Charles Dickens: A Life (20 page)

Pleasure apart, Forster’s arrival in Dickens’s life changed it profoundly. To begin with, he began immediately to ask Forster for advice and practical help in dealing with his publishers. The first problem was with Macrone, who owned the copyright of
Sketches by Boz
– he had paid £100 for them – and was now planning to republish them in monthly parts, reckoning they might sell as well as
Pickwick
. Dickens believed this would damage
Pickwick
. He was enraged and desperate to get back the copyright, for which Macrone now asked £2,000. When Chapman & Hall offered to buy the copyright for the sum asked, and to put out the
Sketches
themselves later, with illustrations by Cruikshank, Dickens at first turned to Forster for advice, but was so impatient that before Forster could answer he had agreed to Chapman & Hall’s plan. There was a sad sequel: before the
Sketches
began to appear in November, Macrone fell ill and died. He was only twenty-eight, and his business had failed. Characteristically, Dickens forgot his rage against him and at once started a scheme to raise money for his widow and children.
²⁵

Forster was disconcerted by the Macrone dealings, but was ready to take on negotiations with Bentley, and from then on was involved in all Dickens’s business with publishers. The result was that Dickens got back his copyrights after three years, had his salary for editing and contributing to the
Miscellany
raised, would be paid more than previously agreed for the long-planned next novel, ‘Gabriel Vardon’, now renamed
Barnaby Rudge
, and was promised bonuses for books that sold well. To Bentley, Forster was a bully who encouraged Dickens to be difficult and demanding, but the truth was that he spoke for Dickens and, when Dickens insisted on breaking contracts he had come to consider unfair, gave him support. Dickens’s habit of reneging on contracts was not morally defensible as business practice – even his friends said so – but it has been argued that, since no one had foreseen his spectacularly rising sales, which meant his publishers made thousands out of his work while his rewards remained relatively modest, he had a case.
²⁶
In these circumstances he felt entitled to insist on adjustments to the contracts, and Forster backed him. Chapman & Hall were prepared to be generous – later in the summer they gave Dickens another £2,000 bonus for
Pickwick –
with the result that Dickens regarded them as friends, while Bentley became ‘the Robber’.

Dickens introduced Forster to Chapman & Hall, and soon Forster was acting as their chief literary adviser, where he continued until 1861 (and was succeeded by George Meredith). It was an arrangement that worked to everyone’s benefit, the more so since Forster moved on from literary editor of the
Examiner
to editor, remaining there until 1856. And from the late 1830s on he acted as Dickens’s ‘right hand and cool shrewd head’. As has often been pointed out, he became effectively his literary agent before the job was invented – though he was unpaid. With his good business sense and stubbornness, he proved an extremely effective negotiator, adopting a high ground on behalf of his author, as for instance in October 1838, when he assured Bentley that Dickens was ‘the greatest master of prose fiction in this or any other language’.
²⁷
He read all his proofs, correcting and cutting when asked, and from 1838, as he recalled, ‘There was nothing written by him … which I did not see before the world did, either in manuscript or proof.’
²⁸
Unlike a modern literary agent, he also felt free to review Dickens’s books.

The July number of
Pickwick
was reviewed by Forster on its appearance, and gave him a chance to express his admiration for his new friend. It was the instalment in which Dickens described the Fleet Prison, where his hero is incarcerated for refusing to pay the breach-of-promise fine imposed on him by a corrupt judge. Every reader of
Pickwick
feels the change of tone and the great force of the account of prison life, and Forster was the first to do it justice: ‘The truth and power with which it is made are beyond all praise – so certain, so penetrating, and so deeply-aimed, and yet, at the same time, so obvious and familiar, are the materials employed. Every point tells, and the reality of the whole is wonderful. We place the picture by the side of those of the greatest masters of this style of fiction in our language, and it rises in the comparison … We recognize in this fine writer a maturing excellence.’
²⁹

