Bella and her father lighten a book that in other parts is grim, dark and violent. It is also sometimes tedious. The weakness of the plotting is a serious fault, and there is far too much of the good Boffins who have inherited the dust heaps, and one-legged Silas Wegg, and of John Harmon’s fake identities.17 But the jealous agony and rage of the schoolteacher Bradley Headstone, tightly controlled and repressed until he is driven to murder, is powerfully done. As Edmund Wilson, a fairer American critic than Henry James, pointed out, Dickens for the first time drew a murderer with a complex character in Bradley, and one who was a respectable member of society.18 The scope of Dickens’s observation is prodigious, and his satirical bite as sharp as a fresh razor. And as well as the Veneerings’ horrible circle, he works some decent middle-class people into the story: those who run a hospital for children in the East End; and a hard-working clergyman, ‘expensively educated and wretchedly paid’, looking after a poor parish with the help of his intelligent wife ‘worn by anxiety’ and desperately overburdened with six children.19 Dickens said he was ‘sick of the church’, but he recognized plain goodness and selflessness, and what it exacted from those who practised it.20
You take away with you from Our Mutual Friend the river, tidal, dark and powerful, the cheerless townscapes of London, the skies, the clocks striking through the night, the littered streets and gritty London churchyards, a whole physical world. What is missing is the good new London, the works of the engineer Bazalgette that were started in the 1860s, the Thames Embankment ‘rising high and dry … on the Middlesex shore, from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars. A really fine work, and really getting on. Moreover, a great system of drainage. Another really fine work, and likewise really getting on.’21 This was how Dickens described the building of the Embankment and the construction of the sewers in a letter to his Swiss friend Cerjat, written shortly after he had completed the book, and it makes you regret that he did not work some of those great enterprises into it. The moral climate of his London is sour and nasty, redeemed here and there only by private courage and virtue.
Another noticeable feature of the novel is the large number of characters who experience bodily distress or difficulty – Jenny hardly able to walk, one-legged Wegg, Eugene nearly dead for months after Bradley’s attack, Betty Higden struggling to die in the open air, the wicked money-man Fledgeby whipped till he bleeds and then peppered. Their pains are a reminder that Dickens was often in pain himself, and that from February 1865 he was suffering intermittently from a foot so swollen he could not wear a normal boot, and so tender it often made it impossible for him to take the exercise on which he depended when he was working. It also gave him nights of ‘sleepless agony’, and he must have feared what it threatened for his future.22 ‘If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish,’ he had told Forster more than a decade ago.23
Still, the book was finished on 2 September 1865, and Dickens took a few days in Paris and Boulogne: it seems unlikely that Nelly went with him, given their previous cross-Channel journey and perhaps too their sorrowful memories of France. He told Forster that he had to have a special boot made ‘on an Otranto scale’ for his sore foot, and that he could not bear anything on it after four or five in the afternoon, when he had to sit down with his leg up on another chair. While in Paris he also suffered from sunstroke, badly enough to take to his bed and call in a doctor, but in Boulogne he managed a little walking by the sea.24 On his return he wrote a Christmas piece for All the Year Round in the form of a monologue by a cheapjack, a tinker with a horse-drawn van. It was called ‘Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions’25 and, with its mixture of comical speech and pathos, was plainly written primarily for him to perform at his readings. Doctor Marigold describes the death of his beloved small daughter, his adoption of another little girl who is deaf and dumb, and how he teaches her to communicate and sends her to a school where she is well educated; she leaves him to marry and goes to China, but at the end he welcomes back her child, the third little girl in the story, who can hear and speak. It is skilfully constructed and deeply sentimental, Dickens hamming it up, and it went down well with audiences, and sold.
This autumn three of Dickens’s sons were far away, Frank in India, Alfred in Australia and Sydney at sea. Charley was in London, trying to run his paper business with small success, and Henry and Plorn were still boys and based at home. Dickens now decided that sixteen-year-old Henry, who was doing well at school in Wimbledon, should be entered for the Indian civil service examination, but Henry had other ideas and in September he told his father he had no desire to become a civil servant and wanted to try for Cambridge. Dickens responded by writing to his headmaster to say he could not afford to send a son to university unless there was a real hope of his doing well there, and asking what he thought of Henry’s abilities. The headmaster’s opinion was favourable, and Henry was allowed to stay on at school for another three years, and given extra coaching in various subjects, mathematics and fencing, among others. His father taught him shorthand, though not very successfully, because the dictations he improvised for him to take down were so funny they both fell about laughing. Henry was an ambitious and intelligent boy; he worked hard and in 1868 was accepted by Trinity Hall, a Cambridge law college, and went on to win an exhibition. Dickens was almost as incredulous at the success of this aberrant son as he was proud of his achievement; and Henry went on to become a conventionally successful and distinguished member of English society.
