Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2339 page)

The Uncommercial Traveller papers, his two serial stories, and his Christmas tales, were all the contributions of any importance made by Dickens to
All the Year Round;
but he reprinted in it, on the completion of his first story, a short tale called “Hunted Down,” written for a newspaper in America called the
New York Ledger
. Its subject had been taken from the life of a notorious criminal already named, and its principal claim to notice was the price paid for it. For a story not longer than half of one of the numbers of
Chuzzlewit
or
Copperfield
, he had received a thousand pounds.
It was one of the indications of the eager desire which his entry on the career of a public reader had aroused in America to induce him again to visit that continent; and at the very time he had this magnificent offer from the New York journal, Mr. Fields of Boston, who was then on a visit to Europe, was pressing him so much to go that his resolution was almost shaken. “I am now,” he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 9th of July 1859, “getting the
Tale of Two Cities
into that state that IF I should decide to go to America late in September, I could turn to, at any time, and write on with great vigour. Mr. Fields has been down here for a day, and with the strongest intensity urges that there is no drawback, no commercial excitement or crisis, no political agitation; and that so favourable an opportunity, in all respects, might not occur again for years and years. I should be one of the most unhappy of men if I were to go, and yet I cannot help being much stirred and influenced by the golden prospect held before me.”

He yielded nevertheless to other persuasion, and for that time the visit was not to be. In six months more the Civil War began, and America was closed to any such enterprise for nearly five years.

CHAPTER XI.

SECOND SERIES OF READINGS.

1861-1863.

Daughter Kate’s Marriage — Wedding Party — Sale of Tavistock House — Brother Alfred’s Death — Metropolitan Readings — Proposed Provincial Readings — Good of doing Nothing — New Subjects for Readings — Mr. Arthur Smith’s Death — Eldest Son’s Marriage — Audience at Brighton — Audiences at Canterbury and Dover — Alarming Scene at Newcastle — Impromptu Reading Hall at Berwick-on-Tweed — In Scotland — At Torquay — At Liverpool — Metropolitan Success — Offer from Australia — Writing or Reading not always possible — Arguments for and against going to Australia — Readings in Paris — A Religious Richardson’s Show — Exiled Ex-potentate.

At the end of the first year of residence at Gadshill it was the remark of Dickens that nothing had gratified him so much as the confidence with which his poorer neighbours treated him. He had tested generally their worth and good conduct, and they had been encouraged in illness or trouble to resort to him for help. There was pleasant indication of the feeling thus awakened, when, in the summer of 1860, his younger daughter Kate was married to Charles Alston Collins, brother of the novelist, and younger son of the painter and academician, who might have found, if spared to witness that summer-morning scene, subjects not unworthy of his delightful pencil in many a rustic group near Gadshill. All the villagers had turned out in honour of Dickens, and the carriages could hardly get to and from the little church for the succession of triumphal arches they had to pass through. It was quite unexpected by him; and when the feu de joie of the blacksmith in the lane, whose enthusiasm had smuggled a couple of small cannon into his forge, exploded upon him at the return, I doubt if the shyest of men was ever so taken aback at an ovation.

To name the principal persons present that day will indicate the faces that (with addition of Miss Mary Boyle, Miss Marguerite Power, Mr. Fechter, Mr. Charles Kent, Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and members of the family of Mr. Frank Stone, whose sudden death
in the preceding year had been a great grief to Dickens) were most familiar at Gadshill in these later years. Mr. Frederic Lehmann was there with his wife, whose sister, Miss Chambers, was one of the bridesmaids; Mr. and Mrs. Wills were there, and Dickens’s old fast friend Mr. Thomas Beard; the two nearest country neighbours with whom the family had become very intimate, Mr. Hulkes and Mr. Malleson, with their wives, joined the party; among the others were Henry Chorley, Chauncy Townshend, and Wilkie Collins; and, for friend special to the occasion, the bridegroom had brought his old fellow-student in art, Mr. Holman Hunt. Mr. Charles Collins had himself been bred as a painter, for success in which line he had some rare gifts; but inclination and capacity led him also to literature, and, after much indecision between the two callings, he took finally to letters. His contributions to
All the Year Round
were among the most charming of its detached papers, and two stories published independently showed strength of wing for higher flights. But his health broke down, and his taste was too fastidious for his failing power. It is possible however that he may live by two small books of description, the
New Sentimental Journey
and the
Cruize on Wheels
, which have in them unusual delicacy and refinement of humour; and if those volumes should make any readers in another generation curious about the writer, they will learn, if correct reply is given to their inquiries, that no man disappointed so many reasonable hopes with so little fault or failure of his own, that his difficulty always was to please himself, and that an inferior mind would have been more successful in both the arts he followed. He died in 1873 in his forty-fifth year; and until then it was not known, even by those nearest to him, how great must have been the suffering which he had borne, through many trying years, with uncomplaining patience.

His daughter’s marriage was the chief event that had crossed the even tenor of Dickens’s life since his first paid readings closed; and it was followed by the sale of Tavistock House, with the resolve to make his future home at Gadshill. In the brief interval (29th of July) he wrote to me of his brother Alfred’s death. “I was telegraphed for to Manchester on Friday night. Arrived there at a quarter past ten, but he had been dead three hours, poor fellow! He is to be buried at Highgate on Wednesday. I brought the poor young widow back with me yesterday.” All that this death involved,
the troubles of his change of home, and some difficulties in working out his story, gave him more than sufficient occupation till the following spring; and as the time arrived for the new Readings, the change was a not unwelcome one.

