by A. N. Wilson
Despite her devotion to Prince Albert, Victoria’s views on marriage were trenchant. ‘All marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.’ So wrote the Queen to her firstborn, the Princess Royal.50 And as Dickens was growing up, the narratives of royal marriages and their failures contributed to the hoard of stories from which fiction could be drawn. One thinks most notably of George IV’s clandestine marriage to Mrs Fitzherbert, and his public disavowal of Queen Caroline, which were notorious features of the English scene during Dickens’s boyhood (he was eight when George became king; eighteen when he died, to be succeeded by William IV, who had fathered ten children, the Fitzclarences, by the celebrated actress Mrs Jordan). One also thinks of the notorious marriage of Prince Albert’s parents, which ended in a sordid divorce, and the fact that his father’s mistress – ‘La Belle Grecque’ – wrote about the scandalous state of royal marriages in a bestseller that was very popular in England.
England, then, was ready for new divorce laws, before they eventually arrived in 1857. In that very year in which the Divorce Bill received Royal Assent, not only Charles Dickens, but also his brothers Frederick and Augustus, ended their marriages. (Augustus’s wife was blind, and he left her for a younger woman and went to America.) Within the same calendar year, Marian Evans – known to us as George Eliot – moved in with George Lewes, a married man. George Meredith, poet and novelist, had to endure the agony of knowing that his wife was holidaying in Wales with her lover Henry Wallis, the painter of The Death of Chatterton, by whom she bore a son.
Given the way that Dickens wrote his novels, burrowing deeper and deeper into his psychological history, and reworking experience as his fiction became ever richer and darker, you can see that the writing of Little Dorrit in 1857 probably had as devastating an effect on his marriage as the meeting with Nelly Ternan. Creatively speaking, his relationship with his parents was of far greater moment than that with his wife, mistress or children. In Little Dorrit he had re-entered the shades of the prison house. He had seen and satirized his own early love(s). He had watched a little child-bride flit in and out of the shadows, unaware of the fact that, months after he finished dreaming about her, he would find her, materialized and realized, in a little actress in Manchester. Above all, he had imagined the destruction of his hated mother – a death-blow that his wife could only have realized, had she been psychologically aware, was a devastating step to have taken. For now, in the pursuit of his art, the reworking and rebuilding of experience in fictive form, nothing was going to be spared.
‘My mother hated me, even before I was born,’ Balzac told his mistress Mme Hanska.51 Dickens could have said the same, and it would have been as true of him as of Balzac – in the view of another of his mistresses – that he was ‘an eagle hatched by geese’. When the mother gives birth to a poet in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Bénédiction’, she rails against God:
Ah! que n’ai-je mis bas tout un noeud de vipères Plutôt que de nourrir cette dérision!52
But the boy is free. While she tries to rip out his heart and feed it to the dogs, he has made a discovery that leaves him invulnerable – that suffering is a unique gift for the artist, a form of noblesse. The ‘worse’ that the husband, and son Dickens became in the twelve years left to him on earth, the greater his art became. The books that followed his separation from Kate – A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend – were getting better all the time in a progressive curve. Then came the final one, the one that killed him, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the book where – into the idyllic world of boyhood Rochester – he allowed to intrude a confrontation of his own lust for mesmeric power over others.
FOUR
THE MYSTERY OF THE CHARITY OF CHARLES DICKENS
WHEN HE WAS in the middle of writing A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens wrote to Wilkie Collins from the office of All the Year Round (16 August 1859) how ‘I want very much to come to Old Broadstairs for a day, but cannot see my way there yet: having to pick up the story, and to blaze away with an eye to October. But I don’t give it up; far from it. I really do hope to come for a day before your time is up. Perhaps a tumble into the sea might – but I suppose there is no nitrate of Silver in the Ocean?’1 The helpful footnote in the Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens reminds us that silver nitrate was ‘used for cauterising warts and the treatment of ulcers’. It was also a regular remedy against gonorrhoea. This is the only reference to the possibility of Dickens having a sexually transmitted disease.
