Delphi complete works of.., p.591
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 591
Nor could his labour stop. He had to busy himself at once with the Christmas number of his magazine. To his delight, it turned out a great success. As usual, it bore a special title, — Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, — and Dickens himself contributed a considerable part of it. At the time Doctor Marigold, — though forgotten now, — was a decided success. Dickens used it from now on as one of his reading pieces for the platform. In the commercial sense this Christmas number and the one that followed, — Mugby Junction, 1866, were among Dickens’s greatest successes. Mugby Junction sold a quarter of a million copies, — an interesting comparison with the 15,000 of the Christmas Carol. Cheap literature (it sold for twopence) was coming into its own.
Meantime with the New Year (1866) Dickens plunged again into his public readings. This time he cut himself loose entirely from the business management and the hazard of profit and loss. He accepted an outright fee of £50 per lecture for the thirty that made the series. The tour began early in the year, ended in June, and included a visit to Ireland and Scotland. It was a vast success, much helped by the able management of George Dolby, henceforth a tower of strength for Dickens in his public work. In the book which Dolby afterwards wrote about his association with Dickens, he tells us that the gross receipts of this tour were nearly £5,000, — leaving a handsome profit for the firm (Messrs. Chappell of London) who financed it.
The readings met everywhere with the same enthusiasm, the same tumultuous success. Any failing there may have been in Dickens’s literary power had no effect upon his histrionic art. But it was the same old story of exhaustion and fatigue. From Liverpool he wrote, ‘the enthusiasm has been unbounded. On Friday night I quite astonished myself: but I was taken so faint afterwards that they laid me on a sofa in the hall for half an hour. I attribute it to my distressing inability to sleep at night.’
Partly to be near his work and partly from sheer restlessness, Dickens made his usual spring migration to a London house (No. 6 Southwick Place). With the departure of his children into the world Gad’s Hill was not the family centre it had been at first. Only when at intervals the boys came back from school and from the sea it turned again into a home like that of earlier years in London. At such intervals the boys published a family newspaper, The Gad’s Hill Gazette, purporting to be sold for twopence.
With the public readings went a few public appearances, such as the dinners to the Dramatic, Equestrian and Musical Fund (February 14, 1866), and the Royal General Theatrical Fund (March 28, 1866). Assistance to the cause of arts and letters and the drama always appealed strongly to Dickens. He was ever ready to take the chair at such gatherings, and his wonderful eloquence in appeal was a valuable asset to them. But society at large he avoided. He was of too self-centred, too dominant a temperament, for the ordinary give and take of social life.
Dolby arranged and conducted certain further readings. But there was now larger game to be seen on the horizon. For some time past suggestions had been made for visiting America in a professional way. Dickens’s circle of readers had grown enormously in that country. His experiment of publishing a story direct in New York (The Haunted Man) was followed by similar publication of two others.
Then as now America valued genius more — in terms of dollars and cents — than did the Old World. The great upheaval of the Civil War had sunk into oblivion all the animosities that had grown out of Dickens’s tour of 1842. Everything was forgiven and forgotten, and slavery itself was no longer there.
The time was ripe for a great artistic and financial success. Dickens’s intimates, — Wills, Forster, and the rest, — sought to dissuade him. They knew too well the risks, — one might almost say the certainties, — involved for Dickens’s broken constitution. It was in vain. The bait was too tempting, and Dickens, in any case, never measured consequences. There was a farewell dinner at the Freemasons’ Tavern (November 2), and he sailed (November 9, 1867) on the Cuba outward bound from Liverpool to Boston.
Charles Dickens’s second American pilgrimage began with his landing in Boston in November of 1867 and ended with his departure from New York on April 22, 1868. The whole of the intervening time, with one brief and unintentional cessation, was filled with his work on the platform. The state of his health compelled him to forgo all social engagements and all external activities. The tour as originally planned was to have extended into the southern states and westward to the Mississippi. But in the sequel this proved impossible, and, in a financial sense, unnecessary.
