Friend," making the title three distinct large lines--"Our" as big as
"Mutual Friend." This would give you too much design at the bottom. I
would therefore take out the dustman, and put the Wegg and Boffin
composition (which is capital) in its place. I don't want Mr. Inspector
or the murder reward bill, because these points are sufficiently
indicated in the river at the top. Therefore you can have an indication
of the dustman in Mr. Inspector's place. Note, that the dustman's face
should be droll, and not horrible. Twemlow's elbow will still go out of
the frame as it does now, and the same with Lizzie's skirts on the
opposite side. With these changes, work away!
Mrs. Boffin, as I judge of her from the sketch, "very good, indeed." I
want Boffin's oddity, without being at all blinked, to be an oddity of a
very honest kind, that people will like.
The doll's dressmaker is immensely better than she was. I think she
should now come extremely well. A weird sharpness not without beauty is
the thing I want.
Affectionately always.
[Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.]
57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, W.,
_Tuesday, March 1st, 1864._
MY DEAR KNIGHT,
We knew of your being in the Isle of Wight, and had said that we should
have this year to drink your health in your absence. Rely on my being
always ready and happy to renew our old friendship in the flesh. In the
spirit it needs no renewal, because it has no break.
Ah, poor Mrs. White! A sad, sad story! It is better for poor White that
that little churchyard by the sea received his ashes a while ago, than
that he should have lived to this time.
My poor boy was on his way home from an up-country station, on sick
leave. He had been very ill, but was not so at the time. He was talking
to some brother-officers in the Calcutta hospital about his preparations
for home, when he suddenly became excited, had a rush of blood from the
mouth, and was dead. His brother Frank would arrive out at Calcutta,
expecting to see him after six years, and he would have been dead a
month.
My "working life" is resolving itself at the present into another book,
in twenty green leaves. You work like a Trojan at Ventnor, but you do
that everywhere; and that's why you are so young.
Mary and Georgina unite in kindest regard to you, and to Mrs. Knight,
and to your daughters. So do I. And I am ever, my dear Knight,
Affectionately yours.
P.S.--Serene View! What a placid address!
[Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Ollier.]
"ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _March, 1864._
EXTRACT.
I want the article on "Working Men's Clubs" to refer back to "The Poor
Man and his Beer" in No. 1, and to maintain the principle involved in
that effort.
Also, emphatically, to show that trustfulness is at the bottom of all
social institutions, and that to trust a man, as one of a body of men,
is to place him under a wholesome restraint of social opinion, and is a
very much better thing than to make a baby of him.
Also, to point out that the rejection of beer in this club, tobacco in
that club, dancing or what-not in another club, are instances that such
clubs are founded on mere whims, and therefore cannot successfully
address human nature in the general, and hope to last.
Also, again to urge that patronage is the curse and blight of all such
endeavours, and to impress upon the working men that they must originate
and manage for themselves. And to ask them the question, can they
possibly show their detestation of drunkenness better, or better strive
to get rid of it from among them, than to make it a hopeless
disqualification in all their clubs, and a reason for expulsion.
Also, to encourage them to declare to themselves and their fellow
working men that they want social rest and social recreation for
themselves and their families; and that these clubs are intended for
that laudable and necessary purpose, and do not need educational
pretences or flourishes. Do not let them be afraid or ashamed of wanting
to be amused and pleased.
[Sidenote: The Lord Chief Baron.]
57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, _Tuesday, March 15th, 1864._
MY DEAR CHIEF BARON,
Many thanks for your kind letter, which I find on my return from a
week's holiday.
Your answer concerning poor Thackeray I will duly make known to the
active spirit in that matter, Mr. Shirley Brooks.
Your kind invitation to me to come and see you and yours, and hear the
nightingales, I shall not fail to discuss with Forster, and with an eye
to spring. I expect to see him presently; the rather as I found a note
from him when I came back yesterday, describing himself somewhat
gloomily as not having been well, and as feeling a little out of heart.
It is not out of order, I hope, to remark that you have been much in my
thoughts and on my lips lately? For I really have not been able to
repress my admiration of the vigorous dignity and sense and spirit, with
which one of the best of judges set right one of the dullest of juries
in a recent case.
Believe me ever, very faithfully yours.
[Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.]
57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, _Tuesday, March 29th, 1864._
MY DEAR FORSTER,
I meant to write to you last night, but to enable Wills to get away I
had to read a book of Fitzgerald's through before I went to bed.
Concerning Eliot, I sat down, as I told you, and read the book through
with the strangest interest and the highest admiration. I believe it to
be as honest, spirited, patient, reliable, and gallant a piece of
biography as ever was written, the care and pains of it astonishing, the
completeness of it masterly; and what I particularly feel about it is
that the dignity of the man, and the dignity of the book that tells
about the man, always go together, and fit each other. This same quality
has always impressed me as the great leading speciality of the
Goldsmith, and enjoins sympathy with the subject, knowledge of it, and
pursuit of it in its own spirit; but I think it even more remarkable
here. I declare that apart from the interest of having been so put into
the time, and enabled to understand it, I personally feel quite as much
the credit and honour done to literature by such a book. It quite clears
out of the remembrance a thousand pitiful things, and sets one up in
heart again. I am not surprised in the least by Bulwer's enthusiasm. I
was as confident about the effect of the book when I closed the first
volume, as I was when I closed the second with a full heart. No man less
in earnest than Eliot himself could have done it, and I make bold to add
that it never could have been done by a man who was so distinctly born
to do the work as Eliot was to do his.
Saturday at Hastings I must give up. I have wavered and considered, and
considered and wavered, but if I take that sort of holiday, I must have
a day to spare after it, and at this critical time I have not. If I were
to lose a page of the five numbers I have purposed to myself to be
ready by the publication day, I should feel that I had fallen short. I
have grown hard to satisfy, and write very slowly, and I have so much
bad fiction, that _will_ be thought of when I don't want to think of it,
that I am forced to take more care than I ever took.
Ever affectionately.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Storrar.]
GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_Sunday Morning, May 15th, 1864._
MY DEAR MRS. STORRAR,
Our family dinner must come off at Gad's Hill, where I have improvements
to exhibit, and where I shall be truly pleased to see you and the doctor
again. I have deferred answering your note, while I have been scheming
and scheming for a day between this time and our departure. But it is
all in vain. My engagements have accumulated, and become such a whirl,
that no day is left me. Nothing is left me but to get away. I look
forward to my release from this dining life with an inexpressible
longing after quiet and my own pursuits. What with public speechifying,
private eating and drinking, and perpetual simmering in hot rooms, I
have made London too hot to hold me and my work together. Mary and
Georgina acknowledge the condition of imbecility to which we have become
reduced in reference to your kind reminder. They say, when I stare at
them in a forlorn way with your note in my hand: "What CAN you do!" To
which I can only reply, implicating them: "See what you have brought me
to!"
With our united kind regard to yourself and Dr. Storrar, I entreat your
pity and compassion for an unfortunate wretch whom a too-confiding
disposition has brought to this pass. If I had not allowed my "cheeild"
to pledge me to all manner of fellow-creatures, I and my digestion might
have been in a state of honourable independence this day.
Faithfully and penitently yours.
[Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.]
OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," ETC. ETC. ETC.
_Wednesday, July 27th, 1864._
MY DEAR MR. FITZGERALD,
First, let me assure you that it gave us all real pleasure to see your
sister and you at Gad's Hill, and that we all hope you will both come
and stay a day or two with us when you are next in England.
Next, let me convey to you the intelligence that I resolve to launch
"Miss Manuel," fully confiding in your conviction of the power of the
story. On all business points, Wills will communicate with you. I
purpose beginning its publication in our first September number,
therefore there is no time to be lost.
The only suggestion I have to make as to the MS. in hand and type is,
that Captain Fermor wants relief. It is a disagreeable character, as you
mean it to be, and I should be afraid to do so much with him, if the
case were mine, without taking the taste of him, here and there, out of
the reader's mouth. It is remarkable that if you do not administer a
disagreeable character carefully, the public have a decided tendency to
think that the _story_ is disagreeable, and not merely the fictitious
person.
What do you think of the title,
NEVER FORGOTTEN?
It is a good one in itself, would express the eldest sister's pursuit,
and glanced at now and then in the text, would hold the reader in
suspense. I would propose to add the line,
BY THE AUTHOR OF BELLA DONNA.
