Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow
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domestic environment. No doubt to Dickens it was the most normal thing in the world to do: dressing up and disguising himself was as natural to him as breathing.
However much her father might approve of the dazzling young wordsmith, Kate was not best pleased to find out quite how much of his time Charles gave over to his work, and she let him know it. She had no sympathy whatsoever for his pleas of ‘furteeg’. She was not mercurial or scornful, like Maria; instead she was prone to long sulks and being – as she spelled it in her letters – ‘coss’ with him. But Dickens was having none of it. He had been Maria’s slave: he would, in the kindest, nicest possible, way, be Kate’s master. ‘If a feeling of you know not what – a capricious restlessness of you can’t tell what, and a desire to tease, you don’t know why, give rise to it – overcome it; it will never make you more amiable, I more fond, or either of us more happy.’ Dickens was just four years older than Kate, but already he was writing to her as if he were her father. Kate wrote back asking him to ‘love her once more’ – and he replies briskly, if unromantically, ‘I have never ceased to love you for one moment since I knew you; nor shall I.’ When she persists, he uses the ultimate threat: if she doesn’t like things the way they are, or him the way he is, ‘I will not miss you lightly, but I shall need no second warning.’ This masterful tone of his might have seemed quite sexy to Kate: there seems no doubt that he desired her. When he isn’t disciplining her, his letters are filled with endearments: Dearest Katie, Dearest Love, Dearest Darling Pig, My Dearest Life, as often as not signed off with the lavish addition of 990,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kisses.
It is impossible to believe that a young man of Dickens’s intense vitality was not highly charged sexually. We know virtually nothing of his amorous activity outside of his fertile marriage and the liaison with Ellen Ternan during his final decade (and, in truth, we know very little about that), but he must, by now, at the age of twenty-three, have been in a sexually explosive state. Moreover, he wanted a family, to give to children of his own the things he felt he had lacked: stability, continuity, a sense of nurture. But whether he actually saw Catherine for herself, as she was, is doubtful. He was very turned on by her, and greatly enjoyed his involvement in the Hogarth family – a much better, stabler model than his own – and their nice house in leafy Fulham. But had he worked out what he wanted from a woman, apart from hearth and home and abundant sex? Did he ever?
Alongside his marital aspirations, the rest of his life was whirling along, professionally and socially. He was now mixing with the young bloods of his day. In particular, he had become friendly with William Harrison Ainsworth, wildly successful author of the highwayman novel Rookwood and contributor to the politically provocative Fraser’s Magazine. Ainsworth was some seven years Dickens’s elder, and a brilliant and influential figure on the social scene, witty, elegant, tastefully dandyish. After scandalously leaving his wife and three children, he established a bachelor salon at his rooms at Kensal Lodge, Harrow Road, in North West London, which became the meeting-place of a wide circle of young bloods – Daniel Maclise, the brilliant young Irish painter with a fascination for the theatre, on the brink of becoming a very young Royal Academician; the novelist and political amateur Benjamin Disraeli (his dandyism a rival to Ainsworth’s); the best-selling novelist and Member of Parliament, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and, considerably the oldest of them all, the political satirist, cartoonist and wild man, George Cruikshank. This was Dickens’s first exposure to his leading contemporaries. His presence there was something of a coup for Ainsworth as a social impresario. Everyone wanted to meet Boz. He barely had his foot on the bottom rung of the literary ladder, but Ainsworth’s brilliant guests welcomed him, exhilarated by his energy and entertained by his mimicry. Apart from Disraeli, with whom he was ill at ease both personally and politically, these men all became his friends and collaborators; and it was here that he met his first publisher.
Being Dickens’s publisher, as many people were to discover over the years, was not a restful experience, but the twenty-six-year-old John Macrone, about to reissue Ainsworth’s bestseller Rookwood, foresaw no complications when he suggested to Boz that his Sketches might make a nice book, and that perhaps his friend Mr Cruikshank sitting over there on the other side of the table might be just the man to provide some illustrations for it; perhaps, too, Dickens might like to consider writing a three-volume novel? Well, of course he might, and in short order contracts were signed, one assigning to Macrone the copyright in Sketches by Boz, which appeared soon after, and swept all before it, and the other commissioning a novel, Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London, which took a very long time indeed to see the light of day, and pleased almost no one when it finally did.
Things were now happening for Dickens with extraordinary rapidity. More sketches, under a different pseudonym (Tibbs), were appearing weekly in Bell’s Life in London; he continued reporting up and down the country for the Morning Chronicle; and he was working on the libretto for an operetta. He had been approached by his sister Fanny Dickens’s Royal Academy of Music contemporary John Hullah, who had an idea for a piece set in Venice called The Gondoliers. Delighted though he was at the prospect of writing something for the theatre, Dickens said he couldn’t write about gondoliers; he had to write about real people whom he knew and understood, and suggested instead an everyday story of country folk, their love affairs and comic misunderstandings. To this Hullah meekly agreed – an early example of the irresistible force of Dickens’s personality in action – and went away to write the music, while Dickens thrashed out the book and lyrics.
He had temporarily moved to Fulham to be nearer to Catherine, who was still pouting a great deal about the lack of time he spent with her, and receiving more callous reproofs from him.
If the representations I have so often made to you, about my working as a duty, and not as a pleasure, be not sufficient to keep you in the good humour which you, of all people in the world should preserve – why, then, my dear, you must be out of temper, and there is no help for it.
There is something inexpressibly depressing about Dickens’s relations with the women he loved – a lack of spontaneity, of parity, of freedom. He’s always somehow being trapped by them into these terrible patterns of behaviour. His exchanges with Catherine are of a very low grade; it’s paltry, piffling stuff. From time to time fun was had – they loved going to the theatre together, and he was always able to make her laugh. But, forgivably, she simply didn’t understand the sheer amount of work involved in keeping the Boz bubble going: ‘Is it my fault I cannot get out tonight?’ he cried. ‘I must work at the opera.’ Such were the communications between them, before they were married. No great passion, no torrential exchange of thoughts, no intimations of the sublime, as his ardent nature would seem to have demanded. No doubt that was the last thing he wanted; he had quite enough of that for two of them, and he could communicate with his male friends on that level. What he needed was stability, comfort, continuity. At least, that is what he thought he wanted.
Meanwhile, he received a visit that had momentous consequences. As often with Dickens, the encounter had a fated flavour to it, a sense of the inexorable march of destiny. His visitor was William Hall, one of the partners in Chapman and Hall, a newly established publishing firm. When Dickens opened the door of his new flat at Furnival’s Inn in Holborn, he gasped, because Hall, in his former incarnation as a bookseller, had sold Dickens the copy of the Monthly Magazine in which his very first story had appeared. Hall had come to Dickens with a modest proposal: his firm had just had a big success with their first publication, A Christmas Squib, by the noted illustrator Robert Seymour. Seymour had had an idea for a new book based on his pictures of the absurd exploits of some Cockney would-be sportsmen, they needed someone to provide the copy for the pictures, would he be interested? With extraordinary clarity of purpose, Dickens saw an opportunity for something much more ambitious: a story in monthly episodes based on the free-wheeling activities of an eclectic, not to say eccentric, group of friends whose central figure was to be a genial middle-aged man whom Dickens decided should be named Pickwick, borrowing the name of a well-known coach operator just outside Bath that he must have frequently passed on his journalistic hikes around the country. Dickens would not provide copy for the illustrator: he would deliver his copy, and the illustrator would take his cue from that.
Chapman and Hall were swept away by the boldness of Dickens’s plans, and made it clear to Seymour that he must fall in with the new thinking. Dickens immediately dashed off