Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Page A

love – it is in fact a form of falling in love, without the overt sexual element. Dickens and Forster both liked women well enough, but it was almost impossible for women to give them the sort of good companionship they craved. Some women were innocents, some predators, some disqualified in different ways. Young married women were likely to be perpetually pregnant, as Dickens was discovering. Catherine was pregnant again in the summer of 1837, and when he took her to Brighton he wrote complaining to Forster that ‘unless I am joined by some male companion’ he was ‘unlikely to see anything but the Pavilion, the chain Pier, and the Sea’. 23 He was clearly hoping Forster would join them. The majority of women inevitably remained apart from the intellectual world in which men lived, and outside most of their activities and interests, and, since society was organized on this basis, men expected to spend a great deal of their leisure time with other men. Formal dinners and clubs excluded women, few women were brought up to ride or walk over long distances, and professional women were on the whole seen as a class apart from middle-class wives and mothers. Once Fanny Dickens married and became a mother, her career declined, gifted and musically educated as she was; and Forster’s Letitia Landon earned herself a reputation that made him withdraw from her. But Forster and Dickens together could do whatever they liked, and so they did: they walked, they rode for miles out of town, they took lunch, they dined, they attended established clubs and set up new private clubs, they attended rehearsals in the theatre as well as official performances, they visited places that interested them, they called on friends, discussed business and enjoyed innumerable evenings out at chop-houses and inns. Among Dickens’s surviving letters, there are a great many summoning Forster to ride with him or to come round and simply be with him: ‘My Missis is going out today, and I want you to take some cold lamb and a bit of fish with me,
alone
. We can walk out both before and afterwards but I must
dine
at home on account of the Pickwick proofs.’ ‘I
ought
to dine in Bloomsbury Square tomorrow, but as I would much rather go with you for a ride … that’s off … So engage the Osses.’ ‘As I have been sticking to it pretty hard all last week, I intend ordering a Oss to be at this door at 11 Oclock in the morning to convey me on a fifteen mile ride out, ditto in, and a Lunch on the Road. Can you spare the time to join me? We will return here to dinner at 5.’ ‘I could hug you and Talfourd too – I am so delighted to find that you are going to participate in my holiday. Come to me, and don’t be later than 11. I think Richmond and Twickenham through the Park, out at Knightsbridge, and over Barnes Common, would make a beautiful ride.’ ‘You don’t feel disposed, do you, to muffle yourself up, and start off with me for a good brisk walk over Hampstead Heath? I knows a good ’ous there where we can have a red hot chop for dinner, and a glass of good wine./All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
I
am as dull as a Codfish.’ 24 And so on.
    Pleasure apart, Forster’s arrival in Dickens’s life changed it profoundly. To begin with, he began immediately to ask Forster for advice and practical help in dealing with his publishers. The first problem was with Macrone, who owned the copyright of
Sketches by Boz
– he had paid £100 for them – and was now planning to republish them in monthly parts, reckoning they might sell as well as
Pickwick
. Dickens believed this would damage
Pickwick
. He was enraged and desperate to get back the copyright, for which Macrone now asked £2,000. When Chapman & Hall offered to buy the copyright for the sum asked, and to put out the
Sketches
themselves later, with illustrations by Cruikshank, Dickens at first turned to Forster for advice, but was so impatient that before Forster could answer he had