Charles Dickens: A Life (32 page)

A second tour, made with Catherine to be in Rome for carnival and Easter, gave him more material. He described Carrara, where he was struck by the singing of the workers in the marble quarries, so good that they doubled as chorus in an act of Bellini’s
Norma
given in the little opera house. Pisa’s tower, smaller than he expected from his childhood picture book, made him feel, when he reached the top, as though he were on a ship that had heeled over in the ebb tide. He dwelt on Rome, the carnival festivities, and his dislike of Roman Catholicism, confirmed by visits to St Peter’s and the elaborate Easter rituals. Ancient Rome – the Colosseum, the Forum, the triumphal arches and the stones of the Via Sacra – he saw as bearing the traces of the bloody gladiatorial spectacles put on by the emperors. He praised the industry of the modern Jews, observing that they were locked up each night at eight in their crowded ghetto. The Campagna pleased him best, and he walked many miles along the Appian Way, with its grass-grown ruins and mouldering arches, aqueducts, larks nested in the stones, and fierce herdsmen. And he gave a page to the guillotining of a man found guilty of murdering a German countess. As an opponent of public executions, and indeed of capital punishment, he felt obliged to go and wait for several hours to see a Roman one, and reported that when the criminal was finally brought the blade fell quickly, the head was put on a pole for display, and the guillotine, which he inspected, was dirty; also that the eyes in the severed head were turned up, and there seemed to be no neck left on the body. No one else, he complained, seemed affected by the ‘ugly, careless, sickening spectacle’ on which he lingered, before fixing it with his pen.
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Naples, Pompeii and Paestum followed, but the great set-piece is the ascent of Vesuvius, which Catherine and Georgina made with him. The weather conditions were such – snow had fallen and frozen to slippery ice over much of the volcano’s surface – that they needed twenty-two guides, an armed guard and six horses for a party of six. They rode to the snow line, after which the ladies were carried in litters and Dickens walked with a stick, tumbling at every step. But the sky was clear and once the sun had set a great full moon appeared over the sea below, offering a sublime spectacle. The snow gave way to a region of cinders, ash, smoke and sulphur, since Vesuvius, unknown to them, was working itself towards another eruption, and here they all had to walk as best they could. When the party stopped near the summit, he insisted on crawling to the very edge of the crater and looking down into the boiling fires below, rejoining the others with his clothes alight in several places, giddy, singed, scorched and triumphant. The way down, sliding over sheets of smooth ice, was extremely dangerous, and two guides and a boy slipped and fell into the darkness. One guide and the boy were found, stunned and bloodied but alive, but the second guide failed to reappear. Catherine’s and Georgina’s clothes were torn to bits and his were burnt, but they survived, and were greeted with open-mouthed admiration by the Neapolitans for their foolhardy feat.

This is the high point of Dickens’s narrative. He considered Naples and its famous bay inferior to Genoa. There is a perfunctory account of Florence, its palaces, piazzas, old bridges and shining Dome, but the prison, in a courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, gets a good paragraph, with its inner cells like ovens, while from the outer ones the merry, dirty, violent inmates begged through the bars, smoking and drinking and playing draughts. He ended with the wish that a noble people would be raised up from a country divided and misruled. All this was quickly put together once he was back in England. There were more bad reviews than good, but it made a modest profit for Dickens and his new publishers, Bradbury & Evans. Even on a travel book, his name mattered more than the judgement of the critics: published in May 1846, it went on selling gently and is still in print.

