2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

44 DICKENS AND JESUS I Jesus College Annual Report 2012
Dickens – The Jesus Connection
Stephen Heath
It seems appropriate in the bicentenary year
of Dickens’s birth to think about the great
novelist’s connection with Jesus – but what
connection could there possibly be?
Dickens’s relations with Cambridge, let alone
with this College, were limited. He visited the
town for a couple of hours in 1849 on his way
home from a trip to Norfolk, and he gave
public readings in the town in 1859 and 1867.
These were a huge success, the Guildhall
packed full, with hundreds unable to gain
admission. The colleges, Dickens reported,
had ‘mustered in full force from the biggest
guns to the smallest’, so doubtless at least
some Jesuans will have been present, whether
inside or out. The main, direct Cambridge
connection begins in 1868, when his sixth
and youngest son, Henry, won a scholarship
to Trinity Hall. His other sons had been
disappointing - though later the fifth was to
become a Canadian Mountie hero! Of Henry,
however, Dickens was proud, bent on him
achieving distinction: ‘if he fail to set to in
earnest, I shall take him away’. A week after
Henry came up, Dickens sent him 3 dozen
bottles each of sherry and claret, 2 dozen
bottles of port, and 6 bottles of brandy - not
perhaps the most obvious means for
ensuring the required earnestness. Henry
nevertheless did distinguish himself, both in
the University and in his subsequent career:
he was called to the Bar, took silk, was
appointed Common Serjeant, sat as an Old
Bailey judge, and received a knighthood. Of
course, many of the people Dickens knew in
his life in London as a writer and public figure
were Cambridge educated and here it is that
the Jesus connection can be made, since,
happily, two of the most important men in
his life were Jesuans.
The first of these was John Forster, longstanding
friend and adviser on whom
Dickens depended. Born in Newcastle and
educated at the city’s Royal Grammar School,
Forster came up to Jesus in 1828, but found
the expenses at the University to be ‘very
John Forster
great’ and the world of ‘the cloistered
bookworm’ quite out of touch with ‘the real
business of life’. Accordingly, he left after a
few weeks to study law at London’s new
University College. He did not, though,
follow a legal career, choosing instead the life
of a man of letters, writing himself,
contributing to various papers and journals,
and above all providing counsel and practical
help to many of the writers of the day,
Dickens above all. The two met towards the
end of 1836 and from then on Forster was
intimately involved in Dickens’s life and
work, – conducting negotiations with
publishers, looking over in manuscript or
proof everything he wrote, helping in family
crises, in all matters indispensable. The
intimacy survived even the shock of Forster’s
marriage - he the confirmed bachelor, secure
in his chambers at 58 Lincoln Inn’s Fields
(the model for Mr Tulkinghorn’s chambers
in Bleak House); told of the marriage, Dickens
‘lay down flat, as if an Engine and Tender had
fallen on me’. After Dickens’s death Forster