Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow
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level of excitement in his life at the time, and that nobody loved a party more than Charles Dickens, or more eagerly welcomed an opportunity to dress up. But the wedding, which took place on a Saturday morning at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, the biggest – and tallest – parish church in London, with a nave that was then higher than that of any other London church apart from St Paul’s, was strikingly plain: only his family and Catherine’s were present (whether this was a first meeting for the two families is unclear). His friend and fellow reporter Thomas Beard was his best man; he had asked John Macrone, the publisher of Sketches by Boz, to do the job, but Macrone was married, which disqualified him; he came to the service nonetheless. A significant absentee was Elizabeth Dickens’s book-loving brother, Thomas, of whom Dickens was inordinately fond. He had written to this favourite uncle apologizing for not inviting him: it would be impossible, Dickens said, for him to do as a married man what he had been unable to do as a single one, that is, enter a house from which his father was banned. Obviously some drama, now submerged, lay behind this apology: John Dickens was no doubt held responsible for all the disasters and humiliations that had fallen on the family’s head. Perhaps it was complications of this sort that encouraged Dickens to dispatch the nuptial business as rapidly as possible. A small shadow, a certain complexity, seems to have fallen over what was supposed to be a day of joyous celebration. After the ceremony, they all repaired to the Hogarths’ just up the road, where, according to Fanny’s husband Henry, ‘a few common, pleasant things were said’ at the wedding breakfast, ‘healths were drunk with a very few words’ – how unDickensian it all is! – ‘and all seemed happy, not least Dickens and his young girlish wife’. The carriage took them to Chalk, in Kent, where their married life began, and then, a week later, they took up residence in Dickens’s rooms in Furnival’s Inn, which he had thoughtfully and thoroughly equipped for his new circumstances.
With them in the flat from the beginning was Catherine’s now sixteen-year-old sister Mary, who remained with them for a month after their return from Chalk. This is a little odd. Dickens’s 1950s biographer Edgar Johnson was of the opinion that the presence of Mary in their lives right at the very beginning got the marriage off to the worst possible start: the young couple never had time to get to know each other alone. G. K. Chesterton rather more forthrightly suggested that Dickens simply married the wrong sister. Mary adored her clever brother-in-law and was excited by his growing renown (‘his literary career gets more and more prosperous every day and he is courted and flattered on every side by the great folks of this great City – his time is so completely taken up that it is quite a favour for the Literary Gentlemen to get him to write for them’). Dickens was equally enchanted by her.
For all her starry-eyed admiration of her new brother-in-law, Mary was scarcely exaggerating the ever-increasing demands on his time; most of his day must have been spent at his desk toiling away. In July he had a read-through of The Village Coquettes, the operetta he had written with Hullah; meanwhile he was busy cultivating outlets for future novels, accepting commissions that there was little chance of his having the time to write; he even accepted a commission for a play, The Strange Gentleman, a little two-act farce adapted from one of the Boz sketches, which he knocked up more or less overnight. It opened to tepid notices; by the savage standards of the time, though, they were not unkind.
More impressively, he was approached by Richard Bentley to write not one but two novels. Bentley was the successful publisher of Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood and Edward Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, both runaway bestsellers; after protracted negotiations, he and Dickens struck a deal. In addition, Dickens was contracted as editor of a new magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany. This was something he was very excited by. He was determined to acquire greater control over his work, and being the editor of a magazine seemed like a good way to do so. Indeed, it would have been, had he had absolute authority over one; but this was not Bentley’s intention at all, as Dickens very soon discovered. The young author had no experience whatever as an editor, and, to no one’s surprise but Dickens’s, Bentley meddled. This was not a good thing to do with Charles Dickens, even at the age of twenty-four; trouble was in the air from early on. As for the contract for the novels, that too proved problematic. One word lay at the heart of the increasingly bitter dissension between Dickens and Bentley: copyright. In the 1830s, publishers owned the copyright in the books on their lists. Writers had no continuing reward from their own work: once they had been paid, that was it. This was, naturally, enshrined in the contract Dickens signed with Bentley, but the more he thought about it, the more it enraged him. In November 1836, however, everything seemed to be going splendidly, and he cheerfully handed in his notice on the Chronicle. It was churlishly, not to say sourly, received. Dickens responded tartly: ‘Depend upon it, Sir, if you would stimulate those about you to any exertions beyond their ordinary routine of duty … this is not the way to do it.’
The old year ended joyfully, with the production of The Village Coquettes, followed by The Strange Gentleman as an after-piece. The reviews were poor for the operetta – ‘all … blow their little trumpets against unhappy me, most lustily’ – but worse for the tenor, who was also the manager. In the packed theatre itself, though, they screamed and screamed for Boz on the night. He briefly trotted on and bowed and then trotted off again; he was excoriated for this, too (‘a disgusting new practice’). He couldn’t have cared less, and whenever he could get to the theatre during the short run, he was to be found backstage, adoring just being part of it all. Before long, Dickens was somewhat embarrassed by the operetta’s naivety: like virtually everything Dickens wrote for the stage, it suffered from his abject adoration of the theatre of his day, which he dutifully reproduced. It would be hard to find a sentence in any essay, novel, story or letter of Dickens’s that does not have some authentic flavour, but you will search the plays in vain for a single Dickensian turn of phrase. He was, surprisingly, the most uninspired of dramatists, though the most theatrically obsessed of men. Every episode of Pickwick introduced new editions of old stage characters; the spirit of Charles Mathews was everywhere in its pages. Dickens had put all of his love of the theatre, all of his ‘strong perception of character and oddity’, all of his pleasure in the stage devices of coincidence and contrivance, into it. Before long, other people would respond to the inherent theatrical potential in his fiction and start restoring them to the stage to which, in an important sense, they belonged.
FIVE
The Peregrinations of Pickwick
The New Year began dramatically with the birth, nine months almost to the minute after the wedding, of Charles Dickens’s son and heir, Charles Culliford Boz, dutifully named after an ancestor, triumphantly named after a Phenomenon. The precise date of birth was 6 January, Twelfth Night (or rather, to be pedantic, Twelfth Day), a date that would forever thereafter be sacred to Dickens. But the birth was not without its complications: the confinement had been far from easy, and Catherine was unable to breastfeed the child. ‘Poor Kate! It has been a dreadful trial for her,’ wrote Mary Hogarth to her cousin. ‘Every time she sees her baby she has a fit of crying and keeps saying that he will not love her now that she is not able to nurse him.’ Catherine, it seems, was in the grip of post-natal depression. ‘I think time will be the only effectual cure for her,’ continued Mary, wisely, for so it proved, and would prove after each of her many subsequent confinements. ‘Could she but forget this, she has everything in the world to make her comfortable and happy.’ Dickens, says Mary, ‘is kindness itself to her and is constantly studying her comfort in every thing’; both her mother and Charles’s were in bustling attendance.
By the end of the month, he was responsible for producing another new child: an orphan, this time. The first episode of Oliver Twist (which also had a very difficult birth, one with which he had to cope all on his own) appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany: Dickens had decided that the article the contract committed him to write every month should be a short serial, then he realized that it should be a novel. He was still writing, for an ever-expanding readership, the monthly instalments of Pickwick Papers. That was 12,000 words a month; Twist meant another 12,000. A nightmarishly demanding form for most writers, the novel in monthly instalments suited the journalist in him: the rush of adrenalin, the need to focus the mind with absolute clarity, the sense of sending out a dispatch