Crisis

The enormous coach carried the Dickens family home over the St Gotthard Pass, travelling between high snow walls, and using wooden logs as drags as it descended the north side, a fearful task for the four horses. Repairs were needed at the bottom, but within a week they were in Zurich and in another ten days in Brussels, where they were met by Forster, recovered from his rheumatic illness, and by Maclise and Jerrold. After a few sightseeing jaunts in Belgium, from which Dickens took a day off to write to the De La Rues, they were at Devonshire Terrace again on 5 July, in a chaos of unpacking. D’Orsay wrote at once, ‘Voici, thank God, Devonshire Place ressuscité. Venez luncheonner demain à 1 heure et amenez notre brave ami Forster.’
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Catherine settled down to await the birth of her sixth child in the autumn; she had reached her thirtieth birthday just before they left Italy. Georgina was now eighteen, and always ready to be a walking companion for her brother-in-law. Broadstairs was booked for August and September. Dickens had no large new project in mind, although he soon proposed an idea for a weekly periodical to Forster, to be called ‘The Cricket’, and made up in ‘a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home, and Fireside’.
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Forster was discouraging, so Dickens enlisted him instead into putting on a play, and the two friends threw themselves into theatricals, choosing Ben Jonson’s comedy
Every Man in His Humour
for their first attempt and persuading others to join them in the enterprise. ‘Home, and Fireside’ could not compete with the excitement of organizing public performances. For Dickens it was a way of dealing with his restlessness as well as fulfilling his old ambition to be a stage manager and actor. For this first attempt he recruited two of his brothers, Fred and Augustus, his publisher Frederick Evans, his friend Thompson, still hoping to marry Christiana Weller, and various
Punch
contributors including the artists John Leech and Frank Stone, Douglas Jerrold and one of the editors, Mark Lemon. A few friends – Maclise, Cruikshank, Stanfield – held out against all persuasion. A retired actress, Miss Fanny Kelly, allowed them to use her little theatre in which she gave lessons in the dramatic art and provided two of her pupils to play small female parts; but the leading lady was the beautiful professional actress Julia Fortescue, well known to Dickens for her performances in adaptations of
Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Chuzzlewit
and
The Chimes
– and the mother of two children by her married lover, Lord Gardner, something that was naturally never mentioned. The men all agreed to contribute their own modest expenses, Maclise consented to advise on costumes, and Stanfield painted the scenery. The theatre was full for the performance on 20 September, and the presence of both Tennyson and the Duke of Devonshire in the audience delighted Dickens. Two more performances were given in mid-November to privately invited audiences who paid generously for their places, all the proceeds going to charity, and Prince Albert attended one, as the President of a committee that would benefit.

Dickens continued to put on theatricals over the next twelve years with unabated enthusiasm, sometimes at home, more often in theatres before large audiences; and he was generally admired for his acting skills, said by many to equal those of a professional. But amateur theatricals are always more exciting to take part in than to watch, and it is not easy to know how good Dickens’s productions really were. His celebrity meant that many people wanted to see them, from royalty to provincial citizens, and his powers of organization and energy in arranging tours meant that they did see them; those who talked of what they had seen mostly felt they had been present at a great occasion. Yet Forster himself suggested that the performances might not have been much better than the average amateur attempts. Jane Carlyle thought the acting of the first production ‘nothing to speak of’, Thomas Carlyle described ‘poor little Dickens, all painted in black and red, and affecting the voice of a man of six feet’, and Lord Melbourne was heard to bellow in an interval, ‘I knew this play would be dull, but that it would be so damnably dull as this I did not suppose!’ Even Macready, who was surprised to find Dickens so good an actor, was sardonic in his diary about the preparations and performance of
The Elder Brother
in January 1846: ‘it is quite ludicrous the fuss which the actors make about this play,’ he wrote, and he found it ‘not well acted … the whole play was dull and dragging.’
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On the other hand, Mrs Cowden-Clarke, a clever, enthusiastic daughter of the music publisher Vincent Novello, asked Dickens if she might act with him in 1848, and wrote a glowing account of his efficiency as a manager, his genius as an actor and his ‘indefatigable vivacity, cheeriness, and good humour’ during rehearsals and performances.
⁴
Gifted men like John Leech and another artist, Augustus Egg, were pleased to join him.
⁵
So was Mark Lemon, the ebullient editor of
Punch
, who shared his enthusiasm for acting and wrote many farces himself.
⁶
Friendships were made and strengthened, he worked his actors hard and gave them a good time, and through them he raised large sums of money for good causes: many widows were helped, many orphans educated, some indigent writers supported and charitable institutions funded. There were theatricals in 1846, 1848, 1850, 1851, 1852 and 1857. Two comedies by Jonson, Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives of Windsor
and various farces were done, Mrs Inchbald’s
Animal Magnetism
and Charles Mathews’s
Two in the Morning
as well as
Mr Nightingale’s Diary
, written by Dickens and Lemon; also plays by friends, Bulwer’s
Not So Bad as We Seem
and Wilkie Collins’s
The Lighthouse
and
The Frozen Deep.
Dickens found acting, involving as it did the losing of himself in taking on another personality, intensely enjoyable, ‘I hardly know for how many wild reasons,’ he told Bulwer.
⁷
One, no doubt, was that being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character, who would run on predictable tracks, whereas Dickens did not always know where he was going next.

