by A. N. Wilson
He might have loved Catherine Hogarth at first, but he already loved Boz – or at least being Boz – more. Sketches by Boz was published on his twenty-fourth birthday, 7 February 1836. Thereafter, his career enjoyed meteoric success.
It was in Hall’s bookshop that he had first seen his work in print. When Mr William Hall himself visited Dickens on 10 February 1836, it seemed like a good omen. Hall had gone into partnership with Edward Chapman, and Chapman and Hall intended to start a periodical called The Library of Fiction, published in monthly episodes from April 1836. They offered Dickens £14 per month to write for it. He was to provide 12,000 words per issue to accompany some comic illustrations by the melancholic artist Robert Seymour. These were sporting sketches of life in the country, and, while eagerly accepting the offer of well-paid work, Dickens had felt bound to tell Chapman and Hall that he intended to interpret the brief fairly liberally, since he had no taste for country sports and had never been hunting, shooting or fishing in his life.
On 18 February, he wrote to Chapman and Hall the momentous words, ‘Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory. The first chapter will be ready tomorrow.’25
Dickens had not met Seymour, the illustrator, when he had the boldness to write to him, suggesting that he alter one of his etchings. By then – 14 April 1836 – The Pickwick Papers were under way, and Dickens was writing one of the many diversions – ‘The Stroller’s Tale’. He told Seymour the alterations he needed, adding, ‘With this view, I have asked Chapman and Hall to take a glass of grog with me on Sunday evening (the only night I am disengaged) when I hope you will be able to look in.’26 It was the only time they met. Seymour provided illustrations for the first two issues of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. His own illustrations were soon to be posthumous. A week after providing Dickens with a revised drawing, Seymour went into the summerhouse in his garden in Liverpool Road, Islington, and shot himself. A verdict of insanity was declared by the coroner. Dickens liked to tell the story that, a week before killing himself, Seymour had asked his wife to try on a widow’s cap. Thomas Hardy would have liked that story.
Dickens was not to blame for the depressive Seymour’s suicide. Nonetheless, there is a cruel aptness to it. What a horrible contrast between the young writer’s fitness and success and the low-spirited artist’s sense of abject failure. We sense the writer’s superabundant love of life, and ability to bring forth life – his many children, as well as the work, which pulsates, roars, laughs aloud with life, like God on the final day of Creation considering His work very good, grinding down the artist’s inability to face existence. He must increase and I must decrease. There was something relentless, callous, about Dickens’s romping to glory. For Pickwick was to be a success such as had never really been witnessed in the history of English fiction.
Not that the Auguries appeared at all propitious. The first episode sold a mere 400 copies. Then, after Seymour committed suicide, a new illustrator, R. W. Buss, was engaged and he was no good. We’ll meet him later. Having sacked Buss, the publishers looked about for another artist for the third issue. One idea was to engage William Makepeace Thackeray, an accomplished draughtsman and illustrator, who would illustrate his own work, such as The Rose and the Ring. In the end, however, Dickens lighted upon the twenty-one-year-old engraver employed in-house by Chapman and Hall, Hablot Knight Browne – who would be known to the world as ‘Phiz’. Dickens, having been offered the ‘Cockney humourist’ pictures of Seymour, took them over, changed the story, made Pickwick, Tupman and Snodgrass into something Seymour had never intended, sui generis, unclassifiable figures, blundering from one incident – bizarre, hilarious, sometimes tear-jerking – to the next. By the time Pickwick meets Sam Weller in Chapter 10, Phiz was luckily in control, to illustrate one of the most enduring partnerships of literature.
