ANOTHER MAN 95When Dickens traveled in Italy in 1844, he wanted Forster to know and
admire his growing facility in Italian: “I wish you could see me without
my knowing it, walking about alone here. I am now as bold as a lion in
the streets” (4.194). His wish to be watched by an invisible paternal or
godlike figure suggests that Forster’s attention had become central to his
sense of self. He also wanted Forster to know how he suffered in his writ-
ing: “Since I conceived... what must happen in the third [quarter of The
Chimes], I have undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing
were real; and have wakened up with it at night” (4.207). Dickens wanted
his friend with him the day he lost his father. Just two weeks later (14 April
1851), Forster had what he called a “very difficult” part to play when he
was informed just half an hour before Dickens was to deliver a speech
for the General Theatrical Fund that Dickens’s infant daughter Dora had
died. Forster decided to let the speech go on, and listened with “anguish”
as Dickens spoke about how we “hide our hearts in carrying on this fight
of life.” When it was over he and Mark Lemon told Dickens, and Lemon
stayed with Dickens while Forster went to Malvern to deliver the ailing
Catherine home to London (Forster 539–40). This episode may be the
most poignant, though not the most difficult, of the many services Forster
performed for his friend.
Dickens maintained long correspondences with several other artist-
friends whom he met in the 1830s and ’40s: the Shakespearian actor William
Charles Macready, the painter Daniel Maclise, the playwright and editor of
Punch Mark Lemon, the marine painter Clarkson Stanfield, and the novelist
Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Each of these friendships developed a story of its
own, and they flourished at different periods, often depending on who was
participating in one of Dickens’s theatrical schemes. The friendships with
Maclise and Macready are special instances of connection with men whose
backgrounds echoed parts of Dickens’s own life. Macready, nineteen years
older than Dickens, was the son of an Irish actor and manager who had been
imprisoned for debt while his son was preparing for an academic career at
Rugby. The young Macready gave up his aspirations, took over the man-
agement of his father’s theater, and began a provincial acting career under
his father’s auspices. His diaries, which repeatedly record his rage at having
to spend his talents among uneducated players and ignorant theater critics,
show that he never recovered from that social disappointment. Maclise, just
six years older than Dickens, also came from a humble Irish background and
had, like Dickens, risen to very early fame, in his case as a Royal Academy
painter. After the youthful years of their friendship, Maclise became increas-
ingly solitary and devoted to his work. Dickens’s letters display many pressing