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 for it in others, which no doubt explains the strong friendships he formed with some of the most interesting and difficult 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
