Charles Dickens: A Life (34 page)

His idea was to begin with about thirty women, and he expected they might fail with as many as half of them. His hope was that those who stayed the course could be restored to society and even become ‘Virtuous Wives’. He was especially interested in the possibility of preparing them to emigrate to the colonies, Australia, South Africa and Canada, and thought the government might give recognition and aid to such a scheme. Failing government aid, he hoped that ‘good people’ might be found to take them into service. He invited Miss Coutts to entrust him with ‘any share in the supervision and direction of the Institution … I need not say that I should enter on such a task with my whole heart and soul.’
³²
And although he was not yet in a position to start on the scheme, he meant every word, and he continued to write to Miss Coutts with further ideas and suggestions from Switzerland.

On 29 May, Dickens dined with Forster, who accompanied the whole family as far as Ramsgate the next day. This time the Dickens caravan consisted of six children, Anne and two nurses, Roche the courier, Dickens, Catherine and Georgina, and the same dog, Timber. At Ramsgate they took the steamer to Ostend, then a river steamboat up the Rhine, a voyage that must have taxed the vigilance of the nurses. They reached Strasbourg on 7 June, went on by train to Basle, and there fitted themselves into three coaches for the three-day drive to Lausanne. On 11 June they were at the Hotel Gibbon and after an intensive search for somewhere to live Dickens took Rosemont, a house small enough to fit into the great hall of the Peschiere in Genoa, he observed, but delightfully placed on the slopes above Lac Léman. There were enough bedrooms for all of them and guests, a small study for him, with a balcony overlooking mountains and lake, and the garden was full of ‘roses enough to smother the whole establishment of the
Daily News
in’, he assured Forster, pressing him to come out and join him in reading and smoking in the many bowers scattered about the grounds.
³³
No sooner had he arrived than he also began to plan to ‘run over to you in England for a few days’ in November, should his writing go well.
³⁴
But he could not get going with his writing because the box holding his proper writing materials and the small bronze figures he liked to keep on his desk had not yet turned up. He managed only letters, and eleven chapters of a ‘Life of Our Lord’ intended for the older children, and not for publication. He became anxious that Bradbury & Evans, unsettled by their newspaper enterprise, might not be the best publishers for his proposed new book, and asked Forster to consider whether Chapman & Hall should be asked to take over again; and Forster managed to dissuade him from this idea.

Rosemont, the house above Lausanne taken by Dickens in 1846.

On top of all this he wrote to Lord Morpeth, a Liberal peer whom he knew slightly, telling him he was ambitious for some public employment, and that he had hoped ‘for years’ to become a Police Magistrate, a position in which he might put his social knowledge – of the poor, of education and housing, of disease and vice, of prisons and criminals – to practical use. He believed Morpeth might be able to help him to such employment.
³⁵
Forster was not consulted about this surprising idea, no doubt another by-product of Dickens’s failure of confidence in his ability to return to novel writing, and nothing came of it.

On 28 June, however, fortified by the arrival of his box of writing materials, and a copy of
Tristram Shandy
, which he opened by chance at the words ‘What a work it is likely to turn out! Let us begin it!’, he wrote the first pages of the book that would establish him in a secure financial position for the first time in his life:
Dombey and Son
.
³⁶
But he could not know this yet, and he remained nervous about whether he could write it, and jittery about being committed to produce his fourth annual Christmas story at the same time. The first instalment of
Dombey
was due to appear at the end of September. Unhappy letters went off to Forster. Beautiful as Switzerland was, it had a terrible drawback: he explained that he found himself afflicted by ‘an extraordinary nervousness it would be hardly possible to describe’ because there were no streets to walk through at the end of his day’s work, and he felt the want of them badly.
³⁷
Still, he wrote steadily to finish the first number in mid-July, putting off a trip to Chamonix to do so; he felt he had a strong and promising story in hand, and wrote at length to Forster about his ideas for its development. At the end of the month he sent him the first four chapters and outlined more of the plot, but added that he was suffering from ‘queer and trembling legs’ and could not sleep.
³⁸

