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 to unknown but eagerly awaiting readers, provided almost ideal conditions for his creativity. There 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