The illustrations are an essential part of the experience when reading a novel by Charles Dickens. Q. D. Leavis, in her superb chapter on the Dickens illustrations, wrote that, ‘If Dickens never read Blake, then it is an extraordinary coincidence how wonderfully his novels incarnate Songs of Innocence and Experience; he is indeed the Blake as well as the Shakespeare of the novel.’27
They remind us that when we open these pages, we are entering an alternative universe, a version of the nineteenth century, but not a photographic version. Dickens was no Zola, he made no attempts at cinéma vérité. The reader, like all his intimates, his friends, his children, his wife, accepted the world on his terms or not at all. No one looking at the Phiz illustrations before reading could suppose they were going to read realistic accounts of the world. Yet no one who has absorbed either Phiz or Dickens in the system will ever quite lose the habit of seeing the world through their spectacles, recognizing people in ‘real life’ as highly ‘Dickensian’, and imagining how they would appear when drawn by Phiz, or Cruikshank.
At about the time that Boz was entertaining an increasingly rapturous public with the Pickwick Breach of Promise case, Dickens had become a married man. He and Kate were married in the Hogarths’ parish church, St Luke’s, Chelsea, on 2 April 1836. Like Dickens’s own mother, Kate was marrying very young, at just twenty. Because she was not yet of age, they had to obtain a special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury. To get this, Dickens had to revisit the arcane old haunts of Doctors’ Commons, which gave him the idea for the fourth episode of Pickwick, when the fraudulent actor Mr Jingle obtains a parchment from the Archbishop via Doctors’ Commons, addressed to his ‘trusty and well-beloved Alfred Jingle and Rachael Wardle’. [PP 10]
Charles and Kate had a brief honeymoon in Kent, the land of innocence, in the village of Chalk, near his childhood home in Rochester, and, all too soon for Kate’s liking, she was taken back to share his set of rooms in Furnival’s Inn with her sister Mary and his brother Frederick. It was there, in the first month of their marriage, that Dickens entertained Seymour, Chapman and Hall to that glass of grog, twelve days after their wedding and a week before Seymour’s suicide. It was there that Kate realized that, although she was to share his bed, and – when he had the time or inclination – his leisure hours, for the most part she was to be alone, while he gave himself up to frantic activity.
Kate became pregnant almost at once, their first child, Charley (Charles Culliford Boz Dickens), being born on 6 January 1837. In that time, while Dickens praised her neatness and said she was ‘a capital housekeeper’, and wrote and spoke to her in baby language, begging her not to be ‘coss’ at his neglect of her, he had thrown himself into polemical journalism, theatricals and fiction-writing. He had, moreover, become famous. The amusing young Boz, who had been in the nature of a Hogarth-family discovery, was no longer Kate’s property: she found herself married to someone prodigiously successful and celebrated. By the time of their first wedding anniversary, Pickwick was selling 6,000 copies per month, and on 8 April 1837, Chapman and Hall gave him a cheque for £500 and a dinner to celebrate his ever-growing success. The Dickenses left the cramped quarters of Furnival’s Inn and moved into 48 Doughty Street, a substantial terraced house near Gray’s Inn.
By now he was on to Oliver Twist. The past never stays still. It changes, which is why the task of the historian changes with each generation. Those taught as students that the British Empire was their country’s moral, as well as political, apogee lived to see the absolutely opposite viewpoint become the orthodoxy. In personal narratives, this phenomenon is observable in almost every human life. In the life of one of the greatest creative geniuses, it is inevitable that his narrative of his own marriage should be presented with especial forcefulness; with such a pungent strength that biographers of Dickens have inevitably divided between those who sided with his version of the marriage and those who have subsequently found it dismaying.
John Forster, a young journalist and aspirant writer, two months the novelist’s junior, met Dickens in the year of his marriage. He was destined to be not merely one of Dickens’s closest friends and allies, but
also his biographer. Forster’s is not one of the very greatest literary biographies. It is not in the league of Boswell’s Johnson, Froude’s Carlyle or Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, but it is a wonderful book, and everyone who tries to become acquainted with the life of Dickens is in his debt. Whereas Carlyle specifically entrusted Froude with the task of telling the full truth about his less-than-happy marriage, Forster felt constrained by his close friendship with Dickens, and his own personal antipathy to Mrs Dickens. He made as little as possible of the marriage, mentioning Dickens’s wife only when strictly necessary. In some senses, Forster and his version of history are set up by the biography as Kate Dickens’s rival. For example, he claimed to be the only person to whom Dickens had imparted the secret of his working at Warren’s Blacking. One of Kate’s only comments about the biography, when it appeared, was that she had known of, and read, the Autobiographical Fragment in which Dickens revealed his secret childhood misery. Our first impressions of Mrs Dickens, if we rely on Forster, are therefore likely to be skewed; but not so skewed as if we merely read Dickens’s self-justificatory accounts of the marriage when it was over.
