Dilke (2 page)

His achievement was marred only by his unimportance within his own family. He was in no way indifferent to family ties. He encouraged the filling up of his house in London with his wife's relations. Her grandmother, her mother and her unmarried cousin all came to live there in 1840 (the last two surviving and remaining in Sloane Street until the 'eighties). Thirteen years later his own father gave up his house in Lower Grosvenor Place, made over his property to his son, and joined the Sloane Street establishment for the rest of his life. Wentworth Dilke could surround himself with dependent relations, but he could not make himself pivotal to the household which was thus created, and he could not win the respect of his elder son.

Of this latter fact there can be no doubt. Much later in his life Charles Dilke could look back and feel that his father had perhaps been harshly treated by himself and by others. “He was a man of great heart and of considerable brainpower,” he was to write in 1890, “but brain-power wasted and heart misunderstood.”
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But at the time, in the 'fifties and the early ‘sixties, he was consistently disparaging of his father. He could feel no real respect even for Wentworth Dilke's work for the Great Exhibition. “Father was concerned with matters in themselves interesting,” he wrote, “but his part in them was one of detail, and his share in the planning and direction of the ‘51,' for instance, large as it was, is not a share an account of which would be of more interest than would a reprint of the minutes of the executive committee.”
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“. . . he was entirely without literary power,” was another of Charles Dilke's severe judgments. At another time he noted with mild contempt that his father was jealously resentful of his own growing influence over his younger brother. And he wrote letters of patronising advice during the Wallingford campaign such as a father can rarely have received from a twenty-one-year-old son: “You must set to work. . . . You must get up the last debates. . . . You must make up your mind what to do as to Church Rates, and not budge an inch!”
⁴
So the instructions flowed from the pen of Charles Dilke. And he summed up his disparagement of his father, and his preference for his
grandfather, in a comparison that was as cool as it was sweeping. “. . . my father was in every way a man of less real distinction than his father,” he wrote, “although much better known by the public on account of the retiring nature of my grandfather.”
⁵

This grandfather, Mr. Dilke as he can best be called for purposes of differentiation from his son and grandson, was unquestionably the dominating influence on Charles Dilke's boyhood. He had been born in 1789, the son of yet another Charles Wentworth Dilke, who was a clerk in the Admiralty, but who came of a cadet branch of a landed family of some note, the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle in Warwickshire. Mr. Dilke was also appointed to an Admiralty clerkship, but he did not retain it for his whole working life. His interests were literary and his talents were not negligible. From 1815 onwards he was contributing frequently to the
Quarterly
and other reviews. He was a close friend of Keats, and he had intimate associations, extending over a long period, with Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood.

In 1830 he resigned from the Admiralty and turned all his energies to letters. In the words of his grandson, “he brought the but-just-born yet nevertheless dying
Athenaeum
. . . and restored its fortunes and his own.” For the first sixteen years of his proprietorship he acted in effect as editor and chief contributor, in addition to being principal shareholder. During this period he gave the paper a unique reputation for the detachment and impartiality of its literary criticism. Most comparable journals were in the hands of one publisher or another, and reflected this attachment in their literary columns. But the
Athenaeum
remained austerely independent; and Mr. Dilke fortified its reputation for incorruptibility by the extreme—and perhaps slightly priggish—course of withdrawing entirely from general society. This was “to avoid making literary acquaintances which might either prove annoying to him, or be supposed to compromise the independence of his journal.”
⁶

After 1846 Mr. Dilke's supervision of the
Athenaeum
became less detailed and his social life less restricted. He continued his
publishing activities, however. For three years, working in close association with Charles Dickens, he acted as manager of the radical and recently established,
Daily Mews
. Despite his favourite description of himself as an “antiquary,” his political views were fully in accord with those of the paper, but this was not enough to make his work here as successful as it had been with the
Athenaeum
. It was left to a later manager to establish the
Daily News on
a secure financial basis. With weekly papers, however, Mr. Dilke continued to show a surer touch. In 1849 he helped to found
Notes and Queries
, and thereafter contributed frequently to this successful literary journal which later passed into the full ownership of his grandson.