The opening chapters, with the birth of Paul Dombey, the death of his mother, the appointment of a wet nurse – something Dickens knew a great deal about – and the setting up of the unhappy relationship between little Florence Dombey and her father in the great, sombre house somewhere ‘between Portland Place and Bryanstone Square’, and the other cheerful household in the City where Dombey’s office boy Walter lives with his uncle Solomon Gills, maker of ships’ instruments – all this is done with vigour and assurance, and Forster praised it highly. Dickens replied that he had ‘not been quite myself … owing to the great heat’, that the weather made it almost impossible to work, and that he was thinking of turning to the Christmas book because it would be a relief to get it out of the way.
³⁹
Soon he was finding ‘extraordinary difficulty in getting on fast’, which he saw as the effect of his two years’ freedom from writing. The lack of crowded streets remained a real problem, and London seemed to him like a magic lantern in the distance, without which the labour of writing day after day grew ‘IMMENSE’ (written in capitals).
⁴⁰
His need to walk through streets at night was a tormenting ‘mental phenomenon’: ‘I want them beyond description. I don’t seem to be able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds.’
⁴¹

He does not explain what he meant by his spectres, but the word is a reminder of Augusta De La Rue’s ‘phantoms’, sometimes called ‘spectres’ by Dickens, the tormentors she saw in her fantasies.
⁴²
The De La Rues were in Switzerland in August and Dickens managed to spend a day with them at Vevey, and surely talked with her of her troubled mental state, and as surely did not mention his own. Forster tried to cheer him by pointing out that there would be busy streets in Paris, where Dickens was moving in November, and that once there he could easily get over to London. But he was not to be comforted, and he found letters a poor substitute for Forster’s presence. When he feared that he might not get the Christmas book written at all, he wrote, ‘I would give the world to be on the spot to tell you this,’ and added that he had thought of starting for London that very night.
⁴³

Some relief from his wretchedness came when he made up his mind to read the first number of
Dombey
to the new friends he had made in Lausanne, mostly among English residents. They included the Hon. Richard Watson, a landowner of liberal views who ran his estate of Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire on enlightened lines with his cultivated wife Lavinia; also William de Cerjat, a Swiss gentleman who became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and Cerjat’s brother-in-law William Haldimand, a rich and philanthropic expatriate. They were invited to a soirée in mid-September for a formal prepublication reading from the proofs, where he read for over an hour and delighted everyone present. His spirits lifted and he felt himself, briefly, inimitable again. In England, Bradbury & Evans were showing their mettle as publishers by preparing for publication of the first number with bill-stickers posting announcements of ‘Mr Dickens’s new work’ in Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Coventry, Bath and London, salesmen distributing cards announcing terms for advertising in the forthcoming numbers, and a distribution of 3,000 red-and-black advertising show cards.
⁴⁴
Dickens took himself to Geneva, hoping to throw off attacks of sickness, giddiness and a bloodshot eye, but still thinking of giving up the Christmas book, and telling Forster again, ‘I would give any money that it were possible to consult with you.’ The giddiness and headache continued, and Geneva’s staid townscapes were useless. He continued to complain of ‘the absence of streets’.
⁴⁵
Catherine, who was again pregnant, went with him, and Georgina was soon summoned to join them: he was there for a week at the end of September and for another in late October. Afterwards, Forster concluded his friend had been ‘gravely ill’, and Dickens himself felt he had been ‘in serious danger’ when his spirits sank so low.
⁴⁶

Yet in Lausanne he did a second reading for local friends, which caused ‘uproarious delight. I never saw or heard people laugh so,’ he told Forster, and he was inspired with a new idea. He went on, ‘ I was thinking the other day that in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not infra dig) by one’s having Readings of one’s own books. It would be an
odd
thing. I think it would take immensely. What do you say?’
⁴⁷
Forster did think it infra dig for a writer to become a paid performer, but once the idea had come to Dickens it never left him, and twelve years later he put it to the test and found it deeply satisfying. Not only did it ‘take immensely’, it gave him intense pleasure to stand up before an audience to act out his own imagined characters, and to find he could hold the house enthralled, laughing and crying by turns. And it did more than this, offering him the best proof of the admiration and love in which he was held by the public, nourishing his belief in himself, and helping to carry him through the pain and unhappiness that was by that time inescapable.

