She gave me a cup of tea, as if I were a hyena and she my cruel keeper with a strong dislike to me. I mingled my tears with it, and had a petrified bun of enormous antiquity in miserable meekness.”
The Court of Chancery finds a place in more than one of his books. His strong feeling in regard to it is shown in the following extract from a letter to Wills: “It has become (through the vile dealing with those courts and the vermin they have called into existence) a positive precept of experience, that a man had better endure a great wrong than go, or suffer himself to be taken, into Chancery, with the dream of setting it right” (7th August 1856).
He wrote to Mrs Winter: “A necessity is upon me . . . of wandering about in my old wild way, to think. I could no more resist this on Sunday or yesterday than a man can dispense with food. . . . Whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go my way whether or no” (3rd April 1855).
In September 1855 he was at Folkestone, whence he wrote to Mrs Watson about Little Dorrit, to which he at the time intended to give the name Nobody’s Fault: “The new story is everywhere—heaving in the sea, flying with the clouds, blowing in the wind. . . . I settle to nothing, and wonder (in the old way) at my own incomprehensibility” (16th September 1855).
In 1857 he came into possession of Gad’s Hill, and thus fulfilled the dream of his childhood.
There are many instances of his kindness to would-be authors. In a letter to a lady he says that he cannot tell her with what reluctance he gives an opinion against her story, in spite of much that is good in it. And about an article by another lady he writes to F. Stone (who approached Dickens on her behalf). He says: “These Notes are destroyed by too much smartness. For the love of God don’t condescend! Don’t assume the attitude of saying, ‘See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is.’”
In a letter to Miss Hogarth from Dublin he wrote: “The success at Belfast has been equal to the success here. Enormous! . . . and the personal affection there was something overwhelming. . . . I have never seen men go in to cry undisguisedly as they did at that reading yesterday afternoon. They made no attempt whatever to hide it, and certainly cried more than the women. As to the ‘Boots’ [at the Holly Tree Inn] at night, and ‘Mrs Gamp’ too, it was just one roar with me and them, for they made me laugh so that sometimes I could not compose my face to go on.”
With regard to the crowds at his readings he wrote to Miss Dickens: “Arthur [221] told you, I suppose, that he had his shirt-front and waistcoat torn off last night. He was perfectly enraptured in consequence. Our men got so knocked about that he gave them five shillings apiece on the spot. John passed several minutes upside against a wall, with his head among the people’s boots.”
We hear of his readings in a letter to John Forster: “I cannot tell you what the demonstrations of personal
regard and respect are; how the densest and most uncomfortably packed crowd will be hushed in an instant when I show my face.”