On 9 May 1858, he would write to Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, the devoutly Christian philanthropist with whom he did so much charitable work:
We have been virtually separated for a long time. We must put a wider space between us now, than can be found in one house. If the children had loved her, or ever loved her, this severance would have been a far easier thing than it is. But she has never attached one of them to herself, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they have grown older, never presented herself before them in the aspect of a mother. I have seen them all fall off from her in a natural – not unnatural – progress of estrangement, and at this moment Mary and Katey (whose dispositions are of the gentlest and most affectionate conceivable) harden into stone figures of girls when they can be got to go near her, and have their hearts shut up in her presence as if they were closed by some horrid spring.
No one can understand this but Georgina, who has seen it grow from year to year, and who is the best, the most unselfish, and most devoted of human Creatures. Her sister Mary, who died suddenly and who lived with us before her, understood it as well in the first months of our marriage. It is her misery to live in some fatal atmosphere which slays every one to whom she should be dearest. It is my misery that no one can ever understand the truth in its full force, or know what a blighted and wasted life my married life has been.28
Forster, by contrast, recorded many moments in the marriage when it was clear that there were years in which Dickens enjoyed happiness in Kate’s company. During Dickens’s first tour of America in 1842, he could write:
Kate… you recollect her propensity? She falls into, or out of, every coach or boat we enter; scrapes the shins off her legs; brings great sores and swellings on her feet; chips large fragments out of her ankle-bones; and makes herself blue with bruises. She really has, however, since we got over the first trial of being among circumstances so new and so fatiguing, made a most admirable traveller in every respect. She has never screamed or expressed alarm under any circumstances that would have fully justified her in doing so, even in my eyes.29
This letter recognized that Dickens did have a tendency to find her annoying, that he did think she was unnecessarily querulous, as well as clumsy; but that nevertheless, he was happy in her company. A Bostonian lady recalled after this trip:
There was no sign then of any disagreement or incompatibility between husband and wife… After their return to England I saw several amusing and familiar letters written by Dickens to his Boston friends – letters in which repeated and affectionate allusions were made to ‘Kate’ – and it struck me with the greatest surprise when several years afterwards I learned that conjugal difficulties in the Dickens household had led to estrangement and separation.30
Similar words could be written about the two protagonists in any failed marriage. Had Dickens and his wife struggled on bravely together to the end, had he been able to subdue the irritation she awoke in him, and had he never become infatuated with Nelly Ternan, the discontents and quarrels in the marriage would not necessarily have loomed large, when the story of his life came to be told.
That said, we can see cracks appearing in the marriage, even if we do not accept Dickens’s completely negative version of events, after it had fallen apart.
In the autumn of 1856, for example, we find a passage in the diary of Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Speaking of Dickens last evening, Mrs [Monckton] Milnes mentioned his domestic tastes, how he preferred home-enjoyments to all others and did not willingly go much into society. Mrs Bennoch, too, the other day, told us how careful he was of his wife, taking on himself all possible trouble as regards his domestic affairs, making bargains at butchers and bakers, and doing, as far as he could, whatever duty pertains to an English wife.31
January 1857 found him writing to Wills, sub-editor on Household Words, that ‘I am going to Newgate Market with Mrs Dickens after breakfast to shew her where to buy fowls.’ The fact that he took her shopping can be read either as over-controlling – he did not trust Kate to buy the fowl herself – or affectionately uxorious. It shows that, despite what he later liked to claim, it was not always her sister Georgina who ran the household, and Kate did cater for at least some of the meals.
The tenth and last child, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, was born on 13 March 1852. By the time he was born, Kate had given birth nine times, and she had suffered a number of miscarriages. She was only thirty-five years old and she was not in a robust state of health, physically or mentally.
