Charles Dickens: A Life (63 page)

He went on to give the murder reading twenty-eight times between January 1869 and March 1870, and the effect was just as he had hoped, exciting and horrifying his audiences. It had its effect on him too, raising his pulse and prostrating him for a while at the end of the reading. Yet he was determined to keep giving it. He wanted the excitement and the public wanted to be horrified; and it was an argument with Dolby, who tried to persuade him to cut down on ‘Sikes and Nancy’ in favour of quieter readings, that led him to shout angrily and then burst into tears. Philip Collins, who wrote so well about Dickens, tells us he himself tried reading ‘Sikes and Nancy’ to audiences and found it more than enjoyable: ‘anyone who has enough talent to perform this Reading at all competently, must find it exhilarating. The satisfaction must have been immensely stronger for Dickens than for me.’
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Collins also quotes Edmund Wilson’s remark that ‘Dickens had a strain of the ham in him, and, in the desperation of his later life, he gave in to the old ham and let him rip.’ He did not need the words written down even: the son of his old illustrator, Hablot Browne, described him throwing away his book for ‘Sikes and Nancy’.
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The immediate effect of each reading, or performance, of the murder was to reduce him to a condition in which he found it difficult to get off stage, and once he had been helped to the sofa he had to lie down, unable to speak for some minutes – this was Dolby’s account. He recovered with the help of a glass of champagne and would then go blithely back on stage for the next reading; but later in the evening the shock to his nerves recurred, ‘either in the form of greater hilarity or a desire to be once more on the platform, or in a craving to do the work over again’. Here, as in so many other aspects of his life – in his dealings with his sons, in his complicated domestic arrangements – there were opposing forces at work. The Sikes readings were a strain on his physical and nervous system, as he came to realize, but they were also an experience he found irresistibly exciting and elating.

The new tour had started on 6 October in London, and there were eighteen readings scheduled for London, Manchester, Brighton and Liverpool, taking them through November, when there was a pause for the period of the election, which brought Disraeli’s resignation and the return of Gladstone as Prime Minister. During the pause Dickens took up his London street walks again, going as far as Limehouse and Stepney, visiting the poorest and most miserable homes where sick people lay untended and the children had the pinched faces that came from three generations of undernourishment. While he was in this part of the East End he noticed a newly established hospital for sick children, set up by a young doctor and his wife, and was greatly impressed by the place and those who worked in it, including the nurses, who were paid only one pound a month and could have earned more elsewhere. Much of the sickness dealt with came from chronic malnutrition and filthy living conditions, and many young patients were invited back for meals after being discharged, simply in order to keep them healthy. His description of the living conditions in the area and of the East London Children’s Hospital’s commitment to its patients appeared in
All the Year Round
just before Christmas, and brought many offers of support for the hospital. His persistence in walking through parts of the East End regarded as no-go areas by the middle classes, and his journalist’s skill in describing what he saw and alerting others who might do something to help there, confirmed his reputation as the friend of the people, and his belief that working through his writing was more effective than any political action.

