The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens (17 page)

It was rare for an author to live off the sale of his work without family funds or a benefactor to support him. By my thirtieth birthday, my earnings easily covered the expenses of what was becoming a rather large family. My clothes were more costly than before, and I was acquiring things of material value to have in the home.

It was during this time, when royalties from the sale of my work had become substantial, that I committed myself to one particular act of charity. I resolved to give a stipend to Florence Spriggs and pay for the schooling of her daughter Ruby. I found my way to the place where they had lived, but the hovel was no longer there. It had been torn down, or, more likely, it had fallen of its own state. No one could tell me where they had gone or whether they were alive or dead.

I sought out Benjamin Ellsworth, who by then had risen to the rank of district superintendent, and asked for his assistance.

“Leave it alone,” Ellsworth cautioned. “The probabilities are such that you do not want to know their fate.”

I did not pursue the truth. I feared what I might find.

On the fourth of January, 1842, I embarked upon a new adventure, a journey to America. I arrived in Boston after eighteen days at sea and was now in the Land of Liberty, although any land would have satisfied me after so much water.

My reputation had preceded me, and my presence was very much in demand. So many people of note sought to speak with me that the British Consulate arranged for a daily reception at Tremont House in Boston, where I was lodged.

I had come to America to meet a new people, see nature at its most beautiful, and gather insights for a book. After my stay in Boston, I journeyed to New York, where three thousand people attended The Great Boz Ball at the Park Theatre in my honour. Then I visited a dozen more cities and Niagara Falls, where I was moved by Nature's splendour.

There were elegant parties, formal dinners, and meetings with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe. In the capital of America, I was introduced to John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John Tyler, President of the United States.

But America was not the republic that I had imagined. The factory system and treatment of labour were more enlightened than in England. However, there was a negative side to the ledger.

There was no respect for copyright in America. Pirate editions of my work were widely sold without any payment to me. Whenever protection of copyright was
discussed, it was opposed on the ground that literature and knowledge should belong to The People.

Worse, I had no privacy in America. Crowds gathered whenever I appeared in public. If I walked down the street, I was followed by a multitude. If I went to the theatre, people stared at me as though I were a marble statue to be commented upon. If I dined out, I had to talk to everybody about everything. If I stayed at the hotel, it became like a fair with callers. If I went to a party, I was so enclosed and hemmed about that I was exhausted for want of air. I could not drink a glass of water without a dozen people looking down my throat when I opened my mouth to swallow. There was no time for rest or peace. I wearied of giving myself up to spectacle as though I were public property.

I was handed newspaper accounts of discussions as to whether I was shorter than people had expected or taller or thinner or fatter or younger or older; whether my eyes were brown or blue or hazel or green; whether my attire was flashy or tasteful, gentlemanly or vulgar.

I will admit to being a bit vain in matters of appearance. For most of my life, I have been partial to theatrical dress. Dinner jackets with velvet and satin trim, brightly coloured waistcoats, noticeable jewelry. That said, it did my mood no good to pick up a newspaper and read that I was foppish, inclined toward dandyism, and very English in appearance although not the best English. And concern for my crude, vulgar, flamboyant behaviour did not keep the barber who cut my hair from sweeping up the locks and selling them to the public.

After six months, I returned home from America and docked in Liverpool. The writing of
American Notes
followed. In my previous writing, I had never shown any disposition to soften my commentary on what is ridiculous or wrong in England. I had assumed that the people who had honoured me so extravagantly in America would be indisposed to quarrel were I to apply the same standard to their own country. I was wrong. Nonetheless, my time in America endowed me with greater understanding of my fame and the power that my literary creations placed at my command.

With the publication of
A Christmas Carol
and
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit,
my career grew even more prosperous. I was caressed by the public and courted by the rich and powerful. Common men and women loved my work because it was about them. Members of the aristocracy welcomed me into their homes as the famous Charles Dickens. I had completed the journey from humble origins to recognition as a gentleman and was a guest of distinction at any gathering. People responded in haste to my requests, and my requests became demands.

I continued to advocate for causes that I believed in.

Dombey and Son
and
The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield
flowed from my pen.

As my fortune grew, my father was creative in finding ways to borrow against my credit. He had never become a responsible provider. At times, he went so far as to forge my name as the guarantor of his debts. He died in 1851, and I paid off what was still owed. Thus, even his dying caused me expense. When my father died, my mother was left to me. She was by then in a strange state of mind from senile decay, and I assumed full financial responsibility for her as well. That same year, I signed
a lease on Tavistock House, an eighteen-room stone mansion in London.

In 1853, I read publicly from my work before a large audience for the first time. It was a charitable undertaking to benefit the Industrial and Literary Institute in Birmingham. Three readings were scheduled. The first was on 27 December. Seventeen hundred people braved a snowstorm to attend. It is a good thing to have that many people together in the palm of one's hand. The final reading in the series was on 30 December. The audience was comprised of working people, who had been asked to pay only six pence apiece. I read to them from
A Christmas Carol
, not just as an author but as a stage performer, employing a different voice for each of the twenty-three characters.

