Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow
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men of his time: Carlyle, Landor, Tennyson, Lamb. He was a prolific writer, but he never attempted fiction or poetry; as a biographer, he was both acute and adoring. Dickens instantly took to him, forming with him one of those intense nineteenth-century male friendships which, though not remotely sexual, achieve intense tenderness; despite being constantly threatened by jealousy and temperament, it endured solidly till Dickens’s death. But in May of 1837, and for a long time afterwards, they could scarcely get enough of each other.
Shortly after that dinner – a matter of weeks – Dickens was writing to Forster: ‘I look back with unmingled pleasure to every link which each ensuing week has added to the chain of our attachment. It shall go hard, I hope, ere anything but death impairs the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted.’ Forster, for his part, was overwhelmed by his handsome new friend’s charisma: he found his face to be uncommonly compelling, ‘the eyes wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humour and cheerfulness’. But there was something beyond mere animation: ‘the quickness, keenness, practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books and so much of a man of action and business in the world. Light and motion flashed from every part of it.’ Dickens cemented his friendship with Forster. He wanted him by him at all times. After a hard morning of writing and editing, he needed the relief of physical exercise, walking, or, even better, riding, ideally all over Hampstead Heath with his best friend and then a good supper and a few flagons of wine at Jack Straw’s Castle. The summons would arrive; how could Forster refuse? ‘Is it possible that you can’t, oughtn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t, won’t, be tempted, this gorgeous day!’ or ‘I start precisely – precisely, mind – at half-past one. Come, come, come, and walk in the green lanes. You will work the better for it all week. COME! I shall expect you.’ Or ‘where shall it be? Oh where? – Hampstead? Greenwich? Windsor? WHERE?????? While the day is bright, not when it has dwindled away to nothing! For who can be of any use whatsomdever such a day as this, excepting out of doors?’ Or it would just be: ‘A hard trot of three hours?’ and then, without waiting for a reply: ‘So engage the osses.’
Many people were struck by what Forster calls Dickens’s ‘practical power’: his appearance of being a man of action. Jane Carlyle, always, like her husband the great philosopher Thomas, pitiless in judgement, said of his face: ‘It was as if it was made of steel.’ Carlyle himself wrote to her, rather more comprehensively: ‘He is a fine little fellow – Boz, I think,’ noting the ‘clear, blue, intelligent eyes that he arches amazingly, large, protrusive, rather loose mouth, a face of the most extreme mobility, which he shuttles about – eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all – in a very singular manner while speaking. Surmount them with a loose coil of common coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure very small and dressed à la d’Orsay [a noted dandy of the time, whom Dickens knew and indeed imitated] rather than well – this is Pickwick. For the rest, a quite-shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he is and what others are.’ This was not the mask polite society expected: ‘What a face to meet in a drawing room!’ said Leigh Hunt: ‘It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings!’
Forster’s arrival so close to Dickens’s heart was not a cause for rejoicing among the rest of his circle, the Ainsworths and the Cruikshanks. They did not take at all well to his brusqueness, his discourtesy, his assertiveness. Quirky, combative, aggressive, he made a point of correcting everyone (even quarrelling with William Macready, the greatest actor of his day, on points of dramatic interpretation). Richard Bentley, who had invited him to a party at Dickens’s behest, found that he had insulted many of his guests. But Dickens had a strong instinct that the very faults that sometimes made Forster a social liability could be of great use to him in the sphere of business: his forcefulness, doggedness, the thickness of his skin, to say nothing of his knowledge of the law, made him a very useful negotiator, and Dickens increasingly asked him to take on the role of his unofficial business manager; as far as we know he was never paid for these services. And Dickens made use of them, almost immediately, in his battles with publishers. He currently had three: Macrone for Sketches by Boz, Bentley for Oliver Twist, and Chapman and Hall for Pickwick; each of them at one time or another had to be put in their place. Macrone was simply and rather brutally bought off; Chapman and Hall were behaving impeccably for the time being, throwing a party to celebrate the anniversary of the first number of Pickwick, giving Dickens an ex gratia payment of £500 and striking a dozen apostle spoons with characters from the novel in place of the saints; but Bentley, with his oppressive contract, had to be punished. And Forster was the man to do it.
The truth is that, despite his unparalleled success – and there had been nothing like it, since, after the publication of Childe Harold, Bryon had woken up one morning to find himself famous – Dickens was by no means well-off. When Mary Hogarth died, he had paid for the funeral, and he needed to borrow money to do so. His publishers, by contrast, were becoming very rich on his back, and this disparity deeply rankled with him: it was an injustice and a humiliation, and he had had enough of both in his life. Forster acted brilliantly and cannily for Dickens. But his contribution did not end there. He had considerable critical heft in his own right. He was, after all, the literary editor of The Examiner, one of the most valuable and influential of the bewildering plethora of magazines of the period, and Dickens invited him, to an altogether surprising degree, to give his opinion on work in progress; what is more, he often took it. Dickens was notably lacking in preciousness about his work, but no one had a greater influence on it – often for better, occasionally for worse – than John Forster, who was the first reader of everything he wrote from now on, advising and arbitrating; in time he even did Dickens’s proof-reading for him, making small changes as he saw fit, almost without exception endorsed by Dickens. And Forster introduced him to his own friends, who, as we have seen, were a formidable bunch.
For Dickens, the prize of all these introductions was not a painter, nor a philosopher, it was Macready, the great tragedian, in the mid-1830s at the very height of his powers as a performer, and widely acknowledged as the man who had restored dignity to the British stage. Dickens had seen everything he had done in the last decade and idolized him, making a determined and ultimately successful effort to bind the actor to him with hoops of steel, at first somewhat to the alarm of the famously formal and reserved Macready. Long after abandoning his dreams of becoming an actor, Dickens remained slavishly devoted to the theatre in all its forms, even putting the somewhat spurious Memoirs of Grimaldi into shape, and providing a loving introduction to them out of nostalgia for the sublime clown whom he had twice seen as a little boy; to his amazement, the book proved a bestseller (not that he saw any of the profit from that, either). The fascination with the stage was not all one way: the stage was very interested in Dickens, too. A mere six months after the first number of Pickwick appeared, the first pirate adaptation was up and running under the title of The Peregrinations of Pickwick; more followed. William Moncrieff’s Sam Weller, cashing in on the accession of young Princess Victoria to the throne, featured a loyal chorus, during the singing of which a procession of ‘Heralds, Beefeaters, Guards etc’ are seen passing through Temple Bar to acclaim her. Dickens despaired at the violence done to his work before he had even finished it; but his affection for the theatre stopped him from preventing his friends the actors from trying to earn a decent crust at his expense; in the absence of copyright laws, it was virtually impossible to stop them, anyway. The Pickwick Papers had come to a conclusion, and Oliver Twist was in its sensational stride, exposing the criminal underbelly of London which he had studied so closely in his endless wanderings in the city. Twist was immediately, and wretchedly, adapted to the stage, too. Within the pages of the novel, he had written, more or less en passant, an artistic manifesto that frankly acknowledged his dues to the theatre: ‘It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon.’ The streaky bacon method was to serve Dickens exceptionally well, right to the end. The readers of Twist were much more conscious of the tragic scenes, which presented almost unacceptably horrifying images of contemporary life. They were particularly shocking as the next characters to come from the pen of the dashing young author who had just enchanted the world with the great comedians that comprise the cast of The Pickwick Papers; his sudden descent into the underworld seemed like a betrayal of his affirmation in the closing pages