Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2344 page)

The last of the Memoranda, and the last words written by Dickens in the blank paper book containing them, are these. “‘Then I’ll give up snuff.’ Brobity. — An alarming sacrifice. Mr. Brobity’s snuff-box. The Pawnbroker’s account of it?” What was proposed by this must be left to conjecture; but “Brobity” is the name of one of the people in his unfinished story, and the suggestion may have been meant for some incident in it. If so, it is the only passage in the volume which can be in any way connected with the piece of writing on which he was last engaged. Some names were taken for it from the lists, but there is otherwise nothing to recall
Edwin Drood
.

CHAPTER XIII.

THIRD SERIES OF READINGS.

1864-1867.

Death of Thackeray — Dickens on Thackeray — Mother’s Death — Death of his Second Son —
Our Mutual Friend
— Revising a Play — Sorrowful New Year — Lameness — Fatal Anniversary — New Readings undertaken — Offer of Messrs. Chappell — Relieved from Management — Greater Fatigues involved — A Memorable Evening — Mrs. Carlyle — Offer for more Readings — Result of the Last — Grave Warnings — At Liverpool — At Manchester — At Birmingham — In Scotland — Exertion and its Result — An Old Malady — Audiences at Newcastle — Scene at Tynemouth — In Dublin — At Cambridge — Close of the Third Series — Desire in America to hear Dickens read — Sends Agent to America — Warning unheeded — For and against reading in America — Decision to go — Departure.

The sudden death of Thackeray on the Christmas eve of 1863 was a painful shock to Dickens. It would not become me to speak, when he has himself spoken, of his relations with so great a writer and so old a friend.

“I saw him first, nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last,
shortly before Christmas, at the Athenæum Club, when he told me that he had been in bed three days . . . and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he laughingly described. He was cheerful, and looked very bright. In the night of that day week, he died. The long interval between these two periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many occasions when he was extremely humorous, when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he was softened and serious, when he was charming with children. . . . No one can be surer than I, of the greatness and goodness of his heart. . . . In no place should I take it upon myself at this time to discourse of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of his mastery over the English language. . . . But before me lies all that he had written of his latest story . . . and the pain I have felt in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour of his powers when he worked on this last labour. . . . The last words he corrected in print were ‘And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.’ God grant that on that Christmas Eve when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done, and of Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his own heart so to throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer’s rest. He was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, undisturbed, and to all appearance asleep.”

Other griefs were with Dickens at this time, and close upon them came the too certain evidence that his own health was yielding to the overstrain which had been placed upon it by the occurrences and anxieties of the few preceding years. His mother, whose infirm health had been tending for more than two years to the close, died in September 1863; and on his own birthday in the following February he had tidings of the death of his second son Walter, on the last day of the old year in the officers’ hospital at Calcutta; to which he had been sent up invalided from his station, on his way home. He was a lieutenant in the 26th Native Infantry regiment, and had been doing duty with the 42nd Highlanders. In 1853 his father had thus written to the youth’s godfather, Walter Savage Landor: “Walter is a very good boy, and comes home from school with honourable commendation and a prize into the bargain. He never gets into trouble, for he is a great favourite with the whole house and one of the most amiable boys in the boy-world. He comes out on birthdays in a blaze of shirt pin.” The pin was a present from Landor; to whom three years later, when the boy had obtained his cadetship through the kindness of Miss Coutts, Dickens wrote again. “Walter has done extremely well at school; has brought home a prize in triumph; and will be eligible to ‘go up’ for his India examination soon after next Easter. Having a direct appointment he will probably be sent out soon after he has passed, and so will fall into that strange life ‘up the country’ before he well knows he is alive, or what life is — which indeed seems to be rather an advanced state of knowledge.” If he had lived another month he would have reached his twenty-third year, and perhaps not then the advanced state of knowledge his father speaks of. But, never forfeiting his claim to those kindly paternal words, he had the goodness and simplicity of boyhood to the last.

