40. Longfellow to F, 12 June 1870, Forster, Life, III, Chapter 14.
27 The Remembrance of My Friends 1870–1939
1. Manuscript in the National Library of Scotland, Thomas Carlyle to John Carlyle, 15 June 1870, see the Dickensian (1970), p. 91.
2. F to Norton, 22 June 1870, Manuscript in the Houghton Library, Harvard, cited in James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (New York, 1983), p. 123.
3. Given in P, XII, p. 325, fn. 6, from J. A. McKenzie (ed.), Letters of George Augustus Sala to Edmund Yates in the Edmund Yates Papers University of Queensland Library (St Lucia, Qld, 1993), Victorian Fiction Research Guides nos. 19–20, p. 131. Sala had not seen Dickens since the Liverpool banquet in Apr. 1869. He wrote an obituary for the Daily Telegraph and then published a short, warm-hearted and ill-informed biography.
4. Sala knew nothing of Dickens’s childhood or family background, saying he was born into ‘a respectable middle-class family’ and received ‘a strictly middle-class education’. He also referred to the ‘great shadow that fell across his hearth’ and said he would avoid prying into secrets, which should not be inquired into for fifty years.
5. Browning to Isa Blagden, 19 Oct. 1870, after she had written to him suggesting that Fanny Trollope had been overpaid for her novels by Dickens because of his relationship with her sister. Edward C. McAleer (ed.), Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden (Austin, 1951), p. 349.
6. Annie Fields’s diary for 6 Dec. 1871, quoted by George Curry in Charles Dickens and Annie Fields (San Marino, Calif., 1988), p. 60.
7. He was taken in by Leslie Stephen and his wife Minnie, Thackeray’s younger daughter, who knew Katey of old, and had married Leslie Stephen in 1867.
8. With Ouvry’s help Georgina bought back the chalet and gave it to Lord Darnley.
9. GH to Annie Fields, 1 Mar. 1871, Arthur A. Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957), p. 181.
10. GH to Annie Fields, 17 Mar. 1871, ibid., p. 167.
11. Charley’s wife Bessie wrote this to Alfred in Australia. From Alfred Tennyson Dickens’s letter to G. W. Rusden, 11 Aug. 1870, MS State Library of Victoria, given in Philip Collins (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, I (London, 1981), p. 156.
12. Charles W. Dickens in Mumsey’s Magazine, 28, 6 (Sept. 1902).
13. Lucinda Hawksley, who discovered the record of a wedding in Sept. 1873, in a register office with no family present, records it in her biography Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter (London, 2006), and suggests Katey may have feared wrongly that she was pregnant. The official wedding followed in June 1874.
14. Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, III (London, 1874), Chapter 14.
15. Sydney Cockerell, a reliable witness, wrote in the Sunday Times, 22 Mar. 1953, after an article about Dickens, that he had met Mamie and Georgina at the Revd Robinson’s – i.e., Nelly’s husband, George Wharton Robinson – about 1880, when he was thirteen, living in Margate. He remembered Mrs Robinson as a close friend of his mother, and her reciting A Christmas Carol at parties.
16. Charles Dickens Museum, Storey Papers VIII, p. 89; also Suzannet Papers, Walter Dexter to Le Comte de Suzannet, 22 Feb. 1939, ‘it is confirmed by Miss S that the children of Henry D and of E. T. used to play together on the sands at Boulogne’; also, ‘Lady D[ickens] told me that Georgina Hogarth introduced Lady D to Ellen Ternan when she was Mrs Robinson.’ Storey Papers VIII, p. 89.
17. These are the opening words of Mamie Dickens’s My Father as I Recall Him (London, 1897).
18. For Mamie’s alleged drinking, see Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 241. He writes that Georgina grew worried about her erratic behaviour in the 1880s, and that she grew ‘more and more unstable emotionally as she sought in changes of scene – in alcohol, even – some anodyne for the dissatisfaction which plagued her’.