Another earlier plan he mentioned to Forster again was his ambition to found a periodical, a weekly, to be sold cheaply, with something of the
Spectator
’s current radicalism and something of the
Athenaeum
’s cultural distinction, as it was edited by Dilke, with Carlyle, Landor and Browning as contributors. Here again was an idea he would carry out later; for the moment Forster knew that the most important thing was to keep him on track with his writing, and he did his best from a distance to be adviser, encourager and nurse. When Dickens found his prose running into lines of blank verse as he struggled with his Christmas book, he told Forster, ‘I
cannot
help it when I am much in earnest,’ and asked him to ‘knock out a word’s brains here and there’, which Forster duly did.
⁴⁸

Still more important than any of these exchanges was Dickens’s confession to Forster that little Paul Dombey and Mrs Pipchin’s establishment, where the children were underfed and unhappy, were based on his own experience: ‘It is from life, and I was there – I don’t suppose I was eight years old; but I remember it all as well, and certainly understood it as well, as I do now. We should be devilish sharp in what we do to children. I thought of that passage in my small life, at Geneva. Shall I leave you my life in MS when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very much …’
⁴⁹
Whether the spectres haunting Dickens were connected with the stirring up of unhappy childhood memories or not, his unburdening of himself to Forster helped and led on to his bringing the memories out, in the autobiographical narrative he wrote to show him and also in his next novel,
David Copperfield
. Paul Dombey, the sick child who has to endure whatever is imposed on him by his unfeeling father in the way of care and education – losing his nurse, lodged with the unkind Mrs Pipchin, sent to a school with lessons far beyond his capacity – is the immediate forerunner of little David, who also loses nurse and mother, is cruelly used by his stepfather, and is sent to a bad school and then out to work unsuited to his age or abilities.

Forster’s unfailing sympathy and responsiveness was especially admirable since he was himself dealing with problems at the
Daily News.
He felt increasingly out of step with the proprietors, objected to the raising of the price in October and resigned the editorship in November. Dickens would leave for Paris with his family in mid-November, settle them in a rented house there and travel alone to London, staying at the Piazza Coffee House again, in mid-December; and Forster agreed to go to Paris in January for two weeks so that he and Dickens could explore the city together.

Dickens sent an affectionate letter to Macready from Geneva in mid-October, telling him he was escaping there from a bad headache, thanking him for his kind words about the first two numbers of
Dombey
, which he had sent him in proof, and teasing him about his large family of eight children, with a rueful acknowledgement that he was as bad, since his seventh was expected in the spring. Macready was in the middle of a season at the Surrey Theatre in Blackfriars, playing in the great Shakespeare tragedies,
Hamlet, Lear, Othello
and
Macbeth
. His Lady Macbeth was Mrs Ternan, a hard-working and reliable middle-aged actress, once the beautiful Frances Jarman, and at present living in lodgings over a fire-engine manufactory in the Blackfriars Road with her old mother and her children. After playing with her one night he heard of the death of her husband, who had long been confined to a lunatic asylum in Bethnal Green. Macready thought of how he might help her and sent round a note offering to let her have ten pounds. Two days later she answered, ‘accepting with much feeling my offer … and wishing it to be considered as a loan. I wrote to her, enclosing a cheque for the amount; but unwilling to hamper her with the sense of a debt, requested, if the surplus of her labours offered it, to transfer it as a gift from me to her little girl. Poor thing!’ And the diary went on, ‘Forster came into my room; all is not going well with him and the
Daily News
.’
⁵⁰
Had Dickens been in England, Macready might well have applied to him for further help for the Ternans, knowing how generous he was in assisting families in distress; but he was altogether too far away, and too preoccupied. On 4 November Mrs Ternan visited Macready, bringing not the one little girl he expected but her three daughters, Fanny aged eleven, Maria nine, and seven-year-old Nelly. All had worked in the theatre from the age of two. In the course of the visit their mother gracefully recited Portia’s speech on mercy – ‘it blesseth him that gives and him that takes’ – as an expression of gratitude to Macready for his goodness, and brought tears to his eyes. Then the family set off to do the best they could, and for the next five years they toured in Ireland and the north of England, living in lodgings on cold meat, bread and beer, making their own costumes, taking any parts they were offered and ready to learn four parts in a week if they had to. They were professionals but the mother insisted that her daughters should never forget that they were also ladies. They were clever and tough, and knew that you had sometimes to play trashy parts, and do your best to redeem them; and the theatre in which they worked, although it often fell short of what they hoped it might be, represented an ideal of culture and beauty to which they subscribed. They were modern young women, hard up and ambitious, and in another ten years they would become part of Dickens’s world.