Charles Dickens: A Life (78 page)

  
2.
Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867) was named for the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, a friend of his father, who was a Catholic actor and author. Born in Sunderland, Clarkson kept to his father’s religion. He was in the Navy at fifteen and served under Captain Charles Austen (younger brother of Jane Austen) for two years aboard the Sheerness guardship
Namur
. He took Turner to the lunch party Dickens gave to celebrate
Martin Chuzzlewit
in 1844. He painted particularly admired backdrops for Dickens’s later amateur productions.

  
3.
The Copyright Act ensured that every book published in the author’s lifetime remained his property (in England at least) and for seven years after his death belonged to his heirs. Should the author die fewer than forty-two years after the first publication of a book, the heirs would be entitled to the copyright for forty-two years after his death.

  
4.
Passages from
Queen Mab
were held to be blasphemous, the jury found against Moxon and he had to expunge them. This was in 1841. Moxon also published Lytton, Browning and Tennyson.

  
5.
The Pickwick Papers
, Chapter 56.

  
6.
J. S. Mill in a letter, given by Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens:
Interviews and Recollections
, I (London, 1981), p. 18.

  
7.
D to Bentley, 2 July 1837,
P
, I, pp. 282–3.

  
8.
D to F, 11 Feb. 1838,
P
, I, p. 370.

  
9.
Dickens wrote of this strongly worded warning from a Yorkshireman in his preface to the first cheap edition of 1848.

10.
I have drawn on John Bowen’s discussion of the economic theme in
Nickleby
in
Chapter 4
of his excellent book
Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit
(Oxford, 2000).

11.
Dickens recalls this time to Forster in a letter of 3 Sept. 1857: see
Chapter 19
, p. 285.

12.
House and streets are long since gone.

13.
D to G. H. Lewes, [?9 June 1838],
P
, I, p. 403.

14.
D to F, 2 Oct. 1838,
P
, I, p. 439.

15.
D to Bentley, 3 Oct. 1838,
P
, I, p. 439.

16.
Edinburgh Review
, 68 (Oct. 1838), pp. 75–97, anonymous but by Thomas Henry Lister, quoted in Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1971), p. 72.

17.
Oliver Twist
, Chapters 40, 46.

18.
D to F, 2 Nov. 1838,
P
, I, p. 449.

19.
As she noted in her diary for 30 Dec. 1838 and 1 and 3 Jan. 1839, cited by Kathleen Tillotson in her edition of
Oliver Twist
(Oxford, 1966), p. 400.

20.
There was no dedication to Forster until 1858, when Dickens dedicated the complete Library Edition of his works to him.

21.
D to F, 4 Jan. 1839,
P
, I, p. 491.

22.
D to Bentley, text as given by F, 21 Jan. 1839,
P
, I, pp. 493–4.

23.
The diary is given in
P
, I, p. 640. In Mar. 1838 Dickens mentions Pepys’s Diary in an unpublished letter to the
Miscellany
,
P
, I, p. 382. He owned Braybrooke’s five-volume edition.

24.
D to F, 1 Mar. 1839,
P
, I, p. 515.

25.
D to Catherine D, 5 Mar. 1839,
P
, I, p. 517, also letters to Forster and Mitton.

26.
D to Catherine D, 5 Mar. 1839,
P
, I, p. 523.

27.
Later known as badminton, a game played with shuttlecocks.

28.
D to F, 11 July 1839,
P
, I, p. 560; D to Mitton, 26 July 1839,
P
, I, p. 570.

29.
D to Macready, 26 July 1839,
P
, I, p. 571.

30.
The diary is given in
P
, I, this entry p. 642.

31.
D’s diary for Sun., 22 Sept. 1839,
P
, I, p. 643.

32.
John Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, I (London, 1872),
Chapter 6
.

33.
They were published on 10 Feb. 1840 and no one seems to have attributed them to Dickens at the time.

34.
These exchanges described in Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), pp. 95, 97, 110–11.

35.
He raised the idea of a visit to the US in a letter to the American publisher Putnam in Aug. 1838,
P
, I, p. 431, and on 14 July 1839 wrote to Forster from Petersham mentioning his idea that he might go there to write ‘a series of papers descriptive of the places and people’.
P
, I, p. 564.

