Charles Dickens: A Life (23 page)

Engraving made from Maclise’s portrait of 1839. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, Thackeray wrote in
Fraser’s Magazine
: ‘a looking-glass could not render a better facsimile. Here we have the real identical Dickens: the artist must have understood the inward Boz as well as the outward before he made this admirable representation of him … I think we may promise ourselves a brilliant future from this [countenance].’

In the evening of 29 October 1839 a second Dickens daughter was born, named Kate for her mother, always known as Katey, and quite unlike her mother in her fiery disposition. Catherine was in labour for twelve hours, attended by a monthly nurse, by Dr Pickthorn and by her mother-in-law, who had come up from Devon, and to whom Dickens was paying five pounds for her services. He himself was suffering from one of his peculiarly lowering colds, declaring himself to be ‘in such a sneezing, winking, weeping, watery state as to be quite unfit for public inspection’. But he was well enough to go house-hunting.
³⁶
He had made up his mind that the house in Doughty Street was no longer big enough for the family’s needs, and started looking at larger places around the southern end of Regent’s Park; he also sent his mother to give her opinion of some of them. Speedy as ever, he found a suitable house within a week. It was No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, and he agreed to pay £800 for a twelve-year lease, with an annual rent of £160. Catherine’s opinion does not seem to have been asked, and perhaps she hardly expected it to be, since six weeks’ rest was usual for ladies after giving birth. In any case, her husband had chosen a very good house, large, light, airy and beautifully placed. Built in the 1770s, its main rooms were elegantly laid out on two floors, there were tall bow windows on the garden side, and the big walled garden was not overlooked by any other building. The park was across the road, and Portland Place and the West End a step away.
³⁷

Dickens was so eager to move that he offered many of the fittings he had put into Doughty Street to his landlord there, paid the rent to March when his lease expired and determined to be gone before Christmas. The new decade would be started in Devonshire Terrace, and he at once set about improving the house: installing mahogany doors, bookshelves, mantelpieces, great mirrors on the walls, thick carpets, white spring roller-blinds at every window, and the best available bathroom fittings. A dining table with five additional leaves was specially made for the columned dining room, and twelve leather chairs. The library became his study, its French windows opening on to a flight of steps down to the garden. There were nurseries in the attics, kitchens in the basement, cellars, a butler’s pantry and a coach house in the mews at the end of the garden, in which Dickens presently installed a red-headed coachman called Topping.

The move was made in mid-December, when Catherine was back on her feet and Katey settled with her wet nurse. On the 16th Dickens told Bentley, who had indeed advertised
Barnaby Rudge
, thinking he was about to receive the completed manuscript, that he could not deliver it, and confessed that he had written only two chapters. The next day he described Bentley to Beard as ‘the Burlington Street Brigand’, promising ‘war to the knife with no quarter on either side’. Beard was also asked to order cigars for him, ‘a pound box of the unrivalled Cubas’.
³⁸
The Dickens parents – ‘relations from the country’ as their son coolly described them – were at Devonshire Terrace for Christmas.
³⁹
Chapman & Hall’s printers, the businesslike William Bradbury and his partner Frederick Evans, a man as plump, cheerful and bespectacled as Mr Pickwick, sent round a gigantic turkey. On 2 January, Dickens wrote to them, ‘The blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday, the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two.’

Lucky not to have poisoned themselves, they embarked on the new decade. During the 1840s Dickens would be plagued with money problems and leave England to travel and live abroad for three long periods: to America, to Italy, and to Switzerland and Paris. He would father five more unwanted sons. He would undergo surgery for a fistula in 1841, before chloroform was available, and insist on chloroform for Catherine in 1849 as she gave birth to their eighth child, Henry. He would see his sister Fanny die of tuberculosis and welcome his young sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth as a permanent member of his household. He would briefly edit a newspaper, change his publishers again, and embark on a long sequence of amateur theatrical productions. With his friend Miss Coutts he would set up an ambitious enterprise to help young prostitutes to start on new and better lives, establishing and organizing a Home for them in Shepherd’s Bush. On top of this he would write two travel books; the first of his Christmas stories – the perennially popular
A Christmas Carol
– to be followed by more, all of which were dramatized; three full-scale novels,
Barnaby Rudge
,
Martin Chuzzlewit
and
Dombey and Son.
With
Dombey
he would at last reach a secure and comfortable financial position, and discover how much he enjoyed reading his own work aloud to friends, planting the idea of his later public readings. He would embark on
David Copperfield
, his own favourite among his novels. And he would appoint Forster to be his biographer.

Killing Nell

As he approached his twenty-eighth birthday in February, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed and desired a rest, and he had made up his mind to keep 1840 free of the pressure of producing monthly instalments of another long novel. Instead, he intended to enjoy himself in a more leisurely way by editing
Master Humphrey’s Clock
, the small miscellaneous weekly magazine. He planned to commission work from other writers and to contribute short stories and occasional essays himself; and to have pleasant dealings with his many artist friends about the fine illustrations that would adorn its pages. Chapman & Hall were to pay him £50 for each issue, plus half the profits, and he was confident that sales would be high. Copies would be distributed in Germany and America, and he expected to make something like £5,000 a year.

