Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

The arrival of James and Annie Fields in England in May for a prolonged European holiday raised his spirits and inspired him to feats of hospitality. First he took a suite for himself in the St James’s Hotel in Piccadilly in order to show them the sights of London, Windsor and Richmond. Then, with Dolby also of the party, and Sol Eytinge, an American painter, he took them to Shadwell, in the East End, under police protection, and they were able to go into an opium den, where they watched and listened to the mutterings of an old woman dealer. After this the whole party was invited to spend a week at Gad’s Hill in early June, with many walks, games of croquet and bowls in the garden, charades in the evening, elaborately planned lobster picnics in the woods, drives through hop gardens and orchards, visits to Rochester, where they all climbed to the battlements of the castle, and to Canterbury, where Dickens dismissed the cathedral verger and gave his guests his own guided tour. There was a visit to Chatham and another to Cobham Woods, and the week culminated in a great dinner, with dancing in the drawing room afterwards that continued until first light.27 The Fieldses were back at Gad’s in October, when they met Henry, in high favour since winning a college scholarship at the end of his first year, and both his sisters were there again. After dinner Mamie played Scotch reels on the piano, and Dickens could not resist getting to his feet and leading Katey in a dance. ‘I never saw anything prettier; Katie with her muslin kerchief as in the old time and the double white hollyhocks in her hair & her quaint graceful little figure and he, light and lithe as a boy of 20 – those two take great delight in each other.’ So wrote Annie Fields in her diary, seeing him rejuvenated as he showed off with his daughter, a glimpse of a man who had already been near death and had only nine months left to live, but who could still look like a boy absorbed in the pleasure of dancing with a beloved girl.28

  The Fieldses were not introduced to Nelly during their stay in England, but Dickens spoke of her to James Fields, telling him that ‘when he was ill in his reading only Nelly observed that he staggered and his eye failed, only she dared tell him’ – a remark that indicates her presence at readings earlier in the year, possibly in the north.29 There was a cricket match at Gad’s in August, at which, according to Katey, Nelly was present, staying as a guest in the house, and taking part in the cricket too. No doubt she was presented as a friend of the family – and why not? A genuine friendship began to grow up between her and Georgy and Mamie.30 In September, when Dickens was going to speak to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, an educational body he had supported from its beginning sixteen years earlier, he told Dolby, ‘I have a notion … of supplementing the speechmaking with a small N excursion next Day to Stratford, or Kenilworth, or both, or somewhere else, in a jovial way.’31 Mr Ryland, the Birmingham organizer, was told that Dickens wouldn’t be staying with him, since he would be with his secretary, Mr Dolby, and they must be away early next morning; and Nelly and Dickens were able to make a short cultural jaunt together, and pay their homage to Shakespeare, or Amy Robsart, or both.32

  Dolby knew Nelly well enough to approach Dickens through her: in November, for instance, Dickens wrote to him from Wellington Street, ‘In answer to your enquiry to N – I do not think I shall be here until Wed. in the ordinary course. But I can be in town on Tuesday at from 5 to 6, and will dine at the Posts with you, if you like.’33 And Dolby gave his own interesting account of how Dickens divided his time, saying the early days of the week were devoted to business, ‘Mr Dickens, on these days, taking up his residence at the office in London, returning to Gad’s with his guests, as a rule, on Friday, and remaining there until the following Monday’ – leaving the middle of the week open, with a neat space for the Tringham life at Peckham.34