19. In 1912 they were published as Charles Dickens as Editor, edited by R. C. Lehmann, heavily cut, but fortunately the originals survived and were preserved in the Huntington Library, and infra-red treatment revealed the inked-over passages, printed by Ada Nisbet in 1952.
20. Eliza Lynn Linton, My Literary Life, published posthumously in 1899. It sounds as though she had Nelly in mind.
21. Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember, II (London, 1887), p. 113.
22. GH to Annie Fields, 19 Jan. 1888, quoted in Adrian, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, p. 246.
23. Carlyle to F, 11 June 1870, cited in Collins, Interviews and Recollections, I, p. 63.
24. Emile Yung’s Zermatt et la vallée de la Viège, printed and published in Geneva by Thévoz; the English edition also printed in Geneva but published in London by J. R. Gotz in 1894.
25. In Sept. 1893, information from Katharine M. Longley’s typescript, fn. 109 to Chapter 13.
26. According to Wright in Thomas Wright of Olney. An Autobiography (London, 1936). Wright also said that Charley had threatened to ‘speak out’ at various times, presumably about his father’s liaison with Nelly.
27. Shaw recalled this in his letter to the TLS in 1939.
28. As mentioned in n. 3, Chapter 7, English copyright at this time was for forty-two years after publication or seven years after the death of the author, whichever was greater. This meant that Copperfield came out of copyright in 1892, Great Expectations in 1902 and Drood in 1912, the centenary year, after which there was nothing. An Anglo-French copyright agreement of 1852 established Dickens’s rights in France, giving his widow a share for life, and his children for twenty years, i.e., until 1890. Whether there was any income from America, or from other countries, I have not been able to establish, but it seems unlikely.
29. In the Dickensian (2010), p. 75, Tony Williams quotes from a newspaper cutting about Dolby’s death, found by Michael Slater pasted into a copy of Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: ‘a distant relative named Rycroft, who identified the body, said he thought the deceased had got so shabby that he had been ashamed lately to approach friends for help’. Also that the New York Times for 3 Nov. 1900, reporting his death, mentioned his admission to the Fulham Infirmary ‘five years ago’. Dolby’s book was reissued in 1912.
30. He had given a reading for working men as early as 1874, at the suggestion of his mother, who wrote to Plorn about the success of the occasion, 11 Dec. 1874, typescript of a letter at the Charles Dickens Museum.
31. She came to London in 1923 as a New York delegate to the Dickens Fellowship and died in England of pneumonia, aged sixty-six.
32. GH to Geoffrey Wharton Robinson, 17 Aug. 1913, manuscript in private possession.
33. Nelly left about £1,200, but curiously she had more money than she had realized, so that her will had to be resworn at £2,379.18s.11d.
34. Katey Perugini to Bernard Shaw, 19 Dec. 1897, quoted in Lucinda Hawkesley, Katey, p. 310.
35. After Storey’s death in 1978 many of her handwritten notes were found and are now deposited in the Charles Dickens Museum. A good account of them by David Parker and Michael Slater appeared in the Dickensian (1980), pp. 3–16.