Let me know your opinion as to the title. I need not assure you that the
greatest care will be taken of you here, and that we shall make you as
thoroughly well and widely known as we possibly can.
Very faithfully yours.
[Sidenote: Sir James Emerson Tennent.]
GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_Friday, Aug. 26th, 1864._
MY DEAR TENNENT,
Believe me, I fully intended to come to you--did not doubt that I should
come--and have greatly disappointed Mary and her aunt, as well as
myself, by not coming. But I do not feel safe in going out for a visit.
The mere knowledge that I had such a thing before me would put me out.
It is not the length of time consumed, or the distance traversed, but it
is the departure from a settled habit and a continuous sacrifice of
pleasures that comes in question. This is an old story with me. I have
never divided a book of my writing with anything else, but have always
wrought at it to the exclusion of everything else; and it is now too
late to change.
After receiving your kind note I resolved to make another trial. But the
hot weather and a few other drawbacks did not mend the matter, for I
have dropped astern this month instead of going ahead. So I have seen
Forster, and shown him my chains, and am reduced to taking exercise in
them, like Baron Trenck.
I am heartily pleased that you set so much store by the dedication. You
may be sure that it does not make me the less anxious to take pains, and
to work out well what I have in my mind.
Mary and Georgina unite with me in kindest regards to Lady Tennent and
Miss Tennent, and wish me to report that while they are seriously
disappointed, they still feel there is no help for it. I can testify
that they had great pleasure in the anticipation of the visit, and that
their faces were very long and blank indeed when I began to hint my
doubts. They fought against them valiantly as long as there was a
chance, but they see my difficulty as well as anyone not myself can.
Believe me, my dear Tennent, ever faithfully yours.
[Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.]
THE ATHENAEUM, _Wednesday, Sept. 21st, 1864._
MY DEAR STANNY,
I met George in the street a few days ago, and he gave me a wonderful
account of the effect of your natural element upon you at Ramsgate. I
expect you to come back looking about twenty-nine, and feeling about
nineteen.
This morning I have looked in here to put down Fechter as a candidate,
on the chance of the committee's electing him some day or other. He is a
most devoted worshipper of yours, and would take it as a great honour if
you would second him. Supposing you to have not the least objection (of
course, if you should have any, I can in a moment provide a substitute),
will you write your name in the candidates' book as his seconder when
you are next in town and passing this way?
Lastly, if you should be in town on his opening night (a Saturday, and
in all probability the 22nd of October), will you come and dine at the
office and see his new piece? You have not yet "pronounced" in the
matter of that new French stage of his, on which Calcott for the said
new piece has built up all manner of villages, camps, Versailles
gardens, etc. etc. etc. etc., with no wings, no flies, no looking off
in any direction. If you tell me that you are to be in town by that
time, I will not fail to refresh your memory as to the precise day.
With kind regard to Mrs. Stanfield,
Believe me, my dear old boy, ever your affectionate
DICK.
[Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.]
GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER,
_Tuesday, Oct. 25th, 1864._
MY DEAR CERJAT,
Here is a limping brute of a reply to your always-welcome Christmas
letter! But, as usual, when I have done my day's work, I jump up from my
desk and rush into air and exercise, and find letter-writing the most
difficult thing in my daily life.
I hope that your asthmatic tendencies may not be strong just now; but
Townshend's account of the premature winter at Lausanne is not
encouraging, and with us here in England all such disorders have been
aggravated this autumn. However, a man of your dignity _must_ have
either asthma or gout, and I hope you have got the better of the two.
In London there is, as you see by the papers, extraordinarily little
news. At present the apprehension (rather less than it was thought) of a
commercial crisis, and the trial of Mueller next Thursday, are the two
chief sensations. I hope that gentleman will be hanged, and have hardly
a doubt of it, though croakers contrariwise are not wanting. It is
difficult to conceive any other line of defence than that the
circumstances proved, taken separately, are slight. But a sound judge
will immediately charge the jury that the strength of the circumstances
lies in their being put together, and will thread them together on a
fatal rope.
