100 KNOWING DICKENS
him about how “tremendously old” he was, or to taunt him about being “so
fearfully conceited in those pretences of growing old when you know bet-
ter” (5.486; 8.77; 10.39). But he thought seriously about Macready’s choices
in relation to his own. In 1856, after Macready had visited him during his
residence in Paris, Dickens mused about those choices in a letter to Forster:
It fills me with pity to think of him away in that lonely Sherborne place.
I have always felt of myself that I must, please God, die in harness, but
I have never felt it more strongly than in looking at, and thinking of,
him. However strange it is to be never at rest, and never satisfied, and
ever trying after something that is never reached, and to be always laden
with plot and plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and
that one is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked
out! It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. (8.89)By this time Dickens, at forty-four, had entered the period of explosive
restlessness that was to end in the separation from Catherine and the estab-
lishment of a new, equally driven life. He had begun to understand that he
would never hold the “something” he was always reaching for, but he knew
he would go on trying.
By 1866, when Dickens was looking older than his age, he still teased
the seventy-three-year-old Macready, but privately emphasized his dis-
may, in a letter to Georgina Hogarth, that Macready—now remarried with
young children—was “greatly aged” (11.175). In 1869 Dickens reported him
“extraordinarily old” (12.280), “distressingly infirm and unintelligible at
table” (12.282). Macready was not the only friend who elicited this fear. In
1868 Dickens described Forster to Macready in the same terms he had used
to describe Macready to Forster: “I cannot but feel that he has gotten into an
old way which is not wholesome. He has lost interest in the larger circle of
tastes and occupations that used to girdle his life, and yet has a morbid sort of
dissatisfaction in having subsided into an almost private personage” (12.258).
In a letter congratulating Macready on his seventy-seventh birthday, Dickens
seemed unable to help sounding the note again, in a postscript about the
wife of Stanfield, “looking well, but curiously old” (12.484). The repetition
of the theme is striking, coming from a man in his fifties, and suggests that
Dickens was fearful about what he saw in his friends’ faces and bodies. As
it turned out, he died in harness at fifty-eight—the age Macready had been
when he retired from the stage. The old actor outlived Dickens by three
years. The deliberateness with which Dickens pushed himself in the face of
his own bad health may have had something to do with what he thought he
saw mirrored in his friends.