36. Storey to Shaw, 23 July 1939, British Library Add. MS 50546, f. 76.
37. All from Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939), p. 219.
38. Ibid., pp. 96, 98.
39. Ibid., p. 94.
40. Ibid., p. 134.
41. Ibid., p. 219.
42. Ibid., p. 134.
43. Ibid., p. 93.
44. Ibid., p. 94.
45. This is from the unpublished Storey papers that came to light after her death in 1978.
46. Henry F. Dickens, Memories of My Father (London, 1928), pp. 14, 26.
47. Ibid., p. 28.
Select Bibliography
Kathleen Tillotson, Graham Storey and others (eds.), The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1965–2002)
Vol. I, 1820–1839, Madeline House and Graham Storey (1965)
Vol. II, 1840–1841, Madeline House and Grah
am Storey (1969)
Vol. III, 1842–1843, Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (1974)
Vol. IV, 1844–1846, Kathleen Tillotson (1977)
Vol. V, 1847–1849, Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding (1981)
Vol. VI, 1850–1852, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (1988)
Vol. VII, 1853–1855, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (1993)
Vol. VIII, 1856–1858, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (1995)
Vol. IX, 1859–1861, Graham Storey (1997)
Vol. X, 1862–1864, Graham Storey (1998)
Vol. XI, 1865–1867, Graham Storey (1999)
Vol. XII, 1868–1870, Graham Storey (2002)
The Dickensian 1905–2010
Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens (London, 1990)
Adrian, Arthur A., Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (Oxford, 1957)
Andrews, Malcolm, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings (Oxford, 2006)
Aylmer, Felix, Dickens Incognito (London, 1959)
Bentley, Nicolas, Slater, Michael, and Burgis, Nina (eds.), The Dickens Index (Oxford, 1988)
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, Knowing Dickens (Ithaca, NY, 2007)
Bowen, John, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford, 2000)
Carey, John, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London, 1973)
Chittick, Kathryn, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge, 1990)
Collins, Philip, Dickens and Crime (London, 1962)
— Dickens and Education (London, 1963)
— Dickens: The Public Readings (Oxford, 1975)
— (ed.) Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971)
— (ed.) Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London, 1981)
Davies, James A., John Forster: A Literary Life (New York, 1983)
Dolby, George, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (London, 1885)
Fielding, K. J. (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition (Brighton, 1988)
Fisher, Leona Weaver, Lemon, Dickens, and ‘Mr Nightingale’s Diary’: A Victorian Farce (Victoria, BC, 1988)
Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens, 3 vols. (London, 1872, 1873, 1874)
— Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England (London, 1840)
— The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1848)
— Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, 2 vols. (London, 1869; my edition 1872)
Furneaux, Holly, Queer Dickens (Oxford, 2009)
Gissing, George, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (London, 1898)
Hardy, Barbara, The Moral Art of Dickens: Essays (London, 1970; my edition 1985)
Hartley, Jenny, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London, 2008)
Hawksley, Lucinda, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter (London, 2006)
House, Humphry, The Dickens World (Oxford, 1941)
Hughes, William Richard, A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land (London, 1891)
Johnson, Edgar, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Boston, Mass., 1952)
Leavis, F. R., and Leavis, Q. D., Dickens the Novelist (London, 1970)
Miller, J. Hillis, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)
Nisbet, Ada B., Dickens and Ellen Ternan (Berkeley, Calif., 1952)
Patten, Robert L., Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978)
Pope-Hennessy, Una, Charles Dickens (London, 1945)
Renton, Richard, John Forster and His Friendships (London, 1912)
Schlicke, Paul, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London, 1985)
— Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (Oxford, 1999)
Slater, Michael, Charles Dickens (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2009)
— (ed.) The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, 4 vols. (London, 1994–2000)
Vol. I, Sketches by Boz and Other Early Papers 1833–1839 (1994)
Vol. II, ‘The Amusements of the People’ and Other Papers, Reports, Essays and Reviews 1834–1851 (1996)
Vol. III, ‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers from Household Words 1851–1859 (1998)
Vol. IV (with John Drew), The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers 1859–1870 (2000)
Storey, Gladys, Dickens and Daughter (London, 1939)
Tillotson, Kathleen, and Butt, John, Dickens at Work (London, 1957)
Tomalin, Claire, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (London, 1990)
Toynbee, William (ed.), The Diaries of William Charles Macready (London, 1912)
Watts, Alan S., Dickens at Gad’s Hill (Goring-on-Thames, 1989)
Wilson, Edmund, ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ (lecture, 1939), then published in The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, Mass., 1941; revised 1952)
Bates, Alan, A Directory of Stage Coach Services 1836 (New York, 1969)
Healey, Edna, Lady Unknown: The Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts (London, 1978)
O’Callaghan, P. P., The Married Bachelor; or, Master and Man (Dick’s Standard Plays, 313 the Strand [n.d. but 1830s]), and Peake, Richard Brinsley, Amateurs and Actors (London, 1818), musical farce. Both plays put on by Dickens and family in Bentinck Street in 1833
Peters, Catherine, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1991)
There are innumerable editions of Dickens, Oxford World Classics and Penguin providing some of the best value, many with introductions of high quality. The Oxford Clarendon hardback critical editions of the novels are still far from a complete set and those already published are all out of print, a sad situation. Oliver Twist, Kathleen Tillotson (1966), Little Dorrit, Harvey Peter Sucksmith (1979), David Copperfield, Nina Burgis (1981), The Old Curiosity Shop, Elizabeth M. Brennan (1997), have all been of great assistance.