The Christmas of 1865 was celebrated with a house party at Gad’s Hill. Georgina and Mamie were in charge of the domestic arrangements, and Henry and Plorn were at home. Dickens arrived from London on 23 December and stayed for five days. Of the family, Katey and Charles Collins were there, and Charley, now forgiven for his marriage, with his wife Bessie and their babies, including ‘Master Charles Dickens, Junior’. Monsieur and Madame Fechter were also invited, with their son Paul. Henry Chorley, a bibulous bachelor, old friend of the family, contributor to All the Year Round and critic – he had reviewed Our Mutual Friend favourably in October – was there.26 Also Dickens’s protégé and current illustrator, Marcus Stone, whose father Frank had been dear to Dickens. A surprise guest was seventeen-year-old Edward Dickenson, whose life Dickens had saved at Staplehurst: Dickens had pulled him out of a heap of broken metal where he was jammed upside down, then taken him to Charing Cross Hospital, where he had visited him during the five weeks he was there. Henry kept everyone busy with billiard contests, there were walks for the energetic, and the usual games – Dumb Crambo, Proverbs, Forfeits, whist, pool. The food was lavish, with cigars for the men, champagne and other wines, and Dickens’s specially prepared gin punch. On Christmas Day Higham neighbours were invited, a Mr and Mrs Malleson with their daughter, and there was an unexpected arrival, Will Morgan, son of an American sea captain, another of Dickens’s old friends. The great Christmas dinner culminated as usual in a flaming pudding, after which he proposed the toast in the words of Tiny Tim, ‘God bless us every one’. After this there was dancing from nine until two in the morning.27 Henry’s account of the festivities does not say whether his father was able to dance this year, and on 29 December he was back at the office making up the next number of All the Year Round and proposing to visit Wills, who was ill, in his house in Regent’s Park Terrace, Camden Town – a little too close to Catherine’s house round the corner to be perfectly comfortable for Dickens.
On the other side of London, at Waltham Cross in Essex, another novelist, Anthony Trollope, gave a Christmas ball at his country house, and among the guests were Fanny and Nelly Ternan, who could now count two famous novelists among their friends. However delicate the state of Nelly’s health, or her sadness, she was ready to make a good appearance at the Trollopes’ ball in a girlish dress of pale green silk with an overskirt of matching tarlatan, a fine muslin, trimmed with white lace and dewdrops, and with scarlet geraniums and white heather in her hair.28 Nelly’s invitation to the Trollopes’ ball had c
ome through Fanny, who had been taken on in the spring of 1865 to give music lessons to their thirteen-year-old niece, Bice, daughter of Anthony’s brother Thomas.29 The Thomas Trollopes lived in Florence, where Bice’s mother had died, and her uncle Anthony had travelled out to bring the child back to stay at Waltham House with him and his wife Rose and their boys: they were good-hearted people. Throughout the summer of 1865, while Nelly was leaving France and recovering from the rail accident, Fanny had travelled to Waltham every other weekend to teach Bice. She cheered Bice up so well and made such a friend of her that when Thomas Trollope came to fetch her back to Italy in the autumn she and Fanny agreed to write to one another. Thomas Trollope had met Fanny seven years before when she was in Florence to study singing, armed with an introduction from Dickens; and now she made herself well liked by all the Trollopes, who appreciated her for what she was, a gifted, agreeable and lively woman.
All three Ternan daughters had now given up their acting and singing careers. Fanny was teaching, Maria was in Oxford with her brewer husband, and Nelly was pursuing her own mysterious life. In December 1865, however, their mother announced her intention of returning to the stage, to appear in a double bill with Fechter’s company. Dickens was greatly interested in the production and was at a rehearsal just before Christmas: she was already word perfect while Fechter had not yet begun to learn his lines.30 One play was an adaptation of Scott’s romantic tragedy The Bride of Lammermoor, the other a translation of Dumas’s popular melodrama The Corsican Brothers. The Ternan sisters were at the Lyceum together on the opening night on 11 January 1866 to see their mother perform, and Dickens was without doubt in the audience too, and later reported that the show was ‘an immense success’. It ran until June, when Mrs Ternan retired from the stage.
