Charles Dickens: A Life (60 page)

The readings were never taken directly from his books, but rather from scripts he had adapted carefully to allow him to impersonate his favourite characters and offer highlights of the narrative. Of the novels only
Pickwick, Nickleby, Dombey
,
Chuzzlewit
and
Copperfield
figured at all, and they were filleted, reworked and reshaped, brought much closer to simple dramas, with the emphasis always on humour and pathos. Mr Micawber, the wooing and death of Dora, the flight of Little Em’ly and the drowning of Steerforth, were condensed into a narrative that stood for ‘David Copperfield’. From
Pickwick
he made ‘The Trial’ (Bardell and Pickwick) and ‘Mr Bob Sawyer’s Party’.
Chuzzlewit
was ‘Mrs Gamp’. Some listeners felt this as a loss, but for most it was a supreme experience to hear Dickens himself speak for his characters. Half of the readings were made from Christmas stories,
A Christmas Carol
always a favourite. For the 1866 tour he added the newly written ‘Doctor Marigold’, which gave him the voice of the cheapjack who loses his daughters, with many opportunities to play on the heartstrings. The success of the tour was beyond anything he or the organizers had imagined, with thousands turned away in some towns, and immense takings.

Annie Thackeray remembered how she responded to a London reading:

We sat in the front, a little to the right of the platform; the great Hall was somewhat dimly lighted, considering the crowds assembled there. The slight figure (as he appeared to me) stood alone quietly facing the long rows of people. He seemed holding the great audience in some mysterious way from the empty stage. Quite immediately the story began. Copperfield and Steerforth, Yarmouth and the fishermen and Peggotty, and then the rising storm, all was there before us … The lights shone from the fisherman’s home; then after laughter terror fell, the storm rose; finally, we were all breathlessly watching from the shore, and (this I remember most vividly of all) a great wave seemed to fall splashing on to the platform from overhead, carrying away everything before it, and the boat and the figure of Steerforth in his red sailor’s cap fighting for his life by the mast. Some one called out; was it Mr Dickens himself who threw up his arm?
⁸

The triumph was paid for with pains in foot, hand, heart and left eye, nervous seizures, sleeplessness and, as he told Forster, depression at the end of each tour. While he was travelling in 1866 Jane Carlyle died suddenly, another old friend gone. The Bayswater house was given up that June and he resumed his slightly more normal life, divided between Wellington Street, Gad’s Hill and wherever Nelly was – for the moment in Slough, where he figured as Mr Tringham. Some letters that summer were headed ‘Eton’ and ‘Windsor’, and explained that he was walking, or waiting for a train. In July he started running Fanny Ternan’s novel
Aunt Margaret’s Trouble
in
All the Year Round
, keeping its authorship strictly secret, and wrote to Thomas Trollope to say how pleased he was that she was in Florence with him; and at the end of July Fanny and Trollope announced their forthcoming marriage. In August there was a cricket match at Gad’s, in September Dickens was ‘seized in a most distressing manner’ in the heart or the nervous system, and Beard was applied to for medicine against pains in the stomach and chest.
⁹
Dolby was invited for a weekend and congratulated on the birth of a daughter.
¹⁰
In October news came from America of the death of Augustus, Dickens’s youngest brother, the third of his siblings to die from tuberculosis of the lung. Augustus left, beside a widow in England whom Dickens was already helping, a mistress and several children in Chicago, and he feared they would ‘bring upon me a host of disagreeables’, and arranged to give the eldest son, Bertram, an allowance of £50 a year during his own lifetime.
¹¹