Forster’s perceptiveness was especially acute in that he knew nothing, at this point, of Dickens’s childhood experiences in the Marshalsea Prison. Dickens wrote at once to thank him: ‘I feel your rich, deep appreciation of my intent and meaning more than the most glowing abstract praise that could possibly be lavished upon me. You know I have ever done so, for it was your feeling for me and mine for you that first brought us together, and I hope will keep us so, till death do us part. Your notices make me grateful but very proud; so have a care of them, or you will turn my head.’
³⁰
Everyone is grateful for a good review, but the tone of Dickens’s thanks is more than grateful, with its allusion to the marriage vow. They had been getting to know each other for only a few weeks, and this reads like a love letter. Seven months later another letter to Forster strikes much the same note: ‘I know your sterling value, and look back with unmingled pleasure to every link which each ensuing week has added to the chain of our attachment. It shall go hard, I hope, ’ere [
sic
] anything but Death impairs the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted.’
³¹
And in December 1839 he wrote to him of ‘that feeling for you an attachment which no ties of blood or other relationship could ever awaken, and hoping to be to the end of my life your affectionate and chosen friend’.
³²
Young men of the early nineteenth century might write to one another in florid terms, but to no one else did Dickens use such language – or at least no such letters survive – and they suggest how perfectly Forster filled a need for him that no one else, parents, sister, friend or wife, had done. Forster saw him as he wanted to be seen and listened to him as he wanted to be heard. He made it plain that he loved him and put him first, before even his own work. With him Dickens could most easily be himself, sharing his ideas, hopes, ambitions and unhappinesses. Few if any women did this for Dickens. In 1840, presenting Forster with a claret jug, he enclosed a note telling him, ‘My heart is not an eloquent one on matters which touch it most, but suppose this claret jug the urn in which it lies, and believe that its warmest and truest blood is yours … let it add, to the wine we shall drink from it together, a flavor which the choicest vintage could never impart. Take it from my hand – filled to the brim and running over with truth and earnestness.’
³³

Forster’s responses are lost – Dickens burnt all his correspondence in 1860 – but his attachment was absolute. When Dickens returned from six months’ absence in America, in July 1842, he drove to Lincoln’s Inn and, finding no one at home, guessed where Forster might be dining, told his driver to take him there and sent in a message to say that ‘a gentleman wanted to speak to Mr Forster’. Dickens’s own account of what happened next says everything about the intensity of his friend’s feelings. Guessing it was Dickens, Forster came flying out of the house without stopping to pick up his hat, got into the carriage, pulled up the window and began to cry.
³⁴

Blackguards and Brigands

While Forster was making himself into an essential component of Dickens’s working life, he did something equally important in his social life, opening it up and transforming it by introducing him into his own large and multi-talented circle of journalists, lawyers, novelists, poets, editors, actors and painters. Although Dickens had, for example, seen the actor Macready on stage many times, it was Forster who led him into the dressing room at Covent Garden in June 1837 and made them friends. Macready, twenty years older than Dickens, took an instant fatherly liking to him. Dickens responded with filial affection, and soon he was showing him his latest writing, discussing plays with him and attending performances regularly.

Here was a great man whose start in life had been a struggle like his own. Macready’s father, an actor, had wanted to make his boy into a gentleman and sent him to Rugby School intending him to become a lawyer, but he was bankrupted, and at sixteen the young Macready had to leave school and earn his living on the stage. Rugby had inculcated him with the sense that he was a gentleman and he bitterly resented the low status of the acting profession. Falling in love with a child actress, he removed her from the stage and her family, and had her re-educated by his sister to become a suitable wife. By the time he and Dickens met they both had growing families. The wives – both Catherines – also made friends, and the two couples enjoyed spending time together. There were dinners, parties, expeditions and visits to the Macready home, first his house at Elstree in Hertfordshire and then at Clarence Terrace on Regent’s Park, and Dickens was soon attending rehearsals and first nights as a matter of course. Often he took the latest number of the novel he was writing round to Macready and read passages aloud to him. Macready wrote down his honest opinion in his diary, more often than not praising the genius of Dickens, his humour or pathos, but sometimes expressing disappointment, although he was tactful enough not to mention this to Dickens. The friendship was unclouded by quarrels and lasted to the end of Dickens’s life – Macready, although so much older, outlived him.

