Read Charles Dickens: A Life Online
Authors: Claire Tomalin
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Authors
40.
Longfellow to F, 12 June 1870, Forster,
Life
, III,
Chapter 14
.
1.
Manuscript in the National Library of Scotland, Thomas Carlyle to John Carlyle, 15 June 1870, see the
Dickensian
(1970), p. 91.
2.
F to Norton, 22 June 1870, Manuscript in the Houghton Library, Harvard, cited in James A. Davies,
John Forster: A Literary Life
(New York, 1983), p. 123.
3.
Given in
P
, XII, p. 325, fn. 6, from J. A. McKenzie (ed.),
Letters of George Augustus Sala to Edmund Yates in the Edmund Yates Papers University of Queensland Library
(St Lucia, Qld, 1993), Victorian Fiction Research Guides nos. 19–20, p. 131. Sala had not seen Dickens since the Liverpool banquet in Apr. 1869. He wrote an obituary for the
Daily Telegraph
and then published a short, warm-hearted and ill-informed biography.
4.
Sala knew nothing of Dickens’s childhood or family background, saying he was born into ‘a respectable middle-class family’ and received ‘a strictly middle-class education’. He also referred to the ‘great shadow that fell across his hearth’ and said he would avoid prying into secrets, which should not be inquired into for fifty years.
5.
Browning to Isa Blagden, 19 Oct. 1870, after she had written to him suggesting that Fanny Trollope had been overpaid for her novels by Dickens because of his relationship with her sister. Edward C. McAleer (ed.),
Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden
(Austin, 1951), p. 349.
6.
Annie Fields’s diary for 6 Dec. 1871, quoted by George Curry in
Charles Dickens and Annie Fields
(San Marino, Calif., 1988), p. 60.
7.
He was taken in by Leslie Stephen and his wife Minnie, Thackeray’s younger daughter, who knew Katey of old, and had married Leslie Stephen in 1867.
8.
With Ouvry’s help Georgina bought back the chalet and gave it to Lord Darnley.
9.
GH to Annie Fields, 1 Mar. 1871, Arthur A. Adrian,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
(Oxford, 1957), p. 181.
10.
GH to Annie Fields, 17 Mar. 1871, ibid., p. 167.
11.
Charley’s wife Bessie wrote this to Alfred in Australia. From Alfred Tennyson Dickens’s letter to G. W. Rusden, 11 Aug. 1870, MS State Library of Victoria, given in Philip Collins (ed.),
Dickens: Interviews and Recollections
, I (London, 1981), p. 156.
12.
Charles W. Dickens in
Mumsey’s Magazine
, 28, 6 (Sept. 1902).
13.
Lucinda Hawksley, who discovered the record of a wedding in Sept. 1873, in a register office with no family present, records it in her biography
Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter
(London, 2006), and suggests Katey may have feared wrongly that she was pregnant. The official wedding followed in June 1874.
14.
Forster,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, III (London, 1874),
Chapter 14
.
15.
Sydney Cockerell, a reliable witness, wrote in the
Sunday Times
, 22 Mar. 1953, after an article about Dickens, that he had met Mamie and Georgina at the Revd Robinson’s – i.e., Nelly’s husband, George Wharton Robinson – about 1880, when he was thirteen, living in Margate. He remembered Mrs Robinson as a close friend of his mother, and her reciting
A Christmas Carol
at parties.
16.
Charles Dickens Museum, Storey Papers VIII, p. 89; also Suzannet Papers, Walter Dexter to Le Comte de Suzannet, 22 Feb. 1939, ‘it is confirmed by Miss S that the children of Henry D and of E. T. used to play together on the sands at Boulogne’; also, ‘Lady D[ickens] told me that Georgina Hogarth introduced Lady D to Ellen Ternan when she was Mrs Robinson.’ Storey Papers VIII, p. 89.
17.
These are the opening words of Mamie Dickens’s
My Father as I Recall Him
(London, 1897).
18.
For Mamie’s alleged drinking, see Adrian,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
, p. 241. He writes that Georgina grew worried about her erratic behaviour in the 1880s, and that she grew ‘more and more unstable emotionally as she sought in changes of scene – in alcohol, even – some anodyne for the dissatisfaction which plagued her’.
19.
In 1912 they were published as
Charles Dickens as Editor
, edited by R. C. Lehmann, heavily cut, but fortunately the originals survived and were preserved in the Huntington Library, and infra-red treatment revealed the inked-over passages, printed by Ada Nisbet in 1952.
20.
Eliza Lynn Linton,
My Literary Life
, published posthumously in 1899. It sounds as though she had Nelly in mind.
21.
Thomas Adolphus Trollope,
What I Remember
, II (London, 1887), p. 113.
22.
GH to Annie Fields, 19 Jan. 1888, quoted in Adrian,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
, p. 246.
23.
Carlyle to F, 11 June 1870, cited in Collins,
Interviews and Recollections
, I, p. 63.
24.
Emile Yung’s
Zermatt et la vallée de la Viège
, printed and published in Geneva by Thévoz; the English edition also printed in Geneva but published in London by J. R. Gotz in 1894.
25.
In Sept. 1893, information from Katharine M. Longley’s typescript, fn. 109 to
Chapter 13
.
26.
According to Wright in
Thomas Wright of Olney. An Autobiography
(London, 1936). Wright also said that Charley had threatened to ‘speak out’ at various times, presumably about his father’s liaison with Nelly.
27.
Shaw recalled this in his letter to the
TLS
in 1939.
28.
