Charles Dickens: A Life (80 page)

31.
D to De La Rue, 29 June 1845,
P
, IV, pp. 323–5.

32.
D to Mme De La Rue, 27 Sept. 1845,
P
, IV, p. 391.

33.
D to Le Fanu, 24 Nov. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 444.

34.
See
Chapter 18
below.

35.
D to F, 12 Nov. 1844,
P
, IV, p. 217.

36.
Pictures from Italy
, ‘An Italian Dream’.

37.
Pictures from Italy
, ‘Rome’.

  
1.
D’Orsay to D, 6 July 1845,
P
, IV, p. 326 and fn. 3.

  
2.
D to F, early July 1845,
P
, IV, p. 328.

  
3.
Macready’s diary for 2 and 3 Jan. 1846, William Toynbee (ed.),
The Diaries of William Charles Macready
, II (London, 1912), p. 318.

  
4.
Mary Cowden-Clarke (1809–98),
Recollections of Writers
(1878), cited in Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: Interviews and Recollections
, I (London, 1981), pp. 90–96. A daughter of Vincent Novello, Italian-born music publisher, she was born in London and knew Leigh Hunt, the Lambs, Mary Shelley, Keats and Keats’s schoolmaster John Clarke, whose son Charles Cowden-Clarke she married. She compiled a concordance to Shakespeare and produced an edition of his plays. She persuaded Dickens to invite her to act with him as Mistress Quickly in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. In 1856 the Cowden-Clarkes moved to Nice, then Genoa, where she died in 1898.

  
5.
Augustus Egg (1816–63), London born, had an inheritance from his father and a good artistic training, and he specialized in literary and historical subjects with considerable success. He suffered from asthma but was a hard-working, sociable and generous bachelor, and he readily agreed to join in Dickens’s theatricals and in the course of acting with Georgina formed an attachment to her.

  
6.
Mark Lemon (1809–70) worked in a brewery and then a pub before becoming the spectacularly successful editor of
Punch
in 1841. He was as convivial as Dickens and also shared his humanitarian concerns, in 1843 publishing Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’, which tripled the circulation. Dickens first invited him to dinner in that year, and found that Lemon’s passion for amateur theatricals was as great as his own. A close friendship was formed between the two men and their large families (Lemon had three sons and seven daughters).

  
7.
D to Bulwer, 5 Jan. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 257.

  
8.
D to F, [?1 or 2 Nov. 1845],
P
, IV, p. 423.

  
9.
D to Evans, 26 Feb. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 506.

10.
D to Coutts, 10 Sept. 1845,
P
, IV, pp. 374–5; also D to T. J. Serle, 23 Dec. 1845,
P
, IV, p. 454. For
Bleak House
see
Chapter 17
below.

11.
D to Coutts, 10 Sept. 1845,
P
, IV, p. 374; and D to Coutts, 1 Dec. 1845,
P
, IV, p. 442.

12.
D to Mrs Milner Gibson, 28 Oct. 1845,
P
, IV, p. 418.

13.
Mamie Dickens,
My Father as I Recall Him
(London, 1897), p. 16.

14.
See Arthur A. Adrian,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
(Oxford, 1957), p. 15. He cites a letter to
The Times
from Lady Robertson Nicoll, 22 May 1943: ‘My mother, when a girl, lived in Camden Square, and often used to see the Dickens family, then living in Devonshire Terrace. My grandmother used to relate laughingly that she always knew when a new Dickens baby was coming because Mrs Dickens would religiously take a walk twice a day, passing her window.’ If this is true, she was not a bad walker, as it is a good mile from Devonshire Terrace to Camden Square.

15.
Ibid., p. 14.

16.
The play was Fletcher’s
The Elder Brother
, ‘Adapted for Modern Representation’ by Forster and published by Bradbury & Evans. The rival brothers were played by Forster and Dickens.

17.
The novelist Frederick Marryat wrote of ‘a hundred more’ in a letter given in
P
, IV, p. 466, fn. 2.

18.
D to Coutts, 7 Jan. 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 466–7.

19.
D to W. J. Fox, 23 Jan. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 479.

20.
W. J. Carlton, ‘John Dickens, Journalist’,
Dickensian
(1957), p. 10.

21.
D to F, 30 Jan. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 485.

22.
D to De La Rue, 16 Feb. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 498.

23.
D to Wills, 16 Feb. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 500; D to Evans, 24 Feb. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 503.

24.
Philip Collins, in his
Dickens and Crime
(London, 1962; my edition 1994), p. 227, writes that Dickens addressed no other social question at such length as in these articles arguing the case against capital punishment; and that he changed his mind on the subject later.

25.
D to Bradbury & Evans, 5 Mar. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 514. He was paid £722.5
s
.5
d
. on 29 Apr., rather a generous payment for his short editorship. He had received a payment from them on 31 Dec. 1845, £300 to cover the months of Jan. and Feb. 1846. On 6 Mar., they paid another £300 into his Coutts account.

26.
D to Coutts, 22 Apr. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 539.

27.
Macready,
Diaries
, II, p. 333.

28.
R. B. Martin,
Tennyson
(Oxford, 1980), p. 302.

29.
D to F, [?17–20 Apr. 1846],
P
, IV, p. 537.

30.
Probably for £300, the rent paid for a year by the previous tenant.

31.
D to Coutts, 26 May 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 552–6.

32.
Ibid.

33.
D to F, 13 or 14 June 1846,
P
, IV, p. 561.

34.
D to F, [?22 June 1846],
P
, IV, p. 569.

35.
D to Morpeth, 20 June 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 566–7. Lord Morpeth, seventh Earl of Carlisle, was Chief Secretary for Ireland 1835–41, a supporter of liberal causes and a poet. Either he failed to answer Dickens’s letter or Dickens lost or destroyed his reply.

