The first two weeks of 1868 were quite frenetic for me and I suspect that I was happier then than at any time in my life. My letters to Mother (and scores of other friends and associates) were not exaggerations; No Thoroughfare was indeed—despite Charles Dickens’s long-distance dismissal of it—a bona fide success. I continued making at least bi-weekly visits to Gad’s Hill Place, enjoying the meals with Georgina, Charley and Katey (when Charley was there), Dickens’s son Charley and his wife, Bessie (who were there often), Dickens’s daughter Mamie (who was always there), as well as such occasional visitors as Percy Fitzgerald or William Macready and his lovely second wife.
I invited all of them to come to London to see No Thoroughfare. Through my many letters, I invited others such as William Holman Hunt, T. H. Hills, Nina Lehmann, Sir Edward Landseer, and John Forster.
I invited all of these people and more to dine with me at Number 90 Gloucester Place on Saturday, 18 January—not in evening costume, I emphasised—and to go from there to the theatre and to sit in the spacious author’s box with me to enjoy the play. Caroline was delighted and began setting the three servants to with a metaphorical whip getting the huge house ready. She also spent hours conversing with the French cook.
Mother wrote—actually, she had dictated the letter to Charley, who had stopped in at Tunbridge Wells for the day—to say that she had been visited by a certain Dr Ramseys, a physician visiting a family in the village who had heard of Mother’s problems and who, after a thorough examination, diagnosed her symptoms as heart congestion, gave her three medicines for the problem (which, she said, did seem to help), and recommended that she move out of the cottage in the village because of all the hammering going on there during renovations. When she told him about her beloved Bentham Hill Cottage nearby in the country outside the village, Dr Ramseys urged her to move there immediately. Charley added a note telling me that Mother had also invited her former housekeeper and cook and sometime neighbor, Mrs Wells, to join her at Bentham Hill Cottage, which was a relief to both Charley and me, since someone would then always be there to watch over her while she recovered from these minor problems.
Mother added that Dr Ramseys said that she required absolute rest and that—in both his medications and future ministrations—he would do everything in his power to provide it for her. In a postscript she added that poor Dr Ramseys himself had suffered terrible burns in a fire many years before, that the pains and scars were ever with him, and thus had dedicated his life to alleviating the pain of others.
OUR HOPES OF A GLORIOUS SALE of theatrical rights for No Thoroughfare to an American producer were dashed forever when a letter arrived from Dickens: “Pirates are producing their own wretched versions in all directions.”
Dickens insisted that he had done everything in his power to place my script, or at least the rights to our collaboration, in honest hands—to the point that he registered No Thoroughfare as the property of Ticknor and Fields, his Boston publishers, but I had my doubts about the sincerity (or at least urgency) of his efforts. His earlier letters had, after all, condemned my final script as “far too long” and, even more irritating, as “perhaps crossing the line into mere melodrama,” so I half-suspected Dickens of waiting until he himself could revise the play… or create a new adaptation from scratch. (This suspicion was borne out the following June when Dickens did precisely that, writing a new version of the play with Fechter’s help for a premiere in Paris. It failed.)
At any rate, Dickens went on to say in his letter that the Museum Theatre in Boston had rushed a theatrical adaptation of our story onto the stage an astonishing ten days after the original tale arrived in the United States. This was pure piracy, of course—and Dickens insisted that he had prodded Ticknor and Fields into threatening an injunction—but the pirates, knowing that, given Americans’ easy acceptance of such piracy, there would be an outcry against Dickens if he persisted, called the publisher’s bluff and went on with their abominably bad version. “Then,” continued Dickens in his letter, “the noble host of pirates rushed in, and it is being done, in some mangled form or other, everywhere.”
Ah, well. I paid little heed to this distant disaster. As I had written to Mother on 30 December—“The play is bringing money. It is a real success—we shall all be rich.”
When I had visited her on the second of January, I brought legal papers for her to sign so that Charley and I might get our fair share of the £5,000 from Aunt Davis that was the source of her annual income— or be able to assign it to someone we chose—should Mother die before we did.
Everything proceeded at breakneck speed towards the gala dinner at Gloucester Place and theatre party immediately afterward. Caroline and Carrie had decorated the huge house as if there were to be a royal coronation there, and our food bill that week equalled six months of our regular purchases. No matter. It was a time to celebrate.
On a Thursday, I wrote:
90Gloucester Place
Portman Square W.
Jan 17th, 1868
My dear Mother,
It was a great relief to me and to Charley to hear that you had made the move, and established yourself again under Mrs Wells’s care. I am not surprised to hear that you are terribly fatigued by the exertion. But when you have rested I hope and trust you will begin to feel the benefit of this change. Let me hear—in two lines—how you go on—and how soon you will let me come (or let Charley come) and see you in the new place. Remember that the quiet and the freedom from London interruptions are sure to help me to get on with my work. Also—when you can write without too much trouble—let me hear when it will be convenient for me to send a small supply of brandy and wine to Bentham Hill Cottage.
The play goes on wonderfully. Every night the Theatre is crammed. This speculation on the public taste is paying, and promises long to pay me, from fifty to fifty-five pounds a week. So make yourself easy about money matters.
I am getting to nearly halfway through The Moonstone.
No more news at present. Goodbye.
Yours ever afftly WC
LITTLE DID I KNOW that this would be the last letter I should ever write to my dear mother.
That second week of the new year had been so congested with work on The Moonstone and theatrical-related labours that once again I had to move my night at King Lazaree’s from Thursday to Friday. Detective Hatchery did not seem to mind—he said it was easier to find the night away from his regular duties for Inspector Field on Friday than on Thursday—so once again I treated my huge bodyguard to an excellent dinner (this one at the Blue Posts tavern on Cork Street) before he led me into the darkness of the dockside slums and escorted me safely to that terrible place of cold granite and graves that Dickens had long since christened St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.
Hatchery had a new book to read through that night of vigil—Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, I noticed. Dickens had once mentioned to me that he liked the way Thackeray had arbitrarily divided the large novel into three “Books” and had borrowed the idea for all of his own subsequent books. But I did not mention that small professional item to Hatchery, since I was in a hurry to get below.
King Lazaree greeted me as warmly as always. (I had mentioned to him the week before that I might be coming on Friday rather than Thursday, and he had assured me in his perfect English that I would be welcome and expected any time.) Lazaree and his large Chinese guard showed me to my cot and handed me my opium pipe, prepared and lighted, as always. Filled with good feeling about the day and my life—knowing that this pleasurable sense of satisfaction would be enlarged a hundredfold during my hours under the pipe—I closed my eyes and allowed myself, for the hundredth time in the safety of that deep-sheltered cot, to drift up and away on the rising, curling smoke of amplified sensation.