As to the Church, my friend, I am sick of it. The spectacle presented by
the indecent squabbles of priests of most denominations, and the
exemplary unfairness and rancour with which they conduct their
differences, utterly repel me. And the idea of the Protestant
establishment, in the face of its own history, seeking to trample out
discussion and private judgment, is an enormity so cool, that I wonder
the Right Reverends, Very Reverends, and all other Reverends, who commit
it, can look in one another's faces without laughing, as the old
soothsayers did. Perhaps they can't and don't. How our sublime and
so-different Christian religion is to be administered in the future I
cannot pretend to say, but that the Church's hand is at its own throat I
am fully convinced. Here, more Popery, there, more Methodism--as many
forms of consignment to eternal damnation as there are articles, and all
in one forever quarrelling body--the Master of the New Testament put out
of sight, and the rage and fury almost always turning on the letter of
obscure parts of the Old Testament, which itself has been the subject of
accommodation, adaptation, varying interpretation without end--these
things cannot last. The Church that is to have its part in the coming
time must be a more Christian one, with less arbitrary pretensions and a
stronger hold upon the mantle of our Saviour, as He walked and talked
upon this earth.
Of family intelligence I have very little. Charles Collins continuing in
a very poor way, and showing no signs of amendment. He and my daughter
Katie went to Wiesbaden and thence to Nice, where they are now. I have
strong apprehensions that he will never recover, and that she will be
left a young widow. All the rest are as they were. Mary neither married
nor going to be; Georgina holding them all together and perpetually
corresponding with the distant ones; occasional rallyings coming off
here, in which another generation begins to peep above the table. I once
used to think what a horrible thing it was to be a grandfather. Finding
that the calamity falls upon me without my perceiving any other change
in myself, I bear it like a man.
Mrs. Watson has bought a house in town, to which she repairs in the
season, for the bringing out of her daughter. She is now at Rockingham.
Her eldest son is said to be as good an eldest son as ever was, and to
make her position there a perfectly independent and happy one. I have
not seen him for some years; her I often see; but he ought to be a good
fellow, and is very popular in his neighbourhood.
I have altered this place very much since you were here, and have made a
pretty (I think an unusually pretty) drawing-room. I wish you would come
back and see it. My being on the Dover line, and my being very fond of
France, occasion me to cross the Channel perpetually. Whenever I feel
that I have worked too much, or am on the eve of overdoing it, and want
a change, away I go by the mail-train, and turn up in Paris or anywhere
else that suits my humour, next morning. So I come back as fresh as a
daisy, and preserve as ruddy a face as though I never leant over a sheet
of paper. When I retire from a literary life I think of setting up as a
Channel pilot.
Pray give my love to Mrs. Cerjat, and tell her that I should like to go
up the Great St. Bernard again, and shall be glad to know if she is open
to another ascent. Old days in Switzerland are ever fresh to me, and
sometimes I walk with you again, after dark, outside the hotel at
Martigny, while Lady Mary Taylour (wasn't it?) sang within very
prettily. Lord, how the time goes! How many years ago!
Affectionately yours.
_Wednesday, Nov. 16th, 1864._[13]
DEAR MADAM,
I have received your letter with great pleasure, and hope to be (as I
have always been at heart) the best of friends with the Jewish people.
The error you point out to me had occurred to me, as most errors do to
most people, when it was too late to correct it. But it will do no harm.
The peculiarities of dress and manner are fused together for the sake of
picturesqueness.
Dear Madam, faithfully yours.
[Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.]
GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_Saturday, Dec. 31st, 1864._
MY DEAR PROCTER,
I have reserved my acknowledgment of your delightful note (the youngest
note I have had in all this year) until to-day, in order that I might
send, most heartily and affectionately, all seasonable good wishes to
you and to Mrs. Procter, and to those who are nearest and dearest to
you. Take them from an old friend who loves you.
Mamie returns the tender compliments, and Georgina does what the
Americans call "endorse them." Mrs. Lirriper is proud to be so
remembered, and says over and over again "that it's worth twenty times
the trouble she has taken with the narrative, since Barry Cornwall,
Esquire, is pleased to like it."
I got rid of a touch of neuralgia in France (as I always do there), but
I found no old friends in my voyages of discovery on that side, such as
I have left on this.
My dear Procter, ever your affectionate.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] In answer to another letter from the "Jewish lady," in which she
gives her reasons for still being dissatisfied with the character of
Riah.
