Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

each, I should never be so proud of any of them, as I am of Pickwick, feeling as I do, that it has made its own way.’ 19 He was beginning to plan the
Miscellany
for Bentley, and he had to tell Macrone he was withdrawing from writing ‘Gabriel Vardon’, and asked for his letter of agreement to be returned. He enforced his point by instructing his other publishers to refuse Macrone’s advertisements for ‘Gabriel Vardon’. Macrone gave way only when Dickens made over to him, for the low price of £100, the copyrights of both the first and second series of
Sketches by Boz
in December. 20 For the second series Dickens wrote a final piece, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’, intended to finish the book ‘with eclat’. It must be the worst in the series, a melodramatic tale of a drunkard given to ‘wild debauch’, imbiber of ‘the slow, sure poison … that hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death’. When the drunkard’s wife lies dying of a broken heart, he ‘reeled from the tavern to her bedside in time to see her die’. His sons leave as soon as they can after this, but one night one returns home to the attic in an alley between Fleet Street and the Thames, pursued by the police for a capital crime, and – improbably, and unwisely – trusts his hated father to hide him. The drunkard betrays him and is cursed as the son goes to the gallows. Abandoned by his daughter, he takes himself to the Thames, plunges into the water, changes his mind, screams ‘in agonies of terror’, remembers the curse of his son and is carried away by the fierce tide to his death. Dickens in moralizing mood is not good company, and this is a feeble and overblown piece of prose, full of verbal and emotional clichés – a bit of early ham. But, as he told Bentley, he was ‘Nothing but head and ears in work, and really half dead with fatigue.’ 21
    The
Village Coquettes
opened on 6 December, with Hullah’s music, and there were cheers for Boz at the curtain. But a young critic named John Forster had something to say about the cheers and the piece: ‘the libretto was totally unworthy of Boz,’ he wrote, although ‘the audience screamed for Boz!’ He went on, ‘Now we have a great respect and liking for Boz; the
Pickwick Papers
have made him, as our readers are very well aware, an especial favourite with us … Bad as the opera is … we feel assured that if Mr Braham [the producer] will make arrangements to parade the real living Boz every night after that opera, he will insure for it a certain attraction.’ 22 Dickens wrote to Hullah about the review: ‘It is
rather
depreciatory of the Opera, but … so well done that I cannot help laughing at it, for the life and soul of me.’ 23 And it seems likely he thought Forster more right than wrong about
The Village Coquettes
because he later described it as the ‘most unfortunate of all unfortunate pieces’ and asked to have his name of Boz removed from the bills; and during the next year Forster became his best and most trusted friend. 24
    The
annus mirabilis
was coming to an end, with a bad story and a feeble libretto, but with a huge triumph for
Pickwick
, and a new novel ready in his head to start writing in January in tandem with further instalments of
Pickwick.
He was married, and the first baby was due in the first week of the new year. Over Christmas he dined with Ainsworth, danced quadrilles with the nieces of his publisher Edward Chapman in their home off the Strand, and invited Tom Beard to share in the family turkey. He also confessed to Beard that, whatever his disapproval of drunkenness in print, ‘I arrived home at one oClock this morning dead drunk, & was put to bed by my loving missis.’ 25 Catherine rose to the occasion well, and may even have felt a certain pleasure that, just for once, her ever busy and omnicompetent husband had put himself into a condition in which she could help, and take charge of him.

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    ‘Till death do us