30. D to Ouvry, 20 Oct. 1867, P, XI, p. 458.
31. K. J. Fielding (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition (Brighton, 1988), p. 370.
32. He barely mentions it in his Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1974), Chapter 13. See Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 103, for one account, and Fielding’s The Speeches of Charles Dickens, pp. 368–74, for another.
33. D to Catherine D, 5 Nov. 1867, P, XI, p. 472.
34. Huntington MS, HM 18394.
35. Henry James to William James, 22 Nov. 1867, Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: Letters, I (London, 1974), p. 81.
36. James’s description from many years later, given by Collins, Interviews and Recollections, II, p. 297, from The Notebooks of Henry James. James also came face to face with Dickens at Norton’s house, and found that ‘the offered inscrutable mask was the great thing, the extremely handsome face, the face of symmetry yet of formidable character, as I at once recognised, and which met my dumb homage with a straight inscrutability, a merciless military eye’. This is from Henry James’s Notes of a Son and Brother of 1914.
37. Worth something like fifty times as much today, i.e., close to a million. Precise conversion is not possible because it depends on whether you are using the retail price index, average earnings, per capita Gross Domestic Product, share of GDP or GDP deflator.
38. D to F, 5 Jan. 1868, P, XII, p. 5. He also told Forster, 3 Jan. 1868, P, XII, p. 2, ‘My landlord invented for me a drink of brandy, rum and snow, called it a “Rocky Mountain Sneezer,” and said it was to put down all less effectual sneezing; but it has not had the effect.’
39. D to F, 14–15 Jan. 1868, P, XII, pp. 14–15.
40. D to GH, 21 Jan. 1868, P, XII, p. 20.
41. D to F, 30–31 Mar. 1868, P, XII, p. 86.
42. Forster’s Life, III, Chapter 15 and fn.
43. D to F, 13, 14 Mar. 1868, P, XII, p. 75.
44. Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 341. In July 1868 Dickens presented his godson with a massive silver bowl, plate, fork and spoon, at Marylebone Church. See D to Fields, 7 July 1868, P, XII, p. 150.
45. A Child’s Journey with Dickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin (Boston and New York, 1912).
46. Only a few of the letters to Wills have survived, with many inked-over passages, later deciphered with infra-red photography. All are now printed in P, XI and P, XII.
47. These payments to Wills were noted by Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Boston, 1952) – see notes xc–xci. He mentions another to ‘Wills Trust’ for £250 on 7 Nov. 1867. He writes that he found no other record showing how the sums were invested and that ‘the reader may give these payments totalling £2,250 what significance he wishes.’ The editors of the Pilgrim Edition mention only the £1,000, which is referred to in a letter to Georgina, saying it was ‘probably intended for Nelly’. P, XII, p. 6, fn. 7.
48. Both these quotes from Annie Fields’s diaries are taken here from Collins, Interviews and Recollections, II, pp. 320, 321, 322.
49. The promise was kept.
25 ‘Things look like work again’ 1868–1869
1. D to Alfred Dickens, 16 May 1868, P, XII, p. 110.
2. D to Macready, 20 July 1868, P, XII, p. 378. D to Morley, 2 Oct. 1868, P, XII, p. 192. Morley went on to teach literature at University College, London. His views are given in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, II (London, 1981), p. 193.
3. Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1874), Chapter 8, quoting from D to Fields, 7 July 1868, P, XII, p. 149.
4. Lady Molesworth, née Andalusia Carstairs (1803–88), an Irish singer and actress who played at Drury Lane in the 1840s, was married and widowed before marrying Sir William Molesworth, Bart., and becoming a rich and enthusiastic lion-hunting hostess. Dickens was fond of her and enjoyed her dinners.
5. D to Mamie Dickens, 26 Sept. 1868, XII, p. 188.
6. D to Plorn Dickens, 26 Sept. 1868, P, XII, pp. 187–8.
7. D to Dolby, 25 Sept. 1868, P, XII, p. 187.
8. D to GH, 7 Nov. 61, P, IX, p. 500; D to P. Cunningham, 15 Feb. 1865, P, XI, p. 16.
9. D to Dr Hewison, 23 Oct. 1868, P, XII, p. 207.
10. D to Dolby, 29 Sept. 1868, P, XII, p. 190.
11. D to F, given in Life, III, Chapter 17, and [?10–15 Oct. 1868], P, XII, p. 203.
12. These quotes from George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (London, 1885; my edition 1912), p. 351.
