Walter had got into debt and Dickens was angry with him and had not been in contact for many months. There had been a note from Walter to Mamie in the autumn to say he was ill, and another at Christmas telling her he was now so ill that he was about to be sent home on sick leave; but before he could be embarked he died, of an aneurism, on the last day of 1863. Miss Coutts took the opportunity of Walter’s death to write to Dickens, again urging a reconciliation with Catherine. His reply said that ‘a page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank, and that it is not in my power to pretend that it has a solitary word upon it.’31 He neither spoke nor wrote to Catherine about the death of their child, but paid off Walter’s debts and hardened his heart.32
Francis and Alfred, in their late teens, both disappointed him. In October, Francis failed to get into the Foreign Office after coming second in a competitive examination, despite having been nominated by Lord John Russell and coached by a senior civil servant. His stammer may have stood in his way, but Dickens found his failure ‘unaccountable’ and applied to Lord Brougham to get him a place in the Registrar’s Office in London. When this too proved impossible, Francis agreed to go to India to join the Bengal Mounted Police and left for India in December 1863, expecting to see his brother Walter. At the same time Alfred’s preparations to take the Army examinations for Woolwich were thought by his teachers so unlikely to succeed that Dickens decided to put him into a firm in the City, and when he failed to do well there he was persuaded to go to Australia. In May 1865, as Dickens left for France, Alfred sailed for Australia to become manager of a sheep station in New South Wales. He saw neither of his parents again.
Professionally things were better, as we have seen. After two years with no novel planned, at the end of August 1863, returning from France, Dickens told Forster he had an idea for a new story that would make a twenty-number novel, and by October he declared himself fairly confident of it, and it became Our Mutual Friend.33 He also did good among his own friends that autumn, reconciling Forster and Macready after a long estrangement brought about by Forster’s disapproval of Macready’s remarriage. In February 1864 he complained of some of his private correspondence being published, destroyed a further batch of letters received, declared he would write ‘as short letters as I possibly can’ in future and visibly carried out his intention.34 There were no readings in 1864. He took a house at Gloucester Place, Hyde Park Gardens, until June, and refurbished his rooms at Wellington Street, choosing handsome new carpets for them. In March, after his visit to France, he wrote to Forster praising his new biography of the seventeenth-century statesman Sir John Eliot, and arranged for it to be prominently reviewed in All the Year Round. He told Forster he was working very slowly on his novel and wanted to have five instalments ready before the first number appeared on 30 April. On 23 April he celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday ‘in peace and quiet’, going to Stratford for the day with Forster, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins.35 In the autumn another dear friend, the artist John Leech, not yet fifty, died, and Dickens went grimly to the funeral at Kensal Green, remembering their cheerful family holidays together, their walking club, their theatricals and Leech’s much admired illustrations for the Christmas books. Then came the death of Joseph Paxton in June 1865, with whom he had set up the Daily News.
A new friend appeared to fill some of these losses: Charles Fechter, who in January 1863 became manager of the Lyceum Theatre, just opposite the Wellington Street office. Fechter was partly English, partly German, his education had been largely in France, French was his first language, and he had started his career in the theatre in Paris in the 1840s, becoming a star, but a quarrelsome one. Dickens had admired his acting in Paris, and when he moved to London in 1860 he made a point of seeing him again. He gave a thrilling and much praised Hamlet, his naturalism breaking with all the traditions, and a great Iago. His English was accented but good; his nerves made him vomit before each performance. He was famous for his bad temper, he borrowed money and was generally unreliable, yet Dickens took to him strongly, praising him for being ‘a capital fellow and an Anti-Humbug’.36 During the summer of 1864 he said Fechter usually came to Gad’s on Sundays when he was there, and by 1865 he described him as ‘a very intimate friend’ and proposed him for membership of the Athenaeum.37 Not surprisingly, the Athenaeum turned him down, but the Garrick Club welcomed him. English gentlemen’s clubs were centres of intrigue, gossip and quarrels, and when Wills was blackballed by the Garrick and Dickens resigned – it was his fourth resignation – Fechter loyally followed suit.
Fechter never fitted into English society, entertaining in his dressing gown and sending guests to fetch their food from the kitchen. He was married to a French actress, became the lover of another, Carlotta Leclerq, whom he abandoned later for a third, and this Gallic sans-gêne had its appeal for Dickens, as D’Orsay’s flouting of respectability had done, perhaps because it allowed him to become someone different himself when he was with them. Fechter made his own mark upon Gad’s Hill when, in January 1865, he was inspired to give Dickens a perfect present: a great box full of all the parts needed to build a two-storey wooden Swiss chalet. Dickens had it put up at once. Set well away from the house, in the wilderness reached only through a tunnel he had built under the road, it gave him an airy upstairs writing room – ‘a most delightful summer atelier’ – hung with mirrors and full of light and birdsong.38 Here he could escape from people, letters, anxieties, troubles, and work uninterrupted.
The chalet given to Dickens by Fechter in 1865 – a perfect present.
