FACSIMILE PLAY-BILL OF “THE FROZEN DEEP,” WITH DICKENS AS ACTOR-MANAGER
Friday, April 24.—After the Press dinner in New York Mr. Dickens repeated all his speech to me, as I believe I have said above, never dropping a word. “I feel,” he said, “as if I were listening to the sound of my own voice as I recall it. A very curious sensation.” Jamie asked him if Curtis was quite right in the facts of his speech. He said, “Not altogether, as, for instance, in that matter about the Queen and our little play, ‘Frozen Deep.’ We had played it many times with considerable success, when the Queen heard of it and Colonel Phipps (?) called upon me and said he wished the Queen could see the play. Was there no hall which would be appropriate for the occasion? What did I think of Buckingham Palace? I replied that could not be, for my daughters played in the piece and I had never asked myself to be presented at court nor had I ever taken the proper steps to introduce them there, and of course they could not go as amateur performers where they had never been as visitors. This seemed to trouble him a good deal, so I said I would find some hall which would be appropriate for the purpose and would appoint an evening, which I did immediately, taking the Gallery of Illustration and having it fitted up for the purpose. I then drew up a list of the company, chiefly of artists, literary and scientific men, and interesting ladies, which I caused to be submitted to the Queen, begging her to reject or add as she thought proper, setting aside forty seats for the royal party. The whole thing went off finely until after the first play was over, when the Queen sent round a request that I would come and see her. This was considered an act of immense condescension and kindness on her part, and the little party behind the scenes were delighted. Unfortunately, I had just prepared myself for the farce which was to follow and was already standing in motley dress with a red nose. I knew I could not appear in that plight, so I begged leave to be excused on that ground. However, that was forgiven and all passed off well, although the large expense of the whole thing of course fell on me, which amounted to one hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds. Several years after, when Prince Albert died, the Queen sent to me for a copy of the play. I told Colonel Phipps the play had never been printed and was the property of a gentleman, Mr. Wilkie Collins. Then would I have it copied? So I had a very beautiful copy made and bound in the most perfect manner, and presented to her Majesty. Whereupon the Princess of Prussia, seeing this, asked for another for herself. I said I would again ask the permission of Mr. Collins and again I had a beautiful copy made with great labor. Then the Queen sent to ask the price of the books. I sent word that my friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, was a gentleman who would, I was sure, hear to nothing of the kind and begged her acceptance of the volumes.” “How has the Queen shown her gratitude for such favors?” I said. “We have never heard anything more from her since that time.” Good Mr. Dolby said quietly, “You know in England we call her ‘Her Ungracious Majesty.’” Certainly one would not have believed it possible for even a queen’s nature to have become so hardened as this to the kindly acts of any human being, not to speak of the efforts of one of her most noble subjects and perhaps the greatest genius of our time.
If any reader wishes to follow the further course of the friendship between Dickens and the Fieldses, he has only to turn to “Yesterdays With Authors,” in which many letters written by Dickens after April, 1868, are quoted, and many remembrances of their intercourse when the Fieldses visited England in 1869, the year before Dickens’s death, are presented. Here it will suffice to quote one out of several passages in Mrs. Fields’s diary relating to Dickens, and to bring to light a single characteristic little note from Dickens, not hitherto printed.
On Wednesday, May 12, 1869, Mrs. Fields wrote of Dickens:—
He drove us through the Parks in the fashionable afternoon hour and afterward to dine with him at the St. James, where Fechter and Dolby were the only outsiders. Mrs. Collins was like one of Stothard’s pictures. I felt this more even after refreshing my memory of Stothard’s coloring at the Kensington Museum yesterday. C. D. told me that the book of all others which he read perpetually and of which he never tired, the book which always appeared more imaginative in proportion to the fresh imagination he brings to it, a book for inexhaustiveness to be placed before every other book, is Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” When he was writing “A Tale of Two Cities,” he asked Carlyle if he might see some book to which he referred in his history. Whereat Carlyle sent down to him all his books, and Dickens read them faithfully; but the more he read the more he was astounded to find how the facts but passed through the alembic of Carlyle’s brain and had come out and fitted themselves each as a part of the one great whole, making a compact result, indestructible and unrivalled, and he always found himself turning away from the books of reference and rereading this marvellous new growth from those dry bones with renewed wonder.
The note from Dickens read:—
Gad’s Hill Place
Higham by Rochester, Kent
Wednesday Sixth October, 1869
My dear Fields:—
Delighted to enjoy the prospect of seeing you and yours on Saturday. Wish you had been at Birmingham. Wish you were not going home. Wish you had had nothing to do with the Byron matter.[28] Wish Mrs. Stowe was in the pillory. Wish Fechter had gone over when he ought. Wish he may not go under when he oughtn’t.