13. Forster, Life, III, Chapter 17, and [?15 Nov. 1868], P, XII, p. 220.
14. Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London, 1962; my edition 1994), p. 269.
15. Edgar Browne, Phiz and Dickens, as They Appeared to Edgar Browne (London, 1913), p. 146.
16. Dolby, Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 347.
17. Dickens’s friends accepted Georgina’s part in his life, but she was not generally invited with him, and among neighbours in Kent and some of his American friends there was uneasiness about her position.
18. D to Cerjat, 4 Jan. 1869, P, XII, p. 267.
19. D to Ouvry, 12 Jan. 1869, P, XII, p. 273.
20. D to Dolby, 19 Feb. 1869, P, XII, p. 294.
21. D to GH, 26 Feb. 1869, P, XII, p. 299.
22. The young man, Edward Young, told his family about his meeting with Dickens, and an account of it was printed in his obituary in 1927. His granddaughter remembered him well and told me that he said they were black stockings, but it was not thought suitable to mention this in the obituary.
23. D to Frank Beard, 19 Apr. 1869, P, XII, p. 336; D to Norton, 20 Apr. 1869, P, XII, p. 337.
24. D to GH, 21 Apr. 1869, P, XII, p. 339.
25. This was his final will, appointing Forster and Georgina his executors, responsible for managing his personal estate and copyrights and holding the proceeds to be distributed equally among all his children when they should reach the age of twenty-one. All the children were over twenty-one when he died except Edward (Plorn), who was eighteen. He left £1,000 to ‘Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square’, settled money on Georgina and on Mamie, and made Charley and Henry responsible for the capital that would provide their mother with an income for life. To Forster (‘my dear and trusty friend’) he left all his manuscripts and his watch, and to Georgina his private papers. To Charley he left his library, engravings and various knick-knacks. There were small bequests to servants. He wanted Gad’s Hill to be sold as part of the estate.
26. D to W. J. Farrer, 15 Dec. 1869, P, XII, p. 451.
27. This is Dolby’s account, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, pp. 421–9.
28. Quoted by George Curry in Charles Dickens and Annie Fields (San Marino, Calif., 1988), reprinted from the Huntington Library Quarterly, 51 (Winter 1988), p. 48.
29. Diary of Annie Fields, quoted on p. 42 of ibid.
30. Katey told Gladys Storey about Nelly staying at Gad’s, reported in Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), p. 127. For Nelly’s later friendship with Georgy and Mamie see Chapter 27 below.
31. D to Dolby, 11 Sept. 1869, P, XII, p. 408.
32. D to Arthur Ryland, 6 Sept. 1869, P, XII, p. 407.
33. D to Dolby, 27 Nov. 1869, P, XII, pp. 445–6.
34. Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 338.
35. Una Pope-Hennessy, Charles Dickens (London, 1945), p. 451, attributes this account to young Lord Ribblesdale, but Collins, Interviews and Recollections, II, p. 112, attributes it to Lord Russell’s granddaughter Baroness Deichmann, Impressions and Memories (London, 1926), pp. 101–3, which must be right.
36. Dolby gives the story as Dickens told it to him on p. 432 of his Charles Dickens as I Knew Him.
37. D to GH, 12 Nov. 1869, P, XII, p. 439.
38. Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, pp. 440–41. One of the lectures was given at the Crystal Palace to the crews of the Harvard and Oxford boats who raced against one another, and allowed Dickens to express his warm feelings about America again; the second, already me
ntioned, was to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, with which he had been long connected, and to which he returned for the last time in Jan. 1870.
39. D to Thomas Trollope, 4 Nov. 1869, P, XII, p. 434.
40. As with Our Mutual Friend, there was a clause in the contract covering repayment of the advance should he die before the book was finished, to be arranged with Forster.
41. D to John Murray, 19 Oct. 1869, P, XII, p. 426.
42. Or Responsions, an exam taken in the second year, no longer in existence.
43. D to Macready, 27 Dec. 1869, P, XII, p. 457.
44. Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 441. Georgina also says he was unable to walk that day, in her edition of his letters.
26 Pickswick, Pecknicks, Pickwicks 1870
1. George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (London, 1885; my edition 1912), pp. 452–3.
2. D to Wills, 23 Jan. 1870, P, XII, p. 470.
3. D to C. E. Norton, 11 Mar. 1870, P, XII, p. 488.
4. Mamie attended the Queen’s ball on 17 May, without her father, who was not well enough. Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1874), Chapter 20.