The circumstances of Dickens’s second visit to America differed greatly from those of the first. In 1842 he came with all the exuberance of youthful energy and early success, at a time when celebrity was still new enough to be a constant joy. Moreover, he was, or was prepared to be, intensely interested in America. Like all the people of his generation, he marvelled at the rise of this wonderful new republic, where civilization was spreading in a flood over a vast new continent. Like many of his generation, he had idealized the republic from a distance. There is a certain type of human who is a radical when among conservatives, and a republican when living under a monarchy; who despises the forms and ceremonies of the Old World until he finds himself where they don’t exist, and becomes a loyal and ardent royalist when outside of the domain of kingship. There is no reference here to the revolutionist who conspires to destroy the government under which he lives; but only to the peaceful citizen who prefers the luxury of discontent to the subservience of approval. Dickens himself has often portrayed this type of mind. Mr. Jerry Cruncher, the body snatcher of the Tale of Two Cities, is a fine atheist till he gets to France where they all are.
So was Dickens a first-class radical till he got to America where they all were. He despised all hereditary and clan privileges, all powers and distinctions, precedence and formalities. But when he got to a country where these things did not exist, and where human nature and human impulses ran riot without the restraint of ancient custom, it seemed to him that he was lost in a sea of vulgarity. As a consequence Dickens, on his first visit, as already seen, felt bitterly disillusioned with America.
But that does not alter the fact that in 1842 he came to it with intense interest, intense eagerness, intense enjoyment. The mingled admirations and angers of the first visit were at least an acknowledgment of the importance and interest of America. His attitude of 1842 might be thought insulting, but it was at least complimentary in its intensity.
Far more deprecating in reality was his attitude towards his second visit. When he came in 1867 he took not the faintest interest in the place. He didn’t care whether he saw much of it, any of it, or none of it; whether he went to many cities or a few; whether he visited Canada or cut it out. His wearied energies and his excited mind left him without any interest in the country in which he moved. At this period the great epic struggle of the Civil War had just drawn to a close. Dickens had had time to realize that, after all, the Jefferson Bricks and the Major Pawkinses and all the other oddities and crooks of Martin Chuzzlewit were a terrible people when in arms; that the South might have nourished the evil institution on which he had poured the burning contempt of his indignation, but that it had paid for its sins with a nobility of sacrifice on the field never excelled in history.
But Dickens thought nothing of these things. He had come to America to make money, and his thoughts never wandered far from the box office; this and the personal and artistic interest in his own performances filled all his mind. He chafed to begin, and counted the days and nights till he could end. The weariness of mind and brain, the breaking energy and the ill-health which pursued him in these closing years no doubt explain it all. The Fates were whispering already and holding the open shears close to the thread of life. It is no cause for blame that Dickens took so little interest in America and had no vision to see it. But of the facts there is no doubt. We have only to open the pages of the letters that he sent home to his daughter and to Miss Hogarth to realize his frame of mind.
‘Parker House, Boston,
‘Nov. 21st, 1867.
‘I arrived here on Monday night after a very slow passage from Halifax against head winds. All the tickets for the first four readings were sold immediately on their being issued.’
‘Nov. 25, 1867.
‘I am constantly chafing at not having begun to-night instead of this night week. The tickets being all sold for next week, and no other announcement being yet made, there is nothing new in that way to tell of. Dolby (Dickens’s manager, as already seen) is over in New York, where we are at our wits’ end to keep the tickets out of the hands of speculators . . . My anxiety to get to work is greater than I can express, because time seems to be making no movement towards home until I can be reading hard. Then I shall begin to count and count the upward steps to May.’
This wearied frame of mind is revealed in practically all of the letters that follow. On November 5 he writes to his eldest son from Boston:
‘The tickets for the first four readings here were all sold immediately, and many are selling at a large premium. The tickets for the first four readings in New York were on sale yesterday, and were all sold in a few hours. The receipts were very large indeed, but engagements of any kind and every kind I steadily refuse, being resolved to take what is to be taken myself.’
