37. According to Storey, Dickens and Daughter, p. 107, and given in P, IX, p. 304, fn. 1.
38. So he told first Collins and then his Swiss friend Cerjat, 24 Oct. 1860, 1 Feb. 1861, P, IX, pp. 331, 383. Readers of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher will know that a quite different solution emerged.
39. D to Cerjat, 1 Feb. 1861, P, IX, p. 383.
40. Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections (London, 1981), I, p. 156, cites Alfred’s memory of the rowing trips in an interview given in Nov. 1910. Frank also recalled rowing him to Maidstone.
41. The observation was Kate Field’s, made later in her Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings of 1868, and cited by Malcolm Andrews in his Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings (Oxford, 2006), p. 255.
42. Stephanie Harvey’s translation of Dostoevsky’s letter, dated 18 July O.S. 1878, in her article ‘Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion’, Dickensian (2002), p. 233.
43. D to Régnier, 17 Sept. 1859, P, IX, p. 124.
44. Great Expectations, Chapter 29.
45. Ibid.
22 The Bebelle Life 1862–1865
1. D to Letitia Austin, 4 Jan. 1862, P, X, p. 4.
2. D to Thomas Beard, 1 Feb. 1862, P, X, p. 29.
3. D to GH, 24 and 28 Jan. 1862, P, X, pp. 22, 25.
4. D to Thomas Beard, 5 Apr. 1862, P, X, p. 66.
5. D to F, 8 Apr. 1862, P, X, p. 67.
6. D to Cerjat, 16 Mar. 1862, P, X, pp. 54–5.
7. D to Yates, 3 Apr. 1862, P, X, p. 64.
8. Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957), pp. 76–81 and esp. p. 79.
9. D to Wilkie Collins, 20 Sept. 1862, P, X, p. 129; D to F, 5 Oct. 1862, P, X, p. 134.
10. D to Wilkie Collins, 8 Oct. 1862, P, X, p. 137; D to Mrs Brown, 21 Oct. 1862, P, X, p. 150.
11. I am much indebted to John Bowen’s article ‘Bebelle and “His Boots”: Dickens, Ellen Ternan and the Christmas Stories’ in the Dickensian (2000), pp. 197–208, which discusses how Dickens’s writing may be read in relation to his life at this time. He points out that Dickens introduces a character, M. Mutuel, who seems to be based on his Boulogne landlord; and that Langley, the central figure, has quarrelled with his daughter in England, who also had a child who has died. Dickens’s contributions to the next two Christmas issues of AYR, ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings’ (1863) and ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy’ (1864), were further concerned with an illegitimate birth, and then with a visit to France.
12. D to Wills, 18 Dec. 1862, P, X, p. 178.
13. D to F, 22 Oct. 1862, P, X, p. 148.
14. D to Olliffe, 18 Jan. 1863, P, X, p. 196. Sir Joseph Olliffe was a childhood friend of Maclise, who introduced Dickens to him. He studied medicine in Paris and married a rich English wife, and both admired Dickens’s work and became friends whom he saw when in Paris.
15. D to Wilkie Collins, 20 Jan. 1863, P, X, p. 198.
16. D to Wilkie Collins, 20 Jan. and 29 Jan. 1863, P, X, pp. 198, 201.
17. D to GH, 1 Feb. 1863, P, X, p. 206. It was Danton himself who said this, on the scaffold.
18. D to Macready, 19 Feb. 1863, P, X, p. 215.
19. D to Ouvry, 17 Mar. 1863, P, X, p. 224; D to Leighton, 9 Apr. 1863, P, X, p. 230; D to Wilkie Collins, [?Aug. 1863], P, X, p. 281.
20. He had mentioned to Forster, 25 Aug. 1862, P, X, p. 120, a preliminary idea for a story about two strongly contrasted groups of people and an electric message, which was possibly the germ of Our Mutual Friend – although it lost the electric message, tantalizingly.
21. D to Mrs Nicholls, 26 June 1864, P, X, p. 408; D to Wills, 26 June 1864, P, X, p. 409.
22. D to Mrs Frances Elliot, 4 July 1866 [recte 1867], P, XI, p. 389.
23. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), p. 94. See Chapter 27 below.
24. When Storey’s book was attacked, as it was, Bernard Shaw wrote to the TLS in 1939 to say that Mrs Perugini (Katey Dickens) had told him everything in it in the 1890s. For Henry Dickens’s statement, see manuscript note by Gladys Storey in Charles Dickens Museum papers; David Parker and Michael Slater’s account of the Storey manuscripts in the Dickensian (1980), pp. 3–16, and see Chapter 27 below.
