Charles Dickens: A Life (41 page)

He established the office of
Household Words
in a house at No. 16 Wellington Street, in what was then, and still is, theatre land. It was old territory for him, familiar from his childhood, Wellington Street running from Covent Garden south across the Strand and on to Waterloo Bridge. He was again knitting together disparate pieces of his experience, and from the start he used Wellington Street as much more than an office. When it was being fitted up, he asked Evans to have gas put in upstairs, to make the rooms comfortable, and it became a means to escape into bachelor life, somewhere he could dress and dine before going to a box at the Adelphi or the Lyceum without having to return to Devonshire Terrace. In April 1851 he told Wills he wanted to make himself two good rooms at Wellington Street to live in during the summer when necessary, and he had two iron bedsteads put in to use during the period of the Great Exhibition, intending to let out Devonshire Terrace while the family was at Broadstairs. Sometimes he talked of his ‘gypsy tent’ and joked about boiling a kettle on a cord hanging from three sticks and eating stolen fowls, but the reality was that men friends were invited for dinner as well as drinks, and presently he had the upstairs rooms properly furnished, and later installed a housekeeper, making it into an informal second residence in which he could comfortably stay overnight.
⁶
He found Wellington Street so congenial that when he closed
Household Words
in 1859 and started a new periodical, he simply moved from No. 16 to the bigger No. 26 and set up the same arrangement on a larger scale, with five rooms for his own use upstairs, to which he brought some of the furniture from the family home. Taking the two houses together, Wellington Street was his other home for eighteen years, longer than any other. Accounts of his entertaining there, over which he sometimes presided in a velvet smoking coat, suggest that there was a high consumption of iced gin punch and hot brandy punch, much smoking of cigars, and delicious food brought in from Fortnum’s – pickled salmon, pigeon pie, cold meats and hot asparagus – oysters from Maiden Lane and sometimes a baked leg of mutton stuffed with veal and oysters, a dish of his own invention.

No. 16 Wellington Street, Dickens’s offi ce and pied-à-terre from 1850 to 1859, when he moved to No. 26, still standing.

Household Words
, out every Wednesday for twopence, went well from its launch in March 1850, and was soon selling around 40,000 copies a week. Bradbury & Evans had a quarter share in it, Forster an eighth and Dickens a half, and he paid himself a steady £40 a month, contributing something like a hundred stories and articles in the first three years. He set out to raise standards of journalism in the crowded field of periodical publication and, by winning educated readers and speaking to their consciences, to exert some influence on public matters; and to this end he himself wrote on many social issues – housing, sanitation, education, accidents in factories, workhouses, and in defence of the right of the poor to enjoy Sundays as they chose. He ran several pieces describing the work of the Metropolitan Police detectives, a body of men he presented as preternaturally observant and discreet, and unfailingly efficient, who enjoyed disguising themselves to pursue suspects; he entertained a group of them at Wellington Street, and became friendly with Chief Inspector Field, who worked in retirement as a private inquiry agent.
⁷
As well as these factual articles he contributed purely entertaining ones, including ‘A Child’s Dream of a Star’, a piece about death and children that made a great appeal to the readers of 1850. He even launched himself into art criticism, attacking Millais’s
Christ in the House of His Parents
as ‘mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting’.
⁸
The article is ridiculous as well as offensive about the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement, but Dickens had convinced himself in a manic moment that he could take on any subject.

Until October 1850 he was also writing
David Copperfield
, and remained confident in the book even though it continued to sell less well than
Dombey.
There was a moment of annoyance in February when he had to change the character of Miss Mowcher. Then in May he was ‘Still undecided about Dora, but MUST decide today,’ as he told Forster: and, having decided to kill her, he allowed himself to go to the Derby with a hamper from Fortnum’s. In August, when Catherine gave birth to a daughter, she was named Dora in honour of his dead heroine. By then the other children were installed at Broadstairs, where Dickens had taken Fort House for two months. He wanted to be close to the sea as he finished his book, and there he wrote the great storm scene, eight hours on one day and six and a half the next, feeling completely knocked over by it; and did indeed come to the end, with a wistful feeling that he was sending some part of himself ‘into the Shadowy World’.
⁹
He told D’Orsay how much he liked working at Broadstairs, ‘cette Ile desolée de Thanet. Je l’aime, néanmoins parcequ’elle est tranquille et je puis penser et rêver ici, comme un géant.’
¹⁰