Those in attendance listened closely with earnestness. Meeting with some of them after the reading, I saw a young woman with a cherubic face and golden hair and wondered if she might not be Florence Spriggs's daughter. Ruby would have been eighteen years old by then, the same age as this woman looked to be. But the young woman before me was from the north of England, and her parents were with her. The resemblance between mother and daughter was unmistakable.

Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit
. My books grew in number.

I added a moustache and beard to my appearance. Friends said that they approved because they now saw less of me.

In 1858, I made the decision to read in public for my own financial profit. Some questioned the dignity of the undertaking and feared that it might damage
my respectability. But there was no compromise of the literature.

I rehearsed the selection for each reading as many as a hundred times. Performances were in the evening, starting at eight o'clock. After ninety minutes, I would go to my dressing room for a ten-minute intermission, during which I had a glass of brandy or champagne. Then I returned to the stage for a final selection of about thirty minutes.

The readings were done from specially printed texts with large type and broad margins. In preparation, I deleted and reordered passages, marked each page with different coloured inks to denote stage instructions, and underlined phrases for emphasis.

My first reading for profit was conducted on 29 April at Saint Martin's Hall in London. I began by telling my audience, “I have long held the opinion that whatever brings a public man and his public face to face on terms of mutual confidence and respect is a good thing. Thus, it is that I come to be among you tonight, to hold with persons who would otherwise never hear my voice or see my face.”

I read for three months in London and for three months more in other parts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The crowds I saw every night welcomed me with affection and treated me as a friend.

But the happiness I had anticipated when I was young was not the happiness that I enjoyed. A vague longing shadowed me like a cloud. Years of marriage had provided me with little in the way of romance or companionship. I was a mismarried man.

Most men are disappointed in life somehow or
another. But a sense often came upon me of the most important friend that I had never made. Catherine was a kindhearted woman. But we were ill suited for one another, and there was no help for it.

There is no disparity in marriage more troublesome than unsuitability of mind. When I was young, I had made a terrible mistake. If Catherine had married another sort, she might have done better. As it was, we were poorly matched and bound together by a manacle forged of misfortune that joined our fettered hands so harshly that it chafed to the bone.

My affections for Catherine diminished steadily over time. Her presence aggravated me. As I grew leaner, she grew larger so that she was unpleasantly heavy. Plump became obese. Her face was very round. She fell into or out of every carriage we entered, scraped the skin off her legs, brought great sores on her feet, and made herself blue with bruises.

She was constantly pregnant, although I was as much to blame for that as she. Long after I lost feeling for her, we continued to have children. Catherine followed a pattern of pregnancy, birth, depression, and another pregnancy. As she aged, she suffered from violent headaches, melancholy, and nervous depression.

I became unbearably selfish, though I did not know it or refused to acknowledge that condition in myself. There was fault on my side in the intensity of my nature and the difficulties of my disposition. But nothing I might have done to better the situation would have altered the fact that the marriage was a weight upon me to which an anvil was a feather.

As Catherine and I grew more distant, I was given
to infatuations toward other women. She accused me often of infidelity. The accusations were false and infuriated me. I was unfaithful only in my heart. Other women crossed my path, but I acted beyond flirtation with none of them.

As the years passed, Amanda Wingate remained in my thoughts. She was a ghost that haunted me, an image of beauty stamped upon my heart, forever changeless and indelible. I preserved in my mind the image of her from each of the times we had met. The first day at her home; next, when I returned to interview Geoffrey Wingate for the second time; their dinner party; the ballet; and our assignation. The recollection of that late afternoon never dimmed in memory. There were periods in my life when I tried not to think of her. But always, she came back to me.

I have thought at times that no one can see Amanda with my eyes or know her with my mind. But then I wonder how many of my dreams have been dreamed by others and how many of those other dreamers were with her, as I was on that late afternoon in the spring.

I did not know what Amanda felt for me then nor what her remembrances were. Many times, I looked back upon that hour. Many times in the twilight of a summer evening or beside a flickering winter fire, my mind journeyed back to those moments. I dismissed Amanda from any association with my present or future as completely as if she were dead, which she might have been for all I knew. But she remained indelible in my thoughts like a great tower on a plain. In the innermost recesses of my mind, I cherished her against reason, against happiness, against peace.

I was at a loss to penetrate the mystery of my own heart. I never spoke to a soul about her. Over time, she became for me like a character of my creation whom I had loved and parted from forever when the writing of a book was done. She stood midway between the world of real people who populated my daily life and the fantasies of my mind.

My writing continued to be the only truly satisfying love of my life. I do not know why this was so. I know only that it was and remains true to this day.

I live in my books. Things do not exist for me until I have written them. The children of my mind, created and shaped as I wish them to be, are as real and as important to me as my flesh and blood children. They are my true progeny. Each time I finish the writing of a book, I bid farewell to family and friends who are dear to my heart. I am melancholy to think that they are lost to me forever and I will never see them again. I am happy and content only when I am writing. My cares lift when I sit with paper before me and pen in hand. If I stop writing, I will die.