23
Wise Daughters
1864–1866
From the autumn of 1863 until the autumn of 1865, Dickens was writing Our Mutual Friend. It was to be his last completed novel. He did no readings during the two years it took, and although they were years of stress the book he made was an ambitious and powerful piece of work, full of sardonic humour and offering his final judgement on the society in which he lived. He had been hailed as a young writer for his echoing of Hogarth, and in this late work there is still a Hogarthian vigour and precision in his drawing of scenes and characters, no smoothing over of rough places, physical or moral deformities but rather a relish for them. He chose not to run it in All the Year Round but serialized it in twenty monthly numbers in green-paper wrappers in the old way. He also signed a contract with Chapman & Hall that raised for the first time the possibility that he might not live to finish a work, in which case Forster would negotiate compensation to the publishers. All being well, Dickens would be paid in three instalments: £2,500 on publication of the first number, and again at the sixth, then £1,000 at the end, a grand total of £6,000.1 Knowing himself to be less energetic than he had been, he decided to have five instalments written before the first number appeared in April 1864. There were times when he became anxious about keeping up the pace, and in July, telling Forster he had been unwell and was still out of sorts, he complained that he had ‘a very mountain to climb before I shall see the open country of my work’.2 It did not help to find that sales were lower than those for any of his recent books. The starting monthly print order of 40,000 fell until, for the final number, only 19,000 copies needed to be stitched into paper covers;3 but it attracted more advertising than any serial yet, making £2,750 to be shared equally between publishers and author. And the book has endured.
Our Mutual Friend offers us his last look at London, the London of the 1860s, ‘a black shrill city, combining the qualities of a smoky house and a scolding wife; such a gritty city; such a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky’.4 A city too in which people starve to death in the streets every week; and in which the middle classes are shown as corrupt, complacent, lazy, greedy and dishonest, more interested in the pursuit of shares than the pursuit of love. Among the rich and would-be rich he mocks are the Lammles, a confidence man and woman who marry, each under the delusion that the other has money; Veneering, a corrupt businessman going into par
liament; and Podsnap, an insurance broker convinced of the superiority of the British over all other nations and set on ignoring any aspect of life that might trouble his complacency. Their good friend Lady Tippins, widow of ‘a man knighted by George III in mistake for somebody else’ and invited to raise the tone at the Lammles’ wedding, makes private observations to herself in the church: ‘Bride; five and forty if a day, thirty shillings a yard, veil fifteen pounds, pocket-handkerchief a present. Bridesmaids; kept down for fear of outshining bride, consequently not girls … Mrs Veneering; never saw such velvet, say two thousand pounds as she stands, absolute jeweller’s window, father must have been a pawnbroker, or how could these people do it?’5 We are into the comic world of Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward with this nasty, witty old woman’s inner monologue.
Other characters inhabit the new London that is spreading haphazardly around the old: ‘that district of the flat country tending to the Thames, where Kent and Surrey meet, and where the railways still bestride the market-gardens that will soon die under them … a toy neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherent mind … here, another unfinished street already in ruins; there, a church; here, an immense new warehouse; there, a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley of black ditch, sparkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated kitchen-garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned canal … As if the child had given the table a kick and gone to sleep.’6 There is always a lot of mess and dirt in Dickens’s London. Waste paper blows through the streets, and much of the plot relates to the great dust heaps piled up in Camden Town, rubbish that is worth a fortune once it has been sorted, making its owner into a ‘Golden Dustman’. Dickens had published a description of the real dust heaps in Household Words in 1850,7 and some critics have seized on them as symbols in the book; although, as John Carey points out, if they are meant to suggest that money is dirt, and that the accumulation of money is bad, this hardly fits with Dickens’s view of money, which he valued and worked hard to earn.8 The thing itself always fascinated Dickens more than whatever it might symbolize or represent.
Something that had not changed much since the 1830s when he first wrote about it was the condition of City clerks, travelling to work from northern suburbs through a ‘suburban Sahara’ of dust heaps, dog fights, rubbish heaps, bones, tiles and burning bricks.9 They came further now, but were still likely to live in small and inconvenient houses and to have to share them with lodgers in order to keep up with the rent: in Holloway, Reginald Wilfer’s family lets out the best rooms in the house to a lodger. The Wilfers are usually short of candles and low on food, often with nothing more than an old piece of Dutch cheese for supper, and when they have something better they fry it up over an open fire. The grown-up daughters share a room furnished with an upturned box and a small piece of glass for a dressing table, and they do not stand on ceremony, Bella coming downstairs in bare feet, with her hairbrush in her hand, to talk to her father. Dickens knows exactly how they live, perhaps with an echo of the Ternan household as he had seen it at Park Cottage.