Macready and Forster were both members of the Shakespeare Club and Dickens was soon enrolled among its seventy or so members. They met on Saturday evenings at the Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden for readings and discussions on cultural subjects, held a monthly dinner and occasionally organized a Shakespeare gala. Most of the friends he made here remained his friends for life, even though the club fizzled out in 1839.
¹
The young Thackeray, artist and satirist, the poet Barry Cornwall, the playwright Douglas Jerrold, the literary lawyer and MP Thomas Talfourd, journalists Charles Knight and Samuel Laman Blanchard; and artists Daniel Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield, Frank Stone, Edwin and Tom Landseer, and George Cattermole. Dickens always felt comfortable with artists: none of them was rich, most had struggled to educate themselves, and all of them worked hard. Stanfield had started life as a child actor, been apprenticed to a coach painter, pressed into the Navy and sailed halfway round the world before he got work as a London scene painter and at last found his
métier
as a marine artist; he settled in Hampstead and was elected to the Royal Academy. He became Stanny to Dickens, who loved him dearly, and they enjoyed many jaunts, theatre trips and dinners together.
²
Frank Stone became another favourite, the son of a Manchester cotton-spinner; he had taught himself to paint and scraped a living with portraits and watercolours. Dickens nicknamed him ‘Old Tone’ or ‘Pumpion’, and became devoted to his children, whose mother Stone neglected for many years to marry. Maclise, just establishing himself as a painter of portraits and historical subjects, came of poor Irish parents. He shared Dickens’s taste for low life and joined him for night-time rambles through rough parts of London, mixing with the criminal classes, keeping an eye out for pretty street girls and drinking more than was good for them. A bachelor, much admired by women for his good looks – he was tall and well built and wore his thick dark hair curling down his back – Maclise got into scrapes with ladies. In the summer of 1837, as Dickens was getting to know him, he was in danger of being cited as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings when Lady Henrietta Sykes, previously Disraeli’s mistress, was caught
in flagrante
with him. This was the
vie de Bohème
as it was played out in London: precarious earnings, irregular working hours, the pursuit of adventure and comradeship.

Forster also introduced Dickens to older, established writers. One was Leigh Hunt, famous for having been sent to prison for insulting the Prince Regent in his paper, the
Examiner
; now in his fifties, he had known Shelley, Byron and Keats, and was still renowned for his literary discernment, his essays and verse, his radical journalism and his personal charm. Another was Bulwer, landowner, Liberal politician, and prolific and successful novelist (
The Last Days of Pompeii
) and playwright (
Money
); he was estranged from his strong-minded wife, with whom he clashed furiously.

Then there was Thomas Talfourd, whom he had seen as a barrister in court while reporting the Norton v. Melbourne case. Although his name is hardly remembered now, Talfourd was an outstanding figure in his day, idealistic, hard-working and effective. The son of a brewer too poor to send him to university, he made his own way and by the late 1830s was MP for Reading, standing as a Liberal on the radical side of the party. He had protested against the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, supported universal male suffrage and the total abolition of slavery, steered through the bill giving divorced women custody of their young children, and was currently seeing through the 1842 Copy right Act that for the first time protected authors’ earnings in England during their lifetimes and for a period after their death.
³
He also defended the publisher Moxon, who put out Shelley’s
Queen Mab
, against the accusation of blasphemy.
⁴

All this was congenial to Dickens, and to crown it Talfourd was also a playwright. His blank-verse drama
Ion
was given a hero who, on becoming King of Argos, declares himself a republican, disbands the army and makes the people promise never to re-establish the monarchy – after which he commits suicide, with the intention of leaving his people free.
Ion
carried a strong political charge and ran for a year in London, in 1836 and 1837, with Macready in the lead: this was the last year of the reign of the feeble William IV, when the monarchy was at a low ebb. It was revived many times and hailed as a masterpiece in America. Talfourd had a wide range of friends among writers and politicians, including Lord Melbourne and Lord Grey. He was generous and convivial, and he and his wife gave famously enjoyable dinner parties in their house in Russell Square, where Dickens became a favourite.