This same strain of weariness and of eagerness to be at home follows through all of Dickens’s correspondence from America in the ensuing months. It is broken only with remarks on the tremendous success of his lectures, the public enthusiasm and the personal kindness which he met everywhere and the incessant fatigue and illness which pursued him. Of the country itself, even at this moment of its history when emerging from the titanic and heroic struggle of the war, — nothing or practically nothing.
Dolby himself, the manager, seems to have played a hero’s part. He took all Dickens’s troubles and difficulties on his broad shoulders and carried them gaily along. He fought against the speculators that haunted the box office, the press agents, the bores, and the nuisances who would have persecuted his suffering celebrity. Dickens’s one prayer was for rest and peace, and as far as could be, Dolby, aided by the kindliness of sympathetic friends, contrived it for him.
‘The Bostonians,’ writes Dickens, ‘having been duly informed that I wish to be quiet, really leave me as much so as I should be in Manchester or Liverpool.’
‘I have been in bed all day’ (New York, December 20) ‘till two o’clock, and here I am now at three o’clock a little better. But I am not fit to read, and I must read to-night’ . . .
‘We arrived here’ (Philadelphia) ‘last night, January 13, 1868. . . . This is one of the immense American hotels (it is called the Continental), but I find myself just as quiet here as elsewhere . . . My cold is no better. . . . If I could only get to the point of being able to hold up my head and dispense with my pocket handkerchief for five minutes, I should be all right.’
‘The people’ (this is New York, January 15) ‘are exceedingly kind and considerate, and desire to be most hospitable beside. But I cannot accept hospitality and never go out, except at Boston, or I should not be fit for the labour’ . . .
‘My cold sticks to me’ (January 21), ‘and I can scarcely exaggerate what I sometimes undergo from sleeplessness.’
Only now and then does this melancholy cloud of exhaustion and illness and overwork lift for a little while; and then more by the stimulus of anything that seems like the routine of his life at home than the interest in anything that he saw abroad. As has already been seen, the exercise of active walking was throughout Dickens’s life his favourite pastime and restorative. Even in his present condition he turned to it whenever possible.
‘Dolby and Osgood,’ he writes to Miss Hogarth from Baltimore at the end of January, ‘who do the most ridiculous things to keep me in spirits (I am often very heavy and rarely sleep much) have decided to have a walking match at Boston on Saturday’ Feb. 29th. Beginning this design in joke, they have become tremendously in earnest, and Dolby has actually sent home (much to his opponent’s terror) for a pair of seamless socks to walk in. Our men are hugely excited on the subject and continually make bets on “the men”. Fields and I are to walk out six miles, and the men are to turn and walk round us. Neither of them has the least idea what twelve miles at a pace is. Being requested by both to give them a “breather” yesterday, I gave them a stiff one of five miles in the snow, half the distance uphill. I took them at the pace of four miles and a half per hour, and you never saw such objects when they got back.’
The walking match, moreover, actually came off as planned when Dickens returned to Boston at the end of February. ‘The walking match,’ he writes, ‘came off on Saturday, over tremendously difficult ground, against a biting wind and through deep snow-wreaths. It was so cold, too, that our hair, beards, eyelashes, eyebrows, were frozen hard and hung with icicles. . . . In the evening I gave a very splendid dinner, eighteen covers, most magnificent flowers, such table decoration as was never seen in these parts. The whole thing was a great success, and everybody was delighted. I am holiday-making until Friday.’
The reason for this break in the clouds of depression was that Dickens had had to stop lecturing. American politics had got in his way. The impeachment of President Johnson in connection with the reconstruction policy had set the country in a turmoil of excitement. Not even Charles Dickens’s overwhelming popularity could keep an audience quiet in their seats.
Dickens himself, needless to say, did not share in the excitement. ‘Nothing in this country lasts long,’ he wrote to his sister-in-law, ‘and I think the public may be heartily tired at the president’s name by March 9th, when I read it at a considerable distance from here. So behold me with a whole week’s holiday in view.’