His characters, like Dickens himself, leave town in order to feel better. They go to Blackheath or Greenwich, or along the Thames towards Hampton and further west – Staines, Chertsey, Walton, Kingston, where there are trees and green fields – as far as Oxfordshire: we remember Dickens’s solitary boat trip when he rowed himself from Oxford to Reading in June 1855. Yet even out there the Thames has its sinister side, since people can drown or be drowned as easily as in town; and there are many drownings and near-drownings in Our Mutual Friend. Violence and danger threaten many of the characters, and Lizzie Hexam, who is attached to the Thames from having grown up alongside it at Limehouse, also sees it as ‘the great black river with its dreary shores … stretching away to the great ocean, Death’.10
In town, we are taken into the shops and workrooms of lesser London trades: Mr Venus, the taxidermist in his shadowy cluttered rooms; Fanny Cleaver, the dolls’ dressmaker, so crippled she can hardly walk and her shoulders are uneven as she sits at her work bench where she cuts and glues fabrics, looking at first sight like ‘a child – a dwarf – a girl – a something –’ She calls herself Jenny Wren and she has a sharp tongue, a ‘queer but not ugly little face, with its bright grey eyes’ and a mass of golden hair.11 She is our old friend the child worker, already well established in her profession at twelve or thirteen. The dolls’ dressmaker upset some nineteenth-century readers who, like Podsnap, preferred not to acknowledge the existence of the deformed and disabled. Henry James, who gave Our Mutual Friend a ferociously bad review, particularly objected to Jenny as ‘a poor little dwarf’ put in to arouse ‘cheap merriment and very cheap pathos … Like all Dickens’s pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr Dickens’s novels.’12 James did not trouble himself to remember Jenny as Dickens actually wrote her – as a young woman who has made a trade for herself, works at it hard and imaginatively, maintains herself, looks after her drunken father and is a staunch friend. She may have sentimental ideas about angels who comfort her when she is in pain, but that is a small defect to set against her virtues. James probably disliked Sloppy too, the workhouse boy presumed to be an idiot because he is ungainly, has a small head to his long body and has never been taught anything. Dickens, who had seen enough to know that ugliness and ignorance don’t necessarily denote lack of intelligence, shows how Sloppy, given training, proper food and kindness, learns the trade of cabinet-maker.
Jenny is a girl who is wiser than her father, and another is her friend Lizzie Hexam, daughter of a Thames waterman who lives by robbing the corpses of the drowned. With a criminal father, no mother and no education, she manages to be intelligent and principled, brings up her younger brother, Charlie, and sends him away to be given an education that will allow him to live a respectable life. She is a needlewoman and has a job as keeper of the stockroom of a seamen’s outfitter, and we are shown that she is enterprising and brave as well as lovely to look at. Some of this may stretch our belief, and her inner life remains closed to us. Dickens can draw poor, ambitious young men like her brother and his schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, but he can’t get into the mind of Lizzie, and he gives her nothing but conventional ideas and feelings. He describes her beautifully, seen by her admirer through a small window, sitting on the floor by the brazier, ‘with her face leaning on her hand. There was a kind of film or flicker on her face, which at first he took to be the fitful fire-light, but on a second look he saw that she was weeping … It was a little window of but four pieces of glass, and was not curtained … he looked long and steadily at her. A deep rich piece of colour, with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair …’13 Lizzie is like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Eugene, the idle barrister who falls in love with her, is like a Du Maurier hero: interesting types, each with a wonderful surface, but we are not shown beyond the surface into the complex creature within. Their story culminates in a breaking of the class barriers that divide them, but only after he has been reduced to permanent invalidity, and she must become more nurse than lover.14
Dickens does better with Bella Wilfer, in spite of making her part of a plot that involves her in a series of unbelievable predicaments. We can believe that she longs to escape from poverty in suburban Holloway as much as the Ternan girls longed to escape from suburban Islington, but the crude course in moral improvement Bella is put through is feeble stuff. When she declares, ‘I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house,’15 we prick up our ears, as Ibsen did, so that it is a let-down to find her settling into life as a devoted married doll with her nose in the cookery book, a baby to keep her busy and never questioning the husband she has made into an idol. The best part of Bella is when she is shown with her father, letting her feelings and her behaviour rip. She is his favourite, he calls her �
�my pet’ and ‘the lovely woman’, and they keep up their flirtation throughout the book, enacting the ageing man’s dream of a young girl who devotes herself to making him happy. Bella is always hugging her father, arranging and rearranging his hair and smothering him with her hair. She ties his napkin on for him and pins him to the door, holding his ears while she kisses him all over his face. They go on secret expeditions together, one of them to Greenwich, which he calls ‘the happiest day he had ever known in his life’.16 She gives him money to buy new clothes, is in his confidence about his unsatisfactory relations with his wife – her mother – and offers him a quiet corner to escape to in her house when she is married. Contemporary critics, mostly middle-aged men, found Bella irresistibly charming. As you read the scenes between her and her father, it is tempting to see Dickens with Nelly, or with his daughter Katey, or with an amalgam of the two; only Reginald Wilfer is no stand-in for him, and it would have taken courage for either Nelly or Katey to smother the great Charles Dickens in her hair, or to take hold of his ears while she kissed him. His account of Bella suggests that he would have enjoyed it if they had.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 42