112 KNOWING DICKENS
wrote to Collins from Boulogne in July 1854, inviting him out to play in
London: “The interval I propose to pass in a career of amiable dissipation and
unbounded license in the metropolis. If you will come and breakfast with
me about midnight—anywhere—any day—and go to bed no more until
we fly to these pastoral retreats—I shall be delighted to have so vicious an
associate” (7.366). Clearly Collins’s reputation as a sybarite was an affection-
ate joke between them. The year after Dickens separated from Catherine,
Collins moved out of his mother’s house and began living with his mistress,
Mrs. Caroline Graves. Dickens wrote to Esther Nash in 1861, reporting on
Collins’s handsome rooms in Harley Street, “We never speak of the (female)
skeleton in that house.... I hope [Collins’s mind] does not run in any matri-
monial groove.... I can not imagine any good coming of such an end in this
instance” (9.388–89). He did not mention that his own life was very much
like Collins’s at that time.
Changes in John Forster’s life may well have influenced Dickens’s turn to
a younger and wilder man who offered more easy-going company as well as
the opportunity for professional patronage on Dickens’s part. On 11 March
1856, Dickens learned that Forster was to be married. He wrote to Georgy
that day: “Tell Catherine that I have the most prodigious, overwhelming,
crushing, astounding, blinding, deafening, pulverising, scarifying secret of
which Forster is the hero, imaginable by the united efforts of the whole Brit-
ish population” (8.70). Making play with his wife’s interest in gossip, Dickens’s
exaggerations also manage to suggest that he felt Forster’s news as a major
disorientation. Other references during the period before the marriage are
brief and rather facetious; he was clearly determined to write as if he did not
care. In fact Forster had already left Dickens behind in the literary trenches.
At the end of 1855 he accepted a position as Secretary to the Lunacy Com-
mission that offered a higher salary than he had previously been able to mus-
ter. He resigned as editor of the Examiner and left the paper entirely when he
married Eliza Colburn, a widow with 35,000 pounds, in September 1856.
With no children to support, Forster was now a wealthy man. Dickens, still
scrambling to support his large family and (after 1858) the Ternans as well,
suspected that his friend’s new security lay behind his severe opposition to
Dickens’s idea of doing public readings for money. He still felt that he had
to convince Forster that he was right to begin the reading tours, but he wrote
to Collins in March 1858, as the decision was pressing on him, “Forster seems
to be extraordinarily irrational about it. (I have a misgiving sometimes, that
his money must have got into his head)” (8.534–36). Throughout the years
of public readings, Dickens regularly sent Forster bulletins about how well
they had gone and how much money he had made. Although they were not