  For several years Lord and Lady Russell had made a habit of inviting Dickens to a summer dinner at Pembroke Lodge, their house in Richmond Park, and this year he agreed to stay overnight. Two accounts of the evening were given, one by the Russells’ granddaughter, who was charmed by the great man. She noticed his frilled shirt and diamond studs, his white hair and his abstemiousness: ‘At dinner he ate and drank very little. Champagne did not circulate at Pembroke Lodge, nor was it the fashion in those days to have whiskey-and-sodas; but there was port and madeira, and we sat for some time over the wine. Mr Dickens drank madeira sparingly.’35 Dickens’s own account, given to Dolby, is rather different. He told him that, knowing Lord Russell’s ‘very temperate habits’, he had packed a bottle of Ballard’s punch in his portmanteau, intending to mix himself a drink in his room at bedtime. He went without a servant, expecting to do his own unpacking, and was embarrassed to find that the valet who laid out his dress suit had also arranged his bottle of punch on the mantel-shelf, with a tumbler, wine glass and corkscrew beside it. ‘At this spectacle he was troubled in spirit,’ he told Dolby. Worse followed. At half past ten, the hour at which the Russells normally went to bed, as Dickens stood up to wish them goodnight, they both started laughing and Lady Russell said, ‘Don’t be in a hurry, the tray will be here in a minute.’ And in came a servant with all the materials for making punch.36 Dickens told Dolby the story against himself with good humour; but packing a private bottle and planning a secret drink does suggest that his need for alcohol had become a serious dependence.

  In August he began to turn over an idea for a new novel, a murder mystery and a love story, much of it set in Rochester, where the cathedral was put to some sinister usage. This was the chief occupation of the autumn. In October he found a title, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and was able to read some of it to James Fields, who had been with him when he visited the Shadwell opium den described in the opening pages; and at the end of the month he read the whole of the first number to the Forsters. Charles Collins asked if he might illustrate it and was invited to design the cover. Dickens was pleased with what he did, and happy for him to provide the illustrations, but Collins let him down, declaring himself too ill. Dickens turned to Luke Fildes, who had been recommended by Millais; the young artist was jubilant to have been given the job, which he did well.

  Dickens’s own health was so troublesome that he told Georgina he was giving up tea and coffee in the morning, and asked her to prepare ‘Homeopathic Cocoa boiled with milk’ for his breakfast instead.37 He kept at his writing, and also managed to deliver two public lectures during the autumn; while Dolby noticed ‘a slow but steady change working in him, and had serious doubts whether he would be able to get through the twelve Readings announced’ for the next year, as Dickens insisted there must be, to say a last farewell to his London public.38 He kept his eye on the future, even if only in joking with Thomas Trollope, who pressed Dickens to visit him in Italy, about how he was going to cross all the passes of the Alps, ‘and I am also “going” up the Nile to the Second Cataract, and I am “going” to Jerusalem, and to India, and likewise to Australia. My only dimness of perception in this wise, is, that I don’t know when … But whenever (if ever) I change “going” into “coming”, I shall come to see you.’39 And on 13 December he signed a contract for Drood, to be published by Chapman & Hall in twelve numbers, starting in March 1870, and put out in green-paper covers. Chapman paid £7,500 for the right to all profits on the first 25,000 copies, and after that equal shares for publisher and author, and two American publishers vied for the rights, which finally went to Harper’s for £1,000. He was now committed up to the spring of 1871.40

  At Gad’s Hill he entertained a great deal, the Fieldses again, Forster, the playwright and novelist Charles Reade, his journalist friend Charles Kent, his solicitor Ouvry. Dolby describes an all-male gathering there with Fechter, his American theatre manager Palmer and Webster of the Adelphi – madeira to drink, gambling on the billiards and a Bohemian atmosphere, but this was unusual. Dickens’s pride in the place was great: he had his house boy Isaac put into page’s livery, and he was always making more improvements, ordering the construction of a large conservatory, another gauge for the future, for which the insurance alone cost £600. He was amused to hear that Wills in
retirement was perfectly happy in his idle life, settled in a country house in Hertfordshire: idleness was not an option for Dickens. He kept an eye on public affairs, worrying about the situation in Ireland and the Fenians, who gathered in large numbers for a protest meeting in London. He expressed his indignation against Mrs Beecher Stowe, who had published a book called Lady Byron Vindicated, writing to John Murray to tell him of how he had visited Byron’s daughter Ada years before, and how ‘She little thought, in speaking to me of her father, that the Ghoules were even then growing their nails for his grave.’41 Perhaps he foresaw a Mrs Dickens Vindicated.

