Chapter 6
Back to Gad’s Hill
Between Charles’s new book, Bleak House, Household Words, and Urania Cottage, he had little time to relax. When he had a kidney infection, he took only six days off work.
Catherine had had her tenth and last child, Edward, in 1852. In his letters to friends, Charles started to mention trouble at home. He and Catherine were growing apart, but Charles never said why. In Charles’s next novel, Hard Times, the hero was married to a woman who wasn’t right for him, but the law wouldn’t let him divorce her. Many thought this was a reflection of the Dickenses’ own marriage.
Charley Dickens, now eighteen, was at school at Eton. Charles planned to send his second son, Walter, to India to work for a British company. To others, Charles’s family looked perfect—like the families in the stories he often wrote about in his magazine.
In February 1855, on a visit to Chatham, Charles saw that the house he had liked so much on Gad’s Hill was for sale. Charles decided to buy it. He had worked hard for many years, and now he was going to live in the very house he had once admired.
In November of that same year, Charles and Wilkie Collins were writing a play together called The Frozen Deep. It was based on the Franklin expedition, a group of English explorers who had gotten lost in the Arctic ten years earlier in 1845. Their frozen bodies had recently been discovered.
The play was about the explorers’ last days. Charles played the starring role of the expedition’s leader, Richard Wardour. He was also the play’s director and stage manager.
The Frozen Deep was a big success in England. People loved how Charles played the doomed Richard Wardour. Charles’s daughters Mamie and Katey had parts in the show, as did his sister-in-law Georgina. They even gave a private performance for Queen Victoria.
In August 1857, not long after sixteen-year-old Walter Dickens left for India, Charles was invited to perform The Frozen Deep at the Free Trade Hall. It was a big theater. Charles would need professional actresses to put the show on in that large a space. A friend recommended Frances Ternan and her three daughters, Fanny, Maria, and Ellen, who was known as Nelly.