After he left the
Daily News
Mr. Dilke's interests were increasingly engrossed by the upbringing of this grandson, Charles Dilke. The death in 1850 of his own wife, a Yorkshire farmer's daughter whom he had married forty years before when he was only eighteen and she even younger, that of his daughter-in-law in 1853, and his abandonment of his own house in the same latter year, all helped to concentrate his attention in this direction. This concentration was further assisted by the fact that Charles Dilke never went to school. He was not judged to be strong enough. “My health at that time (1856),” he was to write later, “was not supposed to be sufficiently strong to enable me even to attend a day-school, and still less to go to a public school, but there was nothing the matter with me except a nervous turn of mind, over-excitable and over-strained by the slightest circumstance. This lasted until I was eighteen, when it suddenly disappeared, and left me strong and well.”
⁷

Charles Dilke did not entirely escape formal education, however. At the age of ten, immediately after his mother's death, he began lessons in classics and mathematics with a Chelsea curate. Three years later he became half-attached to a Kensington day-school, doing the work which was set without regularly attending the school. In addition his grandfather sought to fill some of the gaps which were left by this tuition. But all this did not add up to the pattern of instruction which
he would have received, still less to the way of life he would have experienced, had he been sent to school in the normal way. In the first place his ill-health led not merely to his being kept away from school, but to the discouragement of intellectual application. “I was a nervous, and, therefore, in some things a backward child,” he wrote, “because my nervousness led to my being forbidden for some years to read and work, as I was given to read and work too much, and during this long period of forced leisure I was set to music and drawing, with the result that I took none of the ordinary boy's interest in politics. . . .”
⁸
The music lessons, which continued for fourteen years, constituted no useful training. He abandoned them on going to Cambridge, where, because of their proximity to the Fellows' Combination Room, he was allowed to keep no piano in his rooms, and retained barely the normal, untutored man's capacity for musical appreciation. Drawing he abandoned almost equally quickly, but in this case there was no revulsion of feeling. Throughout his life he retained and developed a carefully cultivated taste for pictures.

Charles Dilke's training was further untypical in that, behind his rather sketchy formal education, he was given a background of cultural experience and knowledge of the world such as few children have experienced. At the age of ten he began regular play-going. His earliest theatrical recollection was Rachel, who ceased to perform in the early 'fifties. She aroused his great enthusiasm and he was later to remember her as being far superior to Bernhardt; Charles Kean, Madame Vestris and her husband Charles James Mathews also excited his admiration. By his middle 'teens, Charles Dilke was familiar with the performances of all the actors and actresses of note in both Paris and London; and before he was nineteen his passion for the theatre had burnt itself out, exhausted by over-indulgence. In later life he rarely went to a play, and, even when he did, was most unlikely to stay for the whole performance.

He travelled widely for a child of his period, both in England and in France. With his grandfather he visited every English cathedral, both university towns, and a wide range of
other monuments. In the autumn of 1854 he paid his first French visit, also with his grandfather. But it was in the summer of the following year, when he was eleven years old, that his close association with France began. Wentworth Dilke, as one of the English Commissioners to the French International Exhibition, took his family to live in Paris for four months. It was a glittering year, in many ways the apogee of the Empire, and was marked not only by the Exhibition, but by the visit of Queen Victoria, and by superb military displays. Charles Dilke was not a retiring child. He was present at the great balls—that given by Walewski, the son of the first Emperor, at the Quai d'Orsay, that of Flahaut, the father of Morny, at the
Légion d'Honneur
, and that at the Hôtel de Ville for the Emperor and Empress and Queen Victoria. He heard Lablache in his last great part at the Opéra, and saw Rachel for the last time at the Théâtre Français. He was present at the military reviews and at the entry and departure of the Queen. The entry, he thought, was the finest display of troops which he ever witnessed. In the evenings he used to go regularly to the Place Vendôme to hear the combined tattoo of the Guards, and this remained his most vivid and persistent memory of the visit: “Every regiment was represented, and the drummers were a wonderful show in their different brilliant uniforms—Chasseurs of the Garde, Dragoons, Lancers, Voltigeurs, and many more. In the midst was the gigantic sergeant-major waiting, with baton uplifted, for the clock to strike. At the first stroke he gave the signal with a twirl and a drop of his baton, and the long thundering roll began, taken up all round the great square.”
⁹