  In December, Fechter departed for America after a farewell dinner at Gad’s, leaving his wife and son in England and taking his mistress with him as his leading lady. He also took Dickens’s valet Scott, who knew America, an arrangement Dickens must have made out of the goodness of his heart. At Christmas there was a small family gathering: Georgina, his two daughters, Henry, who had passed his Little Go examination42 with all honours, Charles Collins, and Charley and Bessie with a grandchild, or so he told Macready, although by now there were four grandchildren.43 To Dolby he wrote saying this Christmas was one of great pain and misery to him, and contrasted it sadly with the one they had spent together in America. Then, as he said pathetically, he had the use of his legs, but this year he was confined to his bed the whole day, getting up only in the evening to join the party in the drawing room after dinner.44 Yet by New Year’s Eve he was well enough to go to London, and to read the second number of Drood aloud to the Forsters.

  26

  Pickswick, Pecknicks, Pickwicks

  1870

  No one can imagine their own death, even when they know it is approaching. Dickens rejected and defied his illness with a spirit that would not flinch or budge. At the same time he sensed danger and set about putting order into his affairs – family matters, money, copyrights. His days were now packed with business meetings, readings, public and private, office work to do with the magazine, discussions with illustrators, plans for more improvements at Gad’s, the rebuilding of the staircase, changes to the garden and the new conservatory. Then there were speeches to deliver, dinners and receptions, his daughters’ amateur theatricals in which they involved him, social obligations to insistent friends, to politicians and even to royalty – and woven through all this, the writing of his novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He did not pause until the day he fell unconscious to the ground.

  Keeping to his practice of renting a London house to allow Mamie to enjoy herself, he took another in Bayswater, at No. 5 Hyde Park Place, close to Marble Arch, belonging to the Liberal politician Milner Gibson, who had served in Lord Russell’s last government. He told Dolby he liked the view over the park, where he could see people enjoying themselves, and that he also enjoyed the rattling of early morning wagons taking produce from Paddington to the markets, even when he was woken by it, because it showed that an important part of the world was already at work. In the same way, he added, he liked sleeping at the office, Wellington Street being one in which ‘when the last cab had gone “off”, the first market cart came “on”.’1

  There were five London readings in January, one of them a special matinee on the 21st to allow theatre people to hear ‘Sikes’. Dickens wrote to Wills afterwards, saying he had decided it had been ‘madness ever to do it continuously. My ordinary pulse is 72, and it runs up under this effort to 112. Besides which, it takes me ten or twelve minutes to get my wind back at all: I being in the meantime like the man who lost the fight.’ He went on to say he hoped Wills would come to hear it, and told him he would be doing it twice in February and once in March. Meanwhile he had something wrong with his right thumb – it must have been gout again, which travels about – and he could not write plainly. He ended the letter, ‘The patient [i.e., Nelly] was in attendance and missed you. I was charged with all manner of good and kind remembrance.’2 His bad thumb obliged him to put off a dinner with Gladstone.

  His father-in-law, George Hogarth, now eighty-six, was still working as a journalist, a respected figure and well liked for his good nature and unassuming ways. In January he fell down the stairs at the office of the Illustrated London News and died as a result of the fall in February, nursed to the end by Catherine’s married sister, Helen Roney, who lived close to her. Dickens, thirty years younger than his father-in-law, had not spoken to him for over a decade, and he made no sign to the Hogarth family, who can hardly have expected it, but all the obituaries pointed out the relationship between the two men, and Georgina used black-bordered paper for her correspondence as a token of mourning for her father.

  Although he did not choose to remember Mr Hogarth, ceremonies and courtesies were important to Dickens. He spent his fifty-eighth birthday with the Forsters, who gave a dinner to which Georgy came, and Katey with her husband. He wrote to Macready to congratulate him on reaching his seventy-seventh on 3 March. On the same day Nelly’s birthday lunch was held, this year at Blanchard’s in Regent Street, with Wills and one other guest, probably Dolby: one wonders how much any of the participants enjoyed these occasions. On Sunday, 6 March, Dickens dined with George Eliot and Lewes, who found his conversation energetic and entertaining, although they thought he looked ‘dreadfully shattered’. On the 8th he gave a reading: the sentimental ‘Boots at the Holly-tree Inn’, next the Sikes murder, for the last time, sending his pulse racing, and finally the comic ‘Bob Sawyer’s Party’. The next day, overcoming his lack of enthusiasm for royalty, he went to Buckingham Palace for an afternoon interview with the Queen, who had ‘signified in a note that she wished “to make my acquaintance”’.3

