The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly

Author:Helena Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

8 ENTER RUMOUR (1855–62)

A carte de visite of Frances, Maria, and Ellen Ternan. (History and Art Collection/Alamy)

To celebrate his 43rd birthday on 7 February 1855, Dickens went walking across the north Kent marshes with a friend – from Gravesend, on the River Thames, towards Rochester, on the Medway, a journey of about seven miles. It was cold. The previous week had seen heavy snowfall and out in the open country the thaw had not set in. The main road, with the way cleared, and the snow piled up on either side, had been turned into a glassy corridor, walls of ice and frozen wheel-ruts crunching into slush under his boots as he went. Once he was clear of Gravesend, there were hardly any houses to be seen, only one or two, lonely in that landscape, and looking back, the snow and the wide grey river, the white blanket on the marshes intersected by the dark lines of dyke and ditch. In one of those houses, in the tiny village of Chalk, he and Catherine had spent their honeymoon and had lived for several months after the birth of their first child. That child was now eighteen, and struggling to decide on a career.

Two miles further on, he would have come to higher ground – Gads Hill, a pub, a handful of houses clustered around it, the closest, immediately opposite, being built of red brick, large but not too large; plain, solid.

This ‘very house’ had been, Dickens explained in a breathless letter written just two days after his birthday, ‘literally “a dream of my childhood” ’.339 Possibly it had been, though for little legs it’s quite a distance from Chatham, four miles by the most direct route. The children of the early nineteenth century were, I’m sure, better walkers than many of today’s children are, but it’s difficult to believe young Charles can have often passed the house on foot. The turnpike road ran right past the door, however, so it’s likely that he had seen it several times before. Another attraction was something he would mention a lot later on; Gads Hill features in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 – it’s where Prince Hal and his friends mount a ‘hilarious’ prank, getting Falstaff to rob travellers, and then attacking him and taking the money. The house was for sale.

That same day, two days after Dickens turned 43, he received a letter from Maria Beadnell, now Maria Winter, the woman with whom he had fancied himself in love two decades before. In a novel the coincidence would be meaningful, each reminder of the past intensifying the other, making it seem more significant. In real life, too, it’s possible that her letter would, two years, even a week earlier, have received a different response.

Instead, Dickens wrote back to her, telling her how ‘Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream’ when he recognised the handwriting on the envelope, and how he had ‘opened it with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love’ and read ‘with perfect delight’.

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