36.
D to W. Upcott, a book collector, 28 Oct. 1839,
P
, I, p. 594.

37.
The house has long since been demolished, but there is a plaque commemorating Dickens’s residence on the south side of the Marylebone Road.

38.
D to Thomas Beard, 17 Dec. 1839,
P
, I, p. 619.

39.
D to W. Upcott, 28 Dec. 1839,
P
, I, p. 623.

  
1.
D to Landor, 26 July 1840,
P
, II, p. 106.

  
2.
Carlyle to his brother John, 17 Mar. 1840, Charles Richard Sanders (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
, XII (Durham, NC, and London, 1985), pp. 80–81. Count D’Orsay was famous as a dandy, more Regency than Victorian in his style.

  
3.
See Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: Interviews and Recollections
, I (London, 1981), p. 74 and fn. Also Arthur S. Hearn in the
Dickensian
(1926), pp. 25–9. I have collected more variants.

  
4.
Thomas Trollope in his memoirs, and Marcus Stone, on p. 50 of his MS memoir at the Charles Dickens Museum, adding that he saw him using a pince-nez. Percy Fitzgerald also describes ‘the strained eyes, peering through the gold-rimmed glasses, always of strong power; the face bent down to the manuscript which lay on the table’, quoted in Collins’s introduction to his
Interviews and Recollections
, from ‘Memories of Charles Dickens’ (1913), p. 77.

  
5.
F to D, 16 Jan. 1841,
P
, II, p. 187, fn. 4.

  
6.
D to F, 3 Nov. 1840,
P
, II, p. 144; D to F, 12 Nov. 1840,
P
, II, p. 149.

  
7.
D to Cattermole, 22 Dec. 1840,
P
, II, p. 172. George Cattermole (1800–1868) was an antiquarian painter, son of a Norfolk squire, friend of Forster. He married in 1839 a distant cousin of Dickens through his mother’s family, and spent his honeymoon at Richmond that Aug., when Dickens lent him many books and also his pony carriage.

  
8.
D to Macready, 6 Jan. 1841,
P
, II, p. 180; D to Maclise, 14 Jan. 1841,
P
, VII, p. 823.

  
9.
D to F, [?8 Jan. 1841],
P
, II, pp. 181–2. The italics are mine.

10.
D to Maclise, 27 Nov. 1840,
P
, II, pp. 158–9. He had the grace to ask Maclise to burn his cross letter, but it survived.

11.
Cattermole’s illustration shows her lying in a comfortable bed and looking surprisingly plump for a thirteen-year-old who is supposed to have wasted away.

12.
26 Nov. 1840, William Toynbee (ed.),
The Diaries of William Charles Macready
, II (London, 1912), pp. 100–101.

13.
D to F, [?17 Jan. 1841],
P
, II, p. 188.

14.
D to Cattermole, 14 Jan. 1841,
P
, II, p. 184.

15.
Extracts from
The Old Curiosity Shop
are from Chapters 34, 34, 36.

16.
A remark given to Nell’s grandfather, written in the manuscript of
The Old Curiosity Shop
, but deleted in proof.

17.
The Marchioness saves Dick’s life by nursing him through illness, and her evidence against the Brasses foils their plot with Quilp. Dick sends the Marchioness to boarding school to be educated, after which they marry and settle in Hampstead. Macready’s education of his young working wife may be thought of here, and it points forward to Eugene and Lizzie in
Our Mutual Friend
.

