by Roy Jenkins
While Florestan was in the press, Dilke had triumphantly survived an ordeal the prospect of which had worried him for some time. On January 24th, Gladstone promised the abolition of the income tax and announced a sudden dissolution of Parliament. The country was less impressed by the promise than by the evident exhaustion of the Liberal Government, and the Conservatives were returned with a clear majority of more than fifty. Ten Liberal seats were lost in London, but Dilke’s was not amongst them. He was again at the head of the poll, and in at least one sense it was still more of a personal triumph than in 1868; the second seat was taken by a Conservative, Gordon, and Sir Henry Hoare was defeated.
Dilke’s election tactics were to free himself, so far as possible, of the twin handicaps of republicanism on the one hand and of the record of the Liberal administration on the other. A few days before the announcement of the dissolution he had followed the practice of the age for those who wished to explain away embarrassing actions or statements by writing a letter for publication to one of his Chelsea supporters. This constituent had indicated his support by asking the most convenient questions.
“You ask me whether you are not justified in saying that I have always declined to take part in a republican agitation,” Dilke wrote. “That is so. I have repeatedly declined to do so; I have declined to attend republican meetings and I have abstained from subscribing to republican funds. I also refused to join the Republican Club formed at Cambridge University, though I am far from wishing to cast a slur on those Liberal politicians—Professor Fawcett and others—who did join it. The view I took was that I had no right to make use of my position as a member of the House of Commons, gained largely by the votes of those who are not even theoretical republicans, to push on an English republican movement. On the other hand, when denounced in a Conservative paper as a ‘republican’ as though that were a term of abuse, I felt bound as an honest man to say that I was one. But I am not a ‘republican member’ or a ‘republican candidate’ any more than Mr. Gordon is a monarchical candidate, because there is neither Republican party nor Monarchical party in the English Parliament. I said at Glasgow two years ago: ‘The majority of the people of Great Britain believe that the reforms they desire are compatible with the monarchic form of government,’ and this I believe now as then.”
Dilke then referred to the suggestions that in his Newcastle speech he had made a personal attack upon the Queen.
“Opinion has become so much calmer upon this point,” he added, “that all will believe me when I say that nothing was further from my mind than to impute blame to Her Majesty, that I never for a moment thought my words to be so understood, that I am heartily sorry that they were so understood, and that the very fact that they were shows that they were wrong.”34
He could not go much further than that.
On the second issue Dilke made it clear that, with the introduction of the Education Bill of 1870, he had ceased to be a “steady supporter” of the Government. He instanced the Trades Union Act of 1871,[5] and the Irish Peace Preservation Act of 1873 as other measures which had helped to separate him from official Liberal opinion. He asked for the continued support of the electors of Chelsea, not in order that the Gladstone Government might be sustained in office, but in order that he might continue, as an individual, to put forward a radical point of view in the House of Commons. Paradoxically, however, the tenure which he gained on this highly personal platform in 1874 he used markedly less independently than the tenure which, in 1868, he had secured by means which were far more conformist. As a very young politician, Dilke, in his first Parliament, had learnt a number of important lessons. One was that influence was not to be equated with notoriety. Another was the need to concentrate his fire upon essential objectives. He was not again to be diverted from more important radical purposes by matching his strength against the British monarchy, an institution which, even at one of its weakest moments, had shown surprisingly rock-like characteristics.
Chapter Five
The Birmingham Alliance
Dilke was not for long able to enjoy the calm contemplation of either the more assured political future or the new social reputation which the early part of 1874 had brought him. His wife was again pregnant and again ill. As her pregnancy advanced, her own and Dilke’s sense of foreboding increased. Indeed Dilke was later to decide that their last fully happy time together had been in Paris at Christmas, 1873, when “Gambetta’s brightness was answered by our own,” and that “throughout this pregnancy Katie expected death.” Until the beginning of August, however, they continued to lead as normal a social life as had ever been possible for Lady Dilke. Their last dinner party at 76, Sloane Street was on August 9th. After that Harcourt dined informally on two occasions and another friend on one. They were the last people outside the family to see Lady Dilke. On September 18th a son was born. Two days later she died.
Dilke later wrote a strange and harrowing account both of the death-bed scene and of his subsequent actions:
“The (first) night over, she seemed to me to recover fast. The next night she slept five hours. The next day she slept almost continuously, and each time she woke I gave her water, and she talked and listened. She asked to see the child, and saw it, although without a smile . . . all day she did not smile. I did not know the danger; but by the books on the subject that I afterwards read I found that from the expression on the face I ought to have expected death, and also that we could have done nothing to avert it. At seven in the evening she woke delirious but knowing me, and cried ‘I am going to die.’ I kissed her and she went quietly to sleep again. I sent off again to the doctor, but when he came he was able to do nothing. At nine in the evening she woke again, the doctor standing by her side with me; she threw up her arms and fell back dead.