For part of the visit Mr. Dilke was present in Paris with his son's family, and during this period Charles Dilke became familiar not only with the splendours of the Second Empire but also with the aspects and antiquities of the pre-Haussmann city, soon to be so greatly changed. The impact of the whole visit upon Charles Dilke can hardly be exaggerated. He became strongly Francophile, and remained so, in matters of culture and way of life, if not always in those of politics and diplomacy, until his death. He began to know the language
well—thereafter he and his brother Ashton regularly spoke and wrote to each other in French—and frequent and prolonged visits to France were henceforth an important part of his life.

Whether in England or in France, Charles Dilke had unusual opportunities of getting to know people of note, and also perhaps an unusual talent for doing so. Towards the end of his life he was able dogmatically and confidently to state: “I have known everyone worth knowing from 1850 until my death.” The '51 Exhibition was effectively the beginning of his knowledge of the famous. “I was in the Exhibition every day,” he wrote, “and made acquaintance there through Father with the Iron Duke, of whom I remember only that, small as I was, I thought him very small.”
¹⁰
Later that summer Charles Dilke's mother was to write: “The Queen came and talked to me and Charley at the building on Friday”; and her son subsequently noted against this: “This was the occasion of which the Queen, twenty years afterwards, said that she remembered having stroked my head, and that she supposed she must have rubbed the hairs the wrong way.”
¹¹

From about the same period are Charles Dilke's memories “of the bright eyes of little Louis Blanc, of Milner-Gibson's pleasant smile, of Bowring's silver locks, of Thackeray's tall stooping figure, of Dickens' goatee, of Paxton's white hat, of Barry Cornwall and his wife, of Robert Stephenson the engineer to whom I wanted to be bound apprentice, of Browning (then known as ‘Mrs. Browning's husband'), of Joseph Cooke (another engineer), of Cubitt the builder (one of the promoters of the Exhibition), of John Forster the historian, of the Red-graves, and of that greater painter, John Martin.”
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With Thackeray, Charles Dilke's acquaintance was to prove productive, for it is recorded that a year or two later the novelist came upon the boy lying in the grass of the garden at Gore House in South Kensington and reading
The Three Musketeers
, borrowed the book from him, and as a direct consequence wrote one of
The Roundabout Papers
.

By the end of the 'fifties Charles Dilke had also built up a large French acquaintanceship, although there, at this time,
it was the fringes of the Imperial family, rather than the men of solid Victorian achievement, literary, commercial or scientific, who frequented 76, Sloane Street, which most impressed him. Parts of the summers of both 1859 and 1860 he spent with his family in Normandy.

“At Havre,” he wrote, “I got to know King Jerome, father to ‘Plon-Plon,' and father-in-law to my friend Princess Clothilde, and was duly interested in this last of the brothers of Napoleon. The ex-King of Westphalia was a wicked old gentleman; but he did not let a boy find this out, and he was courteous and talkative. . . . He used to walk in the garden with me, finding me a good listener. The old Queen of Sweden
^[2]
was still alive, and he told me how . . . (she) had thrown Bonaparte over for him, and then had thrown him over for Bernadotte. He also described riding through Paris with Bonaparte on the day of Brumaire.”
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