ANOTHER MAN 93Dickens and welcomed the intense charm of his epistolary attentions. He
had known women like Mary (Mrs. Charles Cowden) Clarke and Mrs.
Watson’s cousin Mary Boyle as fellow-actors in his amateur theatricals; with
the spirited Mary Boyle in particular he felt free to write mock (or not so
mock) love letters in the guise of their stage characters, and, later in life, to
confide his sorrows. Of the women writers who contributed to Household
Wo rd s and All the Year Round, Dickens’s correspondence with Elizabeth Gas-
kell is the most substantial and reveals a good deal about his editorial styles of
management. Only rarely in these letters to women did Dickens exhibit the
imaginative energy that he poured into letters to his male friends, though it
is possible to glimpse in his letters home to Catherine and Georgina a man
less fully on display as a writer.
Between the beginning of their friendship in 1837 and the late 1850s,
when their relations became more strained, John Forster was of course Dick-
ens’s primary friend and correspondent. The two men were the same age;
they shared strong opinions, high energy levels, and a commitment to raise the
status of literature in their time. They also suffered comparable sensitivities
about their class origins; Forster was the son of a Newcastle butcher and
resented any allusion to that fact. He had received a better formal education
than Dickens’s, and he had already formed friendships with prominent literary
men in London, but he, too, was making his way up through the world as the
drama critic (and later editor) of the Examiner, a Sunday weekly founded by
Leigh Hunt. On 2 July 1837, Dickens wrote to Forster thanking him for his
review of Pickwick. He calls the review a “beautiful notice” in which “I feel
your rich, deep appreciation of my intent and meaning.... You know I have
ever done so, for it was your feeling for me and mine for you that first brought
us together, and I hope will keep us so, till death do us part” (1.280–81).
Dickens was fifteen months into his marriage with Catherine; his grief for
Mary Hogarth, who had died in May, was still fresh. The “marriage” he
invokes with Forster is powered both by his sense of lost companionship and
by Forster’s own intense rhetoric of friendship. It is underlined the following
month in a note of thanks for a present sent to him and Catherine, “coupled
with an expression of our most selfish hope that our friendship may be lasting
as sincere. Believe that if I meant less, I should say a great deal more, and that
I am My Dear Forster, Ever faithfully yours, Charles Dickens” (1.297). Late
in March 1838, despite Catherine’s illness at the time, Dickens invited Forster
to begin what became a twenty-year tradition of celebrating Forster’s birthday
and the Dickenses’ wedding anniversary on the second of April.
The vows, so to speak, were renewed early in 1845, after the sudden death
of Forster’s older brother. Dickens wrote from Italy: “I feel the distance