5. Dickens had given his opinion of the book to Wills in a letter from America, 25 Feb. 1868, P, XII, pp. 59–60, in which he chided him for putting words of praise into AYR.
6. On account of this he had to decline dinner with Sir Charles Dilke, grandson of the Charles Dilke who had given him half a crown when he was working at the blacking factory. D to Dilke, 27 Feb. 1870, P, XII, p. 483.
7. Given in Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings (Oxford, 2006), pp. 264–5.
8. Forster’s Life, III, Chapter 20, gives Dickens’s words and describes the scene. Others say he kissed his hand to the audience and had tears on his face.
9. The codicil appears at the end of his will, dated 2 June and witnessed by two of his assistants at Wellington Street, Holsworth and Walker. Wills retained his one eighth share in AYR, which Charley bought out after his father’s death.
10. D to Alfred Dickens, 20 May 1870, P, XII, pp. 529–30.
11. D to George Clowes, 18 Feb. 1870, P, XII, p. 481. As far as I know this is the only time Dickens uses the formulation: compare Jane Austen with her ‘sucking child’ (Sense and Sensibility) and her ‘darling child’ (Pride and Prejudice).
12. The Thuggee were an Indian secret society that came to the attention of the British in the early nineteenth century and were largely put down by them. The Thuggee specialized in murdering and robbing travellers, strangling them with a cloth noose and disposing of the bodies rapidly.
13. D to S. Cartwright, 11 Apr. 1870, P, XII, p. 508; D to Charles Kent, 25 Apr. 1870, P, XII, p. 512; D to Arthur Helps, 26 Apr. 1870, P, XII, p. 513. When on 31 May he told Mrs Bancroft he had reached Gad’s ‘from town circuitously, to get a little change of air on the road’, it was perhaps via Peckham. P, XII, p. 541.
14. D to Arthur Helps, 3 May 1870, P, XII, p. 519; D to Mrs Dallas, 2 May 1870, P, XII, p. 517.
15. Forster, Life, III, Chapter 20.
16. Lady Houghton was born in 1814 Annabella Hungerford Crewe, daughter of the second Baron Crewe and granddaughter of the first Baron and Lady (Frances) Crewe, the famous beauty and Whig hostess, who had employed Dickens’s grandmother as housekeeper.
Dickens had described the Prince of Wales as ‘a poor dull idle fellow’ to Cerjat, 16 Mar. 1862, P, X, p. 55. He also complained to Macready, 31 Mar. 1863, at the time of the royal wedding, ‘We really have been be-princed to the last point of human endurance; haven’t we?’ P, X, p. 227. Mamie insisted on her father taking her, with extreme reluctance, to the Prince’s ball in the City in May 1863.
Leopold II of Belgium, Queen Victoria’s first cousin, was the monster who made himself a private colonial empire in the Congo, of land largely bought for him by Stanley, and was guilty of atrocities on a massive scale. He was responsible for the enslavement, mutilation and deaths of many thousands of people in Africa. He was also so disliked in Belgium that his funeral was booed. He was altogether a vile man, although Dickens is unlikely to have known this.
17. The play was a translation of a French drama, The Prima Donna, suggested by Dickens after he had seen one of his daughters acting in a country-house production of another play, written by Herman Merivale, a lawyer with dramatic ambitions, and also a contributor to AYR. Merivale was also involved in the production at the Freake house in Cromwell Road, and said Dickens stage managed well and showed no sign of illness beyond wearing a slipper on his bad foot and using a stick. His account is hard to square with what we know of Dickens’s condition at this time, but Merivale insisted that he rose cheerfully to the dramatic occasion.
18. Lady Dorothy Nevil in her Reminiscences talked of the bubbling: see Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, II (London, 1981), p. 350. Lady Jeune, later Lady St Helier, published her Memories of Fifty Years in 1909, and gives her memory of Dickens on p. 78. Inevitably with someone as famous as Dickens there are conflicting accounts of him.
