Part 13

_Tuesday._—I find it very difficult today to write at all. Mr. Dickens is on his bed and has been unable to rise, in spite of efforts all day long.... Mr. Norton has been here and we have been obliged to go out, but our hearts have been in that other room all the time where our dear friend lies suffering.... Oh! these last times—what heartbreak there is in the words. I lay awake since early this morning (though we did not leave him until half-past twelve) feeling as if when I arose we must say good-bye. How relieved I felt to brush the tears away and know there was one more day, but even that gain was lessened when I found he could not rise and even this must be a day of separation too. When Jamie told him last night he felt like erecting a statue to him because of his heroism in doing his duty so well, he laughed and said, “No, don’t; take down one of the old ones instead!”

The diary goes on to express the genuine sorrow of Mrs. Fields and her husband at parting from a friend who had so completely absorbed their affection, but in terms which the diarist herself would have been the first to regard as more suitable for manuscript than for print. The pages that contain them throw more light upon Mrs. Fields—a warm and tender light it is—than upon Dickens. There is, however, one paragraph, written after the Fieldses had returned to Boston from New York, which tells something both of Dickens and of Queen Victoria, in whose personality the public interest appears to be perpetual; and with this passage the quotations from the diary shall end.

_Friday, April 24._—After the Press dinner in New York Mr. Dickens repeated all his speech to me, as I believe I have said above, never dropping a word. “I feel,” he said, “as if I were listening to the sound of my own voice as I recall it. A very curious sensation.” Jamie asked him if Curtis was quite right in the facts of his speech. He said, “Not altogether, as, for instance, in that matter about the Queen and our little play, ‘Frozen Deep.’ We had played it many times with considerable success, when the Queen heard of it and Colonel Phipps (?) called upon me and said he wished the Queen could see the play. Was there no hall which would be appropriate for the occasion? What did I think of Buckingham Palace? I replied that could not be, for my daughters played in the piece and I had never asked myself to be presented at court nor had I ever taken the proper steps to introduce them there, and of course they could not go as amateur performers where they had never been as visitors. This seemed to trouble him a good deal, so I said I would find some hall which would be appropriate for the purpose and would appoint an evening, which I did immediately, taking the Gallery of Illustration and having it fitted up for the purpose. I then drew up a list of the company, chiefly of artists, literary and scientific men, and interesting ladies, which I caused to be submitted to the Queen, begging her to reject or add as she thought proper, setting aside forty seats for the royal party. The whole thing went off finely until after the first play was over, when the Queen sent round a request that I would come and see her. This was considered an act of immense condescension and kindness on her part, and the little party behind the scenes were delighted. Unfortunately, I had just prepared myself for the farce which was to follow and was already standing in motley dress with a red nose. I knew I could not appear in that plight, so I begged leave to be excused on that ground. However, that was forgiven and all passed off well, although the large expense of the whole thing of course fell on me, which amounted to one hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds. Several years after, when Prince Albert died, the Queen sent to me for a copy of the play. I told Colonel Phipps the play had never been printed and was the property of a gentleman, Mr. Wilkie Collins. Then would I have it copied? So I had a very beautiful copy made and bound in the most perfect manner, and presented to her Majesty. Whereupon the Princess of Prussia, seeing this, asked for another for herself. I said I would again ask the permission of Mr. Collins and again I had a beautiful copy made with great labor. Then the Queen sent to ask the price of the books. I sent word that my friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, was a gentleman who would, I was sure, hear to nothing of the kind and begged her acceptance of the volumes.” “How has the Queen shown her gratitude for such favors?” I said. “We have never heard anything more from her since that time.” Good Mr. Dolby said quietly, “You know in England we call her ‘Her Ungracious Majesty.’” Certainly one would not have believed it possible for even a queen’s nature to have become so hardened as this to the kindly acts of any human being, not to speak of the efforts of one of her most noble subjects and perhaps the greatest genius of our time.

If any reader wishes to follow the further course of the friendship between Dickens and the Fieldses, he has only to turn to “Yesterdays With Authors,” in which many letters written by Dickens after April, 1868, are quoted, and many remembrances of their intercourse when the Fieldses visited England in 1869, the year before Dickens’s death, are presented. Here it will suffice to quote one out of several passages in Mrs. Fields’s diary relating to Dickens, and to bring to light a single characteristic little note from Dickens, not hitherto printed.