Dickens had at this time begun his last story in twenty numbers, and my next chapter will show through what unwonted troubles, in this and the following year, he had to fight his way. What otherwise during its progress chiefly interested him, was the enterprise of Mr. Fechter at the Lyceum, of which he had become the lessee; and Dickens was moved to this quite as much by generous sympathy with the difficulties of such a position to an artist who was not an Englishman, as by genuine admiration of Mr. Fechter’s acting. He became his helper in disputes, adviser on literary points, referee in matters of management; and for some years no face was more familiar than the French comedian’s at Gadshill or in the office of his journal. But theatres and their affairs are things of a season, and even Dickens’s whim and humour will not revive for us any interest in these. No bad example, however, of the difficulties in which a French actor may find himself with English playwrights, will appear in a few amusing words from one of his letters about a piece played at the Princess’s before the Lyceum management was taken in hand.

“I have been cautioning Fechter about the play whereof he gave the plot and scenes to B; and out of which I have struck some enormities, my account of which will (I think) amuse you. It has one of the best first acts I ever saw; but if he can do much with the last two, not to say three, there are resources in his art that
I
know nothing about. When I went over the play this day week, he was at least 20 minutes,
in a boat, in the last scene
, discussing with another gentleman (also in the boat) whether he should kill him or not; after which the gentleman dived overboard and swam for it. Also, in the most important and dangerous parts of the play, there was a young person of the name of Pickles who was constantly being mentioned by name, in conjunction with the powers of light or darkness; as, ‘Great Heaven! Pickles?’ — ’By Hell, ‘tis Pickles!’ — ’Pickles? a thousand Devils!’ — ’Distraction! Pickles?’“

The old year ended and the new one opened sadly enough. The death of Leech in November affected Dickens very much,
and a severe attack of illness in February put a broad mark between his past life and what remained to him of the future. The lameness now began in his left foot which never afterwards wholly left him, which was attended by great suffering, and which baffled experienced physicians. He had persisted in his ordinary exercise during heavy snow-storms, and to the last he had the fancy that his illness was merely local. But that this was an error is now certain; and it is more than probable that if the nervous danger and disturbance it implied had been correctly appreciated at the time, its warning might have been of priceless value to Dickens. Unhappily he never thought of husbanding his strength except for the purpose of making fresh demands upon it, and it was for this he took a brief holiday in France during the summer. “Before I went away,” he wrote to his daughter, “I had certainly worked myself into a damaged state. But the moment I got away, I began, thank God, to get well. I hope to profit by this experience, and to make future dashes from my desk before I want them.” At his return he was in the terrible railway accident at Staplehurst, on a day
which proved afterwards more fatal to him; and it was with shaken nerves but unsubdued energy he resumed the labour to be presently described. His foot troubled him more or less throughout the autumn;
he was beset by nervous apprehensions which the accident had caused to himself, not lessened by his generous anxiety to assuage the severer sufferings inflicted by it on others;
and that he should nevertheless have determined, on the close of his book, to undertake a series of readings involving greater strain and fatigue than any hitherto, was a startling circumstance. He had perhaps become conscious, without owning it even to himself, that for exertion of this kind the time left him was short; but, whatever pressed him on, his task of the next three years, self-imposed, was to make the most money in the shortest time without any regard to the physical labour to be undergone. The very letter announcing his new engagement shows how entirely unfit he was to enter upon it.

“For some time,” he wrote at the end of February 1866, “I have been very unwell. F. B. wrote me word that with such a pulse as I described, an examination of the heart was absolutely necessary. ‘Want of muscular power in the heart,’ B said. ‘Only remarkable irritability of the heart,’ said Doctor Brinton of Brook-street, who had been called in to consultation. I was not disconcerted; for I knew well beforehand that the effect could not possibly be without the one cause at the bottom of it, of some degeneration of some function of the heart. Of course I am not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved without
some
penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided change in my buoyancy and hopefulness — in other words, in my usual ‘tone.’ But tonics have already brought me round. So I have accepted an offer, from Chappells of Bond-street, of £50 a night for thirty nights to read ‘in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris;’ they undertaking all the business, paying all personal expenses, travelling and otherwise, of myself, John” (his office servant), “and my gasman; and making what they can of it. I begin, I believe, in Liverpool on the Thursday in Easter week, and then come to London. I am going to read at Cheltenham (on my own account) on the 23rd and 24th of this month, staying with Macready of course.”

