Charles Dickens: A Life (31 page)

His treatment consisted of putting her into sleep-like trances and then questioning her about her experiences or fantasies. Few of his notes survive, but he told her husband in one of the letters the two men exchanged during the treatment that she talked of being on a hillside, among a crowd of men and women, and suddenly seeing an absent brother, whom she named as Charles, leaning against a window, seeming sad. Dickens asked her what made him sad, and she said she would try to find out. Next Charles was walking up and down the room, looking out of a window at the sea, still very sad: she cried at this point. Dickens asked how he was dressed, and she replied ‘in his uniform’. Then she said, ‘He is thinking of me,’ and after a pause explained that he believed himself forgotten, that her letters to him had miscarried. Then he was gone. She also talked of lying on the hillside and being hurt by stones rolled down by unseen people; and of a man haunting the place, dimly seen, whom she feared and did not dare to look at. Dickens decided this man was the bad spirit or phantom whom she had already mentioned on another occasion, and whom she feared greatly.

Freud might have interpreted all this, and a modern counsellor might ask about her past experiences. Was there in fact a brother called Charles? Where was he, and what was her relationship with him? When had she begun to suffer her symptoms? Did she grieve for her childlessness? What were her relations with her husband? If Dickens asked any questions of this kind, he left no record of them. He thought the treatment was going well when she began to sleep better in January, and told him that she had been ‘pursued by myriads of bloody phantoms of the most frightful aspect; and that, after becoming paler, they had all
veiled their faces
’.
¹⁹
But there was still the evil spirit, or phantom, who gave her orders and was hostile to Dickens. She also talked about sensations of fire in her head, which cooled under his treatment, she said. And she told him she had suffered experiences too terrible to be described. They were like fevered dreams, she said, but they had really happened to her. Her account of her experience in the Trinità dei Monti Church in Rome sounds like a psychotic episode, something that seemed real and was more powerful than real experience, and more frightening. Such psychotic episodes can stay with patients for years, as this one clearly did, leaving her devastated, so much so that she even warned Dickens not to go to that particular church when he was in Rome.
²⁰

In fact he had already arranged to go to Rome, taking Catherine. They would be leaving Genoa on 19 January. The De La Rues would join them in Rome in March, and meanwhile he and Augusta De La Rue agreed to a plan whereby they would think of one another every day at 11 a.m., relying on being able to continue the treatment in this unusual way. They attempted the method, and there was an absurd episode when he thought he was mesmerizing her long-distance from the box of the coach on which he was travelling, only to find that Catherine, also seated on the box, and knowing nothing of the arrangement with Madame De La Rue, had gone into a trance. In Dickens’s next letter to De La Rue he warned him that the ‘devilish figure’ of her fantasies was likely to drive her into madness, and speculated as to whether it had its origin in ‘some great nerve or set of nerves on which her disease has preyed’; and this is when he also wondered if the disease was being cured by ‘the inexplicable agency of the Magnetism’.
²¹

Dickens himself was now so emotionally involved that in Rome, before the De La Rues arrived, he experienced night disturbances in which he woke up suddenly in the small hours in ‘a state of indescribable horror and emotion’. He took this to be part of the battle between the evil phantom, doing its best to drive her to madness, and his own efforts to rescue her. ‘I thought continually about her, both awake and asleep, on the nights of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday … I don’t dream of her … but merely have an anxiety about her, and a sense of her being somehow a part of me, as I have when I am awake,’ he wrote to De La Rue from Naples.
²²
A modern therapist would be expected to guard himself against this degree of emotional involvement, but Augusta was sending him impatient letters, ‘incoherent and unconnected … My mind misgives me that she must have had a bad attack, after this long interval.’
²³
When the De La Rues were due to arrive in Rome in March, he rode out to meet them, and escorted them to the hotel in which both families were staying. Shortly afterwards De La Rue took Dickens into his wife’s bedroom one night, where she was lying unconscious, having had a seizure, rolled into a tight ball. He said she had been in similar states for thirty hours at a time before, and untreatable; but Dickens, after taking up her long hair and tracing it to its roots gently to get at her head, was able to relax her into a peaceful sleep in half an hour.
²⁴
On 19 March, Dickens noted in his diary, ‘Madame DLR very ill in night. Up ’till four.’
²⁵