“I was unable to realise what had happened. I sat in my room quietly writing a kind of certificate for which the frightened doctor asked me, to say that to me he seemed to have done his duty. I then went back to her room, kissed her, said farewell for ever to her old Scotch maid, ‘Mrs.’ Watson, and walked down the street quietly to my grandmother’s, and there told her what had happened, and asked her to lie down by my side on her bed for a few hours, and we lay there side by side holding hands. I then asked her to do everything, calling in only my brother, and told her what should be done, and begged her to return to take charge of my house and of the child. At daylight she went to the house, where she again lived until her death, and I went to Victoria Station, and, having shaved off my beard to prevent myself from being recognised and spoken to by any friend, went to Paris and there took careful steps not to be found. I took rooms in the Rue de l’Arcade; and only after some weeks rooms in my own name at the Grand Hotel, and for about a month I think I did not see a letter. I worked steadily at historical work; but I have little recollection of the time (except by looking at the notebooks which contain the work I did), and even within a few months afterwards was unable to recall it. For all practical purposes I was mad.”1
In this way Dilke passed the last days of September and almost the whole of October. Not only did he not see a letter, but he did not write one either. All the readjustments in Sloane Street had to be carried through without his presence or instructions.[1] Ashton Dilke carried out the rather complicated funeral wishes of his sister-in-law, which involved transporting her body to Dresden, and there arranging for its burning. Mrs. Chatfield not merely arranged for the baptism of the child, but did it herself, in what Dilke described as “a form used by lay members of the Church in case of necessity.” At least the choice of names presented her with no difficulty; the child became the fifth Charles Wentworth Dilke.
At the end of October Dilke began to write from Paris to friends in England. But he said little except that he did not feel able to return. Then, at about the same time, he was recognised in the street by Gambetta—“my beard having partly grown again”—and from then onwards Dilke saw him constantly, and was brought back by him into normal human interc
ourse. Later, while attributing some of the credit for his recovery to Ashton Dilke and to Harcourt, he gave the clear judgment that it was Gambetta who “saved” him. The task was not an easy one. At the beginning of November he still felt incapable of taking any further part in politics and was determined to resign his seat. The only activity he was willing to contemplate was an extensive and prolonged journey into Africa. He had not only become a teetotaller (which he was to remain for eleven years), but also an extreme vegetarian with the strongest possible views on the killing of animals (which was to be only a passing phase), and what he himself described as a “primitive Christian.” He carried on a very strange correspondence about the existence of the human soul with Frances Power Cobbe, the author of a little book entitled Hopes of the Human Heart, and he again indulged his extremely limited talent for writing poetry.
By the middle of the month there was a distinct improvement. He replied to a resolution of sympathy from his constituents, and while he mentioned the possibility that he might not take his seat throughout the session of 1875, he did not threaten resignation. He took to reading Balzac and Mme. de Staël instead of Miss Cobbe, and he contemplated a less extended African tour. “From this time forward I got rapidly better as far as nervousness at meeting people went,” he wrote, adding cautiously “although for many months I was completely changed and out of my proper self, and not really responsible for what I wrote or said or did.”2
He left for North Africa in December. He made an excursion southwards into the desert from Algeria and then returned to Paris during the last week in January, 1875; within a few days he travelled on to London. His intention had been to go straight to Harcourt’s house in Stratford Place, then a bachelor establishment, for Harcourt did not marry his second wife until the following year and his son by his first wife was at Eton. Here Harcourt had suggested rather heartily to Dilke that “we will live together as if in college rooms,” and Dilke had fallen in with the plan, but for the moment it could not be.
“On reaching London . . .” Dilke wrote, “I had to go first to my own house, for I was sickening with disease, and had indeed a curious very slight attack of smallpox, which passed off, however, in about two days, but I had to be isolated for another week. When I became what the doctors called well I moved to Harcourt’s; but my hand still shook, and I had contracted a bad habit of counting the beating of my heart, and I was so weak of mind that the slightest act of kindness made me cry. To my grandmother and brother I wrote to ask them to let me go on living with Harcourt for the present, not because I preferred him to them, but because I could not live in my own house, and should have a better chance of sleep if I returned elsewhere at night from the House of Commons.”3
The arrangement was a success and lasted until the Easter holidays. Then Dilke wrote in the following terms:
Dear Harcourt:
I don’t mean to come back here after Easter. I am quite well enough to go home now. But I shall never forget all your goodness to me. I fear I must have bored you at times tho’ of course you are good enough to say the reverse. But while I do not on many days get gloomy—I do get nervously excited which is worse. Still I am going to get all right again. Once more thank you for all your tender kindness.
Ever yours,
Charles W. D.