Acknowledgements
My first thanks go to the Clarendon Press at Oxford, and to the editors of The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. The twelve volumes are an indispensible source for anyone attempting to follow the course of Dickens’s life, and I am indebted to all its editors: Kathleen Tillotson, Madeline House, Angus Easson, Margaret Brown, Nina Burgis, K. J. Fielding and, in particular, to Graham Storey, who was a friend from my undergraduate days, and ever generous and helpful.
The Dickens House Museum has been particular supportive to me in my research, allowing me to work in their library, and I am grateful to the director, Florian Schweizer, to the curator, Fiona Jenkins, and to all the staff for making me welcome and letting me come and go whenever I needed to. Thanks also to the Trustees of the wonderful Wisbech Museum, and to its curator David Wright and his assistant Robert Bell, for allowing me to examine the manuscript of Great Expectations and other Dickens material held there.
Thanks to the curators and staff of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum for permission to examine manuscripts and proofs of novels by Dickens and other papers in the John Forster Collection. The London Library has been, as usual, an essential support in my research, both for supplying me with books and for giving me access to reference books on line. I am grateful also to the British Library, and to Cambridge University Library for so speedily providing me with a copy of the dramatized version of Great Expectations. Richard High at the Special Collections, Brotherton Library, Leeds University, kindly sent me a photocopy of a Dickens letter held there.
Warmest thanks to Tim Wright, who has lent me manuscript letters by Georgina Hogarth and Mrs Wharton Robinson (Nelly), and given me a copy of her translation of Zermatt and the Valley of the Viège. Also to Benedict Nightingale, for lending me his copy of Julia Fortescue, afterwards Lady Gardner, and Her Circle by George Martelli, a privately printed and rare book.
I am grateful to Jenny Hartley for her Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, which contains many discoveries and valuable insights I have drawn on.
Thanks to Jonathan Miller for giving me a wise and illuminating tutorial on mesmerism.
Also to Dr Virginia Bearn for a helpful discussion about Dickens’s health. Claire Sparrow gave me useful information about psychosis. Professor Ray Dolan, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, generously gave time to consider Dickens’s symptoms, consulted with medical colleagues and reported on their conclusions, as well as presenting me with a clear account of vascular disease and of gout.
With astounding generosity Roy Stanbrook, Harbour Master of the Lower District of the Port of London, sailed me in his beautiful yacht, the Meteor, down the Medway from Chatham to Sheerness and into the Thames estuary as far as Gravesend, so that I could experience something similar to Dickens’s childhood voyages with his father, with whom he sometimes sailed in the Navy yacht from Chatham to the Pay Office at Sheerness and back, about 1820. Roy and his wife Ann were perfect hosts, and gave my husband and me an unforgettable June day on the water. My warmest thanks to them, and also to Helen Alexander, who introduced me to Roy.
Nicholas P. C. Waloff sent me fascinating information about his ancestor, Dickens’s manservant, John Thompson, which he had researched himself, for which I am grateful.
Thanks to Dickens’s descendants, Lucinda Hawksley, H. D. B. Hawksley and Mark Dickens, all of whom have been helpful to me.
Thanks to David Clegg for drawing my attention to the Jarndyce catalogue entry on Dickens’s listing of the contents of his part of his cellar at Gad’s Hill, one of his last pieces of writing, made on Monday, 6 June 1870, in a small ruled book.
Andrew Farmer has again drawn the maps, as he did for my books on Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys and Thomas Hardy: Dickens presents a particularly difficult task, and I am again indebted to him for his patience and delighted with his work.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 60