Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  In April, Charley formally took over from Wills at All the Year Round. Then, on 2 June, Dickens added a codicil to his will giving Charley the whole of his own share and interest in the magazine, with all its stock and effects.9 In this way he did the best he could to look after the future of his beloved first-born son, in whom he had once placed such hopes: he would not – could not – now give up on him, in spite of his failures and bankruptcy. Henry continued to do well at Cambridge and could be relied on to make his own way. In May he wrote to his fourth son, Alfred, expressing his ‘unbounded faith’ in his future in Australia, but doubting whether Plorn was taking to life there, and mentioning Sydney’s debts: ‘I fear Sydney is much too far gone for recovery, and I begin to wish that he were honestly dead.’10 Words so chill they are hard to believe, with which Sydney was cast off as Walter had been when he got into debt, and brother Fred when he became too troublesome, and Catherine when she opposed his will. Once Dickens had drawn a line he was pitiless.

  The conflicting elements in his character produced many puzzles and surprises. Why was Charley forgiven for failure and restored to favour, Walter and Sydney not? Because Charley was the child of his youth and first success, perhaps. But all his sons baffled him, and their incapacity frightened him: he saw them as a long line of versions of himself that had come out badly. He resented the fact that they had grown up in comfort and with no conception of the poverty he had worked his way out of, and so he cast them off; yet he was a man whose tenderness of heart showed itself time and time again in his dealings with the poor, the dispossessed, the needy, other people’s children. Again, the lover who longed to take Nelly to America with him could not think of living permanently with her in England, not only because of the inevitable scandal, but also because he was attached to his life at Gad’s Hill, calmly presided over by Georgina, who served him and limited the demands she made on him. There was another life he valued too, with Dolby and at the office, where he could enjoy being a bachelor, dining well, theatre-going and drinking late with men friends. He grumbled about Forster, his dullness, his surrender to middle-class values and conventions, but he could not manage without him, and the words he had written to him in 1838 – that nothing but death should impair ‘the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted’ – remained true to the end. In his writing too there were conflicts, a touch of ham certainly, but alongside it the dazzling jokes, the Shakespearean characterization, the delicacy and profundity of imagination, the weirdness and brilliance of his descriptive powers.

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood sold well from the start, outstripping Our Mutual Friend by 10,000 and reaching 50,000 a number. Dickens, sending pages of manuscript to the printer, put in a note to tell him, ‘The safety of my precious child is my sole care,’ an unexpected image from this most masculine of writers who had never before described his work as his child.11 Drood has fascinated readers because it is a murder story left unfinished and unsolved, with touches of exoticism, opium, mesmerism, Thuggee practices,12 all new departures for him. It also contains haunting and melancholy descriptions of Rochester, the city of his childhood, beautifully rendered; but the mystery is a slight one, the villain less interesting than he promises to be at first, the comedy only moderately funny, the charm a little forced, and the language reads at times like a parody of earlier work. There is a nicely done bad child who throws stones and pronounces cathedral ‘KIN-FREE-DER-EL’, which Dickens may have heard and appreciated in the streets of Rochester; and what was finished – twenty-two chapters, making half of what was intended – is perfectly readable.

  Drood has to be seen in three ways. First, as the unfinished mystery which has received extraordinary attention just because it is a puzzle left by Dickens and offers itself for endless ingenious speculation by those who enjoy thinking up solutions. Secondly, as half a novel which cannot be regarded as a major work, and which has divided opinion sharply even among Dickens’s warmest admirers, from Chesterton’s hailing it as the creation of a dying magician making ‘his last splendid and staggering appearance’ to Gissing’s and Shaw’s dismissal of it as trivial and of no account. And thirdly, as the achievement of a man who is dying and refusing to die, who would not allow illness and failing powers to keep him from exerting his imagination, or to prevent him from writing: and as such it is an astonishing and heroic enterprise.