25. D to F, [?end May 1865 – F said the day before D left for France], P, XI, p. 48.
26. D to Mitton, 13 June 1865, P, XI, p. 56, giving a long account of the accident without naming his companions.
27. D to John Thompson, 25 June 1865, P, XI, p. 65.
28. Thomas Wright, The Life of Charles Dickens (London, 1935); Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939); Ada B. Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan (Berkeley, 1952); K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens (London, 1953); Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Boston, 1952). Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections (London, 1981), I, p. xxiv, for the quoted remark, and Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London, 1962; my edition 1994), p. 309, and see also pp. 312–13.
29. Miss Longley said she had approached the story without bias, but a note in her hand, dated 15 Mar. 1975, shows she was never impartial in her approach, since it reads, ‘It was very important to my thesis – that Ellen Ternan was not in fact the mistress of Charles Dickens.’ Manuscript note by Katharine M. Longley now in Pocket 13 of the Wright Papers at Charles Dickens Museum.
30. D to Catherine D, 6 Aug. 1863, P, X, p. 280. His authorization was necessary because he owned the plot in the cemetery.
31. D to Coutts, 12 Feb. 1864, P, X, p. 356.
32. See Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, p. 41, quoting from the Letters and Memoirs of Sir William Hardman [Second Series, London, 1925, p. 148], which gives Sir William, a friend of Mrs Dickens, saying her grief over Walter was ‘much enhanced by the fact that her husband had not taken any notice of the event to her, either by letter or otherwise. If anything were wanting to sink CD to the lowest depths of my esteem, this fills up the measure of his iniquity. As a writer, I admire him; as a man, I despise him.’
33. D to F, 30 Aug. 1863, P, X, p. 283; D to F, 12 Oct. 1863, P, X, p. 300.
34. D to R. J. Lane, 25 Feb. 1864, P, X, p. 363.
35. D to Frith, 13 Apr. 1864, P, X, p. 381.
36. D to R. B. Osborne, 1 June 1864, P, X, pp. 400–401.
37. D to Ouvry, 30 Apr. 1865, P, XI, p. 37.
38. D to Fechter, 21 July 1865, P, XI, p. 75. I am indebted to Catherine Peters’s The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1991) for information about Fechter.
23 Wise Daughters 1864–1866
1. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978), pp. 302–3.
2. D to F, 29 July 1864, P, X, p. 414.
3. Figures from Patten, Dickens and His Publishers, pp. 216, 308.
4. Our Mutual Friend, Book 1, Chapter 12.
5. Ibid., Book 1, Chapter 10.
6. Ibid., Book 2, Chapter 1.
7. The piece was by R. H. Horne and entitled ‘Dust; or, Ugliness Redeemed’.
8. John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London, 1973), p. 111.
9. Our Mutual Friend, Book 1, Chapter 4.
10. Ibid., Book 1, Chapter 6.
11. Ibid., Book 2, Chapter 1.
12. James’s review in the Nation (New York) appeared on 21 Dec. 1865. It is reprinted in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), pp. 469–73.
13. Our Mutual Friend, Book 1, Chapter 13.
14. Possibly mirroring Dickens’s fear of what his situation with Nelly was becoming.
15. Our Mutual Friend, Book 4, Chapter 5.
16. Ibid., Book 2, Chapter 8.
17. Dickens drew on plots of two plays of the 1830s by Sheridan Knowles, one about a young woman cured of being mercenary, the other about a young woman whose father steals from the bodies of drowned men.
18. Edmund Wilson, ‘The Two Scrooges’ in The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, Mass., 1941; my ed
ition London, 1961), p. 74.
19. Our Mutual Friend, Book 1, Chapter 9. The hospital for children prefigures one described by Dickens in AYR, 19 Dec. 1868, after a visit, and to which he returned with James and Annie Fields in May 1869. See Michael Slater (ed.), The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, IV (London, 2000, with John Drew), pp. 352–64. The good clergyman Frank Milvey’s wife Margaretta is shown as suffering from having too many children, like Amos Barton’s wife Milly, who dies young and worn out with excessive childbearing, in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, admired by Dickens.
20. Henry James found the whole book ‘lifeless, forced and mechanical’ and all the characters unnatural, and suggested that Dickens failed as a novelist because he had no general understanding of human passions. He allowed that ‘he is a great observer and a great humorist’, but no philosopher. James was of course thinking through his ideas for the sort of novel he meant to write, and it made him harsh. Edmund Wilson on the other hand wrote in 1941 that ‘Dickens has here distilled the mood of his later years, dramatized the tragic discrepancies of his character, delivered his final judgment on the whole Victorian exploit, in a fashion so impressive that we realize how little the distractions of this period had the power to direct him from the prime purpose of his life: the serious exercise of his art.’