The first portion of this second series was planned by Mr. Arthur Smith, but he only superintended the six readings in London which opened it. These were the first at St. James’s Hall (St. Martin’s Hall having been burnt since the last readings there) and were given in March and April 1861. “We are all well here and flourishing,” he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 28th of April. “On the 18th I finished the readings as I purposed. We had between seventy and eighty pounds
in the stalls
, which, at four shillings apiece, is something quite unprecedented in these times. . . . The result of the six was, that, after paying a large staff of men and all other charges, and Arthur Smith’s ten per cent. on the receipts, and replacing everything destroyed in the fire at St. Martin’s Hall (including all our tickets, country-baggage, cheque-boxes, books, and a quantity of gas-fittings and what not), I got upwards of £500. A very great result. We certainly might have gone on through the season, but I am heartily glad to be concentrated on my story.”

It had been part of his plan that the Provincial Readings should not begin until a certain interval after the close of his story of
Great Expectations
. They were delayed accordingly until the 28th of October, from which date, when they opened at Norwich, they went on with the Christmas intervals to be presently named to the 30th of January 1862, when they closed at Chester. Kept within England and Scotland, they took in the border town of Berwick, and, besides the Scotch cities, comprised the contrasts and varieties of Norwich and Lancaster, Bury St. Edmunds and Cheltenham, Carlisle and Hastings, Plymouth and Birmingham, Canterbury and Torquay, Preston and Ipswich, Manchester and Brighton, Colchester and Dover, Newcastle and Chester. They were followed by ten readings at the St. James’s Hall, between the 13th of March and the 27th of June 1862; and by four at Paris in January 1863, given at the Embassy in aid of the British Charitable Fund. The second series had thus in the number of the readings nearly equalled the first, when it closed at London in June 1863 with thirteen readings in the Hanover Square Rooms; and it is exclusively the subject of such illustrations or references as this chapter will supply.

On
Great Expectations
closing in June 1861, Bulwer Lytton, at Dickens’s earnest wish, took his place in
All the Year Round
with the “Strange Story;” and he then indulged himself in idleness for a little while. “The subsidence of those distressing pains in my face the moment I had done my work, made me resolve to do nothing in that way for some time if I could help it.”
But his “doing nothing” was seldom more than a figure of speech, and what it meant in this case was soon told. “Every day for two or three hours, I practise my new readings, and (except in my office work) do nothing else. With great pains I have made a continuous narrative out of
Copperfield
, that I think will reward the exertion it is likely to cost me. Unless I am much mistaken, it will be very valuable in London. I have also done
Nicholas Nickleby
at the Yorkshire school, and hope I have got something droll out of Squeers, John Browdie, & Co. Also, the Bastille prisoner from the
Tale of Two Cities
. Also, the Dwarf from one of our Christmas numbers.” Only the first two were added to the list for the present circuit.

It was in the midst of these active preparations that painful news reached him. An illness under which Mr. Arthur Smith had been some time suffering took unexpectedly a dangerous turn, and there came to be but small chance of his recovery. A distressing interview on the 28th of September gave Dickens little hope. “And yet his wakings and wanderings so perpetually turn on his arrangements for the Readings, and he is so desperately unwilling to relinquish the idea of ‘going on with the business’ to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, that I had not the heart to press him for the papers. He told me that he believed he had by him ‘70 or 80 letters unanswered.’ You may imagine how anxious it makes me, and at what a deadstop I stand.” Another week passed, and with it the time fixed at the places where his work was to have opened; but he could not bring himself to act as if all hope had gone. “With a sick man who has been so zealous and faithful, I feel bound to be very tender and patient. When I told him the other day about my having engaged Headland — ’to do all the personally bustling and fatiguing part of your work,’ I said — he nodded his heavy head with great satisfaction, and faintly got out of himself the words, ‘Of course I pay him, and not you.’“ The poor fellow died in October; and on the day after attending the funeral,
Dickens heard of the death of his brother-in-law and friend, Mr. Henry Austin, whose abilities and character he respected as much as he liked the man. He lost much in losing the judicious and safe counsel which had guided him on many public questions in which he took lively interest, and it was with a heavy heart he set out at last upon his second circuit. “With what difficulty I get myself back to the readings after all this loss and trouble, or with what unwillingness I work myself up to the mark of looking them in the face, I can hardly say. As for poor Arthur Smith at this time, it is as if my right arm were gone. It is only just now that I am able to open one of the books, and screw the text out of myself in a flat dull way. Enclosed is the list of what I have to do. You will see that I have left ten days in November for the Christmas number, and also a good Christmas margin for our meeting at Gadshill. I shall be very glad to have the money that I expect to get; but it will be earned.” That November interval was also the date of the marriage of his eldest son to the daughter of Mr. Evans, so long, in connection with Mr. Bradbury, his publisher and printer.

The start of the readings at Norwich was not good, so many changes of vexation having been incident to the opening announcements as to leave some doubt of their fulfilment. But the second night, when trial was made of the
Nickleby
scenes, “we had a splendid hall, and I think
Nickleby
will top all the readings. Somehow it seems to have got in it, by accident, exactly the qualities best suited to the purpose; and it went last night, not only with roars, but with a general hilarity and pleasure that I have never seen surpassed.”
From this night onward, the success was uninterrupted, and here was his report to me from Brighton on the 8th of November. “We turned away half Dover and half Hastings and half Colchester; and, if you can believe such a thing, I may tell you that in round numbers we find 1000 stalls already taken here in Brighton! I left Colchester in a heavy snow-storm. To-day it is so warm here that I can hardly bear the fire, and am writing with the window open down to the ground. Last night I had a most charming audience for
Copperfield
, with a delicacy of perception that really made the work delightful. It is very pretty to see the girls and women generally, in the matter of Dora; and everywhere I have found that peculiar personal relation between my audience and myself on which I counted most when I entered on this enterprise.
Nickleby
continues to go in the wildest manner.”