On 20th May 1855, he wrote to Stanfield about the scenery of a play by Wilkie Collins which was in preparation.
“There is only one scene in the piece, and that, my tarry lad, is the inside of a light-house. Will you come and paint it for us one night, and we’ll all turn to and help.” And again to the same friend (22nd May 1855): “The great ambition of my life
will be achieved at last, in the wearing of a pair of very coarse petticoat trousers.”
He wrote to Stanfield about the performance—“Lemon and I did every conceivable absurdity, I think, in the farce; and they never left off laughing. . . . Then Scotch reels till 5 A.M.”
Dickens could appreciate other actors, and he writes in 1862 of Fechter’s Hamlet as a “performance of extraordinary merit; by far the most coherent, consistent, and intelligible Hamlet I ever saw.”
On the same subject he wrote to Macready: “Fechter doing wonders over the way here, with a picturesque French drama. Miss Kate Terry, in a small part in it, perfectly charming. . . . She has a tender love-scene in this piece, which is a really beautiful and artistic thing. . . . I told Fechter: ‘That this is the very best piece of womanly tenderness I have ever seen on the stage, and you’ll find that no audience can miss it.’” [216]
Dombey was published early in 1848, and during the whole of 1849 and the summer and autumn of 1850 he was writing David Copperfield. In Sir Walter Raleigh’s Shakespeare, 1907, p. 31, it is suggested that “if the father of Charles Dickens lent his likeness to Mr Micawber, it is at least possible that some not unkindly memories of the paternal advice of John Shakespeare have been preserved for us in the sage maxims of Polonius.”
In March 1852 the first number of Bleak House appeared, and he wrote to Mary Boyle, 22nd July 1852:—“I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as Copperfield. But I foresee, I think, some very good things in Bleak House.” In November he records that the sale is half as large again as Copperfield. In the winter of 1850 he showed his appreciation of Mrs Gaskell by writing to her (31st January 1850): “I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me).” . . . .
In September 1857, he writes to Miss Hogarth from Allonby, telling her of the homage he receives in the North—station-masters help him to alight, deputations await him at hotels, crowds see him off. The landlady at Allonby was immensely fat, and her husband said that once on a time he could tuck his arm round her waist. “‘And can’t you do it now,’ I said, ‘you insensible dog? Look at me! Here’s a picture!’ Accordingly, I got round as much of her as I could; and this gallant action was the most successful I have ever performed, on the whole.”
In 1853 he took the Château des Moulineaux at Boulogne, whence he wrote asking a friend to visit him. He described his château:—“Excellent light wines on the premises, French cookery, millions of roses, two cows (for milk punch), vegetables cut for the pot, and handed in at the kitchen window; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains (with no water in