In July, Bradbury & Evans threw a ‘new notion’ at him. It was nothing less than a project to set up a daily newspaper to rival
The Times
. Since Dickens himself had suggested such a thing three years earlier, he was immediately interested. It was to be a Liberal paper, and it had come about through Bradbury’s friendship with another Derbyshire-born man, Joseph Paxton, the great gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. Bradbury & Evans published Paxton’s
Horticultural Register
, and when he found himself rich through investing in railways he urged them to become newspaper publishers as well. Consulting with Dickens, they found he was excited by the idea of editing the paper. Forster did not approve. Dickens wrote back justifying his interest by telling Forster that his own confidence in his future as a writer was wavering. With hindsight this seems absurd, yet he was seriously worried about the possibility of ‘failing health or fading popularity’, and these fears made the newspaper appointment attractive.
⁸
He had no capital to put into the project – he was still living from month to month financially – and when he was offered £1,000 a year to become editor he bargained for more, and got it. In November agreement was reached between him and Bradbury & Evans that he should become editor of the new
Daily News
for a salary of £2,000 a year. The paper was to be launched in January 1846.

Almost at once there was a hitch when one of the shareholders lost money and withdrew, at which Dickens took fright and said he would not proceed. Paxton, who had put in £25,000, persuaded Bradbury & Evans to increase their contribution to £22,500. Dickens changed his mind. Offices were taken in Fleet Street. He began hiring staff. Forster, Jerrold and Fonblanque were to write political leaders. His uncle John Barrow was sent at once to India to report on the Sikhs, who were breaking out of the Punjab to attack the British with a large and well-equipped army. His father-in-law, George Hogarth, was offered five guineas a week to write on music. The most unexpected appointment to anyone who knew of his relations with his own father was that of John Dickens, brought out of retirement to be in charge of the reporters. The man he had recently excoriated as a nightmare figure, casting a ‘damnable Shadow’, a drag-chain on his life, an outrageous villain who reneged on all his debts, was to be made into a responsible official, to be trusted to fix the terms on which reporters were hired, to deal with their copy and to contribute to the organization of the new paper. Even more surprisingly, John Dickens made a success of the job and became at the age of sixty a popular and respected figure in Fleet Street, where he arrived for work every evening about eight o’clock, full of fun, fond of a glass of grog and known as the father of Boz. And Boz himself claimed that there was not ‘a more zealous, disinterested, or useful gentleman attached to the paper’.
⁹
Among all Dickens’s reversals of opinion, this must be the most startling.

During the autumn of 1845 Dickens was also occupied in looking to his various charitable commitments, taking the trouble to meet Esther, the eldest of the Elton orphans, as she trained to be a teacher. He found in Esther Elton a ‘quiet, unpretending, domestic heroism; of a most affecting and interesting kind’, as he told Miss Coutts, and gave her name to Esther Summerson when he came to write
Bleak House
six years later.
¹⁰
Miss Coutts responded generously to his appeals, fortunately, since he was further involved in raising money for the widow and six children of his late protégé John Overs, and for the four children of Laman Blanchard, who had committed suicide in December. Miss Coutts, no doubt impressed by the extent of Dickens’s charitable work, now offered to do something for him: she proposed to pay for Charley’s education, clearly intending that he should get the very best available. Dickens accepted her offer, and assured her that Charley was ‘a child of a very uncommon capacity indeed’ and that ‘his natural talent is quite remarkable’; but a few weeks later he cautioned her that he needed to be at a school close to home, as ‘a strange kind of
fading
comes over him sometimes’ when ‘he is anxious at his book, or excited at his Play’. He added that he was ‘not at all fearful for him, except as I know him to be very quick and sensitive’. Miss Coutts hoped Charley could be prepared for Eton.
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