Things did not turn out as he hoped. The magazine, after selling 70,000 copies of the first number in April, failed to appeal to readers. Sales crashed. He saw that he must do something drastic to win them back, gave up the idea of a miscellany and realized he would have to be the sole contributor. The first thing to be done was to expand one slight story into a full-length serial, which meant he had to improvise from week to week a novel he had not even thought of in January. Instead of being free from the tyranny of writing serial fiction he found himself tied even more tightly to deadlines. He wrote to a friend lamenting that ‘day and night the alarum is in my ears, warning me that I must not run down … I am more bound down by this Humphrey than I have ever been yet – Nickleby was nothing to it, nor Pickwick, nor Oliver – it demands my constant attention and obliges me to exert all the self-denial I possess.’
¹

Under this new strain his health suffered, and he was advised by his doctor to change his diet and take more exercise. In June he rented a house in Broadstairs, found it a propitious place for work and returned for another five weeks in September. Yet in London he crammed in as much as ever. He gave his time to good works, helping the unfortunate (Eliza Burgess, mentioned in the Prologue, was one) and encouraging poor aspirant writers, a carpenter and a young clerk, both of whom he advised patiently. Meanwhile his fame still grew. Maclise’s portrait was shown at the Royal Academy, and engravings of it were in high demand. He made new friends, meeting at Lady Blessington’s the brilliant and unconventional poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor, with whom he formed an immediate bond amid much joking and mutual admiration; and he travelled to Bath with Forster to visit him. At dinner with the politician Edward Stanley he first met Carlyle, who immediately produced a fine and florid description of him: ‘clear blue intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large protrusive rather loose mouth – a face of the most extreme
mobility
, which he shuttles about, eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all, in a very singular manner while speaking, surmount this with a loose coil of common-coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very small, and dressed rather
à la D’Orsay
than well’.
²
Mr and Mrs Carlyle became his friends. As to the colour of Dickens’s eyes, they were reported variously as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, ‘not blue’, distinct clear hazel, ‘large effeminate eyes’, clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue – with a little orange line surrounding the pupil – and even, by a cautious observer, as ‘nondescript’.
³
Friends observed that he was short-sighted, but reluctant to be seen with spectacles.
⁴

The aged Samuel Rogers, poet, art collector and retired banker, gave a dinner to introduce him to the three beautiful granddaughters of Sheridan: Lady Seymour and Lady Dufferin had succeeded in marrying into the aristocracy, while the third and cleverest, Caroline Norton, remained on the edge of society, estranged from her boorish husband, earning her living by writing, and touched with scandal, as Dickens knew from having reported the court case in which her name was linked with that of Lord Melbourne. Dickens was sympathetic, admiring and cautiously friendly.

He enthusiastically attended rehearsals and the first night of Talfourd’s play
Glencoe
, with Macready in the leading role. In July he overcame his proclaimed disapproval of public executions to watch the hanging of Courvoisier, the valet who cut the throat of his master, the elderly Lord William Russell: Dickens had followed the trial closely and written two letters to the press objecting to the behaviour of the defending lawyer. He went with Catherine to Lichfield and Stratford early in the year, and in July took her with him to visit his parents in their Devon cottage, snatching a few days of holiday in Dawlish and Torquay. He gave a great celebration for the christening of their daughter Katey in August. ‘Rather a noisy and uproarious day … not so much
comme il faut
as I could have wished,’ observed Macready, who presented a gold watch and chain to his god-daughter, and a sovereign to her nurse. Between the ceremony and the dinner Dickens carried off as many of his friends as were willing for his idea of a treat, which was a tour of Coldbath Fields Prison. Catherine was now three months into another pregnancy.

Emotions ran high between him and Forster: in July, Dickens presented him with the claret jug which, he suggested, held his heart, and in August they had a row over the dinner table, no doubt fuelled by drink, but bad enough to make Catherine burst into tears and run from the room. It was quickly made up. Dickens had a temper and Forster could be pompous, but, as he put it, their ‘hasty differences’ were ‘such only as such intimate friends are apt to fall into’.
⁵

These were all distractions from the central business of the year, which was the story that had started as a few episodes and was being made into a novel, week by week,
The Old Curiosity Shop
. Against all the odds, it became the second-highest seller of all his books, surpassed only by
The Pickwick Papers
, another improvised tale. What sort of a story was it? A very odd one, a picaresque tale of a child who tries and fails to escape from her fate, with a supposed protector, her grandfather, addicted to gambling, and a grotesquely wicked pursuer, the dwarf Quilp, both putting her at risk and driving her towards her death. Nell herself has no character beyond sweetness, goodness and innocence, which endeared her to male readers; and Lord Jeffrey, the great Scottish judge, critic and sometime editor of the
Edinburgh Review
, even likened her to Cordelia, although the only resemblance is in their untimely deaths. At the age of thirteen, Nell effectively has to look after her grandfather, who has been corrupted by his fascination with money, rather as Dickens’s maternal grandfather had been corrupted by money, and his father also, overspending, borrowing and failing to settle his debts; so this aspect of the story was quite close to home. And while there is very much more in the book than Nell, it is her death that made its fame. It was Forster who suggested that Dickens should kill her off: he seized the idea, and the slowly approaching death of Little Nell held readers in a state of excited anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic for many weeks. Letters came to Dickens imploring him to save her, and grave and normally equable men sobbed uncontrollably when they read that she was dead.