36.
D to F, [?28 June 1846],
P
, IV, p. 573.

37.
D to F, 5 July 1846,
P
, IV, p. 579.

38.
D to F, 25–6 July 1846,
P
, IV, p. 592.

39.
D to F, 7 Aug. and 9 and 10 Aug. 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 599, 600.

40.
D to F, 30 Aug. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 612.

41.
D to F, [?20 Sept. 1846],
P
, IV, p. 622.

42.
D called them ‘spectres’ as an alternative to ‘phantoms’ in his letter to Sheridan Le Fanu about her case, 24 Nov. 1869,
P
, XII, p. 443.

43.
D to F, 26 Sept. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 625.

44.
Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), p. 184.

45.
D to F, 30 Sept. and 1 Oct., 3 Oct. 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 626, 627.

46.
Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, II (London, 1873),
Chapter 13
, ‘Literary Labours at Lausanne’. D to F, 30 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 670. ‘I may tell you, now it is all over. I don’t know whether it was the hot summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N. [
Daily News
] remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger.’

47.
D to F, 11 Oct. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 631.

48.
D to F, 13 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 656. The story was
The Battle of Life
, the fourth of the Christmas stories and possibly the worst.

49.
D to F, 4 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 653.

50.
Macready,
Diaries
, II, p. 347.

  
1.
D to F, 30 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 669. Dickens went on ‘there can be no better summary of it, after all, than Hogarth’s unmentionable phrase’ – which is ‘French houses were gilt and bullshit’, which is probably what Dickens wrote, according to the editors.

  
2.
D to F, [?30 Nov. 1846],
P
, IV, p. 669. Charles Sheridan was the grandson of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, son of Thomas and brother of Caroline Norton, well known to Dickens. He died of tuberculosis a few months later, in May 1847, at the Embassy in Paris.

  
3.
D to Jeffrey, 30 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 670.

  
4.
D to F, 6 Dec. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 676.

  
5.
Ibid.

  
6.
The cheap edition put out all his existing titles in several different formats, as weekly numbers at a penny halfpenny, monthly parts at 7
d
., printed in double columns, and was intended for the very poor, ‘to be hoarded on the humble shelf where there are few books’, as he wrote in his prospectus. There were new frontispieces by well-known artists such as Leech, Browne, Stanfield, and new prefaces by Dickens. They went on sale in Mar. 1847. Sales were not as good as expected and by the end of 1848 Dickens acknowledged his disappointment, but they were kept going and in 1858 he did another cheap edition.

  
7.
D to Catherine D, 19 Dec. 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 680–81.

  
8.
D to F, 27 Dec. 1846,
P
, IV, pp. 685–6.

  
9.
D to F, [?early Jan. 1847],
P
, V, p. 3.

10.
D to Charles Sheridan, 7 Jan. 1847,
P
, V, p. 3.

11.
Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, II (London, 1873),
Chapter 15
. D to Countess of Blessington, 27 Jan. 1847,
P
, V, p. 15.

12.
D to De La Rue, 24 Mar. 1847,
P
, V, p. 42.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Dickens provided an introductory note to ‘the great French people, whom I sincerely love and honour’, Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), p. 257. He later told the French writer Paul Féval that his fondness for France began in 1847, when he observed, at the funeral of another writer, Frédéric Soulié, how widespread the respect for literature was there. Féval and Soulié were both writers of popular, sensational novels.

15.
See R. H. Horne in
A
New Spirit of the Age
, cited in Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1971), p. 202.

16.
For Forster’s remark,
Life
, II,
Chapter 15
, ‘Three Months in Paris’: ‘He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow defective; but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease and fluency.’ D to F, 10–11 Jan. 1847,
P
, V, p. 5; D to D’Orsay, 5 Apr. 1847,
P
, V, p. 53 (‘Goodness! How horribly fast the months go by! The moment I am free I find myself a galley slave again. Courage Inimitable Boz! You loved him well enough, old fellow, after all!’). By 4 Aug. 1849, Dickens was able to write a well-expressed letter of condolence in French to his friend Régnier on the death of his daughter.

17.
Dombey
,
Chapter 3
.

18.
D to F, 4 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 653.

19.
Maclise to F, 1843, V & A Forster Collection, 48.E.19.

20.
Quoted in
P
, V, p. 227, fn. 1.

21.
Dombey
,
Chapter 27
.

22.
Ibid., Chapter 49.

23.
Ibid., Chapter 30.

24.
For the little houses in Staggs’s Gardens, with their runner beans, rabbits, hens and washing lines, and the railway lines that destroy the houses and transform the district with warehouses, taverns, lodging houses, improved stucco houses, clocks giving standardized railway time, and railway company buildings for the workers, see
Dombey
,
Chapters 6
and
15
.

25.
Dombey
,
Chapter 20
.

26.
Wilkie Collins’s remark was written into the margin of Forster’s
Life
, noted by Frederic G. Kitton,
The Novels of Charles Dickens: A Bibliography and a Sketch
(London, 1897), pp. 109–10, and given by Patten in his
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
, pp. 207–8. Ainsworth’s remarks in letters to friends are given
P
, V, p. 267, fn. 2.