98 KNOWING DICKENS
and gone, after patronizing with suavity the whole population of Broadstairs,
and impressing Tom Collin with a profound conviction that he (F) did the
Ocean a favor when he bathed” (6.506). He and Catherine had their private
jokes as well. In the summer of 1850, as he was writing David Copperfield,
Dickens invited Maclise to join him for two weeks in Paris, on one of their
“vagabond” adventures. Writing home to Catherine, he complained about
Maclise’s dress: “I don’t know what he may have, in a portmanteau like a
Bible; but he certainly don’t put it on, whatever it is. His shirt in front is very
like a pillow-case; and I expect him, at the trois freres presently, to be the
terror and consternation of the assembled guests” (6.117). Having dragged
Maclise to the Paris Morgue, he described his friend’s reaction to “a body
horribly mutilated... It made him so sick, that to my infinite disconcert-
ment, he sat down on a doorstep in the street, for about ten minutes, resting
his cheek (like Juliet) on his hand” (6.120). In matters of fastidiousness and
manliness, he could assure his wife that he was the better man.
The friendship with the older actor Macready was negotiated in more
sentimental terms and elicited some of Dickens’s most sympathetic letters. As
a masterly Shakespearian actor, Macready was what Dickens had once aspired
to be. Ackroyd tells us that Macready’s acting style was the kind Dickens
admired: “he was a master of pathos, remorse, the more bravura aspects of
melodrama” (210). Like Dickens, Macready was tremendously class-conscious:
he resented his chosen profession because it was not gentlemanly enough,
and he was intent on raising the theater from the state of degradation into
which it had fallen. Dickens responded warmly to Macready’s sense of pro-
fessionalism and to his earnest—and tortured—dedication to his art.
Unlike Forster or Maclise, Macready was also a family man, married to
another Catherine, with whom he had ten children. When Dickens and
Catherine traveled to the United States in 1842, Macready, who had already
been there, advised them not to take their four children and persuaded the
reluctant Catherine by promising to look after them in their parents’ absence.
Dickens later reminded Catherine of this debt when he appealed to her and
Georgina to suppress their irritation with Mrs. Macready’s sister, who was
visiting the Dickens family in Italy. “I should never forgive myself or you,”
he threatened, “if the smallest drop of coldness or misunderstanding were
created between me and Macready, by means so monstrously absurd” (4.215).
By 1844 Catherine would have had plenty of time to realize that she was
expected to support and defer to her husband’s friendships, and Dickens was
clearly annoyed at her failure to learn this lesson. Macready’s own Catherine,
who appears in his diaries as a deeply cherished domestic partner, died in
- After eight lonely years, Macready was happily remarried at sixty-seven