18.
Eleanor Emma Picken, later Eleanor Christian, published ‘Reminiscences of Charles Dickens from a Young Lady’s Diary’ in the
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
, 10 (1871), pp. 336–44, under the initials of her married name, E. E. C. Her second article, ‘Recollections of Charles Dickens, His Family and Friends’, appeared in
Temple Bar
, 82 (1888), pp. 481–506.

19.
Elizabeth M. Brennan suggests this timetable in her critical edition of
The Old Curiosity Shop
(Oxford, 1997), p. l, n. 127.

20.
Barnaby Rudge
, Chapter 62.

21.
In the
Tablet
, 23 Oct. 1841.

22.
Lord Jeffrey to Cockburn, 4 May 1841,
P
, II, p. 260, fn. 3. Jeffrey, editor of the
Edinburgh Review
from 1803 to 1829, was one of the most powerful and respected critics in the land, and an early and fervent admirer of Dickens. This was their first meeting.

23.
Lord Gardner’s chief interests were hunting and shooting, and his place in society was assured since he had been Lord of the Bedchamber to both William IV and Queen Victoria, who was fond of him. Although he promised to marry Julia when his wife died, there is no record of the marriage, but she claimed there was one, and the children were received into society. The sons could not inherit their father’s title, but the youngest, Herbert, entered parliament as a Liberal in 1885 and had a distinguished career, serving in Gladstone’s government. He was raised to the peerage as Lord Burghclere in 1895. Information from George Martelli,
Julia Fortescue, afterwards Lady Gardner, and Her Circle
(privately printed, 1959).

24.
D to Maclise, 16 Aug. 1841,
P
, VII, p. 831. An extract and facsimile of this letter appeared in a Sotheby catalogue in July 1987 but the present whereabouts of the original is not known.

25.
Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), p. 127.

26.
An anal fistula is usually caused by an abscess. What happens is that a hole in the rectum produces a new path for the contents of the bowel, opening somewhere near the anus. Symptoms are likely to be throbbing and constant pain, irritation of the skin round the anus, fever and pus or blood when passing stools and a general feeling of being unwell. The treatment is for the surgeon to cut open the fistula and scrape or flush it out. It is then laid open and flattened. The surgeon must take care not to damage the anal sphincter. It is likely to take one or two months to heal. Mercifully, it rarely recurs.

27.
D to Jeffrey, [?8 Dec. 1841],
P
, II, p. 442.

28.
D to D’Orsay, 13 Dec. 1841,
P
, II, p. 497.

  
1.
Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), p. 128. Dickens wrote saying he would visit them, and did so, meeting Henry Carey, now retired. They gave Dickens copies of their editions of his books and other presents, and he bought more books from them, but in July 1842, after his return to England, he declared publicly that he would have no more dealings with American publishers.
P
, III, p. 259, fn. 3, and see below in this chapter.

  
2.
As he told Macready later, 22 Mar. 1842,
P
, III, p. 156.

  
3.
For example, he was toasted as such at the celebratory dinner at Hartford on 7 Feb. 1842, K. J. Fielding (ed.),
The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition
(Brighton, 1988), p. 24.

  
4.
Given in preface to
P
, III, p. xii.

  
5.
D to Fred Dickens, 3 Jan. 1842,
P
, III, p. 7.

  
6.
Pierre Morand, a commercial traveller, was a fellow passenger from whose account of the voyage this is taken,
P
, III, p. 9, fn. 1.

  
7.
Catherine D to Fanny Burnett, 30 Jan. 1842,
P
, III, p. 629.

  
8.
Richard Dana’s journal records initial hostility and later concedes that Dickens was impressive,
P
, III, pp. 38–9, fn. 1. W. W. Story mentioned the rowdyism,
P
, III, p. 51, fn. 2.

  
9.
Among their members were James Russell Lowell and James T. Fields, both of whom became good friends of Dickens later.

10.
Fielding,
The Speeches of Charles Dickens
, pp. 19–21.