I write this because I can’t say anything without breaking down.4
Dilke was undoubtedly grateful to Harcourt at this time. In another letter to him he wrote: “How little credit you get for your heart! How few people know you have one!” But he was always a little cynical about him, and his typical reaction to the mention of his name, then as for many years to come, was to recall some anecdote, usually affectionate but often mildly ridiculous, about Harcourt’s behaviour. And their friendship did not for long retain the intensity of this period. Whether because of the advent of the second Lady Harcourt, of whom Dilke wrote that she “was too remarkable a linguist to be clever in other ways,” or for other reasons, they were no longer intimate when they served together in a Cabinet; and when the second great crisis of Dilke’s life arrived there was no question of his receiving from Harcourt the support which had been given in the first.
So far as his health and even his spirits were concerned, Dilke was probably better by Easter than he admitted in his letter of thanks to Harcourt. In February he had renewed an old friendship which had lapsed for over ten years, but which was henceforth to be the dominant influence in his life; and in the same month he had begun, despite all his protestations, a session of Parliament which he was to describe many years later as his “most successful.” The friendship was with Emilia Pattison, formerly Emilia Strong. She was the daughter of an officer in the service of East India Company and was three years older than Dilke. He had known her in 1859 when they were both members of a curious institution called the South Kensington Trap-Bat Club, and had then found her attractive and accomplished, but bigoted in the intensity of her High Church belief. Two years later she had married Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and a highly controversial figure in mid-Victorian university life. Pattison was nearly thirty years older than his wife. He was stubborn, self-pitying, harsh in his judgments of himself and others, and ungracious in manner; and by the ’seventies his health was poor.[2] Even without the difference in age, he would have been far from easy as a husband, and there is no doubt that Mrs. Pattison was unhappy in her marriage, and regretted, both for her own sake and her husband’s, that it had ever taken place.[3] She consoled herself by creating the only salon in Oxford (there was little competition in the days before 1871 when heads of houses were alone allowed to marry), by establishing herself as an art critic of note, especially of French eighteenth-century work (of which she was later to publish a four-volume history), and by philosophical meditation. This last activity led her away from Tractarianism and, for a short time, into a Positivist position.[4] But in 1875 she was again a “believer” and influenced Dilke in this direction, teaching him to accept “the words of Christ received in Gospel as contrasted with the Pauline tradition of the Epistles.” She was a remarkable woman, both in talent and appearance. Her command of French was such that she wrote one of her books in that language, and she spoke fluently three other foreign tongues. She carried on voluminous correspondence with some of the most distinguished European scholars of her age. And she matched her interest in French painters of the Grand Siècle with an equally intense concern for the conditions of women’s labour in England and the beginnings of female trades union organisation. A revealing glimpse of her appearance was given by her devoted niece, Miss Tuckwell. “Some touches seemed subtly to differentiate her dress from the prevailing fashion,” the latter wrote, “and to make it the expression of a personality which belonged to a century more dignified, more leisured, and less superficial, than our own.”5
For many years after her marriage Mrs. Pattison came to London only rarely, and lost almost all contact with Dilke. In 1875 she was convalescent from a crippling attack of rheumatism, which for many months had kept her arms strapped to her sides, and had involved the construction of a special machine to turn the pages of the books she read. Part of this convalescence she spent staying at the Gower Street house of Sir Charles Newton, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. During this visit Dilke called upon her, and there then began a friendship which was to lead eventually to their marriage ten years later. More immediately it led to a correspondence which within four years was to involve the interchange of letters at least three times a week, and sometimes once a day. Dilke poured out all his political information to Mrs. Pattison and asked her advice about every difficult decision which he had to take.[5]
His parliamentary successes of the year came after Easter. The main event before Easter was the election of a new Liberal leader to replace Gladstone, who had retired with an ill grace after expressing his conviction that political activity was not “the best method of spending the closing years of (his) life”
; and Dilke took no part in this. He did not attend the Reform Club meeting on February 3rd. This resulted in the unanimous election of Lord Harrington, even though the issue had previously been in considerable doubt, with many of Dilke’s former associates, such as Fawcett, Trevelyan and Mundella, working hard to advance the claims of W. E. Forster. Harcourt, however, under whose roof Dilke was living at the time, was equally vehemently in favour of Harrington; and Chamberlain and the Birmingham Nonconformists carried dislike of the author of the Education Act of 1870 to the extent of swallowing their natural suspicion of Hartington’s indolent, patrician whiggery. The pulls upon Dilke’s loyalty would therefore have been by no means all in one direction, and he may not have been sorry to have escaped participation in a dispute of which no possible outcome would have aroused his enthusiasm. In the last speech which he delivered before his wife’s death (on September 8th), he had referred in disparaging terms to Forster as having “been returned by Tory votes at Bradford, than which nothing is more weakening to a Liberal politician.” Dilke never liked Hartington’s politics, but he had, and retained, the highest personal respect for him—“Hartington is a man, but on the wrong side,” he was to write five years later. Because of this, and of his intimacy with Harcourt, he was probably not dissatisfied with the way the issue was resolved.