21. D to Cerjat, 30 Nov. 1865, P, XI, p. 116. The sewers had been opened in Apr. 1865 and would be completed in 1875, and the first part of the Embankment was opened in July 1870, shortly after Dickens’s death.
22. See D to Frank Beard, 21 Mar. 1865, P, XI, p. 28. It must have been the first onset of gout that was to torment him intermittently for the rest of his life. Gout is not life-threatening but often goes with high blood pressure and vascular disease.
23. D to F, [?29 Sept. 1854], P, VII, p. 429.
24. D to F, mid-Sept. 1865, P, XI, pp. 91–2; D to Yates, 13 Sept. 1865, P, XI, pp. 90–91.
25. This was entitled ‘Doctor Marigold’ when reprinted as a Christmas story.
26. Henry Chorley (1808–72) destroyed all his correspondence with Dickens. He was a close family friend. A journalist with the Athenaeum since 1830, he was especially knowledgeable about music and opera (he found Verdi vulgar, Schumann and Wagner decadent, but praised Mendelssohn). He became a heavy drinker, is thought to have been in love with Mamie. He left her £200 a year for life in his will, asked her to send him branches from the cedar trees at Gad’s and had himself buried with them when he died in 1872. (Information from the DNB, Pilgrim Edition, Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957).)
27. Henry Dickens gave a brief account of this Christmas in the ‘Gad’s Hill Gazette’, produced with his father’s encouragement and for which he was given some training in typesetting. Mamie Dickens also wrote about Gad’s Hill Christmases in general in her My Father as I Recall Him (London, 1897).
28. Fanny Ternan to Bice Trollope, 16 Feb. 1866, unpublished letter.
29. Bice is given the Italian pronunciation in two syllables, Bee-chay.
30. D to GH, 21 Dec. 1865, P, XI, p. 125.
31. D to Mrs Elliot, 2 Mar. 1866, P, XI, p. 166.
32. See D to GH, 9 Feb. 1866, P, XI, p. 155.
33. The draft agreement between the editors of AYR and the author of Aunt Margaret’s Trouble is printed in P, XI, p. 536.
34. D to Mrs Elliot, 4 July 1866 [recte 1867], P, XI, p. 389. This is the same letter in which he told her about Nelly having had much to bear alone, discussed in Chapter 22 above.
35. See the author’s The Invisible Woman.
36. No letter of condolence to William Gaskell is known, and the last known personal letter from Dickens to Mrs Gaskell was written in 1861.
37. Dickens refusing an invitation from Mrs Ellicott, wife of the Bishop of Gloucester, 2 Apr. 1867, P, XI, p. 348. He used almost the same phrase to Mrs Elliot in Mar. 1867.
38. Henry F. Dickens, Memories of My Father (London, 1928), pp. 14, 26.
24 The Chief 1866–1868
1. Dolby published in 1885 his memoir, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, written from memory and ‘copious notes’, and described by Mamie Dickens as ‘the best and truest picture of my father that has yet been written’. Dickens described his stammer to Georgina in a letter of 6 Mar. 1867, ‘He has a rock ahead in his speech just now, which he can not get over. This is, Cambridge … Fifty times a day … he tries it – Ca-a-a-a-and then Car-ar-ar, and then Caw-aw-aw-ar-o – and then shoots it out with a suddenness that seems to frighten and astonish him.’ P, XI, p. 328.
2. So D wrote to Mamie, 14 Apr. 1866, P, XI, p. 184.
3. George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (London, 1885; my edition 1912), p. 11.
4. Remark given by Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings (Oxford, 2006), p. 150.
5. This is particularly to his credit because he ended his days penniless, in the workhouse, in 1900, and might have sold what he knew.
6. D to Wills, 6 June 1667, P, XI, p. 377. The remark suggests Dickens looking back, since at this date only Henry and Plorn were still at home, and there was nothing limp about Henry; but Charley was a frequent visitor. The letter, which strongly argues Dickens’s case for going to America, is written on Nelly’s monogrammed writing paper. Wills wrote round the top of the letter, ‘This letter, so illustrative of one of the strong sides of C. D.’s character – powerful will – I think ought decidedly to be published in justice to Forster and myself who dissuaded him from America – which killed him eventually. – W. H. W.’
7. D to Macready, 23 Feb. 1866, telling him about Beard diagnosing ‘great irritability of the heart’, and that ‘Rest is enjoined, but an occasional Reading rather encouraged than objected to.’ P, XI, p. 163.
