ANOTHER MAN 99to a woman of twenty-three, with whom he had two more sons. He was in
all these ways the friend who “went before,” marking both professional and
personal paths that Dickens followed with great interest and identification.
On board a steamer during his American travels, Dickens wrote an extra-
ordinary letter of care when he learned that Macready was suffering from
critical reviews as the new manager of Drury Lane. “I have been thinking
all day, as we have been skimming down this beautiful Ohio, its wooded
heights all radiant in the sunlight, how can a man like Macready fret, and
fume, and chafe himself for such lice of literature as these!... I have won-
dered a hundred times how things so mean and small—so wholly uncon-
nected with your image, and utterly separated from the exercise of your
genius, in its effects on all men—can, for an instant, disturb you.” No one
knew better, of course, how such things could disturb him, than Dickens
in America; in his postscript he writes—ostensibly about his responses to
America—“I speak to you, as I would to myself.”
Two long paragraphs of the letter are devoted to chiding Macready about
careless eating habits: “Old Parr [their icon of longevity] never dined off
chops, or in his dressing room.” Dickens prescribes sherry with an egg beaten
in, the very formula that was later to sustain him during his reading tours.
He begs Macready to let him know that “you have left off eating with your
fingers on week days, and have taken to knives and forks again. Do say that
you are better, and healthfully disposed—but not unless you really are so”
(3.173–76). Dickens’s practical and bossy voice, applied to a state of depres-
sion he knew quite well from the inside, suggests the tone he took with
himself—as well as his sudden recognition that he might lose Macready’s
confidence if he were to push that voice too far. By the time Macready
resigned from Drury Lane in June 1843, Dickens was trying out the tragic-
comic routine: pretending to be the Ordinary (the chaplain) of a prison, he
wrote to prepare Macready for “the scaffold” and exhorted him, to “throw
the weight from off your conscience and make a clean breast” in his resigna-
tion speech (3.513). Finding a way to cheer up his friend required ingenious
work, even for Dickens.
Macready gave his final performance early in 1851 after two “farewell
seasons” in London, a pattern Dickens was to repeat as he approached the end
of his own reading tours in the late 1860s. On the occasion Dickens wrote
up an appreciation that mixed nostalgia with an appeal to his inexpressible
feelings of gratitude and affection. As soon as Macready decided to retire,
however, Dickens became fascinated by the prospect of his friend’s aging.
They had a long-standing joke about Macready’s anxieties about his age;
Dickens liked to pretend that it was he who was old, not Macready, or to tease