  What made him soften? He had shown some photographs of the American Civil War to Arthur Helps, a man of literary tastes and talent who was Clerk to the Privy Council and a courtier, and Helps had mentioned them to the Queen, who asked to see them, and then expressed a wish to meet Dickens. From his point of view, he may have wanted to do something for Mamie, who had social ambitions and could be received at court once he had been.4 Etiquette demanded that he remain standing throughout his conversation with the Queen, and she also stood, leaning on a sofa. It was not a sprightly exchange. She regretted she had never heard him read and he explained firmly that the readings were over – although in truth there was a last one yet to be given – and that he did not give private readings. They talked of his American trip, the Queen mentioned a supposed discourtesy shown by the Americans to her son Prince Arthur on a visit, and Dickens assured her that the royal family was popular across the Atlantic. She asked him if he could account for the fact that it was no longer possible to find good servants in England, and he suggested the educational system might be unhelpful. She talked of the rising price of food.

  She then presented him with a copy of the book she had written, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. He can hardly have forgotten how he had chided Wills for allowing praise of this royal work to appear in his magazine: ‘I would not have had that reference made to the Queen’s preposterous book (I have read it) for any money. I blush to join the Shameful lick-spittle Chorus. It is amazing to me, knowing my opinions on such matters, that you could have passed it.’5 Now he naturally accepted the preposterous book with grace. The Queen expressed a wish to be given copies of his works, and was promised a specially bound set. Dickens then left, to meet Dolby as agreed in the Burlington Arcade, and the two went off arm in arm to dine at the Blue Posts in Cork Street.

  There was another dinner with Dolby on 12 March, when Dickens entertained him with the Chappell brothers to thank them for organizing the readings.6 Three days later, on the 15th, he gave his final reading at St James’s Hall. It was an occasion of high emotion for reader and public. Crowds were turned away at the door as an audience of 2,000 gathered inside, many paying only a shilling for a seat, and when he came on to the platform they rose to their feet to cheer him. He gave them A Christmas Carol and ‘The Trial of Pickwick’. Forster was in the audience and though
t he had never read so well, with delicacy and the quiet sadness of farewell. Dolby was backstage, ready to support him as necessary. Charley was in the front row on the orders of Frank Beard, in case his father should falter: ‘you must run up and catch him and bring him off with me, or, by Heaven, he’ll die before them all.’7 He did not falter, although he could not say ‘Pickwick’, making it Pickswick, Pecknicks or Pickwicks. At the end the audience called him back several times until he spoke some farewell words, telling them to expect his new novel’s first instalment in two weeks, and then, ‘from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.’ ‘The brief hush of silence as he moved from the platform; and the prolonged tumult of sound that followed suddenly, stayed him, and again for another moment brought him back; will not be forgotten by any present,’ wrote John Forster.8

  The bond with Forster was as strong as it had ever been, and he read each number of Edwin Drood aloud at his house in Palace Gate as he finished it, and talked over the plot with him. On 21 March, ten days before the first number was published, he read the fourth, and afterwards confided to his friend that, as he walked along Oxford Street earlier, he had once again been unable to read the right side of the names written on the shop fronts. At the end of the month he wrote to him describing a recurrence of severe haemorrhage from his piles which left him shaken: the laudanum he took to help him sleep would have caused constipation, making the piles worse. Still, he was not deterred from leading his active life. On 28 March he signed an agreement with Frederic Chapman and Henry Trollope, son of Anthony and a new partner in Chapman & Hall, covering the copyright of all his books, which was shared equally between himself and the publishers. He celebrated Forster’s birthday with him on 2 April. On 5 April he spoke at the dinner of the Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution, warming them up with jokes and urging them to contribute more to their own pension fund. On 6 April he put on court dress and attended a levee at the palace. The next day he held a large reception at Hyde Park Place, at which the violinist Joachim and the pianist Charles Hallé both performed, as well as solo and group singers. He had done nothing so ambitious in the way of entertainment since the days at Tavistock House.