There were further night sessions. It did not occur to him that the situation might seem odd to anyone outside it. To Catherine, however, it was upsetting, and she made her objections known to what looked like an infatuation, or a
folie à trois
, in which he and the De La Rues were caught up together. She can hardly be blamed. She was pregnant once more, and must have hoped for some attention from her husband during their holiday together; but Dickens saw the pregnancy merely as ‘a coming event, which I hadn’t reckoned on … casting its shadow … in a very disconcerting manner’ – this in a letter to a man friend.
²⁶
He was fully taken up with his medical mission, and believed he was succeeding, by persuading Augusta that they were engaged in a struggle between the evil phantom intent on controlling her mind and himself, her good champion, offering her freedom and health. By encouraging her to see it as a story, a dramatic narrative, he no doubt hoped to give her something to hold on to, and that they could work on together.

She now told him about another disquieting symptom: that her phantoms threatened and beat her on the arm, leaving a physical soreness there.
²⁷
The treatments were continued throughout their return journey to Genoa, ‘sometimes under olive trees, sometimes in Vine-yards, sometimes in the travelling carriage, sometimes at wayside Inns during the mid-day halt’. If, as Catherine believed, there was an erotic element in all this for him, it was subsumed in his sense of mission. He saw himself as a rescuer, fighting for the good, and told Catherine later that he was simply following the intense pursuit of an idea that had taken possession of him, just as other ideas had done at different times.
²⁸
And although he was obsessed, he was able to extricate himself calmly when other matters needed his attention.

They went through Perugia, Arezzo and Florence, where he made some visits, to the writer Thomas Trollope and to Lord Holland, British Minister to Tuscany; and arrived back at the Peschiere early in April. They found the children well and happy, and he urged Forster, who had suffered all winter from rheumatism in his knees, to come out to enjoy the roses and sunshine of the Italian spring, and to travel back with them in June. His thoughts turning to Devonshire Terrace, he asked Mitton to arrange for it to be repainted for their return, the hall and staircase ‘a good green’, a ‘faint pink blush’ to the ceiling of the sitting room, ‘a little wreath of flowers to be painted round the lamp’ and ‘the paper must be blue and gold or purple and gold … I should wish it to be cheerful and gay.’ It was to be ‘a surprise for Mrs D.’ Unluckily, Mrs D objected to the colour green so strongly when she heard of it that it was countermanded.
²⁹

He spent the last weeks before the return journey trying to teach De La Rue how to mesmerize his own wife, but without success. Dickens even went to stay with them while the preparations for departure were under way at the Peschiere. Augusta gave him presents – a purse, a pretty glass, some slippers – and just before he said his farewells she showed the intensity of her involvement by calling out to him that he must remember to magnetize her on 23 December next, at eleven in the morning, which would be the anniversary of their first session.
³⁰
He wrote to De La Rue from Zurich, and again from Brussels, expressing his conviction that she had benefited to an almost ‘miraculous’ degree from the treatment – ‘I believe it impossible to exaggerate the alteration of her Mind – where incalculably the greatest torment and the greatest danger used to lie.’ Both De La Rues sent frequent letters, and Dickens did his best to tell Emile he should not feel inadequate for being unable to magnetize his own wife, and promised that if she fell ill again, he would come to her aid again. He urged them to visit England and said he would return to Genoa, in a long, emotional letter, recalling their travels together and ‘our happy company. I can’t forget anything connected with it. I live in the Past now, in sober sadness.’
³¹
In September he was addressing her as ‘My dearest Madame De La Rue’, and ending a long, affectionate letter with ‘What would I give to see you …? I carry you about with me in the shape of a Purse; and though that pocket is in a very tender place – breast pocket – left hand side – I carry you about in tenderer places still, in your own image which will never fade or change to me, come what may.’
³²