  Until the end of May he was officially based at Hyde Park Place, but often at Wellington Street, and sometimes he escaped to Gad’s, and without doubt to be with Nelly too. Early in February he tells a friend he has been away in the country for two days, in mid-April he says he has been ‘working hard out of town’ over a weekend, and later in the month he mentions ‘a long country walk’ at Gad’s Hill – any or all of these might mean time with her.13 The death of Maclise brought sorrow although they had scarcely been in touch for years, and he spoke tenderly of him at the Royal Academy dinner on 30 April. It was his last speech and made a great impression. On 2 May he and Mamie dined with his old friend Lavinia Watson and her children, on a visit to London from Rockingham. After this he told one correspondent he was going out of town ‘to get a breath of fresh air’ for two days, and another, ‘I have been (and still am), in attendance on a sick friend at some distance,’ which sounds like Peckham again.14

  On 7 May he read aloud the fifth episode of Drood at Forster’s. Now the pain in his foot was stirring again and he began to be ‘dead-lame’ and had to take more laudanum at night. Ouvry was asked to come to his office to transact business and other engagements were cancelled, including his attendance at the State Ball at Buckingham Palace on the 17th, to which Mamie went without him. He managed to dine with the American Ambassador, Motley, and with Disraeli, and took breakfast with Gladstone.15 On 22 May, Forster dined with him at Hyde Park Place. He had news of the death of another once dear friend, Mark Lemon, and sent Charley to represent him at the funeral. Then on 24 May he somehow got himself to dinner with Lord and Lady Houghton, she being the granddaughter of the Lady Crewe for whom his grandmother had worked as housekeeper: he was invited there to meet the Prince of Wales, who particularly wished to be introduced to him, together with Leopold II, King of Belgium. Dickens was at the dinner and in reasonably good form, but he was unable to go upstairs to the drawing room afterwards.16

  He was also kept busy by his daughters, giving advice and assistance to an amateur group with whom they were putting on a play at the Kensington house of a rich builder, Charles Freake, whose children were their friends. Dickens went there for some rehearsals, and indeed Katey said she was with him constantly in town about this time.17 There was another dinner with the indefatigably hospitable Lady Molesworth. One guest recalled him as bubbling over with fun, but the young Lady Jeune, who had her only meeting with him at Lady Molesworth’s dinner table, remembered sitting between him and Bulwer, aware that ‘the noise and fatigue of the dinner seemed to distress him [Dickens] very much.’18 Worse, his lameness was making it more difficult for him to work at his novel: ‘Deprivation of my usual walks is a very serious matter to me, as I cannot work unless I have my constant exercise.’19

  So on 25 May he took himself to Gad’s Hill, ‘obliged to fly for a time from the dinings and other engagements of this London Season, and to take refuge here to get myself into my usual gymnastic condition’ – but ‘circuitously, to get a little change of air on the road’.20 He remained there until 2 June, sending Fechter a rhapsodic description of the improvements to the house and garden: the conservatory was finished, the rebuilt main staircase had been gilded and brightly painted, and the garden was being managed by a new gardener who had improved the gravel paths and installed forcing houses for melons and cucumbers as well as flowers.21

  View of the house at Gad’s Hill from the garden at the back, showing the conservatory (right) Dickens had built.

  He was still resting at Gad’s when the Hyde Park Place house was officially given up, on the last day of May. Then, on Thursday, 2 June, he was back in London,
at Wellington Street, where Dolby, making his weekly visit to the office, found him immersed in business and looking strained – depressed, and even tearful, he noted. They had their lunch together, talked of Dolby visiting Gad’s to see the improvements, shook hands, said ‘next week, then’ and parted. That evening he went to the Freakes’ mansion in the Cromwell Road to join his daughters at their theatrical entertainment and acquitted himself well as stage manager, although Charles Collins found him sitting alone behind the scenes afterwards, apparently thinking he was at home – which home, you have to ask.22 It was a hot night and he went back to Wellington Street to sleep. There Charley found him in the morning, so absorbed in working on Drood that he did not answer when spoken to. He remained seemingly oblivious of the presence of his son, and even when he turned in his direction appeared to look through him. So Charley left him without any farewells.