In December he gave ten more readings in Scotland and Ireland. Soon, as Dolby wrote, ‘we found ourselves going on in the same way and leading the same life we had led so often before, and it was at times difficult to imagine we had ever had any cessation of it.’
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This meant that Dickens’s health showed signs of breaking down again as it had in America, with severe pains affecting his right foot. He did not let it slow him down. On 21 December he was at the office, on the 22nd he did a London reading, on Christmas Eve he was with Forster at the funeral of his sister, returning to his house party at Gad’s that evening and terrifying his guest, Austen Layard, in the bedroom next to his, from which Layard heard him rehearsing the Sikes and Nancy reading. On Christmas Day he wrote letters and on Boxing Day he refused an invitation, saying he had a previous engagement – possibly to visit Nelly, who was staying in Worthing. He was in London again on New Year’s Day. Having noticed that Georgina was in low spirits, he suggested she should go with him to Ireland for ten days while he read in Dublin and Belfast: Dolby’s account omits to mention that she joined them, no doubt out of tact.
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Just before they set off Dickens wrote to his Swiss friend Cerjat saying that if his daughter Mary were to marry (which he did not expect) he would sell Gad’s Hill ‘and go genteelly vagabondizing over the face of the earth’ – with whom, if anyone, he does not say.
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A few days later he was paying out the £2,500 for the land around Gad’s Hill.
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After the Irish readings came the West Country ones, then the Midlands. The readings in Scotland had to be postponed when the pain in his foot was so excruciating that he could not stand on it, and he became ‘so faint while dressing that I was within an ace of Gone’.
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With rest, and a sofa installed on the train taking him north, he got through two readings in Edinburgh and two in Glasgow, giving the Sikes murder at all of them, and again in London on his return; he told Georgina he was no longer taking champagne during the readings, but only brandy and water.
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In March he celebrated Nelly’s birthday with her and Wills in London. Soon after this he read in Hull, where he went into Dixon’s shop in Whitefriargate and, in the course of buying six pairs of ladies’ silk stockings, asked the young assistant what he liked doing in the evenings, to which the assistant replied that he liked the theatre and dramatic readings, but could not get a ticket for today’s reading; a few questions showed that he had a good knowledge of the work of Dickens. Only when he found a card inscribed ‘Please Admit Bearer’ pressed into his hand did the young man realize he was talking to Dickens himself; but he remained baffled as to why the great writer should be buying ladies’ stockings.
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From York, Dickens had to hurry south for the funeral of Sir James Tennent, the dedicatee of
Our Mutual Friend
, only eight years older than him, whose death upset him badly. Then back on the road, East Anglia, Manchester again, Sheffield, Birmingham and Liverpool, where a great banquet was given in his honour and had him on his feet again with a speech of thanks to the 650 guests and as many spectators in the gallery, with the band of the police force in the vestibule and the band of the Orphans Asylum in the gallery, flags, flowers, a silver-gilt fountain dispensing rose water, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes as was) all speaking before him. More readings in Liverpool, then on to Leeds: and here, since he was sleeping badly and his foot was ‘growling’ again, he and Dolby agreed to take a coach to the pretty town of Chester for two days’ rest before continuing the tour.

In Chester on 18 April Dickens had a stroke. He did not describe it as such, telling Dolby only that he had suffered a very bad night, but from Blackburn, where they arrived the next day, he wrote to Frank Beard describing his symptoms: giddiness, uncertainty of footing especially on the left side and an extreme indisposition to raise his hands to his head. To his friend Norton, who had been at Liverpool, he wrote saying, ‘I am half dead with travelling every day, and reading afterwards.’
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To Georgina he wrote, ‘My weakness and deadness are
on the left side
, and if I don’t look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don’t know where it is.’
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The following day he began to feel more like himself, read
A Christmas Carol
and ‘Bob Sawyer’s Party’, travelled on to Bolton for the next reading, and wrote again to Georgina and to Forster to say he was better and expected to be able to continue the tour. But when Frank Beard caught up with him in Preston and examined him, he said there were to be no more readings. Dolby had to cancel the rest, while Beard took Dickens back to London to consult Sir Thomas Watson, who confirmed Beard’s view that the patient had been on the brink of paralysis of the left side and apoplexy, meaning a haemorrhage of the brain.

