Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

Author:Claire Tomalin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Irish, Welsh, English, General, Literary, Literary Criticism, Scottish, Biography & Autobiography, European
ISBN: 9780141971452
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-10-06T08:14:36+00:00

Dickens took a lease on Tavistock House in 1851, intending to keep it for life.

After this busy and distressing time the Dickens family could at last get to Broadstairs, although with many returns to London. Dickens went to the Derby with Wills, visited Charley at Eton, attended the Duke of Devonshire’s supper and ball for the cast of the play, and a banquet given by Talfourd in belated honour of Copperfield, to which Thackeray and Tennyson both came. There were more theatricals, with the first performance of the farce he and Mark Lemon had concocted together, Mr Nightingale’s Diary, which gave them both the chance to appear in many different disguises and to ad-lib to their heart’s content, Dickens wildly impersonating Mrs Gamp and Sam Weller at different moments. It was a big success with the public in London and the provincial towns to which they took it, and allowed him to prove once and for all that he could rival the man who had first inspired him, Charles Mathews, master of the monopolylogues.

In July he finally acquired another large London house with a garden, Tavistock House in Tavistock Square, for £1,500. It was in very poor condition and needed a great deal of work before the family could move in. His friend, the impoverished artist Frank Stone, had lived in it with his family, and Dickens now lent them Devonshire Terrace. He took a fifty-year lease on Tavistock House, saying he intended it to last out his life, and sent in an army of workmen.27 Back in Broadstairs, he invited Forster for three sunny weeks in September, then in October Stone came down with Augustus Egg.

Egg had been in love with Georgina for some time and now proposed to her. He was a handsome and sweet-natured man, a good friend of Dickens and a successful painter who could well afford to support a wife, but although she liked him she turned him down. Dickens told Miss Coutts later that he asked himself ‘Whether it is, or is not a pity that she is all she is to me and mine instead of brightening up a good little man’s house’, but Georgina, after nine years with the Dickens family, was too much in thrall to his charm and energy to consider any alternative to her position in his life.28 She was still his pet at twenty-four, but she was a pet with a steely centre, and in the organization of the household her voice was second only to his, and poor ailing Catherine let her rule. Georgy’s adoration flattered him and he flattered her in return, saying she was intellectually far superior to Egg, and that her capacities were greater than those of ‘five out of six’ men.29 With him she travelled, entertained and was entertained, enjoying an enviable way of life at the side of a great man. The children loved their aunt, but she and Catherine were both regularly required to be at Dickens’s side when he was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.