The arrangement of this series of Readings differed from those of its predecessors in relieving Dickens from every anxiety except of the reading itself; but, by such rapid and repeated change of nights at distant places as kept him almost wholly in a railway carriage when not at the reading-desk or in bed, it added enormously to the physical fatigue. He would read at St. James’s Hall in London one night, and at Bradford the next. He would read in Edinburgh, go on to Glasgow and to Aberdeen, then come back to Glasgow, read again in Edinburgh, strike off to Manchester, come back to St. James’s Hall once more, and begin the same round again. It was labour that must in time have broken down the strongest man, and what Dickens was when he assumed it we have seen.

He did not himself admit a shadow of misgiving. “As to the readings” (11th of March), “all I have to do is, to take in my book and read, at the appointed place and hour, and come out again. All the business of every kind, is done by Chappells. They take John and my other man, merely for my convenience. I have no more to do with any detail whatever, than you have. They transact all the business at their own cost, and on their own responsibility. I think they are disposed to do it in a very good spirit, because, whereas the original proposition was for thirty readings ‘in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris,’ they wrote out their agreement ‘in London, the Provinces, or elsewhere,
as you and we may agree
.’ For this they pay £1500 in three sums; £500 on beginning, £500 on the fifteenth Reading, £500 at the close. Every charge of every kind, they pay besides. I rely for mere curiosity on
Doctor Marigold
(I am going to begin with him in Liverpool, and at St. James’s Hall). I have got him up with immense pains, and should like to give you a notion what I am going to do with him.”

The success everywhere went far beyond even the former successes. A single night at Manchester, when eight hundred stalls were let, two thousand five hundred and sixty-five people admitted, and the receipts amounted to more than three hundred pounds, was followed in nearly the same proportion by all the greater towns; and on the 20th of April the outlay for the entire venture was paid, leaving all that remained, to the middle of the month of June, sheer profit. “I came back last Sunday,” he wrote on the 30th of May, “with my last country piece of work for this time done. Everywhere the success has been the same. St. James’s Hall last night was quite a splendid spectacle. Two more Tuesdays there, and I shall retire into private life. I have only been able to get to Gadshill once since I left it, and that was the day before yesterday.”

One memorable evening he had passed at my house in the interval, when he saw Mrs. Carlyle for the last time. Her sudden death followed shortly after, and near the close of April he had thus written to me from Liverpool. “It was a terrible shock to me, and poor dear Carlyle has been in my mind ever since. How often I have thought of the unfinished novel. No one now to finish it. None of the writing women come near her at all.” This was an allusion to what had passed at their meeting. It was on the second of April, the day when Mr. Carlyle had delivered his inaugural address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and a couple of ardent words from Professor Tyndall had told her of the triumph just before dinner. She came to us flourishing the telegram in her hand, and the radiance of her enjoyment of it was upon her all the night. Among other things she gave Dickens the subject for a novel, from what she had herself observed at the outside of a house in her street; of which the various incidents were drawn from the condition of its blinds and curtains, the costumes visible at its windows, the cabs at its door, its visitors admitted or rejected, its articles of furniture delivered or carried away; and the subtle serious humour of it all, the truth in trifling bits of character, and the gradual progress into a half-romantic interest, had enchanted the skilled novelist. She was well into the second volume of her small romance before she left, being as far as her observation then had taken her; but in a few days exciting incidents were expected, the denouement could not be far off, and Dickens was to have it when they met again. Yet it was to something far other than this amusing little fancy his thoughts had carried him, when he wrote of no one being capable to finish what she might have begun. In greater things this was still more true. No one could doubt it who had come within the fascinating influence of that sweet and noble nature. With some of the highest gifts of intellect, and the charm of a most varied knowledge of books and things, there was something “beyond, beyond.” No one who knew Mrs. Carlyle could replace her loss when she had passed away.