Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow

was clearly not out of the top drawer; the Beadnells deeply doubted Dickens’s suitability as a prospective husband for their precious little girl. Whether to relieve the situation or not, they sent her off to France. ‘My existence was entirely uprooted, moreover, and my whole being blighted, by the Angel of my soul being sent to Paris to finish her education!’ he wrote to Maria when she made contact with him some twenty years later, effortlessly slipping back into the language of adolescent infatuation. At the time, the inevitable crisis in their relationship came when he found out that Maria’s best friend, Marianne Leigh, who had purportedly been liaising between them, had been imparting to Maria confidences never meant for her to hear, and he realized that he was being played with by the two girls. He wrote Maria an overwrought good-bye letter.

      Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference on the one hand, while on the other they have never failed to provide a fertile source of wretchedness and misery; and seeing, as I cannot fail to do, that I have engaged in a pursuit which has long since been worse than hopeless, and a further pursuit of which can only expose me to deserved ridicule, I have made up my mind to return the little present I received from you some time since (which I have always prized, as I still do, beyond anything I ever possessed) and the other enclosed mementoes of our past correspondence which I am sure it must be gratifying to you to receive, as after our recent situations they are certainly better adapted for your custody than mine.

      He develops a lightly sarcastic manner:

      my feelings upon any subject, more especially upon this, must be a matter to you of very little moment; still I have feelings in common with other people – perhaps so far as they relate to you they have been as strong and as good as ever warmed the human heart – and I do feel that it is mean and contemptible of me to keep by me one gift of yours or to preserve one single line or word of remembrance or affection from you. I therefore return them, and I can only wish that I could as easily forget that I ever received them.

      He ends: ‘A wish for your happiness, though it comes from me may not be the worse for being sincere and heartfelt. Accept it as it is meant, and believe that nothing will ever afford me more real delight than to hear that you, the object of my first and last love, are happy.’ The most striking thing about this letter is not how deeply felt it is (and there is no doubt that it is) but how conventional the expression is. It could have come from any frustrated young man of the period, or from the pages of any unremarkable contemporary epistolary novel. That is what Maria had done to him. Her conventionally capricious behaviour had forced him to play her game; he was humiliated and toyed with, but worse than that, he was diminished, less than himself. He would never allow that to happen again, with anyone.

      But balm was to hand: he was working on a show. He had been writing, directing and acting in plays in his family circle ever since he started work (a little later he wrote a play for them called O’Thello, featuring his father in the role of The Great Unpaid), and during all these anguished months of amorous frustration, he had been directing a triple bill consisting of Clari, the Maid of Milan, The Married Bachelor and Amateurs and Actors. The company and cast were all friends, but there was nothing amateur about his work on the show. He was in supreme command, casting it, staging it, stage-managing it, starring in it, seeing to the music, arranging the set, checking the props. A couple of weeks after his passionate valedictory to Maria, he was writing to his chum Kolle, who was engaged to Maria’s sister Anne, ‘you are, or at any rate will be, what I can never be, that is, happy and contented’, briskly adding that ‘the corps dramatic are all anxiety. The scenery is all completing rapidly, the machinery is finished, the curtain hemmed, the orchestra complete and the manager grimy.’ He was, in short, in his element, and in his letter, the moment he writes about the theatre, he is instantly, unmistakably, Charles Dickens. Lovelorn or not, he had no intention of hiding this particular light under a bushel: he had invited a large audience (including ‘many judges’). It was a triumph. Maria and her family came, too, but she sulked. A month later, he sent her one final, final affirmation of his love, and she was coldly reproachful in return. It was finally over.

      He was shaken by the affair, nonetheless. He had given her everything of himself. He had lowered his guard, bared his heart. And she had just toyed with him. ‘It excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four,’ he wrote a quarter of a century later. That the experience of the relationship burned itself into his heart and mind is beyond question, but the contention that it excluded every other idea from his mind will not bear examination. On the contrary. Perhaps the pain was greater precisely because the whole affair dragged itself out over a time when Dickens was first beginning to feel his power in the world, and was exploding in every direction. At the time he met Maria, he was still a shorthand reporter plodding away at Doctors’ Commons; by the time their relationship was over, in 1833, he was a star reporter, trembling on the brink of authorship.

      The instant he joined The Mirror of Parliament, in 1832, the uncommon accuracy of transcription made possible by his phenomenal shorthand skills was admiringly recognized, and his self-confidence soared. At about the same time, he started writing for another new paper, the True Sun, and again, his skills were immediately hailed. But he quickly made his mark there in another way, too. When he had joined the staff, the Sun was already in trouble. The journalists were at war with the proprietor, and had called a strike. And Dickens, a twenty-year-old tyro reporter, was their chief negotiator. ‘I well remember noticing at this dread time, standing on the staircase of the magnificent mansion we were lodged in,’ wrote another young Sun contributor, John Forster, who had been invited to a meeting of the disaffected workforce, ‘a young man of my own age whose keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose name, upon enquiry, I then for the first time heard.’ ‘Young Dickens’, he discovered, had conducted the recalcitrant reporters’ case ‘triumphantly’.

      It is worth briefly freezing the frame at this moment, because it changed both men’s lives. Though it would be some years before they finally sat down at a table together, they sensed, at occasional accidental meetings over that time, that there was a profound sympathy between them; when they did sit down together, Forster immediately became Dickens’s most intimate associate, which he remained for some decades, his advice sought and taken on matters personal, professional and artistic. Many of Dickens’s books and much of his life would have been quite different without Forster’s influence. And Forster, despite his ingrained cussedness a natural hero-worshipper, found the great task of his life. The vision of Dickens on the staircase during the Sun strike was for him a coup de foudre, of which the final and greatest outcrop was the biography, which, flawed and partial though it sometimes is, gave the world Charles Dickens the man as we know him.

      Dickens, meanwhile, once the strike was (temporarily) resolved, plunged back into the life of a newsman, c. 1833. It was a world without technology: neither telephones, telegrams, tape recorders, television, nor indeed trains. ‘I pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which subsequent generations can form no adequate conception,’ he told a gathering of newsmen in the 1850s. ‘There never was anybody connected with newspapers, who in the same space of time had so much express and post-chaise experience as I.’ He was reporting on political life in Parliament, often in marathon sittings requiring relays of up to half a dozen reporters to cover them – ‘I have borne the House of Commons like a man and have yielded to no weakness except slumber in the House of Lords’ – and up and down the country on the hustings. He and his fellow reporter Thomas Beard were conveyed to these far-flung places in the bone-breaking, heart-stopping, life-threatening species of fast coach known as Tallyhos, Taglionis and Wonders: they leapt in and out of a variety of these vehicles, in a multitude of weather conditions, on their way to remote destinations across the British Isles, in order to record for posterity the deathless words of a class of human being for whom he increasingly found he had nothing but contempt. ‘Night after night,’ he wrote ventriloquially through the mouth of David Copperfield, ‘I recorded predictions that never came to pass, professions that were never fulfilled, explanations that were only meant to mystify.’ His allergy to Parliamentary democracy in action was quickly established, seeing it as a debased form of theatre: ‘I have been behind the scenes to know the worth of political life.’ He thought this disposition of his might be due to ‘some imperfect development