8. From From the Porch (1913), given in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, II (London, 1981), pp. 178–9. This was Lady Ritchie recalling her experience as Annie Thackeray in 1870.
9. D to F, [?6 Sept. 1866], P, XI, p. 243; D to Frank Beard, 6 Sept. 1866, P, XI, pp. 242–3.
10. D to Dolby, 4 Sept. 1866, P, XI, p. 239.
11. D to Wills, 21 Oct. 1866, P, XI, p. 257. For Dickens’s payments see Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957), p. 110, citing the Dickensian (1939), p. 145.
12. D to GH, 6 Nov. 1866, P, XI, p. 265. A sign that Thompson might be getting above himself is in the 1861 census, where he describes himself as a ‘publisher’, living with his wife, children and one servant at No. 26 Wellington Street, Strand.
13. According to Marcus Stone. ‘Marcus Stone, R. A., and Charles Dickens’, Dickensian (1912), p. 216, gives Stone’s statement, made to the Morning Post, 4 July 1912. Dickens may have felt it best to help Thompson, who knew much about his private arrangements with Nelly. Thompson’s two daughters, Emily (born 1854) and Matilda Dorrit (born 1857), were both christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields. In the 1871 census he is listed as unemployed, sharing a house in Shoreditch with a new wife, Mary Anne, who works as a dressmaker, assisted by his younger daughter, a collar-dresser, and in partnership with two women doll-makers, Henrietta Adams, who lives with them, and Anna Watson, a visitor. The elder daughter, Emily, now worked as a servant in Hackney. Information from Nicholas P. C. Waloff, who suggests that the ‘small business’ in which Dickens set up Thompson could have been the dress- and doll-making carried out by the women.
14. D to GH, 5 Nov. 1866, P, XI, p. 263.
15. D to Mamie, 17 Feb. 1867, P, XI, p. 315; D to Frank Beard, 18 Feb. 1867, P, XI, p. 316; D to GH, 19 Feb. 1867, P, XI, p. 317.
16. D to Station Master, Paddington, 20 Apr. 1867, P, XI, p. 357. This is the ‘Loss’ marked in the diary. People lose things when they are tired or stressed. Whether the ‘Tourist’s Knapsack’ was returned is not known.
17. He lost the diary, a very small notebook bound in leather, in America and it turned up in New York in 1922 from an unnamed private collector. It was bought by t
he Berg brothers, great collectors, and remained unexamined in their collection for twenty-one years until 1943, when the curator saw how interesting it was.
18. D to GH, 8 May 1867, P, XI, p. 364.
19. D to F, [?20–25 May 1867], P, XI, p. 372.
20. According to Gladys Storey’s notes Katey talked of ‘an establishment with two servants for her at Peckham’ – see Chapter 27 below.
21. Philip Collins, always perceptive, believes Dickens ‘must have felt a certain satisfaction in so ably playing his part in a really good mystery-plot of his own invention: not written, this time, but lived’. Dickens and Crime (London, 1962; my edition 1994), p. 316.
22. ‘Silverman’ was written for the American market and serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, Jan.–Mar. 1868, while he was in the US, and from Feb. 1868 in AYR.
23. They appeared in Ticknor & Fields children’s magazine Our Young Folks, but not in volume form. The Americans paid the very large sum of £1,000 each for ‘Silverman’ and ‘Holiday Romance’.
24. Sir Henry Thompson, a well-known surgeon, said the bunion was made worse by erysipelas, an inflammation characterized by red skin.
25. D to Dolby, 9 Aug. 1867, P, XI, p. 410.
26. Nelly was described by a friend, Helen Wickham, as sometimes making ‘extraordinary scenes’ when she did not get her way, in the 1890s. ‘She could be quite a little spitfire.’ Katharine M. Longley, to whom this description was given, in ‘The Real Ellen Ternan’, Dickensian (1985).
27. D to ed. of The Times, 2 Sept. 1867, P, XI, p. 416; D to ed. Sunday Gazette, 3 Sept. 1867, P, XI, p. 420.
28. James Fields, head of the publishers Ticknor & Fields, was five years younger than Dickens. He had heard him speak in Boston in 1842. In May 1860 he and his much younger (second) wife, Annie, visited Dickens in England, friendship was established, and Fields began to press Dickens to come to America to read. The four years’ duration of the American Civil War, Apr. 1861 to Apr. 1865, obliged him to put the plan aside.
29. Fanny Trollope was aware of this plan by 8 Oct.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 58