Charles Dickens: A Life (18 page)

Meanwhile, Dickens sent Chapman & Hall an apology for late delivery of the monthly instalments of
Pickwick
, with a cry of joy over its ever growing success: ‘If I were to live a hundred years, and write three novels in each, I should never be so proud of any of them, as I am of Pickwick, feeling as I do, that it has made its own way.’
¹⁹
He was beginning to plan the
Miscellany
for Bentley, and he had to tell Macrone he was withdrawing from writing ‘Gabriel Vardon’, and asked for his letter of agreement to be returned. He enforced his point by instructing his other publishers to refuse Macrone’s advertisements for ‘Gabriel Vardon’. Macrone gave way only when Dickens made over to him, for the low price of £100, the copyrights of both the first and second series of
Sketches by Boz
in December.
²⁰
For the second series Dickens wrote a final piece, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’, intended to finish the book ‘with eclat’. It must be the worst in the series, a melodramatic tale of a drunkard given to ‘wild debauch’, imbiber of ‘the slow, sure poison … that hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death’. When the drunkard’s wife lies dying of a broken heart, he ‘reeled from the tavern to her bedside in time to see her die’. His sons leave as soon as they can after this, but one night one returns home to the attic in an alley between Fleet Street and the Thames, pursued by the police for a capital crime, and – improbably, and unwisely – trusts his hated father to hide him. The drunkard betrays him and is cursed as the son goes to the gallows. Abandoned by his daughter, he takes himself to the Thames, plunges into the water, changes his mind, screams ‘in agonies of terror’, remembers the curse of his son and is carried away by the fierce tide to his death. Dickens in moralizing mood is not good company, and this is a feeble and overblown piece of prose, full of verbal and emotional clichés – a bit of early ham. But, as he told Bentley, he was ‘Nothing but head and ears in work, and really half dead with fatigue.’
²¹

The
Village Coquettes
opened on 6 December, with Hullah’s music, and there were cheers for Boz at the curtain. But a young critic named John Forster had something to say about the cheers and the piece: ‘the libretto was totally unworthy of Boz,’ he wrote, although ‘the audience screamed for Boz!’ He went on, ‘Now we have a great respect and liking for Boz; the
Pickwick Papers
have made him, as our readers are very well aware, an especial favourite with us … Bad as the opera is … we feel assured that if Mr Braham [the producer] will make arrangements to parade the real living Boz every night after that opera, he will insure for it a certain attraction.’
²²
Dickens wrote to Hullah about the review: ‘It is
rather
depreciatory of the Opera, but … so well done that I cannot help laughing at it, for the life and soul of me.’
²³
And it seems likely he thought Forster more right than wrong about
The Village Coquettes
because he later described it as the ‘most unfortunate of all unfortunate pieces’ and asked to have his name of Boz removed from the bills; and during the next year Forster became his best and most trusted friend.
²⁴

The
annus mirabilis
was coming to an end, with a bad story and a feeble libretto, but with a huge triumph for
Pickwick
, and a new novel ready in his head to start writing in January in tandem with further instalments of
Pickwick.
He was married, and the first baby was due in the first week of the new year. Over Christmas he dined with Ainsworth, danced quadrilles with the nieces of his publisher Edward Chapman in their home off the Strand, and invited Tom Beard to share in the family turkey. He also confessed to Beard that, whatever his disapproval of drunkenness in print, ‘I arrived home at one oClock this morning dead drunk, & was put to bed by my loving missis.’
²⁵
Catherine rose to the occasion well, and may even have felt a certain pleasure that, just for once, her ever busy and omnicompetent husband had put himself into a condition in which she could help, and take charge of him.

‘Till death do us part’

Sometime in the evening or night of Thursday, 5 January, Catherine went into labour. Dickens was at home, and by the next morning both his mother and Mrs Hogarth had arrived to help and advise out of their considerable experience of childbirth; and with Mrs Hogarth came Catherine’s sister Mary. In the morning Dickens found time to write to a colleague on the
Chronicle
to explain that he was ‘chained to Mr Pickwick just now, and cannot get away’, but hoped to be free on Tuesday.
¹
Then, leaving Catherine in the care of the two mothers and the monthly nurse, and with the family doctor present or on the way, he and Mary went out together. They spent much of the day wandering happily from one second-hand furniture shop to another in search of a small table for the bedroom as a present for Catherine. At last a table was bought and they arrived back at Furnival’s Inn, and soon after six in the evening Catherine gave birth to a son. The birth was a ‘dreadful trial’ to her, but the baby arrived safely, and the family could rejoice.
²
What Dickens chose to remember, when he looked back a year later, was that, since there was no room for Mary to sleep at Furnival’s, he took her home to Brompton that night. It was too far for her to walk on a winter evening, which meant hiring a hackney cab, but he is likely to have walked back, taking the time to think about his work, and the happiness of the day which, being the festival of Twelfth Night, was a good birthday for his son. The following day Mary came to them again, and remained for most of the month, helping and cheering her sister and brother-in-law. A year later, when they no longer lived at Furnival’s, he recalled this as a time of supreme happiness: ‘I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers … I would hire them to keep empty, if I could …’
³

The baby – ‘our boy’, or ‘the infant phenomenon’ in his father’s letters – was not christened for nearly a year, neither parent considering it a pressing matter or one of great religious significance, although Tom Beard was chosen to be godfather. For Dickens everything had to fall into place behind his work schedule, driven as he was to keep up the monthly instalments of
Pickwick
for Chapman & Hall, and preparing to embark on a new novel for Bentley,
Oliver Twist
, also scheduled to appear in monthly numbers starting in February in the
Miscellany
. The two serial stories would be running simultaneously for ten months, and Dickens would have to work like a juggler to keep both spinning. He said later that he was warned against serial publications – ‘My friends told me it was a low, cheap form of publication, by which I should ruin all my rising hopes’ – but whoever these friends were he triumphantly proved them wrong, and readers were as pleased with the pathos, horror and
grand guignol
of
Oliver
as with the comedy of
Pickwick
.
⁴

