I mentioned earlier that my father decided when we were still quite young that Charley, not I, would be the real inheritor of his artistic talents and career, despite the crib-side assurances of Sir David Wilkie, my namesake. Father enrolled Charley in a private art school, spent much extra time with my brother during our long trips to Europe—analysing paintings in cathedrals and museums (although my father loathed entering Papist churches)—and helped Charley gain acceptance into the prestigious Royal Academy.
Father never really spoke to me about my future or how I would fill it, other than one suggestion, when I was thirteen, that I might consider going to Oxford with a view to entering the Church.
It was when I was thirteen, in Rome during one of our long family stays in Europe, that I experienced my first full love adventure. I remember telling the details to Charles Dickens precisely seventeen years later, during my next visit to Rome and my first trip there with the famous author, and Dickens was so pleased with the amatory precociousness of the affair that he later told me he had informed his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, sparing her, he said, only the details of “how the affair had proceeded to the utmost extremities.” He chuckled when he described how Georgina had blushed when Dickens had summarised my first complete physical encounter by saying, “Our young Willy came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.”
At any rate, even at age thirteen I had no intention of entering Oxford with an eye on going into the Church.
Artists are notoriously sensitive—at least to their own feelings—and young Charley was more sensitive than most. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a doleful child, constantly brooding about this or that, and both of my parents—but especially my mother—took this incessant unhappiness (bordering on sullenness) as a sign of his artistic genius. He also disliked women and girls.
I interrupt here, Dear Reader, to beg your indulgence on this point. Were this not a memoir consigned to the distant future, I would not mention it at all, but—as perhaps you have already detected in this memoir—there was a deep and constant tension between Charles Dickens and his son-in-law, Charles Collins, and I fear that this small matter of Charley’s aversion to women (if not outright misogyny) may have played a part in Dickens’s prejudice. You see, however such things have played out in your distant time, it was not uncommon in our era for young men to go through long periods where they much preferred the company of boys and men to that of women. Given the limitations to education of women in our time, much less the obvious difficulties of the fairer sex in acquiring and mastering more difficult aspects of learning throughout history, it was logical that thoughtful, sensitive men should focus their energies and intercourse on other men.
I remember once when Charley was about fifteen and I came across some of his sketch diaries, left lying about in his room in an uncharacteristic manner (he was always secretive and neat), and I joked with him about the fact that all of the figure studies in his drawing book were of nude men.
Charley had blushed crimson but said with real emotion, “I hate drawing women, Willy. Don’t you? I mean, they are all heavy and pendulous and baggy and bulbous where the human body should not be. How much more delight I take in firm, flat buttocks and muscular thighs and flat bellies and masculine chests, rather than those appalling feminine absences and fleshy protuberances and miserable saggings.”
I was searching for some humourous comment worthy of a sophisticated nineteen-year-old gentleman such as myself when Charley went on, “I mean, Willy, Michelangelo’s female nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—even Eve—are actually all paintings of naked men. Even the great Michelangelo disdained nude women! What do you say to that, Brother?”
I was tempted to say that I had been there in Rome that hot, muggy day years before when our father taught both of us that salient fact. But I resisted the temptation. All I said that afternoon in my brother’s room as he tidied up the sketch diaries and set them away in a locked drawer was—“Those are very good drawings, Charley. Very good indeed.” I did not comment at all upon the fact that not only had my brother violated the unwritten rule that an artist was not to show male genitalia in one’s figure drawings—leaving an absence of graphite if nothing else, drawing a modest loincloth the preferred method—but Charley had drawn some of the male organs in an obvious state of excitement.
It was not too many months after this encounter that some revelation of the sort—perhaps a similar indiscretion in Charles’s drawings, or in his comments—became apparent to my father. I remember Charley being called in to my father’s studio one morning and the door being closed and then repeated screams from my brother as my father whipped the sensitive lad with either a branch, cane, or T square.
After my father died, I believe that Charley and I both would have enjoyed living with my mother in her wonderful home at Hanover Terrace for the rest of our lives. My liaison with Caroline G— took me away from that safe haven. And yet, for months and even years after I moved in with Caroline and her daughter, Harriet—how I loved the coincidence of that name! — I would return to my mother’s home to write and address letters to our mutual friends (my mother’s and mine) from there even as I wrote to other friends from my new home. Mother did not know of Caroline’s existence, of course; or if she did know, she never let on that she did. It was true that I regaled her with many tales of my bachelor life apart from her, never mentioning any woman, much less the widowed Caroline, but it was also true that my mother never once suggested that she visit my various homes during all the years I shared them with Mrs G— and Harriet.
I was still living with Mother when I met Dickens in 1851. As a reporter later wrote of Dickens and me during that early period—“Both were lively men, passionate about the theatre, keen on drinks and company and excursions, on being intensely gay, relaxing strenuously, responding vehemently.” And after our excursions and strenuous relaxations and vehement responses, Dickens would return home to his increasingly bovine wife and I would return home to my mother.
Charley would have lived with our mother until her death and perhaps remained in her home until his own death, I am quite sure, if it had not been for his marriage to Kate Dickens.
None of us shall ever know all the reasons for Charley’s sudden proposal to Kate in the late spring of 1860. In truth, from what I can gather, it was Kate who proposed marriage to Charley that spring. It was certainly Kate who hurried their wedding along to mid-summer—despite her father’s outspoken and vehement opposition, not only to the date of the wedding but to the fact of it.
Charley had not had a long history of courtship and wooing. In fact, up to his thirty-second year (which was to be the year of his marriage), he had continued to avoid women. Whispers abounded that spring and summer that Katey Dickens had fallen in love with and had been pursuing Edmund Yates, a younger friend of the Inimitable who had helped promote the falling-out between Dickens and Thackeray by writing a profoundly unflattering profile of the old writer. A contemporary had described Yates as “… very fascinating too. Superficially, mind you.”