The tour was originally planned to include an extended journey westward to the Mississippi and the South, to visit Canada and Nova Scotia. But the condition of his health, and the fact that audiences were obtainable anywhere in shoals, without hunting for them, somewhat contracted the original plan. As it was, he lectured in Boston and in New York, many times in each of these cities, and in various New England centres, in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington; then westward to Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo; from Buffalo he allowed himself a two days’ visit to Niagara, his only glimpse of the newly formed Dominion of Canada (a formation which he had probably not remarked), and then his farewell appearances in Boston and New York.
The lectures were everywhere an overwhelming, a colossal success. ‘Success last night beyond description and exaggeration,’ he wrote to his son Charles after the first ‘reading’ in Boston. ‘The whole city is quite frantic about it to-day, and it is impossible that prospects could be more brilliant.’ As Dickens had himself anticipated, the audiences, who were prepared to be enthusiastic over the mere notion of hearing Dickens actually read from his own works, passed from enthusiasm to delight when they found that ‘reading’ was but a feeble name for what he actually did. ‘They were accustomed,’ he said, ‘to mere readings out of a book, and I am inclined to think that the excitement will increase when I shall have begun.’ The ‘lectures’, of course, like those already given in England, were utterly different from mere ‘reading out of a book.’ Dickens gave a dramatic rendering of the scenes described, — in which every tone and gesture, every movement of the features and every expression of the eye was calculated with the highest art to call forth a vision of the thing portrayed. The ‘pieces’ that he selected were chiefly the trial scene from Pickwick, Dr. Marigold, the storm scene from Copperfield, and, more than anything else perhaps, the Christmas Carol; and whether known already by the auditors or not, the effect was everywhere the same magnetic appeal. The excitement, as he had forseen, did increase. The success was everywhere the same. In New York the people clamoured in thousands for seats. Dolby, said Dickens, had become the most unpopular man in the United States because he could not put four thousand people into a hall meant for two thousand. Before his appearance in Brooklyn the ticket-speculators, such was their literary enthusiasm, lay out all night on mattresses sucking bottles of whisky to keep them warm for the opening sale. The receipts were enormous: five hundred pounds sterling in a single night in New York; one thousand three hundred pounds per week clear profit to Dickens in Boston. These were the days of green-backs and small denominations, and Dolby went about with what looked like great bundles of paper. The final gross receipts reached $228,000. Dickens’s own profits on the tour, after deducting all commissions, all expenses, and all money which he previously spent in America, and converting the balance from greenbacks to sterling, — as Dickens, with no faith in anything American, hastened to do, even at a discount of 40 per cent., — amounted to £19,000.
In Washington President Andrew Johnson, — impeachment or not, — took a whole row of seats every night of Dickens’s appearance.
At Washington Dickens relaxed on one or two occasions his self-imposed avoidance of hospitality. He writes, on February 4, 1868, to his sister-in-law, ‘I dined (against my rules) with Charles Sumner on Sunday, he having been an old friend of mine. Mr. Secretary Staunton (War Minister) was there. He is a man of very remarkable memory and famous for his acquaintance with the minutest details of my books. Give him a passage anywhere and he will instantly cap it and go on with the context. He was commander-in-chief of all the Northern forces concentrated here, and never went to sleep at night without first reading something from my books, which were always with him.’
Dolby himself in his book on Charles Dickens has left us a glowing account of the tour. Even judged by the statements of the harassed and over-wrought lecturer, Dolby was a marvel of good nature and a tower of strength. The papers reviled him; he passed it off with a laugh; in Buffalo a sheriff’s officer of the Inland Revenue department undertook to forbid the lecture for the want of a licence. Dolby, — not understanding that all the man wanted was ‘his share’, — annihilated him by flourishing a special authorization from the head of the department at Washington. ‘Jerusalem!’ said the discomfited sheriff, ‘I’m beat.’ On which Dolby took him into the bar and put a pint of champagne into him. Dolby understood America if Dickens didn’t. On another occasion (it was at one of the Boston lectures) Dolby had to deal with a man who left the hall in a fit of anger, because he said that Dickens’s presentation ‘was no more like Sam Weller than a cow.’ And once, later on, he had to assist in taking out of the hall a young girl reduced to a passion of hysterical tears by the rendering of Tiny Tim.