When Nelly let out Houghton Place in October, providing herself with a small income, Fanny and her mother found lodgings nearby in Mornington Crescent, and in January Maria and Nelly went together to St Leonard’s-on-Sea on the Sussex coast, saying they needed sea air for their health. Meanwhile Dickens rented two cottages in Slough, at that time a quiet country village, where he thought he could go unrecognized by the country people and install Nelly discreetly. He used a false name – Charles Tringham – under which he paid the rates; his tobacconist in Covent Garden was a Mrs Tringham, which probably amused him. He believed that in a different place, with a different name, he could be a different person, and his life became more like a novel with a plot too complicated to be followed easily. When Mrs Elliot wrote pestering him again about Nelly, he told her, ‘As to my romance it belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor.’31 He refused an invitation to speak in public on 3 March on account of ‘an annual engagement’, and celebrated Nelly’s twenty-seventh birthday with her, possibly in Sussex, possibly in Slough, but much more likely at Verrey’s, one of his favourite restaurants, in Regent Street.
His doctor, Frank Beard, had told him in February that he had a degeneration of the functions of the heart, which hardly surprised him, since he felt himself lacking in ‘buoyancy and hopefulness’.32 Still, to please Georgina and Mamie he rented a London house as usual, this time in what was then known as Tyburnia, at No. 6 Southwick Place, Hyde Park, as a base until June; and, regardless of his health problems, he prepared to set off for a new series of readings.
Maria Taylor now told her husband she needed to travel south, since she was suffering from rheumatism, and Oxford was damp; and she took herself to Florence. In May, Thomas Trollope invited Fanny to come out to be Bice’s governess, and she too was soon in Florence. Fanny had not been idle, and had written a novel, Aunt Margaret’s Trouble, which she showed to Dickens. He was enthusiastic about it and prepared to run it in All the Year Round, but anonymously, and paid for out of his private funds, so that even in the office no one should know what he paid for it. It was dedicated to ‘E. L. T.’ – Ellen Lawless Ternan – and began to appear in July. In the same month Thomas Trollope, relieved to have his household put in order and his daughter cheered up by an efficient and good-natured woman, proposed marriage to Fanny Ternan and was accepted. There was to be a wedding in Paris in October, with Maria, Nelly and Mrs Ternan all present, and Bice was to be sent, to her considerable indignation, to boarding school in England: Fanny could be tough. Dickens wrote to Thomas Trollope to congratulate him warmly, saying he had foreseen the match, but he did not attend the wedding.
Fanny was thirty-one, her husband fifty-six, and both had reason to be pleased. He had acquired an affectionate and hard-working companion and she had taken a crucial upward step socially, her husband being a gentleman by birth and education, albeit a poor gentleman who had to earn his living as a writer. And now Fanny, who had achieved exactly what a young woman hoped to do by marrying into a rank of society higher than she was born into, began to worry about Nelly’s position. Was her friendship with Dickens safe, or was he putting her reputation at risk? The fact was she could do nothing except preach caution to Nelly. That Dickens was now her publisher and patron, already commissioning a second novel, for which he paid her the extraordinarily large sum of 500 guineas for three years’ copyright, made it just about impossible for her to raise objections to whatever was going on between E. L. T. and the editor of All the Year Round.33 Her letters to Bice read curiously as she talks about Nelly as though she were living the life of a conventional young girl, with her mother in attendance and devoted to her pet dog; she passes on Nelly’s silly jokes about the dog, and sends her love.
In the intersecting circles of Ternans, Trollopes, Dickenses, Hogarths, Forsters, Collinses, Elliots, Wills and Dickens’s new readings manager, George Dolby, it is impossible to be sure how much anyone knew about Nelly. Forster, Wills, Dolby and Georgina were pretty well in the know, although not entirely; Katey, Charley and Henry were aware of Nelly’s existence. To Wills, Nelly was ‘the Patient’; to Dolby, she became ‘Madame’. We have seen how Dickens fielded questions from Mrs Elliot, a friend of both Wilkie Collins and Thomas Trollope. He was so much on his guard that he did not even tell Wilkie Collins the name of the author of Aunt Margaret’s Trouble. Soon he was warning Mrs Elliot to be careful what she said to the Thomas Trollopes: ‘Of course you will be very strictly on your guard, if you see Tom Trollope, or his wife, or both – to make no reference to me which either can piece into anything. She is infinitely sharper than the serpent’s tooth. Mind that.’34 It looks as though Fanny had a double role for him: as a writer he published and as someone who could not be trusted with information about his life with Nelly. And it makes you wonder how he and Nelly talked about Fanny together, or he and Thomas Trollope, when they met, as they did; and whether the 500 guineas Dickens paid for Mabel’s Progress, duly serialized from April 1867, was meant to keep Fanny quiet.
