Charles Dickens: A Life (83 page)

27.
Little Dorrit
, Book Two,
Chapter 24
.

28.
D to F, 7 May 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 321, gives a slightly different account. The small boy he meets in Marshalsea Place is nursing a very big baby, tells Dickens about the history of the place, and calls the room’s tenant Jack Pithick.

29.
Sales of the one-volume edition of
Little Dorrit,
published in May 1857 at 21
s
., were very good indeed: in eleven years it sold something like 85,000 copies.

30.
D to Coutts, 11 Dec. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 482.

31.
D to Coutts, 17 Nov. 1854,
P
, VII, pp. 468–9.

32.
D to Coutts, 11 Dec. 1854,
P
, VII, p. 482. Maynard was her real name, but she was also known as Caroline Thompson, possibly taking the name of the father of her child, since Dickens sometimes referred to her as ‘Mrs Thompson’.

33.
Revd William Tennant to Coutts, 3 Feb. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 918–19.

34.
See
P
, VII, p. 917, fn. 2.

35.
The
Pilgrim
editors refer to an account by Georgina of a visit to the Winters by Dickens with Catherine and herself in the year of her marriage, written in 1906, which fits so ill with his saying in his letter that ‘four and twenty years vanished like a dream’ that it seems unlikely. In 1845 he was abroad for the first six months, then busy with large-scale theatricals, the birth of his son Alfred (which would have kept Catherine at home for several weeks), writing his Christmas book and preparing to edit the
Daily News
. It would make a nonsense of his letters to Maria ten years later, in one of which he specifically says that ‘the few opportunities that there have been of our seeing one another again, have died out’ because he avoided them.

36.
D to Mrs Winter, 10 Feb. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 532–4.

37.
D to Mrs Winter, 15 Feb. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 538–9.

38.
D to Mrs Winter, 22 Feb. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 543–5.

39.
D to Ella Winter, 13 Mar. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 563–4.

40.
D to Mrs Winter, 3 Apr. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 583.

41.
D to Mrs Winter, 15 June 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 648–9.

42.
D to Duke of Devonshire, 5 July 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 149.

  
1.
D to Wills, 21 Oct. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 724.

  
2.
D to William Haldimand, 27 Nov. 1846,
P
, IV, p. 665, ‘Paris is just what you know it – as bright, and as wicked, and as wanton, as ever.’ Again in 1863 he found it ‘immeasurably more wicked than ever’, this time to Wilkie Collins, 29 Jan. 1863,
P
, X, p. 200. ‘The time of the Regency seems restored, and Long live the Devil seems the social motto,’ which suggests openly displayed sexual licence, hard drinking, greed and gambling.

  
3.
D to GH, 16 Feb. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 540.

  
4.
D to Wills, 24 Oct 1855,
P
, VII, p. 726. This is Dickens’s (French translation: ‘Ah! The famous writer! Monsieur bears a distinguished name … I am honoured and interested to see Monsieur Dick-in’ and ‘That Madame Tojair (Todgers) … How funny she is, and exactly like a lady I know in Calais’). A translation of
Chuzzlewit
was serialized in the
Moniteur
from Jan. to Oct. 1855.

  
5.
D to F, 27 Jan. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 37.

  
6.
D to F, 24 Feb. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 63. Dickens must have known that Lamartine, now poor and living quietly, had been one of the leaders of the revolution that established the Second Republic in France in 1848, had expected to be elected President and seen instead the rise of Louis-Napoleon and his own extinction as a political voice. He had nevertheless pushed forward the causes of the abolition of slavery and the death penalty. Dickens admired and liked him, but his example confirmed the wisdom of his own refusal as a writer to engage directly in politics.

  
7.
D to F, 20 Jan. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 33. But see below, D to F, 15 Aug. 1856.

  
8.
D to F. O. Ward, 14 Jan. 1852,
P
, VII, p. 575. In Dec. 1851 a bloody
coup d’état
established Louis-Napoleon as President with dictatorial powers. Mass arrests of his opponents followed, and many were exiled without trial. In Nov. 1852 he declared himself Emperor, calling himself Napoleon III. Dickens did not live to see the end of his reign in Sept. 1870, when the French were defeated by the Prussians.

  
9.
Dickens had met Louis-Napoleon at Miss Coutts’s as well as at D’Orsay’s in London in the 1840s, and always disliked him. But D’Orsay was the son of a Napoleonic general, and when he moved to France in 1849 he hoped to be given a position by Louis-Napoleon. Dickens saw D’Orsay in Paris in 1850 and 1851, and early in 1852 he was appointed Directeur Générale des Beaux Arts, only to die in July of the same year.

10.
D to Macready, 4 Oct. 1855,
P
, VII, pp. 715, 716. Dickens wrote more freely to Macready than to anyone else about his political despair.

11.
D to GH, 5 May 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 110.

12.
D to F, 15 Aug. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 178. Forster prints it, and the
Pilgrim
editors reproduce it, with the word ‘natural’ in line 4 (‘the hero of an English book is always uninteresting – too good – too natural, &c.’) – but ‘unnatural’ makes better sense of the passage.

13.
Things did not change until Hardy challenged ‘the doll of English fiction’ in
Far from the Madding Crowd
(1874) and
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891) – both bowdlerized by editors who serialized the novels – and showed
Jude the Obscure
’s sexual and marital problems (in 1894). Disapproving English critics accused Hardy of writing like Flaubert, whose
Madame Bovary
was published in 1857.

14.
Dr Brown died in Pau, in south-west France, in Oct., and his body had to be embalmed and taken back to England for the funeral in Nov. D to Wills, 28 Oct. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 728.