As mentioned in n. 3,
Chapter 7
, English copyright at this time was for forty-two years after publication or seven years after the death of the author, whichever was greater. This meant that
Copperfield
came out of copyright in 1892,
Great Expectations
in 1902 and
Drood
in 1912, the centenary year, after which there was nothing. An Anglo-French copyright agreement of 1852 established Dickens’s rights in France, giving his widow a share for life, and his children for twenty years, i.e., until 1890. Whether there was any income from America, or from other countries, I have not been able to establish, but it seems unlikely.
29.
In the
Dickensian
(2010), p. 75, Tony Williams quotes from a newspaper cutting about Dolby’s death, found by Michael Slater pasted into a copy of
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
: ‘a distant relative named Rycroft, who identified the body, said he thought the deceased had got so shabby that he had been ashamed lately to approach friends for help’. Also that the
New York Times
for 3 Nov. 1900, reporting his death, mentioned his admission to the Fulham Infirmary ‘five years ago’. Dolby’s book was reissued in 1912.
30.
He had given a reading for working men as early as 1874, at the suggestion of his mother, who wrote to Plorn about the success of the occasion, 11 Dec. 1874, typescript of a letter at the Charles Dickens Museum.
31.
She came to London in 1923 as a New York delegate to the Dickens Fellowship and died in England of pneumonia, aged sixty-six.
32.
GH to Geoffrey Wharton Robinson, 17 Aug. 1913, manuscript in private possession.
33.
Nelly left about £1,200, but curiously she had more money than she had realized, so that her will had to be resworn at £2,379.18
s
.11
d
.
34.
Katey Perugini to Bernard Shaw, 19 Dec. 1897, quoted in Lucinda Hawkesley,
Katey
, p. 310.
35.
After Storey’s death in 1978 many of her handwritten notes were found and are now deposited in the Charles Dickens Museum. A good account of them by David Parker and Michael Slater appeared in the
Dickensian
(1980), pp. 3–16.
36.
Storey to Shaw, 23 July 1939, British Library Add. MS 50546, f. 76.
37.
All from
Dickens and Daughter
(London, 1939), p. 219.
38.
Ibid., pp. 96, 98.
39.
Ibid., p. 94.
40.
Ibid., p. 134.
41.
Ibid., p. 219.
42.
Ibid., p. 134.
43.
Ibid., p. 93.
44.
Ibid., p. 94.
45.
This is from the unpublished Storey papers that came to light after her death in 1978.
46.
Henry F. Dickens,
Memories of My Father
(London, 1928), pp. 14, 26.
47.
Ibid., p. 28.
Kathleen Tillotson, Graham Storey and others (eds.),
The Pilgrim Edition of the
Letters of Charles Dickens
, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1965–2002)
Vol. I, 1820–1839, Madeline House and Graham Storey (1965)
Vol. II, 1840–1841, Madeline House and Graham Storey (1969)
Vol. III, 1842–1843, Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (1974)
Vol. IV, 1844–1846, Kathleen Tillotson (1977)
Vol. V, 1847–1849, Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding (1981)
Vol. VI, 1850–1852, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (1988)
Vol. VII, 1853–1855, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (1993)
Vol. VIII, 1856–1858, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (1995)
Vol. IX, 1859–1861, Graham Storey (1997)
Vol. X, 1862–1864, Graham Storey (1998)
Vol. XI, 1865–1867, Graham Storey (1999)
Vol. XII, 1868–1870, Graham Storey (2002)
The Dickensian
1905–2010
Ackroyd, Peter,
Dickens
(London, 1990)
Adrian, Arthur A.,
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle
(Oxford, 1957)
Andrews, Malcolm,
Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings
(Oxford, 2006)
Aylmer, Felix,
Dickens Incognito
(London, 1959)
Bentley, Nicolas, Slater, Michael, and Burgis, Nina (eds.),
The Dickens Index
(Oxford, 1988)
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie,
Knowing Dickens
(Ithaca, NY, 2007)
Bowen, John,
Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit
(Oxford, 2000)
Carey, John,
The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination
(London, 1973)
Chittick, Kathryn,
Dickens and the 1830s
(Cambridge, 1990)
Collins, Philip,
Dickens and Crime
(London, 1962)
—
Dickens and Education
(London, 1963)
—
Dickens: The Public Readings
(Oxford, 1975)
— (ed.)
Dickens: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1971)
— (ed.)
Dickens: Interviews and Recollections
, 2 vols. (London, 1981)
Davies, James A.,
John Forster: A Literary Life
(New York, 1983)
Dolby, George,
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him
(London, 1885)
Fielding, K. J. (ed.),
The Speeches of Charles Dickens: A Complete Edition
(Brighton, 1988)
Fisher, Leona Weaver,
Lemon, Dickens, and ‘Mr Nightingale’s Diary’: A Victorian Farce
(Victoria, BC, 1988)
Forster, John,
The Life of Charles Dickens
, 3 vols. (London, 1872, 1873, 1874)
—
Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England
(London, 1840)
—
The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith
(London, 1848)
—
Walter Savage Landor: A Biography
, 2 vols. (London, 1869; my edition 1872)
Furneaux, Holly,
Queer Dickens
(Oxford, 2009)
Gissing, George,
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
(London, 1898)
Hardy, Barbara,
The Moral Art of Dickens: Essays
(London, 1970; my edition 1985)
Hartley, Jenny,
Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women
(London, 2008)
Hawksley, Lucinda,
Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter
(London, 2006)
House, Humphry,
The Dickens World
(Oxford, 1941)
Hughes, William Richard,
A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land
(London, 1891)
Johnson, Edgar,
Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph
(Boston, Mass., 1952)
Leavis, F. R., and Leavis, Q. D.,
Dickens the Novelist
(London, 1970)