return to his highest form with Great Expectations. It is an almost perfect novel, in part like a ballad, drawn out of early memories and dreams, full of monsters, terrors and puzzles to be solved. This was followed by Our Mutual Friend, a bulging bag of grotesques in which sharp working girls are seen to be cleverer than their fathers, and greedy middle-class Londoners are mocked and reviled at their mahogany dining tables. Through both books corruption and violence are woven, and in both the river runs through the narrative, shining, dark and dangerous, ‘stretching away to the great ocean, Death’, as Lizzie Hexham sees it.5 And through these years bad health wore away Dickens’s strength, neuralgia, rheumatic pains, unspecified but unpleasant and persistent symptoms he associated with a bachelor life, trouble with his teeth and dental plates, piles. Then first his left foot, and then his right, took to swelling intermittently, becoming so painful that during each attack he became unable to take himself on the great walks that were an essential part and pleasure of his life.6 Presently his hand too was affected. The decline was resisted, denied, fought against, but not to be stayed.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 36