ANOTHER MAN 111amateur theatricals. Acting, he found, was a less isolating way than writing
to become “another man.” As he prepared Bulwer-Lytton’s Not So Bad as
We Seem for performance in June 1855, he invited an acquaintance with
this explanation: “The real Theatre is so bad, that I have always a delight
in setting up a sham one—besides deriving a pleasure from feigning to be
somebody else which is akin to the pleasure of inventing—with the addi-
tion of the odd novelty that this sort of invention is executed in company”
(7.641). The creative link between literary and personal forms of invention
makes it clear that Dickens thought of writing as acting in private. Dickens
liked the formula and repeated it in letters of 1857: “I derive a strange feeling
out of it, like writing a book in company... which has to me a conviction
of its being actual Truth without its pain” (8.256). Clearly the sheer toil of
working himself up to write had become more burdensome; as he wrote to
Maclise, acting “enables me, as it were, to write a book in company instead of
in my own solitary room, and to feel its effect coming freshly back upon
me from the reader” (8.367). In the event, acting proved to have the more
profound effect of turning Dickens into another kind of man than the one
he imagined himself to be in 1850.
One indicator of the change in direction was Dickens’s new friendship
with Wilkie Collins. He met the younger novelist in 1851, after inviting
him to play the role of a valet in Not So Bad as We Seem. By 1853 they were
close enough that Dickens invited Collins and a mutual friend, the painter
Augustus Egg, on a nine-week tour of Switzerland and Italy. In this new
trio Dickens was the older man and the guide; he revisited many of the old
haunts, writing home to Catherine and Georgina about places they had lived
and people they had known. To the home audience he claimed that the three
travelers “are all the best friends, and have never had the least difference.”
At the same time he satirized the younger men’s attempts to imitate him by
growing mustaches, and made fun of Collins’s learned diatribes about art and
music. Perhaps Dickens did not want his women to know quite how much
he enjoyed being in younger male company (7.204–5).
The good-tempered Collins was twelve years younger, unattached, and
happy to eat, drink, and womanize without remorse. His imagination, like
Dickens’s, was drawn to the macabre, the irrational, and the melodramatic—
interests Forster tended to view with skepticism. Collins was also willing,
for a time, to profit from the mentorship of the older novelist, who took
great pains to teach Collins what he knew about the writing business. In
the face of disapproval from Forster and probably from Catherine, Dick-
ens found comradeship in the new friend who shared his propensity to
spend the night hours exploring the darker haunts of London or Paris. He