Dickens explained to all concerned that he had become ill from the ‘constant Express travelling’ and that the doctors had made him give up the tour as a precautionary measure, to stop him from becoming ill. At the same time he told Ouvry he wished to make a new draft of his will, set about it at once and signed it on 12 May.
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He was kept busy by the magazine, now without experienced assistants. He reviewed Forster’s biography of Walter Savage Landor himself, at length and with great warmth, when it appeared in July. In August he started running Fanny Trollope’s novel
Veronica
, a risqué story of a girl seduced by a man old enough to be her father. Knowing that Fechter was preparing to travel to America, he wrote a glowing account of his theatrical career for the
Atlantic Monthly.
His son Sydney wrote from his ship with an abject confession that he had run up debts and asking his father to settle them: it was an old familiar story, the debts were paid, Dickens was angry. Another unwelcome business was sorting the mass of papers left to him by his friend Chauncey Townshend, who had died while he was in America, leaving a will appointing him literary executor and asking him to publish a book giving an account of his religious opinions. It was a dismal waste of his time and energy, but he carried out the assignment honourably enough, telling Townshend’s lawyers privately that ‘it would be preposterous to pretend it [the book he compiled] is worth anything.’
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The arrival of James and Annie Fields in England in May for a prolonged European holiday raised his spirits and inspired him to feats of hospitality. First he took a suite for himself in the St James’s Hotel in Piccadilly in order to show them the sights of London, Windsor and Richmond. Then, with Dolby also of the party, and Sol Eytinge, an American painter, he took them to Shadwell, in the East End, under police protection, and they were able to go into an opium den, where they watched and listened to the mutterings of an old woman dealer. After this the whole party was invited to spend a week at Gad’s Hill in early June, with many walks, games of croquet and bowls in the garden, charades in the evening, elaborately planned lobster picnics in the woods, drives through hop gardens and orchards, visits to Rochester, where they all climbed to the battlements of the castle, and to Canterbury, where Dickens dismissed the cathedral verger and gave his guests his own guided tour. There was a visit to Chatham and another to Cobham Woods, and the week culminated in a great dinner, with dancing in the drawing room afterwards that continued until first light.
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The Fieldses were back at Gad’s in October, when they met Henry, in high favour since winning a college scholarship at the end of his first year, and both his sisters were there again. After dinner Mamie played Scotch reels on the piano, and Dickens could not resist getting to his feet and leading Katey in a dance. ‘I never saw anything prettier; Katie with her muslin kerchief as in the old time and the double white hollyhocks in her hair & her quaint graceful little figure and he, light and lithe as a boy of 20 – those two take great delight in each other.’ So wrote Annie Fields in her diary, seeing him rejuvenated as he showed off with his daughter, a glimpse of a man who had already been near death and had only nine months left to live, but who could still look like a boy absorbed in the pleasure of dancing with a beloved girl.
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The Fieldses were not introduced to Nelly during their stay in England, but Dickens spoke of her to James Fields, telling him that ‘when he was ill in his reading only Nelly observed that he staggered and his eye failed, only she dared tell him’ – a remark that indicates her presence at readings earlier in the year, possibly in the north.
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There was a cricket match at Gad’s in August, at which, according to Katey, Nelly was present, staying as a guest in the house, and taking part in the cricket too. No doubt she was presented as a friend of the family – and why not? A genuine friendship began to grow up between her and Georgy and Mamie.
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In September, when Dickens was going to speak to the Birmingham and Midland Institute, an educational body he had supported from its beginning sixteen years earlier, he told Dolby, ‘I have a notion … of supplementing the speechmaking with a small N excursion next Day to Stratford, or Kenilworth, or both, or somewhere else, in a jovial way.’
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Mr Ryland, the Birmingham organizer, was told that Dickens wouldn’t be staying with him, since he would be with his secretary, Mr Dolby, and they must be away early next morning; and Nelly and Dickens were able to make a short cultural jaunt together, and pay their homage to Shakespeare, or Amy Robsart, or both.
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Dolby knew Nelly well enough to approach Dickens through her: in November, for instance, Dickens wrote to him from Wellington Street, ‘In answer to your enquiry to N – I do not
think
I shall be here until Wed. in the ordinary course. But I can be in town on Tuesday at from 5 to 6, and will dine at the Posts with you, if you like.’
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And Dolby gave his own interesting account of how Dickens divided his time, saying the early days of the week were devoted to business, ‘Mr Dickens, on these days, taking up his residence at the office in London, returning to Gad’s with his guests, as a rule, on Friday, and remaining there until the following Monday’ – leaving the middle of the week open, with a neat space for the Tringham life at Peckham.
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