96 KNOWING DICKENS
invitations to his friend, as well as his growing acknowledgment of Maclise’s
tendency to withdraw from social life. Both men elicited letters of particular
warmth from Dickens, who often attempted to cheer them up with teasing
humor and affection when they fell into melancholy moods.
In 1840 Maclise replaced William Ainsworth in a friendship triad with
Dickens and Forster. Ackroyd mentions an “unstated rivalry between Mac-
lise and Forster for the closest friendship with Dickens” (386), but the pos-
sibilities for playful rivalry and minor jealousies are more likely to have played
out in all of the possible combinations. In November 1840 we find Dickens
criticizing Forster to Maclise, for Forster’s excessive emotion at the death
of Macready’s beloved daughter Joan. “I vow to God that if you had seen
Forster last night, you would have supposed our Dear Friend was dead him-
self—in such an amazing display of grief did he indulge, and into such a very
gloomy gulf was he sunk up to the chin” (2.158–59). Hardly immune him-
self to excessive grief at the loss of young girls, Dickens was the one indulg-
ing himself in this case; he may have turned to Maclise in protective irony at
a moment when Forster’s sympathy was especially dear to Macready. Maclise,
tall, handsome, and attractive to women, seems to have been Dickens’s com-
panion for his anti-domestic moods; they took to low-life scenes and pur-
suits unnamed in Dickens’s notes of invitation. Many of these early notes to
Maclise are invitations to some outing or escape from home, should he feel
“vagabondishly disposed” (2.60).
When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, Dickens and
Maclise amused themselves by pretending to be hopelessly in love with her.
Dickens wrote several notes declaiming his passion: “Maclise and I are rav-
ing with love for the Queen—with a hopeless passion whose extent no
tongue can tell, nor mind of man conceive.” Forster was cast in the role of
the one who pretends but “does not love her” (2.25). Dickens had a lot of fun
with these letters of mock-despairing love, which allowed him to fantasize
an escape from domesticity and deadlines. As he wrote to Forster, “I saw
the Responsibilities [his children] this morning, and burst into tears. The
presence of my wife aggravates me. I loathe my parents. I detest my house.
I begin to have thoughts of the Serpentine, of the regent’s-canal, of the razors
upstairs, of the chemist’s down the street, of poisoning myself at Mrs. ——’s
table, of hanging myself upon the pear-tree in the garden”—the list of pos-
sible suicides extends down the page, ending “of turning Chartist, of heading
some bloody assault upon the palace and saving Her by my single hand—of
being anything but what I have been, and doing anything but what I have
done” (2.24). Elaborated versions of the fantasy were sent at the same time to
Maclise and another friend (2.25–29). In all of them the comedy of coming