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With David Copperfield out of the way, Dickens threw himself into the London rehearsals of Ben Johnson's Every Man in His Humour plus a concluding farce, Used Up, slated for three performances at Bulwer's great-house in the third week of November, 1850. Clarkson Stanfield supplied the scenery, Daniel Maclise the costumes. A kind of "heraldic monstrosity," the enchanted castle at Knebworth [north of London] became, appropriately, the headquarters of a project that combined the medieval guild mentality with modern social welfare. Heavily bearded and [already at this time] partly deaf, Bulwer-Lytton was, in Dickens's opinion, "the greatest conversationalist of the age." Inspired at the success of this production, Bulwer agreed to supply Dickens and his amateur company with a farce to be performed both in London and throughout the provinces in aid of "The Guild of Literature and Art." Their intention was to fund a system of annuities to support writers and artists of distinction who had fallen upon hard times. Dickens, anticipating this flood of money and acclaim if Bulwer's five-act historical comedy Not So Bad as We Seem; or, Many Sides to a Character were initially presented to the Queen and her Consort, wrote the Duke of Devonshire asking if his players might use the house for a very select audience in May, 1851. Although Victoria recorded in her diary that she very much enjoyed the whole affair, the Duke of Wellington left after the second act. Again, Bulwer has set the action in the eighteenth century, and combines political intrigue with a love plot. Dickens played the dandy and bon vivant, Lord Wilmot, while John Forster took the role of the unbending self-made man, Mr. Hardman. Dickens subsequently took the production to Bath and Bristol, substituting professional actresses for his amateurs but transporting Paxton's ingenious collapsible stage. The two writers, despite their differences in temperament and even politics as life went on, always remained on intimate terms. March, 1852, Dickens named his tenth and last child after Bulwer, who stood godfather to the boy, his seventh son, whom Dickens nicknamed "Plorn." Previously, in August, 1848, Dickens had sent a letter of condolence from Broadstairs regarding the death of Bulwer's daughter.
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