Augusta De La Rue relapsed slowly into her previous state. By the end of 1845 Dickens was fully occupied with work he could not leave, but somehow in January 1846 both De La Rues were so convinced that he was about to visit them that they prepared for his imminent arrival, making up a room and having his favourite dish ready. They must have misunderstood something he said, or imagined the whole thing, since he neither came nor wrote to explain. They recovered from this, and she heard from him in April, when he excused himself by saying that Catherine was unwilling to revisit Genoa. The friendship survived; they kept up occasional exchanges of letters and met again in Switzerland in 1846, as we shall see. In 1853 he visited them briefly and offered to resume magnetizing; but now she refused, saying that it would be too painful to start and then stop again. He recommended Elliotson to her. She did not follow this up, having heard that he took insane patients: clearly she drew a distinct line between their condition and hers. Some correspondence continued, and in 1863, before a visit to England with her husband, Mme De La Rue described herself as ‘a ruin now’. Such meetings as there were between Dickens and the De La Rues were friendly and uneventful. He remained interested in her, and her sufferings evidently continued, but she did not descend into madness, as they had feared, and continued to live her life as before, always supported and protected by her husband. The two men kept in touch, and Dickens never failed to send his love to her in his letters, although these were for the most part discussions of Italian politics and business. After 1866 there are no further known exchanges of letters, but Dickens went on thinking about the episode, and his account of it in a letter to Sheridan Le Fanu was made six months before his death. It ended, ‘She is … a very brave woman, and has thoroughly considered her disorder. But her sufferings are unspeakable; and if you could write me a few lines giving her any such knowledge as she wants, you would do an action of equally unspeakable kindness.’
³³
Le Fanu did not, and probably could not, respond to this appeal. Dickens was able to do nothing more. He had only months to live. De La Rue also died in 1870, and Augusta disappears from history at this point, still presumably tormented by cruel phantoms and still without any explanation for them. No account by her of her experiences with the phantoms, or with Dickens, has been found, and it is not possible to give a diagnosis of her mental problems now. It may also be questionable as to whether any qualified doctor would have served her much better than Dickens did at that time. He offered himself boldly to help her, armed only with his ability to hypnotize, his good will and his intense curiosity about aberrant human experience and behaviour. Whether the results justified his neglect of his wife and indifference to her jealousy is another matter.

A saintly wife might have put aside whatever dislike and disapproval she felt about his behaviour and the De La Rues’ part in it. Catherine, pregnant, away from home, faced with her husband’s obsession with his charming female patient, felt vulnerable and showed that she was cross with him. She may have remembered how she had been cross during their engagement, and how he reproached her sternly for it and warned her not to repeat the performance. If his behaviour rankled with her, hers also rankled with him, so much so that he still held it against her and reproached her with it eight years later.
³⁴

During his year in Italy, Dickens managed to cover most of the country’s best-known cities, and, as he did in America, wrote descriptive letters to friends, chiefly Forster, intending to use them for a book, which he duly put together as
Pictures from Italy
. It was offered as a series of impressionistic essays, he kept away from politics and art criticism, and the best pages come from his sharp and idiosyncratic eye for detail. Vesuvius and Venice were the two sights that took hold of his imagination most forcibly. Arriving in Venice, he decided that nothing he had read or seen pictured began to do it justice. ‘It is a thing you would shed tears to see,’ he told Forster. ‘I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe … it is past all writing of or speaking of – almost past all thinking of.’
³⁵
He dutifully invoked Shakespeare’s Shylock and Desdemona, but he actually noticed the modern workers – how the carpenters in their shops ‘tossed the light shaving straight upon the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a tangled heap’ – and he had visions of a future when the whole place would be under water, and people would look down into the depths to try to see a stone of the old city.
³⁶
Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Milan were briefly visited on the same trip; Verona delighted him, Mantua he found stagnant and neglected, missing its glories altogether.