Managing this double feat was an unprecedented and amazing achievement. Everything had to be planned in his head in advance.
Pickwick
had started as a series of loosely rambling episodes, but he was now introducing plot, with Pickwick accused of breach of promise, the dealings with lawyers, the trial and his imprisonment, all of which demanded more care in setting up each number; and
Oliver
was tightly plotted and shaped from the start. There was no going back to change or adjust once a number was printed; everything had to be right first time. How different this is from the way most great novelists work, allowing themselves time to reconsider, to change their minds, to go back, to cancel and rewrite. Each number of
Pickwick
and
Oliver
consisted of about 7,500 words, and in theory he simply divided every month, allotting a fortnight to each new section of each book. In practice this did not always work out as he hoped, and although he sometimes got ahead, there were many months when he only just managed to get his copy to the printer in time. He wrote in a small hand, with a quill pen and black (iron gall) ink at this stage – later he favoured bright blue – on rough sheets of grey, white or bluish paper, measuring about 9 x 7½ inches, that he’d fold and then tear in half before starting to write; he called these sheets ‘slips’.
⁵
For
Oliver
he spaced the lines quite widely, fitting about twenty-five lines on each sheet where later he would cram forty-five. Something like ninety-five slips made up one monthly number. In the course of a day he might produce eleven or twelve slips, and if pushed up to twenty. He had also to arrange for the two illustrators – Browne for
Pickwick
, Cruikshank for
Oliver
– to see the copy to work from, more often than not deciding for them what would make the best picture. On top of this he was editing
Bentley’s
Miscellany
, which meant commissioning and dealing with other writers, and with the printers. The pressure was intense, but the results were gratifying: in February
Pickwick
sold 14,000 copies, and after the opening instalment of
Oliver
was reviewed in four papers, 1,000 extra copies had to be printed of the next number.

So far so good, but two weeks after giving birth Catherine was suffering from depression. She refused to eat, and only Dickens could persuade her to take anything. He himself had ‘a violent attack of God knows what, in the head’ and dosed himself with ‘as much medicine as would be given to an ordinary-sized horse’. He told Bentley that, although he considered
Oliver
to be the best subject he had ever thought of, ‘I really
cannot
write under these combined disadvantages’, but at least he had finished this month’s work.
⁶
Catherine had difficulty feeding the baby and gave up trying. A wet nurse was easily found to take over but, according to her sister, ‘every time she sees her Baby she has a fit of crying and keeps constantly saying she is sure he will not care for her now she is not able to nurse him.’ Mary sounds sympathetic but brisk in her letter, saying Catherine should forget what she had been through and remember that she has everything in the world to make her happy, including a husband who is ‘kindness itself’. She goes on to talk proudly of his success: ‘his time is so completely taken up that it is quite a favour for the Literary Gentlemen to get him to write for them.’
⁷

Dickens wanted fresh air and exercise, and when the first number of
Oliver
was in print, with Cruikshank’s illustration showing the small, starved hero asking the workhouse master for more gruel, he took Catherine, Mary and the baby with nurse or nurses to their honeymoon lodgings in Chalk for five weeks. Here he was able to write without interruption, although he had to return to London each week, either by steamer from Gravesend or else on the Dover coach. February, being short of days, was always a challenge for a writer working for monthly publication, but this time he had
Oliver
finished by the 10th and
Pickwick
by the 22nd. Then he was able to take the ladies to see the fortifications at Chatham and enjoy a ‘snug little dinner at the Sun’. Catherine cheered up, and Tom Beard was invited to Chalk for the weekend, and to keep her and Mary company while Charles went out to dinner without them, invited by a contributor to the
Miscellany
, a literary lieutenant in the Marines living in the barracks in Chatham. Meanwhile he had made up his mind to leave Furnival’s and instituted a search for a London house; and as soon as a suitable one was found in Doughty Street, between Gray’s Inn and Mecklenburgh Square, he at once took a three-year lease at £80 a year. He asked Bentley for an advance of £100 to cover the cost of moving, and while the house was being prepared he and Catherine moved back to London, putting up for a few weeks in a rented house near Regent’s Park. On the last day of March they moved into No. 48 Doughty Street.

The move was a mark of Dickens’s confidence in his ability to maintain himself, with wife and child, at a new social level. The Doughty Street house was finer and larger than any he or his parents had ever lived in. It had twelve good rooms on three storeys, a basement and attics, and a small garden at the back, and it stood among similar handsome, solid, brick houses, all built at the turn of the century, in a wide and salubrious Bloomsbury street, gated at each end to keep out undesirables. Here he could live like a gentleman and work comfortably.
⁸

At twenty-five he had achieved more than his father or any of his uncles, but he did not turn his back on his family. His parents were often at Doughty Street, and it became a second home for Frederick. Alfred, at fifteen, was being sent to learn engineering at Tamworth under the Stephensons, an apprenticeship certainly arranged by Henry Austin, who married Letitia this July. When Fanny also married a fellow musician, Henry Burnett, in September, the Dickens parents were left with only Augustus to look after. If Dickens had hopes their father would manage better with fewer responsibilities he was wrong, because John Dickens saw his son’s success as an encouragement to expect more handouts. It also offered him the possibility of trading on his name. These activities verged on the criminal, but he never doubted that Charles would bail him out and protect him, if only to keep his own name unsullied, and about this he was right.