After this the giant took another year-long break before the next book. He was now sure of his position and his earning powers. In April 1852 the
Economist
pronounced that ‘the works of Dickens … are [as] sure to be sold and read as the bread which is baked is sure to be sold and eaten.’
¹¹
As novelist, crusading editor and public figure he was loved by the aspiring poor, listened to by the middle classes and found amusing by their betters. He could invite whom he wished to the large and lavish dinners he gave at Devonshire Terrace, Catherine presiding alongside him, and in the early fifties his social circle expanded in interesting directions. Lord John Russell, Prime Minister from 1846 to 1852 and leader of the Liberal Party, initiated a friendship that meant a good deal to both of them. Dickens was invited to dine by Russell, later dedicated
A Tale of Two Cities
to him, and sought his patronage when trying to get his son Frank into the Foreign Office.
¹²
Richard and Lavinia Watson, the friends made in Switzerland, continued to send pressing invitations to come to Rockingham Castle, and there he met Mrs Watson’s cousin Mary Boyle, a cheerful forty-year-old who wrote novels, delighted in amateur theatricals and quickly established a friendship with him; if it meant more to her than to him there was real warmth on both sides, and they enjoyed mock-flirtatious exchanges.
¹³
The naturalist Richard Owen, Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology and a member of the Royal Commission on Public Health in 1847, wrote articles for
Household Words
and became an admirer, describing Dickens as ‘a handsome man, but much more – there is real goodness and genius in every mark in his face’.
¹⁴
Austen Layard, renowned excavator of Nineveh, whom Dickens first met at Miss Coutts’s, was now a Liberal MP, and the two met to discuss social and political questions. The chemist Michael Faraday readily agreed to Dickens’s request to allow his lectures to be used as a basis for articles in
Household Words.
Lady Eastlake, writer and friend of the Carlyles, and wife of Sir Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, declared how much she enjoyed the company of Dickens at dinner, and they corresponded. Bulwer grew steadily closer: he was, after Dickens, the most successful novelist of their time, enormously prolific, and two of his plays,
The Lady of Lyons
and
Money
, ran for decades. An aristocrat and landowner, he joined with Dickens in founding the Guild of Literature and Art, meant to replace the Royal Literary Fund, whose charitable donations were handed out by condescending patrons, whereas their new insurance scheme was planned to allow writers to help themselves.
¹⁵
Over the next decade Bulwer, Forster and Dickens gave much time and energy to promoting this scheme, and put on more plays to raise money for it.

These were some of the great and the good who became part of the pattern of Dickens’s life in the fifties. A different kind of friend appeared in 1851 in the shape of Wilkie Collins, introduced to him by the artist Augustus Egg. Twelve years younger than Dickens, Collins was the son of a successful artist and just making his way as a writer of fiction. He had read for the Bar, but only at his parents’ insistence, and he was a dedicated Bohemian. Dickens saw that he was gifted, a good journalist and a striking storyteller, and found his way of life, easy and unconventional in its dealings with women, interesting. The two men shared a taste for brightly coloured clothes. Collins might appear in a camel-hair suit with broad-striped pink shirt and red tie, and even in sober colours his physical appearance was odd, with his big head and small body, a cast in one eye and a tendency to tics and fidgets. His best biographer says he made ‘a more or less conscious decision to be not quite a gentleman’.
¹⁶
Wilkie hero-worshipped Dickens, who had risen so high that he did not need to worry any longer about whether he was a gentleman or not. He became Dickens’s chosen companion for many of his escapes and jaunts. In this he replaced Maclise, but he did not replace Forster as the most trusted friend, and Forster continued to receive confidences that were never made to Collins.

Solid success did not keep Dickens from restlessness, and the desire for flight from London overcame him regularly. In June 1850 he persuaded Maclise to go to Paris with him, but they found the heat too much, and Maclise was unable to share Dickens’s enthusiasm for visits to the morgue. On returning they heard of the untimely death of the great political leader Robert Peel, and Dickens lamented his loss to the country: he had changed his view of the man but not of parliament, and remarked that Peel could ‘ill be spared from among the great dust-heap of imbeciles and dandies that there is no machinery for sifting, down in Westminster’.
¹⁷
In February 1851, as he set off for Paris again, this time to do some research for
Household Words
, he told Bulwer, ‘London is a vile place … I have never taken kindly to it since I lived abroad. Whenever I come back from the Country, now, and see that great heavy canopy lowering over the housetops, I wonder what on earth I do there, except on obligation.’
¹⁸
The prospect of the Great Exhibition, due to open in May 1851, made him want to get out of town to avoid the many thousands of visitors, and he failed to be cheered by the signs of progress it brought, the railway companies running hundreds of special trains to bring in country people, many of them given their first sight of London. He forced himself to visit the Exhibition, found it a muddle and told Wills he had always had an instinctive feeling against it.
¹⁹

But it was not only London and the Great Exhibition that depressed him. There was also the feeling that he had too many sons needing to be educated and launched into the world, boys he found noisy and difficult to communicate with, boys who seemed to be inheriting the worst characteristics of both sides of the family – indolence, passivity and carelessness with money. He disciplined them hard at home, insisting on tidiness and punctuality, gave them tasks and inspected their clothes, which led to ‘mingled feelings of dislike and resentment’ and whispers of ‘slavery’ and ‘degradation’.
²⁰
Then there was the problem of his brother Fred, always in debt and asking for money, following in their father’s footsteps.

The year of the Exhibition also brought the end of the lease on Devonshire Terrace and sent him house hunting, in Highgate and around Regent’s Park. He looked only in North London, and offered £2,700 for a large house called Balmoral on the Regent’s Canal.
²¹
In the midst of his unsuccessful bidding Catherine fell ill and needed his attention. She was suffering from migraine-type headaches that made her wretched. Dickens told his brother-in-law Austin that she had been unwell at intervals for three or four years, ‘with a tendency of blood to the head, and alarming confusion and nervousness at times’.
²²
This is the first known mention of such an illness, but she seemed so unwell now that he suggested a water cure at Malvern, recommended by Bulwer, who had benefited from the treatment. Dickens handled the situation with great care and gentleness, renting a comfortable house in Malvern for her while she took the cure, going with her to settle her in and preparing to stay with her for most of the time she remained there. Georgina was also with her. At the same time Charley was sent home from Eton with influenza. Dickens was also heavily engaged in preparing theatricals. There was to be a royal command performance of a comedy written especially by Bulwer,
Not So Bad as We Seem
, intended to raise money for the Guild, and Dickens was engaged in writing a farce, which he had to lay aside.