  Forster was away in Cornwall, working. Dickens was back at Gad’s in the evening, where Georgina was expecting him. He ordered four more boxes of his usual cigars and, for his painful foot, a ‘voltaic band’, a type of electric chain that had become a fashionable all-purpose cure, recommended to him by the actress Mrs Bancroft and supplied by Isaac Pulvermacher, Medical Battery Maker.23 Both his daughters came down on Sunday, and after Georgina and Mamie had gone to bed that night he sat up talking with Katey. ‘The lamps in the conservatory were turned down, but the windows that led into it were still open. It was a very warm, quiet night, and there was not a breath of air: the sweet scent of the flowers came in … and my father and I might have been the only creatures alive in the place …’ So Katey sets the scene for her great talk with her father in which she asked his advice – should she take up an offer to go on the stage? He warned her against the idea, telling her she was pretty and might do well, but that she was too sensitive. ‘Although there are nice people on the stage, there are some who would make your hair stand on end. You are clever enough to do something else.’ As they talked on he said he wished he had been ‘a better father – a better man’ and told her things he had never discussed with her before, no doubt concerning the separation from her mother and his relations with Nelly. He also expressed a doubt as to whether he would live to finish Drood – ‘because you know, my dear child, I have not been strong lately’. He spoke, she said, ‘as though his life was over and there was nothing left’.24

  Katey and Mamie were leaving for town together the next morning. When they came down their father was already working in his chalet in the wilderness – he had ordered his breakfast for 7.30 because he had so much to do, he told the maid – and since he disliked partings they did not think of disturbing him. But, as they sat in the porch waiting for the carriage to take them to the station, Katey felt she wanted to see him again. She hurried through the tunnel under the road to the wilderness, then up the steps to the upper room of the chalet in which he worked. When he saw her he pushed his chair away from the writing table and took her into his arms to kiss her, holding her in an embrace she would never forget.

  In the afternoon he walked into Rochester with his dogs and posted his letters. He also went down into the cellar with a notebook in which he entered details of the casks kept there, heading it ‘Details of Contents of Casks in the Cellar – an account being kept on a slate in the cellar of what is drawn daily from each cask – and added together in this Book at the end of every week beginning 6th June 1870’. On the first page he made seven entries for sherry, brandy, rum and Scotch whisky, giving the number of gallons and when purchased, e.g., ‘Cask Very Fine Scotch Whiskey 30 gallons – came in 1st January 1869’. On page 2 he noted that three quarts of sherry had been used in the previous week, and on page 3 that a pint each of old pale brandy and dark brandy had been drawn. On page 5 he wrote that two gallons of his ‘Very Fine Scotch Whiskey’, stored in casks and stone jars, had been used in London.25

  On Tuesday he worked at Drood again and wrote more letters, one to Luke Fildes telling him he would be at Gad’s from Saturday, 11 June – i.e., not before then – until the following Tuesday or Wednesday, and inviting him down for the next weekend. After lunch he and Georgy went in the carriage to Cobham Woods, where he got out in order to walk home alone; later he hung Chinese lanterns in the conservatory, and they both admired them in the evening. He had his breakfast served early again, at 7.30, on Wednesday, 8 June, and one of the maids left to be married that morning. A few letters written that day said he would be in the office in London on Thursday, and during the morning he looked in at the Falstaff Inn opposite to cash a cheque from the landlord, Mr Trood, as he often did, on this occasion for £22.26