15.
D to Wills, 10 Nov. 1855,
P
, VIII, p. 741.

16.
D to Wills, 30 Dec. 1855,
P
, VII, p. 774.

17.
See Robert L. Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers
(Oxford, 1978), p. 251.

18.
D to F, 13 Apr. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 89.

19.
D to Wilkie Collins, 22 Apr. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 95.

20.
D to Wills, 27 Apr. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 99.

21.
In
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands
(1854). D to GH, 22 July 1854,
P
, VII, p. 377.

22.
D to Fred Dickens, 12 Dec. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 236.

23.
Patten,
Dickens and His Publishers
, p. 240.

24.
When the wedding was planned Dickens would have expected to be still in Boulogne, and was in London only because of the diphtheria epidemic there. On the other hand, crossing the Channel would not have kept him away from any occasion at which he wished to be present, so there must have been some problem or disinclination, whether Forster’s or his; or more likely the bride may have wanted a very quiet wedding, since she had a severe speech defect (mocked by Dickens to Georgina in a letter, 14 Nov. 1860,
P
, IX, p. 399). Eliza Crosbie (1819–94) was the daughter of a naval officer, her first husband, Henry Colburn, a publisher for whom Forster had edited Evelyn’s diaries.

25.
Dickens wrote two long articles in
HW
attacking the evidence given by Inuit hunters to Dr John Rae and ridiculing the idea that British explorers could have sunk to cannibalism. In 1997 the Inuit account seems to have been vindicated when the bodies of some of the men were found, and clear evidence of cannibalism discovered; but the matter is still disputed.

26.
D to Coutts, 3 Oct. 1856,
P
, VIII, p. 199.

27.
See the photograph of the acting group taken in Albert Smith’s garden on 12 July 1857 (see third inset).

28.
See D to Coutts, 10 July 1857, saying the boys were ‘just home from Boulogne after a year’s absence’.
P
, VIII, p. 372.

29.
D to F, [?3–4 Jan. 1857],
P
, VIII, p. 251.

30.
D’s orders to his manservant John Thompson, given in
P
, VIII, p. 254, fn. 3.

31.
D to Sir James Tennent, 9 Jan. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 256.

32.
D to Mary Boyle, 7 Feb. 1857,
P
, VIII, pp. 276–7.

33.
See
P
, VIII, p. 261, fn. 4, quoting letter of William Howitt, 15 Jan. 1857.

34.
D to Cerjat, 19 Jan. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 265.

35.
Fred’s letter of 7 Feb. 1857, given in
P
, VIII, p. 277, fn. 3.

36.
D to Henry Austin, 15 Feb. 1857,
P
, VIII, pp. 283–4.

37.
D to Macready, 15 Mar. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 302.

38.
D to F, [?mid-Apr. 1857],
P
, VIII, p. 317. There is a mention of
Pickwick
in ‘Amos Barton’ which must have particularly pleased Dickens, where the gloomy evangelical clergyman ‘thinks the immense sale of the “Pickwick Papers”, recently completed, one of the strongest proofs of original sin’.

39.
D to F, [?5 Apr. 1857],
P
, VIII, p. 309.

40.
D to Stanfield, 20 May 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 328.

41.
D to Mrs Brown, 28 Aug. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 422.

42.
Edna Healey,
Lady Unknown: The Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts
(London, 1978), pp. 135–6.

43.
C. B. Phipps to D, 5 July 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 366, fn. 1.

44.
D to Coutts, 20 July 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 381.

45.
D to Coutts, 10 July 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 372.

46.
‘The Licence of Modern Novelists’ was published in the
Edinburgh Review
, 104 (July 1857), pp. 124–56, anonymously, but known to be the work of Fitzjames Stephen. Dickens published his reply, ‘Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review’ in
HW
, 16 (1 Aug. 1857), pp. 97–100. As Philip Collins points out in his
Critical Heritage
(London, 1971), p. 366, Stephen’s brother Leslie commented that Fitzjames himself later expressed views about the English system of government and the need for reform that were not so different from those of Dickens. What Fitzjames Stephen found objectionable was the rough caricaturing of civil servants, which is what makes the comedy and the strength of the satire in
Little Dorrit
. Other critics complained of its being duller and darker than his earlier novels.

47.
Emmeline Montague had acted with Dickens in his theatricals, and recalled his energy, his lavish way with gin punch, his irritability and restlessness. She found Mrs Dickens a delightful hostess.

48.
So Katey told Gladys Storey,
Dickens and Daughter
(London, 1939), p. 127.

49.
So Dickens told Mrs Watson later, 7 Dec. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 488.

50.
Francesco Berger described this in his
Reminiscences, Impressions, Anecdotes
(London, 1913).

51.
D’s description to Coutts, 5 Sept. 1857,
P
, VIII, pp. 432–4.

52.
D to Mrs Brown, 28 Aug. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 422.

53.
D to Wilkie Collins, 29 Aug. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 423.

54.
D to Coutts, 5 Sept. 1857,
P
, VIII, pp. 432–3.

55.
D to F, [?3 Sept. 1857],
P
, VIII, p. 430.

56.
D to F, 5 Sept. 1857,
P
, VIII, p. 434.

  
1.
D told Henry Austin, who was putting the house in order for him, ‘It is a life business (I hope)’. 26 Sept. 1851,
P
, VI, p. 494.

  
2.
D to Wilkie Collins, 21 Mar. 1858,
P
, VIII, p. 536.

  
3.
Philip Collins’s
Dickens: The Public Readings
(Oxford, 1975) gives the texts. The reading from
Dombey and Son
, ‘Little Dombey’, is so condensed as to shock anyone who appreciates the original, and much the same is true of the reading from
David Copperfield.
They give one some sympathy with Forster’s fear that this was a lower form of art.