On Wednesday, May 12, 1869, Mrs. Fields wrote of Dickens:—

He drove us through the Parks in the fashionable afternoon hour and afterward to dine with him at the St. James, where Fechter and Dolby were the only outsiders. Mrs. Collins was like one of Stothard’s pictures. I felt this more even after refreshing my memory of Stothard’s coloring at the Kensington Museum yesterday. C. D. told me that the book of all others which he read perpetually and of which he never tired, the book which always appeared more imaginative in proportion to the fresh imagination he brings to it, a book for inexhaustiveness to be placed before every other book, is Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” When he was writing “A Tale of Two Cities,” he asked Carlyle if he might see some book to which he referred in his history. Whereat Carlyle sent down to him all his books, and Dickens read them faithfully; but the more he read the more he was astounded to find how the facts but passed through the alembic of Carlyle’s brain and had come out and fitted themselves each as a part of the one great whole, making a compact result, indestructible and unrivalled, and he always found himself turning away from the books of reference and rereading this marvellous new growth from those dry bones with renewed wonder.

The note from Dickens read:—

GAD’S HILL PLACE HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT

_Wednesday Sixth October, 1869_

MY DEAR FIELDS:—

Delighted to enjoy the prospect of seeing you and yours on Saturday. Wish you had been at Birmingham. Wish you were not going home. Wish you had had nothing to do with the Byron matter.[28] Wish Mrs. Stowe was in the pillory. Wish Fechter had gone over when he ought. Wish he may not go under when he oughtn’t.

With love,

Ever affectionately yours,

CHARLES DICKENS

Among the papers preserved by Mrs. Fields there are, besides the manuscript letters of Dickens himself, many letters written after his death by his sister-in-law, Miss Georgina Hogarth. From bits of these, and especially from a letter written by Dickens’s daughter, while his death was still a poignant grief, the affection in which he was held in his own household is touchingly imaged forth.

“All the Old World,” wrote Miss Dickens, “all the New World loved him. He never had anything to do with a living soul without attaching them to him. If strangers could so love him, you can tell a little what he must have been to his own flesh and blood. It is a glorious inheritance to have such blood flowing in one’s veins. I’m so glad I have never changed my name.”

From one of Miss Hogarth’s letters a single passage may be taken, since it adds something of first-hand knowledge to the accessible facts about one piece of Dickens’s writing which—in so far as the editor of these pages is aware—has never seen the light of print. This letter was written in the September after Dickens’s death:

“I must now tell you about the beautiful little New Testament which he wrote for his children. I am sorry to say it is _never to be published_. It happens that he expressed that decided determination only last autumn to me, so we have no alternative. He wrote it years ago when his elder children were quite little. It is about sixteen short chapters, chiefly adapted from St. Luke’s Gospel, most beautiful, most touching, most simple, as such a narrative should be. He never would have it printed and I used to read it to the little boys in MS. before they were old enough to read _writing_ themselves. When Charley’s children became old enough to have this kind of teaching, I promised Bessy (his wife) that I would make her a copy of this History, and I determined to do it as a Christmas Gift for her last year, but before I began my copy I asked Charles if he did not think it would be well for him to have it printed, at all events for _private_ circulation, if he would not publish it (though I think it is a pity he would never do that!). He said he would look over the MS. and take a week or two to consider. At the end of the time he gave it back to me and said he had decided _never to publish it—or even have it privately printed_. He said I might make a copy for Bessy, or for any one of his children, _but for no one else_, and that he also begged that we would never even lend the MS., or a copy of it, to any one to take out of the house; so there is no doubt about his _strong feeling_ on the subject, and we must obey it. I made my copy for Bessy and gave it to her last Christmas. After his death the original MS. became _mine_. As it was never published, of course it did not count as one of Mr. Forster’s MSS., and therefore it was one of his private papers, which were left to me. So I gave it at once to Mamie, who was, I thought, the most natural and proper possessor of it, as being his eldest daughter. You must come to England and read it, dear Friend! as we must not send it to you! We should be glad to see you and to show it to you and Mr. Fields in our own house.”

Miss Hogarth must have known full well that, if this manuscript Gospel according to Charles Dickens was to be shown to anybody outside his immediate circle, he himself would have chosen the Charles Street friends from what he called—to them—his “native Boston.”

