[39]First printed in “The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[40]First printed in “The Letters of Charles Dickens.”
[41]Tavistock House was for many years the residence of James Perry (editor of Dickens’s old paper, the Morning Chronicle, in its best days), and was then noted for its reunions of men of political and literary distinction. Eliza Cook, the poetess, also lived in Tavistock House when she left Greenhithe, Kent, and Mary Russell Mitford (authoress of “Our Village”) became an honoured guest there in 1818. The house was afterwards divided, and the moiety, which still retained the name of Tavistock, became the home of Frank Stone.
From the front windows of Tavistock House, which stood immediately on the right on entering the railed-in garden or square, the spire of St. Pancras Church was plainly visible, being but a short distance away. The pillars of the gateway leading to the enclosure were (and are) surmounted by quaint lamps with iron supports. Dickens held the lease from the Duke of Bedford at a “peppercorn” ground-rent.
[42]The portrait-bust was probably that executed in marble by Dickens’s beloved friend Angus Fletcher (“Poor Kindheart,” as the novelist called him), whose mother was an English beauty and heiress. He died in 1862. At the sale of Dickens’s effects in 1870, the bust realized fifty-one guineas, and it would be interesting to know its present destination. The pair of reliefs after Thorwaldsen were disposed of on the same occasion for eight and a half guineas.
[43]“Mary Boyle—Her Book,” 1901.
[44]I quote the opening lines of this eccentric effusion:
“‘Great men,’ no doubt, have a great deal to answer for. No one will deny that. Their ‘genius,’ which brings them to the front, and which causes men, women, and children to worship them for the pleasure their beautiful gifts procure to eyes, ears, and senses, brings them all much responsibility.
“But who would ever have imagined that their dwellings may bring grave responsibility and grave trouble to those who take up their abode in a house which the presence of their genius has hallowed? I live in Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London—a dear house, in a nice, quiet, shady garden, where grow fine large old plantains (out of the Square proper), and where in summer, from every window of the house, you may imagine yourself in the country—the real country! That sounds very grand and luxurious in London; and though the mere fact of living in the house has very nearly brought upon me the most terrible fate which can befall a human being nowadays—namely, that of a sane person shut up in a lunatic asylum, put there for the purpose of being slowly or ‘accidentally’ murdered—I cling to the spot because I have spent the happiest, the most interesting, and the most illumined part of my life there; also days of the most bitter anguish, the most heart-crushing despair, when I was obliged to leave the dear home and husband for some time, because I could not stop crying. The thought of my loss and the shipwreck of my life was too vivid, too much for me. I went away and returned when I had got calm enough to restrain my tears, but with the sun set for ever on what remained to me of the summer of middle life. I love the dear home, too, because my darling puggies are buried in the garden under the mulberry-tree, without a tombstone, alas! because ever since they died I have been planning to have a pretty monument made to mark the spot where they lay, and that when I have thought I could afford myself that pleasure somebody has generally stolen my money ... and I have to put off ordering the intended work of art, which I mean it to be, till I feel ‘flush’ again. I was a slave to my dear Dan for nearly thirteen years, and I think I must have loved that dog as much as anybody ever loved anything in this world.
“I must not let you wonder too long what I am driving at, my readers, by telling you that, through the mere fact of living in what had been a house where a great man had lived, I nearly got locked up in a lunatic asylum. You must think me insane, I fancy, to say such a thing, and I must confess that you might guess every mortal and immortal thing under the sun, but you would never guess how this most frightful occurrence took place.