Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow
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were, too, occasional pieces to be penned for the newspapers, and en passant he managed to toss off a quick farce with songs for the St James’s Theatre called Is She His Wife?, which is really quite seriously silly. Nonetheless it took some thinking about; even the process of sending the pen across the page was time-consuming. But in the case of the novels – two of the most famous novels ever written, their every sentence pored over and analysed by scholars from that day to this – he was functioning at the highest level of imagination and invention of which the human brain is capable. For one mind to have created the radically different worlds of Pickwick and Twist within it at the same time is a staggering and indeed barely comprehensible phenomenon. Add to it that he was also editing a magazine, a demanding job he had never done before – correcting, re-shaping, advising, consenting – while at the same time helping to look after a new-born baby and an unhappy, perhaps depressed, wife, and that he was just twenty-five years old – well, one might say that he earned the month’s holiday he now took. It was a working holiday, needless to say, but at least they were out of town.
When they came back from holiday, they moved into a new house, No. 48 Doughty Street, just off Mecklenburgh Square. It represented a very large step up the social ladder from his digs in Furnival’s Inn. There were gates at either end of the street and a uniformed porter on duty. It was, as it happens, less than ten minutes’ walk from the office of the solicitor Charles Molloy, where, a semi-educated lad, he had gone to work straight out of school just ten years before. The new house had twelve rooms, on three floors with a basement; Dickens’s study was at the back of the house, looking into the garden. But all the action was in the front room next to it: here the family – Dickens’s wife Kate, her sister Mary, little Charley, along with Dickens’s younger brother Fred – would gather, surrounded by friends and mothers and brothers and sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law; his sister Fanny and her rather intense husband Henry, both musicians, would come round and sing and play. And as often as not, Dickens himself, drawn by the lively sounds, would come through and bring his writing with him, encouraging them to carry on with their chat and their games, sometimes breaking off from his work – as Mozart and Puccini were wont to do – to share with them what he was working on, reading out loud anything he thought particularly funny or moving. Dickens adored parties, and he and Kate threw a number of notably ebullient ones here; he sang comic songs, accompanying himself at the little upright piano, and hurling himself like a madman into dancing – a thing almost impossible to imagine in the modest confines of that little front room, but a well-attested fact.
Just a month after they all moved in, young Mary went to spend the day with her mother in Brompton; when she came back, she, Catherine and Charles went to the St James’s Theatre to see Is She His Wife? They had a delightfully jolly time, as Dickens always did when Mary was around, and they went home. Catherine retired to bed, and Dickens and Mary chatted until one o’clock. She then went to her bedroom. The moment she entered the room, she uttered a sharp cry. She was all of a sudden very ill. Doctors were sent for; every remedy applied. Dickens held her throughout, comforting her, waiting for the fever to break. And then, without warning, after many hours, suddenly, but calmly, she was dead. Dickens was shattered; when he realized what had happened, he slipped a ring off her finger, and wore it for the rest of his life.
At first, the letters he wrote under the shock of the event were controlled: ‘She had accompanied us to the theatre the night before apparently in the best health; was taken ill in the night, and lies here a corpse,’ he wrote to Harrison Ainsworth. ‘She has been our constant companion since our marriage; the grace and life of our home. Judge how deeply we feel this fearfully sudden deprivation.’ To Mary’s grandfather, he wrote:
You cannot conceive the misery in which this dreadful event has plunged us. Since our marriage she has been the peace and life of our home – the admired of all for her beauty and excellence – I could have better supplied a much nearer relation or an older friend, for she has been to us what we can never replace, and has left a blank which no one who ever knew her can have the faintest hope of seeing supplied.
He was deeply fond of the girl, and he was understandably shocked by her sudden death. But there is something intemperate, disproportionate, in his reaction to her death. His suggestion that he would rather have sacrificed someone else in his immediate circle – who, precisely? – is alarming, and the conviction that she was the peace and the life of their home reflects most unhappily on Catherine. His words are the words of a bereaved parent; but he felt no such emotions about his own children when they died. ‘Thank God she died in my arms,’ he wrote to Thomas Beard, on black-edged mourning paper, ‘and that the very last words she whispered were of me … I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed. I knew her inmost heart, and her real worth and value. She had not a fault.’
Mary, for Dickens, was the angel he had so long sought for. And now she was gone. He composed her epitaph:
YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL, AND GOOD
GOD IN HIS MERCY
NUMBERED HER AMONG HIS ANGELS
AT THE EARLY AGE OF
SEVENTEEN
He was, remember, just twenty-five. Mary had, of course, been absolutely and unnegotiably unavailable to him as wife or lover, but she was a perfect supplement to the imperfect relationship he had settled for; she made his existence possible. When she died it was as if her death had happened to him personally; as if something terrible had been done to him. He had, he felt, been unimaginably blessed by the presence in his life of this paragon, this faultless creature, this shining antidote to a bad, faithless, unreliable world – and now, for no reason, she had been snatched away from him. It was a blow from which he never entirely recovered.
The extent of his shock can be gauged by the fact that, for the first and only time in his life, he stopped working. He and Kate withdrew to a little farm at the North End of Hampstead Heath for a fortnight; no new numbers of either Pickwick or Oliver Twist appeared. Rumours abounded as to why Pickwick had been suspended: the author was an eighteen-year-old who had run out of material; or had been in prison for years; or was a committee that had broken up. In attempting to console her mother, who, Dickens said, had been ‘insensible’ with grief, Catherine seems to have rallied herself, but at Collins’s Farm, she broke down completely; shortly after she lost the child she was carrying. The air was heavy with hysterical mourning. Mary ceased to be a real young woman and became the abstract of all virtues: of her relationship with her sister, which as far as we know was perfectly ordinary, Dickens wrote that ‘not one cross word or angry look on either side even as children rests in judgement against her …’ It is a commonplace that this fetishization of the departed pervades a great deal of his work; when he resumed work on Oliver Twist, he found that he couldn’t, as he had planned, kill off Rose Maylie, the character fashioned after Mary: ‘so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures, her fit companions’. Rose was duly spared. Mary is to be found in novel after novel of Dickens’s. She had died at exactly the age at which for him a woman was at her most perfect: she never grew fat, dull, tired, tedious. To his inexpressible joy, he was sent a lock of her hair by Mrs Hogarth; that, too, he kept by him always. She fixed for ever for him the ideal of what a woman should be – that is, a girl. It is hard to avoid a sense of arrested development in Dickens. To survive inside, he had had to keep alive in a secret place the twelve-year-old boy that he had been; and Mary was that twelve-year-old boy’s salvation.
It was while Charles and Catherine were staying in Hampstead, trying to come to terms with what had happened, that John Forster, whom Dickens had first met at Ainsworth’s on Christmas Day of 1836, finally spent some time with him over a meal. They both came away from that dinner feeling as if they had known each other all their lives. Forster, Dickens’s exact contemporary, was from Newcastle-on-Tyne; his father had been a cattle-dealer and butcher. He went up to Cambridge, but transferred to London University. The plan was for him to become a lawyer; in the fullness of time he did, but his true bent was for literature, and he became a critic. A big, thickset man, he was, even as a young man, pompous, blunt and assertive, something of an intellectual bully, in fact; in literary circles, his insensitivity was legendary. The reverse side of this coin was his acute awareness of artistic excellence, and his reverence