VI

STAGE FOLK AND OTHERS

Had anyone crossed the Charles Street threshold of the Fieldses with the expectation of encountering within none but the New England Augustans, he would soon have found himself happily disillusioned, even at a time when there was no Dickens in Boston. As it was in reality, so must it be in these pages, if they are to fulfill their purpose of restoring a vanished scene, the variety of which must indeed be counted among its most distinctive characteristics. The pages that follow will accordingly serve to illustrate the familiar fact that the pudding of a “family party” is often rendered the more acceptable by the introduction of a few plums not plucked from the domestic tree.

Mrs. Fields once noted in her diary the circumstance that, when her husband came to Boston from Portsmouth at the age of fourteen, and began to work as a “boy” in the bookshop of Carter & Hendee, the second of these employers had a box at the theatre and, to keep his young employees happy, used constantly to ask one or more of them to see a play in his company. Thus enabled in his youth to see such actors as the elder Booth, Fanny Kemble and her father, and many others of the best players to be seen in America at the time, Fields acquired a love of the theatre and of stage folk which stood him in good stead throughout his life. A certain exuberance in his own nature must have sought a response in social contacts other than those of the straiter sect of his local contemporaries. In men and women of the stage, in authors from beyond the compass of the local horizon, writers with whom he formed relations in his double capacity of editor and publisher, in artists and public men outside the immediate “literary” circle of Boston, Fields took an unceasing delight, shared by his wife, and still communicable through her journals.

From their pages, then, I propose to assemble here a group of passages relating first to stage folk, and then to others, and, since these records so largely explain themselves, to burden them as lightly as possible with explanations. Slender as certain of the entries are, each contributes something to a recovery of the time and of the persons that graced it.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, says his biographer, used to declare in his later years, “Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated.” His intimate relation with Boston began in 1865, through the publication of a “Blue and Gold” edition of his poems by the firm of which Fields was a member, and the beginning of his editorship of “Every Saturday,” an illustrated journal issued under the same auspices. His range of acquaintance before that time was such that when the “plating” process began,—it was really more like a transmutation of metals,—he sometimes served as a sympathetic link between his new Boston and his old New York. It was in New York, only a few weeks after the assassination of Lincoln, that Aldrich appears in the diary, fresh from seeing his friend, Edwin Booth.

_May 3, 1865._—An hour before we went to tea, Aldrich came to see us. He said he and Launt Thompson were staying with Edwin Booth alternate nights during this season of sorrow; that it was “all right between himself and the lady he was about to marry.” Then he described to us the first night while Booth was plunged in agony. He said the gas was left burning low and the bed stood in the corner, just where he lay sleepless, looking at a fearfully good crayon portrait of Wilkes Booth which glared at him over the gas. Launt Thompson started with the mother from New York for Philadelphia, where she was going to join her daughter the day that John Wilkes was shot, and an extra containing the news was brought them by a newsboy as they stepped on the ferry-boat. The old woman would have the paper. “He was her ‘Johnny’ after all,” said T. B. A.

_Friday._—Have seen a lady who knows the person to whom Booth is engaged—said that her letter telling him she was true passed his letter of relinquishment on its way to Philadelphia. She thinks these two women have saved Booth. “I have been loved too well,” he said once....

Aldrich said we should not have been more astonished to hear he himself had done the terrible deed than he was to know Wilkes Booth had done it. “He was so gentle, gentler than I, and very handsome—a slight, beautiful figure,” and (as he described the face, it was the Greek Antinous kind of beauty there) I could not but reflect how the deed may deform the man. Nobody said he was beautiful after he was dead, but they laid a cloth upon the face and said how dreadful. It has been a strange experience to come among the people who know the family. I hoped I should be spared this, but the soul of good in things evil God means we should all see.

_Sunday, May 7._—A radiant day. Went to hear Dr. Bellows—a grand discourse. After service sat in his drawing-room and talked and then walked together.... He too has been to see Edwin Booth. The poor fellow said to him, “Ah! if it had been a fellow like myself who had done this dreadful deed, the world would not have wondered—but Johnny!!”

_Wednesday, January 3, 1866._—Dined with the Grahams and went to see Booth upon the occasion of his reappearance. The unmoved sadness of the young man and the unceasing plaudits of the house, half filled with his friends, were impressive and made it an occasion not to be forgotten.