He decided to take her to Malvern for the celebrated water cure. It was while she was there that Dickens hurried back to London and witnessed the gruesome death of his father, which was described in our first chapter. It was also at this time that their eight-month-old baby Dora, being tended at home in London – they were living in Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park – died. With so much else going on, Dickens was also rehearsing a play for a Royal Command Performance: it had the all-too-appropriate title of Not So Bad as We Seem. Douglas Jerrold, again all too appropriately, added, ‘But a great deal worse than we ought to be’.32 In the event, Kate had been so distraught that Dickens was obliged to postpone the performance, while he took his wife to Fort House in Broadstairs. They sublet the house in Devonshire Terrace until September. After only a few weeks beside the sea, Dickens breezily wrote, ‘I am quite happy again, but I have undergone a great deal.’33 His wife’s happiness had been cracked, destroyed, by the loss; its commonness – the death of babies – in that era making it no less heartbreaking.
Some – a very few – of Dickens’s stories end with a happy marriage, but most do not. Three years after Dickens met Nelly Ternan, readers of the 8 September 1860 edition of All the Year Round had been treated to a fiction entitled ‘Nurse’s Stories’, an expanded version of the tale told to him as a child by his nurse, Mary Weller, in Chatham. Her story told of a Captain Murderer whose ‘mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides’. [‘Nurse’s Stories’, UT 15] At a certain stage of the courtship of his victims, the Captain would ask if they could make pie crust. ‘And if she couldn’t by nature or education, she was taught.’ There is something on the verge of pornographic about that slavering sentence.
Having been forced to roll out an enormous piece of pastry, the ‘lovely bride’ would ask, ‘what pie is this to be?’
He replied, ‘A meat pie.’ Then said the lovely bride, ‘Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat.’ The Captain humorously retorted, ‘Look in the glass.’ She looked in the glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the Captain roared with laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing his sword, bade her roll out the crust. So she rolled out the crust, dropping large tears upon it all the time because he was so cross, and when she had lined the dish with crust and had cut the crust all ready to
fit the top, the Captain called out, ‘I see the meat in the glass!’ And the bride looked up at the glass just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off; and he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker’s, and ate it all, and picked the bones. [‘Nurse’s Stories, UT 15]
Through all the decades of public and parliamentary debate about marriage, decades in which the disastrous royal marriages were oft-repeated public jokes, and the few divorce cases were eagerly devoured newspaper scandals, Dickens was writing his novels. Almost every one deals, directly or tangentially, with the theme of marital disintegration. Even in the early novel Oliver Twist, written in the first year of his marriage, a book that appears, at first, to be the melodrama of a child lost in the terrifying streets of criminal London, the theme of marital misery surfaces. Monks, the villain who turns out to be Oliver’s half-brother, is the child of an unhappy marriage; and old Mr Brownlow, who has loved Oliver’s mother and who rescues him from Fagin and the criminals, confesses, ‘“I also know… the misery, the slow torture, the protracted anguish of that ill-assorted union. I know how listlessly and wearily each of that wretched pair dragged on their heavy chain through a world that was poisoned to them both. I know how cold formalities were succeeded by open taunts.”’[OT49]
‘Captain Murderer’ is one of the many instances in Dickens where we read, not merely totally unsympathetic accounts of marital incompatibility, but quasi-comic glorifications of monster husbands. Jerry Cruncher comes to mind, grave-robber and wife-beater, in A Tale of Two Cities. True, by the end of the novel he has undergone a slightly improbable change of heart and even allows, nay, encourages, his wife’s habit of prayer, which in the earlier chapters he has so vigorously opposed: ‘“Saying your prayers! You’re a nice woman! What do you mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin me?”’ [ATTC II 1] When she tries to say grace before the meal he exclaims, ‘Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it agin?… I won’t have my wittles blest off my table.’ [ATTC II 1] Cruncher – pre-conversion – is not presented as loveable exactly, but he is drawn with relish.