116 KNOWING DICKENS
In August Dickens took The Frozen Deep to Manchester, with the purpose
of raising money for Douglas Jerrold’s family after Jerrold’s sudden death.
Because the Dickens women could not be displayed in the large and very
public setting of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he hired the professional
actress Mrs. Frances Ternan and two of her three actress daughters to play
the female parts. On that stage, famously, Dickens met and fell in love with
eighteen-year-old Ellen Ternan. When he returned from Manchester, Dick-
ens began to dismantle his troubled marriage, along with some friendships
and partnerships put under strain by the separation. His new life as a “vaga-
bond” began almost immediately as a restless two-week trip with Collins in
pursuit of the Ternans, who were now on tour at Doncaster. Their excuse
was copy for Household Words: as they traveled, the two writers collaborated
on a description of their experiences that came out during October 1857 as
“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.” Just after returning from Man-
chester, Dickens had written Collins of “the grim despair and restlessness
of this subsidence from excitement” that led him to propose the journey. “I
want to escape from myself. For, when I do start up and stare myself seed-
ily in the face... my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable—my misery,
amazing” (8.423). He did not want to let go of Richard Wardour; his face was
empty without him. A year later, he still missed the role; as he told Collins
while he was away on a reading tour, “I miss Richard Wardour’s dress. And
always want to put it on. I would rather, by a great deal, act” (8.624). He
seems to have felt more emotional range disguised as Wardour than he did in
his staged impersonation of the famous author Charles Dickens.
“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” managed to go on dramatizing
Dickens through tensions between two very different men. As the title sug-
gests, it picked up on a contrast between fanatical action and sleepy idleness
that had figured briefly in The Frozen Deep. Even the traveling plans of Dick-
ens and Collins were uncharacteristically vague; while they planned to stay
in Doncaster for the second week, they were unclear about the first. “Con-
glomeration prevailing in the maps—and our minds—to an alarming extent,
I have the faintest idea of our trip,” Dickens wrote to W. H. Wills as they set
out (8.438). But he did have a secret plan in mind: to ascend Carrock Fell, a
1,500-foot mountain in Cumberland he had read about in a guidebook. The
plan, like most of Dickens’s plans, was carried out despite the fact that they
discovered on arrival that “nobody goes up. Guides have forgotten it.” Using
the comic-telegraphic style, Dickens described the ascent to Forster: “Rain
terrific, black mists, darkness of night.” With Dickens in the lead and their
inn-keeper guide “done up in no time,” the three men reached the top and
had no idea how to get back down. As they spiraled around the mountain