Yours ever afftly WC
Charley proposes crossing to you from Gadshill on Friday in
Christmas week.
As it was, I spent part of Christmas Day afternoon and evening with Mother in her cottage in Tunbridge Wells—she spent most of our time together complaining of her nerves and her heartburn, and also of ominous strangers in the neighbourhood—and then I returned to London on the earliest possible train the next morning.
Fechter was his usual first-night ruin in the hours before the curtain opened. His vomiting due to stage fright was almost continuous in the last two hours, so that his poor dresser was absolutely worn out from running to and fro with his basin.
Finally I suggested a few drops of laudanum to calm the anxious actor. Unable to speak, Fechter answered by putting out his tongue. The colour of it had turned, under the nervous terror that possessed him, to the metallic blackness of the tongue of a parrot.
Once the curtain went up, however, Fechter found his voice and stride as the unspeakable villain Obenreizer.
I should report that I felt no anxiety whatsoever. I knew that the play was to be a triumph, and it was.
On 27 December I wrote—from the offices of All the Year Round at No. 26 Wellington Street:
My dear Mother,
I have a moment to tell you that the Play last night was an immense success. The audience were delighted—and the actors were excellent.
I have got the proofs which you sent me back quite safe.
Charley is, I suppose, with you today.
If you can write, tell me how you are, and what day next week I may come back to you? I sincerely hope and trust you are not suffering so much as when I was with you.
Love to Charley.
Ever yours affly
WC
The night of the play was the only Thursday of 1867 on which I had been forced to miss my weekly excursion to King Lazaree’s subterranean den. But I had made prior arrangements to make up for it on that Friday, 27 December—which is one reason I wrote to Mother from Dickens’s rooms at the magazine, since I had told Caroline and Martha both that I would be spending the night there—and Detective Hatchery had been kind enough to shift his night of work for me from Boxing Day to the Friday following.
CAROLINE G— WANTED marriage. This I would not consider. Martha R—, on the other hand, wanted only a baby. (Or babies, plural.) She made no demands for marriage, since the fiction of “Mr and Mrs Dawson”—her world-travelling merchant of a husband who rarely spent time at his home on Bolsover Street—was sufficient for her.
It was about this time, during the success of No Thoroughfare and near my completion of The Moonstone, and especially after a second secret meeting with Mr Joseph Clow at a slightly less expensive London restaurant, that I began considering the possibility of agreeing to Martha’s wishes.
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.”