Years after Dickens’s death Nelly said that she had begun to feel remorse about her relations with him at some stage during their association, and that her remorse had made them both miserable.35 It may have been a fluctuating remorse, since she was clearly eager to go to America with him, and she made sure she was back from Italy to welcome him on his return. One perpetual worry must have been the fear of becoming pregnant again, and Fanny, protective and practical, and now a knowledgeable married woman, could have urged Nelly to try to avoid further sexual relations with Dickens. There is no way of knowing, but whatever went on between Dickens and Nelly, anxiety, remorse, reluctance and guilt are all spoilers of joy.
With the publication of Our Mutual Friend in November 1865 his best work was almost done. A warning of mortality came in that same month when his fellow novelist, contributor and sometime friend, Elizabeth Gaskell, died suddenly, aged only fifty-five, just before completing her novel Wives and Daughters.36 Over the next years he willed himself to produce a few more articles and some effortful stories, and with a last summoning of creative energy he planned and wrote a good part of another novel. He also kept up a bruising programme of activities. He was rarely in the sam
e place for more than a few days at a time, and said of himself, ‘I am here, there, everywhere and (principally) nowhere.’37 World events had their effect on him, the end of the American Civil War in 1865 bringing renewed invitations to cross the Atlantic to entertain a public eager to hear him and ready to pay generously for the privilege. He needed the money, but 1865 was also the year in which the trouble with his foot began to make things more difficult for him: it seems clear to modern medical opinion that it was gout, but he would not accept the diagnosis, and found doctors who agreed with his denial. From now on he appears as a man assailed, proud and obstinate, not merely keeping going by strength of will but forcing the pace, at the cost of increasingly distressing symptoms. Nelly remained his darling, but she was not always easy and he was not always well. His son Henry remembered his ‘heavy moods of deep depression, of intense nervous irritability, when he was silent and oppressed’.38 Yet he never allowed himself to sink into permanent gloom, and even now there are many more accounts of his charm and conviviality than of his low moments. He was the inimitable still, and would be to the end, with his own trick of putting aside agony and exhaustion and reappearing suddenly, like a clown from behind the curtain, full of energy, amazing everyone with his good humour and laughter, and his determination to get on with the chief work of his life.
24
The Chief
1866–1868
In 1866 a new figure appeared in Dickens’s life who did a good deal to cheer him. This was George Dolby, a big man, full of energy, optimism and know-how, and talkative, with a stammer he bravely disregarded. He was thirty-five, just married, a theatre manager out of work and keen to take on the running of Dickens’s next reading tour. He was sent by Chappell, the music publishers who were setting up the tour, and he won Dickens’s confidence at once, and quickly became a friend.1 Through Dolby’s eyes we see again how irresistibly charming Dickens could be, how funny, how energetic, even when suffering from hideous pain and difficulty in getting about. He became a hero to Dolby, who revered him, called him ‘Chief’, and over the next four years saw him in every mood, from wild high spirits as he demonstrated how to dance a hornpipe in a moving railway carriage, to tears of remorse after he had shouted angrily at his tour manager for being too cautious. Dolby’s Dickens is the boys’ Dickens, the Pickwickian Dickens, at ease with his male companions and masculine pleasures. They laughed and joked together like boys, and enjoyed the small rituals of travel, the ‘artful sandwich’ favoured by Dickens (French roll, butter, parsley, hard-boiled egg and anchovy), the mixing of the gin punch, the coffee made on a spirit lamp, the game of cribbage. Dolby took in his stride being treated to a prison visit in Stirling during a rare free hour, and accepted that whenever there was a circus running nearby it had to be seen. For his part, Dolby showed off by standing on his head, which was a big, solid one. He perfectly understood that Dickens’s favourite restorative between the two parts of his reading every night consisted of ‘A dozen oysters and a little champagne’.2 He observed that his Chief always took a draught of brandy an hour into each train journey, followed by sherry later, and the two of them smoked cigars steadily throughout each trip.3 Dickens said Dolby was ‘as tender as a woman and as watchful as a doctor’.4 He served him to the end of his life, Dickens trusted him with his secrets, and Dolby never betrayed his trust.5 He said that Dickens had given him ‘the brightest chapter of my life’.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 43