1865.
NARRATIVE.
For this spring a furnished house in Somer's Place, Hyde Park, had been
taken, which Charles Dickens occupied, with his sister-in-law and
daughter, from the beginning of March until June.
During the year he paid two short visits to France.
He was still at work upon "Our Mutual Friend," two numbers of which had
been issued in January and February, when the first volume was
published, with dedication to Sir James Emerson Tennent. The remaining
numbers were issued between March and November, when the complete work
was published in two volumes.
The Christmas number, to which Charles Dickens contributed three
stories, was called "Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions."
Being out of health, and much overworked, Charles Dickens, at the end of
May, took his first short holiday trip into France. And on his way home,
and on a day afterwards so fatal to him, the 9th of June, he was in that
most terrible railway accident at Staplehurst. Many of our letters for
this year have reference to this awful experience--an experience from
the effects of which his nerves never wholly recovered. His letters to
Mr. Thomas Mitton and to Mrs. Hulkes (an esteemed friend and neighbour)
are graphic descriptions of this disaster. But they do NOT tell of the
wonderful presence of mind and energy shown by Charles Dickens when most
of the terrified passengers were incapable of thought or action, or of
his gentleness and goodness to the dead and dying. The Mr. Dickenson[14]
mentioned in the letter to Mrs. Hulkes soon recovered. He always
considers that he owes his life to Charles Dickens, the latter having
discovered and extricated him from beneath a carriage before it was too
late.
Our first letter to Mr. Kent is one of congratulation upon his having
become the proprietor of _The Sun_ newspaper.
Professor Owen has been so kind as to give us some notes, which we
publish for the sake of his great name. Charles Dickens had not much
correspondence with Professor Owen, but there was a firm friendship and
great mutual admiration between them.
The letter to Mrs. Procter is in answer to one from her, asking Charles
Dickens to write a memoir of her daughter Adelaide, as a preface to a
collected edition of her poems.
[Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.]
GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_Tuesday, Jan. 17th, 1865._
MY DEAR KENT,
I meant to have written instantly on the appearance of your paper in its
beautiful freshness, to congratulate you on its handsome appearance, and
to send you my heartiest good wishes for its thriving and prosperous
career. Through a mistake of the postman's, that remarkable letter has
been tesselated into the Infernal Pavement instead of being delivered in
the Strand.
We have been looking and waiting for your being well enough to propose
yourself for a mouthful of fresh air. Are you well enough to come on
Sunday? We shall be coming down from Charing Cross on Sunday morning,
and I shall be going up again at nine on Monday morning.
It amuses me to find that you don't see your way with a certain "Mutual
Friend" of ours. I have a horrible suspicion that you may begin to be
fearfully knowing at somewhere about No. 12 or 13. But you shan't if I
can help it.
Your note delighted me because it dwelt upon the places in the number
that _I_ dwell on. Not that that is anything new in your case, but it is
always new to me in the pleasure I derive from it, which is truly
inexpressible.
Ever cordially yours.
[Sidenote: Mrs. Procter.]
GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_Wednesday, Feb. 15th, 1865._
MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER,
Of course I will do it, and of course I will do it for the love of you
and Procter. You can give me my brief, and we can speak about its
details. Once again, of course I will do it, and with all my heart.
I have registered a vow (in which there is not the least merit, for I
couldn't help it) that when I am, as I am now, very hard at work upon a
book, I never will dine out more than one day in a week. Why didn't you
ask me for the Wednesday, before I stood engaged to Lady Molesworth for
the Tuesday?
It is so delightful to me to sit by your side anywhere and be brightened
up, that I lay a handsome sacrifice upon the altar of "Our Mutual
Friend" in writing this note, very much against my will. But for as many
years as can be made consistent with my present juvenility, I always
have given my work the first place in my life, and what can I do now at
35!--or at least at the two figures, never mind their order.
I send my love to Procter, hoping you may appropriate a little of it by
the way.
Affectionately yours.
[Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.]
OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND,"
_Wednesday, March 1st, 1865._
MY DEAREST MACREADY,
I have been laid up here with a frost-bitten foot (from hard walking in
the snow), or you would have heard from me sooner.