CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The premiere of my play Black and White was on a Sunday, 29 March, 1869. I hovered backstage in an advanced stage of nerves, too agitated even to gauge the audience response by the sound or absence of laughter and applause. All I could hear was the beating of my heart and the pounding of my pulse in my aching temples. My stomach revolted frequently in the carefully calculated ninety-one minutes that the play ran (not so long as to bore the audience, not so brief as to make them feel short-changed, all according to the accursed, hovering Fechter’s calculations). Borrowing an idea from Fechter—who had called for the same boy earlier, before the curtain went up—I had the lad follow me around with a basin. I was forced to resort to it several times before the end of Act III.
Peeking out through the curtains, I could see my family and friends crowding the author’s box—Carrie looking especially lovely in a new gown given to her by the Ward family (for whom she still worked); my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey; Frank Beard and his wife; Fred and Nina Lehmann; Holman Hunt (who had attended Mother’s funeral in my place); and others. In the lower omnibus-box closer to the stage was Charles Dickens and all of his family that was not scattered to Australia or India or to lonely exile (Catherine)—Georgina, his daughter Mamie, his son Charley and his wife, his son Henry, home for a break from Cambridge, and more.
I could not bear to watch their reaction. I went back to cowering backstage, the boy with the basin scrambling to stay close.
Finally the last curtain came down, the Adelphi Theatre exploded with wild applause, and Fechter and his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq, went out to take their bows and then to summon out the rest of the cast. Everyone was smiling. The ovation continued unabated and I could hear the cries of “Author! Author!”
Fechter came back to lead me out, and I strode onto the stage with as much an appearance of modest aplomb as I could muster.
Dickens was standing and appeared to be leading the crowd’s wild applause. He was wearing his spectacles and was so close to the stage that the limelights reflected in them turnd his eye sockets into circles of blue fire.
We had a hit. Everyone said so. The newspapers the next day congratulated me on having—at last—found the perfect formula for theatrical success by mastering, as they said, “the essential business of neat, tight, dramatic construction.”
No Thoroughfare had run for six months. I fully expected Black and White to run (with a full house) for a year, perhaps eighteen months.
But after three weeks, empty seats began appearing like leprous lesions on a saint’s face. After six weeks, Fechter and his troupe were emoting to a half-empty house. The play closed after a mere sixty days, less than half the run of the far clumsier and collaborative No Thoroughfare.
I blamed the bovine stupidity of London playgoers. We had laid a pure pearl at their feet and they had wondered where the rancid oyster meat had gone. I also blamed those elements in Fechter’s original scenario for what I (and certain French newspapers) called the overly “Oncle Tommerie” aspects of the play. England in the early 1860s (just as America shortly before it) had gone ecstatically mad about Uncle Tom’s Cabin—everyone in England with a threadbare suit of evening clothes had seen the thing twice—but interest in slavery and its cruelties had faded since then, especially after the American Civil War.
And in the meantime, Fechter’s “Triumph” was coming close to driving me to Marshalsea debtors prison—although Marshalsea itself had been closed and partially torn down decades earlier. When he promised “copious backers” for Black and White, he essentially had me in mind. And I had complied—secretly pouring a fortune into expenses, actors’ salaries, artists’ fees for backdrops, musicians’ fees, et cetera.
I had also been lending more and more money to the always-insolvent (yet always-living-well) Charles Albert Fechter, and it did not console me in the least to know that Dickens had also been subsidising the actor’s extravagant style of living (to the combined tune, I knew now, of more than £20,000).
When Black and White closed after sixty days, Fechter shrugged and went off in search of new roles. I received the bills. When I finally cornered Fechter about what he owed me, he replied with his usual childish cunning—“My dear Wilkie, you know I love you. Do you think I should love you so if I were not firmly convinced you would do the same thing in my place?”
This response made me remember that I still owned poor Hatchery’s pistol with its four remaining bullets.
So, to pay the bills and to begin digging myself out of the debt that had so soon followed and replaced true financial security (with Mother’s inheritance and my earnings from The Moonstone and other projects now all but gone), I did what any writer would do in such an emergency: I drank more laudanum, took my nightly injections of morphine, drank much wine, bedded Martha more frequently, and began a new novel.
DICKENS MAY HAVE LEAPT to his feet applauding during the premiere of my Black and White, but a month later his reading tour had him flat on his back.
In Blackburn he was giddy and in Bolton he staggered and almost fell, although months later I overheard him telling his American friend James Fields, “… only Nelly observed that I had staggered and that my eye had failed and only she dared to tell me.”
Nelly was Ellen Ternan, also still referred to by Dickens as “the Patient” because of the slight injuries she had suffered at Staplehurst four years earlier. Now he was the patient. And she was still travelling with him from time to time. This was interesting news. What a terrible and final turning-point it is in any ageing man’s life when one’s young lover becomes one’s caretaker.
I knew from Frank Beard that Dickens had been compelled to write him describing these symptoms. Beard, in turn, had been sufficiently alarmed that he had departed by rail for Preston the very afternoon he received the letter.
Beard arrived, examined Dickens, and announced that there could be no more readings. The tour was over.
“Are you certain?” asked Dolby, who was in the room. “The house is sold out and it is too late to refund the tickets.”
“If you insist on Dickens taking the platform tonight,” said the physician, glowering at Dolby almost as fiercely as had Macready, “I will not guarantee but that he goes through life dragging a foot after him.”
Beard brought Dickens back to London that very night and the next morning had arranged a consultation with the famous physician Sir Thomas Watson. After a very thorough examination and interrogation of the Inimitable on his symptoms, Watson announced, “The state thus described shows plainly that C. D. has been on the brink of an attack of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of apoplexy.”
Dickens rejected these dire predictions, saying in the following months that he had been suffering only from over-fatigue. Still, he called a pause in his tour. Dickens had finished seventy-four of his planned one hundred readings (this was only two fewer than the number that had driven him to near-collapse in America).
And yet, after a few weeks of relative rest at Gad’s Hill Place and in London, the Inimitable began pressing Dr Watson to allow him to salvage his rescheduled tour. Sir Thomas shook his head, warned against the writer’s over-optimism, prescribed extreme caution, and said, “Preventative measures are always invidious, for when the most successful, need for them is the least apparent.”
Dickens won the argument, of course. He always won. But he agreed that his final readings—his true farewell readings—were to number no more than twelve, were to involve no railway travel whatsoever, and would necessarily have to be delayed until 1870, eight months away.