  After this Georgina was the only person known to have seen him until after six in the evening. In the servants’ hall below stairs there was the cook Catherine, the maid Emma, and the young house boy Isaac Armitage, and somewhere about outside were the groom George Butler, the new gardener Mr Brunt and some under-gardeners, local boys who would go home in the evening. Georgina said that Dickens came to the house in the middle of the day for an hour’s rest and to smoke a cigar, and then went back to work in the chalet, contrary to his usual habit, returning to the house in the late afternoon to write letters and entering the dining room at six, looking unwell. He sat down and she asked him if he felt ill and he replied, ‘Yes, very ill; I have been very ill for the last hour.’ On her saying she would send for a doctor, he said no, he would go on with the dinner, and go afterwards to London. He made an effort to struggle against the fit that was coming on him, and talked incoherently and soon very indistinctly. Georgina gave several versions of what happened, and she told Forster that he mentioned a sale at a neighbour’s house and something about Macready before stating his intention of going to London immediately. In another version, when she suggested calling the doctor, he said no, complaining of toothache, holding his jaw, and asking to have the window shut, which she did.27 In every version she gave their final exchange, her ‘Come and lie down’, and his reply, ‘Yes, on the ground’, as he collapsed on the floor and lost consciousness.28 Haunting last words. Now at last the core of his being, the creative machine that had persisted in throwing up ideas, visions and characters for thirty-six years, was stilled.

  Forster, who like everyone else took his account from Georgina, describes her as trying to get him on to a sofa, but there was no sofa in the dining room. She said she got the servants from below, where they always remained unless sent for, to bring a sofa from the drawing room, on to which he was lifted. Yet Steele, the local doctor who was summoned by Isaac, the house boy, stated with certainty that Dickens was on the floor when he arrived and that it was he who asked for the sofa to be brought into the dining room and he who lifted him on to it; and later he would point out the exact place where he had found Dickens lying. We all know that memories of such events are likely to be uncertain and unreliable: for instance, Isaac said later that he had gone to fetch the doctor on the pony Noggs, although that particular pony had been put down a year before.

  There is another possible version of the events of Wednesday, 8 June. In this, Dickens left for Higham Station after he had cashed the cheque with Mr Trood and made the familiar journey by train and cab to Peckham. At Windsor Lodge he gave Nelly her housekeeping money. Sometime soon after this he collapsed. Nelly, with the help of her maids, of the good-natured caretaker of the church opposite – sworn to secrecy – and of a hackney cabman, got the unconscious man into a big two-horse brougham supplied by the local job-master, used to driving Nelly and Dickens, and drove with him to Gad’s Hill. She knew that Dickens’s reputation, and her own, depended on her action, and one of her two maids could have sent a telegram to Georgina warning her to expect them, while the other could have gone with her to help. The journey must have taken several hours, but the roads were empty because the railway handled all the traffic now: Dickens had just written in Drood of ‘high roads, of which there will shortly be not one in England’. Getting an inert or semi-conscious man into Gad’s Hill would b
e a problem, but it was managed, and the dining room was where he would be expected to be at this time of day, between six and seven o’clock. It seems a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits. It is supported by the fact that Georgina, a careful and efficient person, wrote to their solicitor Ouvry in a letter dated ‘Thursday’ to say she found £6.6s.3d. in the pockets of his suit after his death. Given that he had cashed a cheque for £22 on the morning of 8 June, where did the £15.13s.9d. go?29

  Yet Georgina’s account, even with its slight variants, carries conviction; and in any case, sometime after six o’clock in the evening the two versions become one again. Nelly returned to Peckham. Dr Steele arrived, had a sofa brought into the dining room and the patient lifted on to it. He saw that he was past help and held out no hopes of recovery but went through some palliative medical procedures and said he should be kept warm. Katey and Mamie, summoned by telegram, arrived about midnight. ‘Directly we entered the house I could hear my father’s deep breathing. All through the night we watched him, taking it in turns to place hot bricks at his feet, which were so cold,’ wrote Katey.30 Frank Beard had come with them. He was no more hopeful than Steele, and Steele left. Beard stayed, and in the morning Charley arrived. The London specialist they sent for came and said there had been a brain haemorrhage, and everyone understood there could be no good outcome. Mary Boyle appeared, was seen by Charley and Georgina, and went away again. Nelly arrived, or returned, in the afternoon, and remained.31 A long day went by. Soon after six in the evening Dickens gave a sigh, a tear appeared in his right eye and ran down his cheek, and he stopped breathing.