19. D to Mrs Percy Fitzgerald, 26 May 1870, P, XII, pp. 534–5.
20. Ibid., p. 534; D to Mrs Bancroft, 31 May 1870, P, XII, p. 541.
21. D to Fechter, 27 May 1870, P, XII, p. 538.
22. According to Percy Fitzgerald, Collins, Interviews and Recollections, II, p. 353.
23. Pulvermacher (1815–84) was a Prussian who used Faraday’s 1831 invention of the induction coil to make his electrical chains. He patented them in the US, came to London in 1859 and was successful in selling them, claiming that they cured all kinds of rheumatic, neuralgic, epileptic, paralytic and nervous complaints, as well as indigestion and spasms, and that ‘Philosophers, divines, eminent physicians, in all parts of the world, recommend them.’ He had a shop in Oxford Street and ended his days living on the heights of Hampstead, in Windmill House.
24. Katey wrote and spoke several accounts. See Collins, Interviews and Recollections, II, pp. 354–8, and Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), pp. 133–4.
25. This is one of Dickens’s last manuscripts, written in a small ruled book in blue printed wrappers, with the words ‘Gad’s Hill Cellar Casks’ in his hand with an oval on the front. At the end of page 1 he added ‘Besides which there are 5 Gallons in stone jars of the Whiskey to be used first – ’ Page 4 is blank. I am grateful to David Clegg for sending me in September 2002 the sale catalogue of Jarndyce, No. 46 Great Russell Street, which prints these details. It is headed: ‘Dickens’s Last Project: Stocktaking the Cellar at Gad’s Hill’.
26. William Richard Hughes, A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land (London, 1891), p. 207: Hughes was told this by Trood himself, the landlord of the Falstaff Inn, who said he had been offered £24 for the cheque because of the signature, but turned it down.
27. This was the version given by Sala in his account of Dickens’s death in the Daily Telegraph, reprinted in his short biography of 1870, Charles Dickens.
28. This is partly taken from Georgina’s account in her edition of Dickens’s letters, which gives a short narrative for each year and ends with her description of the last days. Also Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957), pp. 136–7, crediting the obituary in The Times – which of course relied on Georgina’s narrative – and Gladys Storey’s in Dickens and Daughter. Storey, whose information came through Katey, says Dickens also mentioned Forster among his incoherent words. Forster, in his final chapter, says dinner had been begun before Dickens showed signs of trouble and pain, and that the only coherent words he spoke were a wish for dinner to go on. Then he spoke incoherently and rose, and Georgina struggled to get him on to the sofa. There were clearly no servants in the room, and in any case the food was sent up in a dinner-lift.
29. The dogs, if they were about, would have recognized Nelly: see Dolby on how they never forgot anyone they had been introduced to, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, p. 57.
After The
Invisible Woman was published I was sent information which suggested this different narrative for 8 June. I worked out a possible sequence of events and gave the arguments for and against in an appendix to the paperback edition, to which I refer interested readers. No more information has come to light since then and I accept that it seems an unlikely story, although not an impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits.
30. Katey’s words to Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter, p. 136.
31. Nelly’s daughter Gladys told Malcolm Morley that her mother told her she was present when Dickens died (Dickensian, 1960). Gladys Storey told Walter Dexter that Katey had told her Georgina sent for Nelly, Dexter to Le Comte de Suzannet, 22 Feb. 1939, letter in Charles Dickens Museum. Una Pope-Hennessy said that Gladys Storey told her that Katey said she fetched Nelly, and put this into her Charles Dickens (London, 1945), p. 464.
32. She sent a piece of the hair to Norton, Dec. 1873. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 199.
33. These are the splendid last words of Dolby’s Charles Dickens as I Knew Him.
34. Shorne Church was heavily restored a few years later and the village has expanded and changed.
35. GH to Ouvry, 18 June 1870, says expenses were incurred ‘by the Cathedral people at Rochester in preparing the grave, tolling the bell, etc.’. Given by Arthur A. Adrian in ‘Charles Dickens and Dean Stanley’, Dickensian (1946), p. 156.
36. Richard Cumberland, eighteenth-century playwright, is little remembered now except as Sheridan caricatured him as Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic.
37. Dean Stanley’s account is taken from Adrian, ‘Charles Dickens and Dean Stanley’, pp. 152–4.
38. Wilkie Collins said Charles Reade was there and wept on his shoulder, although no one else lists him. The absence of Tom Beard, one of the oldest friends, is surprising.
39. Sala’s account is given in the Dickensian (1950), p. 116. George Sala (1828–96), son of an actress, worked closely with Dickens on HW and AYR. He also had a connection with the Daily Telegraph, which suggests he may have had something to do with the knocking on the Dean’s door.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 59