During October he worked on four ‘railway stories’ for the Christmas number of
All the Year Round
. One was ‘Main Line. The Boy at Mugby’, a humorous tribute to the horrors of the refreshment room at Rugby Station, another a ghost story, ‘The Signalman’. At the end of the month Fanny and Thomas Trollope were married in Paris; the wedding was attended by Maria, who came from Florence with them, and her husband Rowland Taylor, from Oxford, and also by Mrs Ternan and Nelly. Dickens wrote warmly to the bridegroom. Immediately after this his manservant of many years, John Thompson, was found to be stealing from the cash box at the office. Thompson seemed unaware of the gravity of his crime and turned down Dickens’s offer to get him a job as a waiter at the Reform Club with ‘Oh I couldn’t do that, Sir.’
¹²
Bearing in mind the fact that Thompson knew all about Nelly, Dickens then set him up in a small business.
¹³
He was replaced at Wellington Street by a housekeeper, a young woman with a child, Ellen Hedderley: Dickens asked Georgina to tell her ‘there is no objection to her child, and she will have a good sitting room at the bottom of the house, three bright airy rooms adjoining each other at the top, coals and candles, and a guinea a week.’
¹⁴
As you would expect, he was a decent and kindly employer. He took on a new man, Henry Scott, as his valet. Later in November he met Dolby to make plans for the next reading tour, to start in January 1867. In December he told a friend he would be away in Buckinghamshire on a three-day visit from the 17th, which sounds like Nelly’s Christmas celebration. At Gad’s Hill he set up a programme of races for the local people on Boxing Day, relishing his role as benevolent squire. While the rush of so many disparate events and activities may be hard for us to follow, his grip on everything that mattered to him remained firm.

The year 1867 began with a resumption of hard work and travel, thirty-six readings between 15 January and the end of March: Portsmouth, London, Liverpool, Chester, Wolverhampton, Leicester, London, Leeds, Manchester, Bath, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Bradford, Newcastle, Wakefield, London, Dublin, Belfast, Dublin, London, Cambridge, Norwich. A commercial traveller could hardly have matched his hours on the railways. Already in February he described himself as suffering from piles, sleeplessness, faintness and soreness of whole body, but he continued with the tour as planned.
¹⁵
In March he was shuttling between visits to Nelly in Slough and readings in Ireland and Norwich. In April he had a break in the readings between the 12th and the 25th, spending a good deal of that time with Nelly, who was unwell; on the 20th he took Wills to Slough with him to see her, and on their return to London he let his attention wander for a moment and left in a cab his ‘small black bag or Tourist’s Knapsack’ containing a book and a bundle of manuscripts.
¹⁶

Another lapse of attention meant he also lost his private pocket diary later in the year, in America. He was worried about this and it was not returned to him; and because it was recovered and in due course recognized as what it was, we are very much better informed about where he was and what he was doing in 1867 than we should otherwise have been.
¹⁷
The diary offers a page per month, and the names of the towns in which he gave readings are written in full, just as Forster, Wills, Dolby, Macready, Wilkie, Stanfield, Fechter and Charley and Sydney Dickens have their names spelt out. But other entries are abbreviated, sometimes to single capital letters: ‘G. H.’ for Gad’s Hill, ‘Sl’ for Slough, ‘Off.’ for his Wellington Street office, ‘Peck:m’ for Peckham, ‘Ga.’ for Georgina, ‘M’ either for Maria Ternan or her mother, and ‘N’ for Nelly: thus he writes ‘(N. ill latter part of this month)’ at the foot of the page for April, ‘N walks’, ‘N there too’ one evening at the Lyceum, ‘Long wait for N at house’ in June.

The diary allows us to confirm what we already know – that in May, for instance, he was reading in the north of England on Wednesday the 1st and on Thursday the 2nd – and then tells us what we should otherwise not have known – that he was at Slough on Friday the 3rd. On 3 May Dickens was with N and M, and on Saturday, 4 May, he went into town with N and M, did some work at the office and then went to Gad’s that evening, hung pictures there on Sunday morning, returned to the office, dined at the Athenaeum and was back in Slough that night. On Tuesday, 7 May, he noted an evening walk, still in Slough, and on 8 May he took the train from Windsor, N no doubt walking with him to the station. He then went to the office and in the evening read in Croydon, ‘Copperfield’ and ‘The Trial’ from
Pickwick
. On that day he also wrote to Georgina telling her he could not get down to Gad’s before Monday, ‘being fairly overwhelmed by arrears of work’ (which was not the whole truth of course). He added that he was sending his new valet Scott to Gad’s with his laundry, and asked her to send him back some clean clothes.
¹⁸