_September 23, 1866._—Edwin Booth and the Aldriches came to tea; also Tom Beal and Professor Sterry Hunt of Montreal, the latter late. Booth came in the twilight while a magnificent red and purple and gold sunset was staining the bay. The schooners anchored just off shore had already lighted their lanterns and swung them in the rigging, and the full moon cast a silver sheen over the scene. I hear he passes every Sunday morning while here at the grave of his wife in Mt. Auburn. He seems deeply saddened. He was very pleasant, however, and ready to talk, and gave amusing imitations—in particular of his black boy, Jan, who possesses, he says, the one accomplishment of forgetting everything he ought to remember. One day a man with a deep tragic voice, “Forrestian,” he said, came to him with letters of introduction asking Mr. Booth to assist him as he was about to go to England. Mr. B. told him he knew no one in England and could do nothing for him, he was sorry. If he ever found it possible to do him a service he would with pleasure. With that Mr. B. turned,—they were in the vestibule of the theatre—and entered the box-office to speak to someone there; immediately he heard the deep voice addressing Jan with “You are with Mr. Booth.” “Yes,” responded Jan with real negro accent, “I’m wid Mr. Booth.” “In what capacity—are you studying?” “Yaas,” returned Jan, unblushingly, “I’se studyin’.” “What are you upon now?” “Oh, Richelieu, Hamlet, an’ a few of dese yer.” “Ah, I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with you while I am abroad. Would you have any objections?” “Oh, no, no objection, no objection at all.” “Thank you, sir; good-day, sir.” With that they parted and Jan came with his mouth stretched wide with laughter. “Massa, what is ‘correspond’? I told him I’d correspond, what’d he mean, correspond?” Then Jan, convulsed with his joke, roared and roared again. They are surely a merry race, but provoking enough sometimes. They are capable of real attachments, however; this man has been several times dismissed but will not go. Booth told everything very dramatically, but I was especially struck with his description of a man travelling with two shaggy terrier pups in the cars. He had them in a basket and hung them up over his head and then composed himself to sleep. Waking up half an hour later, he observed a man on the opposite side of the car, his eyes starting from his head and the very picture of dismay, as if a demon were looking at him. The owner of the pups, following the direction of the man’s eyes, looked up and saw the two pups had their heads out of the basket. He quietly made a sign for them to go back and they disappeared. The man’s gaze did not apparently slacken, however, but in a moment became still more horrified when the pups again looked out. “What’s the matter?” said the owner. “What are those?” said the man, pointing with trembling finger; “pray excuse me, but I have been on a spree and I thought they were demons.” He introduced the subject of the stage and talked of points in “Hamlet,” which he had made for the first time, but occasionally through accident had omitted. The next day he will be sure to be asked by letter or newspaper why he omits certain points which would be so excellent to make, _the writer thinks_. He has had a life of strange vicissitudes, as almost all actors. He referred last night to his frequent travels during childhood over the Alleghanies with his father, of long nights spent in this kind of travel; and once in Nevada he walked fifty miles chiefly through snow. “Why?” said Lilian. “Because I was hard up, Lily,” he continued; “I walked it too in stage boots which were too tight—it was misery.” ...

They had all gone by half-past ten, but we lay long awake thinking over poor Booth and his strange sad fortune. Hamlet, indeed!—although Forceythe Willson says, “I have been to see Mr. Hamlet play Booth.” Yes, perhaps when he is playing it for the 400th time with a bad cold, it may seem so; indeed I found it dullish myself, or his part, I mean, the other night; but he _did_ play it once—the night of his reappearance in New York.

_May 18, 1869._—Last Sunday evening Booth, Aldrich and his wife and sister, Dr. Holmes and Amelia and Launt Thompson, Leslie and ourselves took tea here together. In the evening came Mr. and Mrs. Emerson. We did have a rare and delightful symposium. Booth talked little as usual, and the next night went round to Aldrich’s and took himself off as he behaves in company!! Nevertheless he was glad to see Holmes, though every time Dr. H. addressed him across the table he seemed to receive an electric shock.

A chance meeting between William Warren and Fields in a lane at the seaside Manchester is recorded, with their talk, in the diary as early as 1865. Two entries in 1872 have to do with Jefferson, first alone and then with Warren. The friendship with Jefferson, begun so long ago, was continued until his death.