The next day he dined at the Athenaeum and went on to the Lyceum, Fechter’s theatre ‘(N there too)’. On 10 May he was at the office and dined at Verrey’s with N and M, returning to Slough again for the next three nights. His diary entry for 13 May notes ‘To Pad.’, and his letters show that he went to the Great Western Hotel in Conduit Street, where he occasionally put up, preparatory to giving his last reading of the tour in London, ‘Dombey’ and ‘Bob Sawyer’s Party’. He was back in Slough for Wednesday the 15th and Thursday the 16th. On the 17th he took the train from Windsor, Nelly again walking across the fields with him to the station. On 18 May Georgina arrived in London and he took her to dinner and the Royalty Theatre in the evening; and on the same day his dearly loved friend Stanfield, the marine painter, died, as he noted the following day in his diary. On 20 May his office housekeeper Ellen was ill, so he moved into the Great Western Hotel again, after dining with Forster and Georgy. During the next few days he saw his doctor, Frank Beard, and also Wilkie Collins and Dolby. His letters show he was wrestling with the question of whether to go to America, telling Forster ‘you have no idea how heavily the anxiety of it sits upon my soul. But the prize looks so large!’
¹⁹
He was at Slough again on the 24th and the 25th, at Stanfield’s funeral on the 27th, then at Gad’s for the remaining days of May, finding his sailor son Sydney on leave there.

This may be more detail than one normally wants about anyone’s life, but it has the value of showing clearly how Dickens divided his time between his various commitments, and how large a proportion of it was devoted to Nelly. It also suggests that balancing her claims and Georgina’s was not always easy.

In June, with the readings over, the diary shows him looking at houses with Nelly in the south-eastern suburb of Peckham, and notes that she kept him waiting on the day they had planned to move into a temporary place: evidence that she was not always at his bidding (this is ‘at P. Long wait for N at house’ on 22 June). Other entries show that he took his work with him and got on with it there: ‘working there Tuesday … [26 June] at P. (tem:) Finish Silverman, in Linden’. ‘George Silverman’ was a story he wrote for the
Atlantic Monthly
, ‘tem’ was the temporary house they rented, and ‘Linden’ stood for Linden Grove, in the hamlet of Nunhead, where the house they settled on for a more permanent residence stood. It was large and comfortable, built as one of a group of houses meant for middle-class families, well equipped with bedrooms and bathrooms, possessing a good garden and stables, and looking out over open fields. The pleasant situation was not Dickens’s only reason for persuading Nelly to look at houses there: it was also close to the new station opened at Peckham Rye in 1865, which gave easy access both to Waterloo and to Gad’s Hill, the nearby station at Higham being on the London, Dover & Chatham line. Either the house was already named Windsor Lodge or they agreed that it should be: what could be more respectable? They must have laughed together sometimes about their invented identities, as the rates on Windsor Lodge were paid at first under the name ‘Frances Turnham’, which evolved into ‘Thomas Turnham’, ‘Thomas Tringham’ and then ‘Charles Tringham’. They needed to agree on what the two servants would call them and on how letters were to be addressed to Nelly; and to discourage friendly and curious neighbours who might notice the comings and goings of Mr Turnham – or was it Tringham?
²⁰
– and remark on his resemblance to the writer Charles Dickens.
²¹

The writing he did that summer, whether at Peckham, Wellington Street or Gad’s, was sad stuff. ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ is the narrative of a man, born to miserably poor parents in Preston, orphaned very young, who grows up with a sense of his own unworthiness that prevents him making friends, although he achieves a university degree and becomes a clergyman and teacher. He even rejects the affection of a girl he loves. It reads like a theoretical case history and gives no real sense of Silverman’s inner or outer life, or of those around him. The satire on the speech and behaviour of the Nonconformist sect who help him as a boy is tedious, and the portrait of the aristocratic woman who gives him a living, makes use of him, and turns against him, fails to shock because it lacks credibility. Although some critics have struggled to find psychological interest in it, it is one of his failures.
²²
He also produced some slight stories for children, ‘Holiday Romance’, for the American market.
²³
Further, he collaborated with Wilkie Collins on a crudely melodramatic tale,
No Thoroughfare
, intended to be adapted by Collins for the stage as a vehicle for Fechter, who would play the murderous villain of the piece. All these works show diminished power and poor judgement and are read today only because they are by Dickens: but they brought in money, and he kept going.