Four years earlier, however, in 1856, he had told Collins in a letter:
On Saturday night I paid three francs at the door of that place where we saw the wrestling, and went in, at 11 o’clock, to a Ball. Much the same as our own National Argyll Rooms. Some pretty faces – but all of two classes – wicked and coldly calculating, or haggard and wretched in their worn beauty. Among the latter was a woman of thirty or so, in an Indian shawl, who never stirred from a seat in a corner all the time I was there. Handsome, regardless, brooding, and yet with some nobler qualities in her forehead. I mean to walk about tonight and look for her.2
If Dickens did have the clap, for however short a period, after the breakdown of his marriage, it would obviously have complicated his hopes for a relationship with Nelly. It would also have made a difference to how he felt about Urania Cottage, the establishment he had set up with Miss Burdett-Coutts in the 1840s for the rescuing of ‘fallen women’.
Dickens’s philanthropic work was continuous throughout his life, whether he was putting on theatrical performances for charity, speechifying for hospitals or impoverished actors, prison-visiting, campaigning for the establishment of schools for the poor or indulging in innumerable acts of private kindness and generosity. The doctrine of Christmas, and Kindliness, was central not merely to his work, but to his life. He always regarded himself as a Christian, impatient of doctrinal or liturgical nicety, but committed to the saying that insomuch as we have done acts of charity to the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, the vulnerable, we have done it to Christ. During his years of active involvement with the women’s refuge known as Urania Cottage, 1846–58, aged between thirty-four and forty-six, he was kept busy by many other charitable concerns. The number of his children rose from six to nine. He founded, edited and ran Household Words. In addition to many articles and short stories, he wrote five great novels: Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit.3 Humphry House wrote: ‘This grind of charitable business would be astounding in any man: it is scarcely credible in the greatest English creative genius of his time.’4
To this should be added that there was no disparity in Dickens between his own works of philanthropy, public and secret, and the frequent denunciations – in his fiction and in his journalism and speeches – of charitable institutions, professional do-gooders, Benthamite social reformers, Pardiggles, Jellybys and Honeythunders. Unlike those who advertise their benevolence, for example, Dickens kept his connection with the House of Fallen Women a secret throughout his life. His article about it in Household Words was anonymous, its location and the name of its philanthropic backer, Miss Burdett-Coutts, suppressed.
Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, a radical politician, and granddaughter of the celebrated banker Thomas Coutts, had known Dickens slightly before she came to inherit her substantial share of the banking fortune. Her father had a salon in St James’s Square, where Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, Dickens, Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers had all been habitués.
The money came to her via her stepmother who, after the death of banker Coutts, had become, en secondes noces, the Duchess of St Albans. Having considered the characters of her first husband’s grandchildren, she selected Angela to be the residuary legatee of her estate, which amounted to £1.8 million in 1837 – billions in today’s money.
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p; After inheriting this gigantic sum, Angela Burdett added the Coutts to her name, moved into a large house in Stratton Street, Mayfair (just off Piccadilly), with her former governess Hannah Meredith, a fervent evangelical Christian who exerted a strong influence on the young woman. After 1849 they moved to Holly Lodge, Highgate. As one of the richest women in Britain, and as someone whose word was taken seriously at the family bank, she was able to offer financial assistance to the Queen herself in the early, impecunious years of her reign – before revenues from the Duchy of Lancaster made Queen Victoria the richest woman in her own kingdom – just as later she would lend money personally to Princess Mary of Teck, mother of the future Queen Mary. (She was also godmother to Queen Mary’s brother, Prince Francis of Teck.)
The greater part of Burdett-Coutts’s fortune, however, was devoted to more obviously worthy objects of charity. Dickens regarded himself as her ‘almoner’, guiding her in how she should dispose of her abundance. He regarded her as ‘the noblest spirit we can ever know’.5 Burdett-Coutts, as a token of her gratitude to Dickens, paid for his son Charley to go to Eton. The two remained friends until Dickens’s death, but there was a cooling – perhaps this was one of the reasons for Dickens having become less involved at Urania Cottage – after the failure of his marriage: Burdett-Coutts was disapproving, as most people were, both of the separation and of its mode.
In 1846, Dickens had accompanied Burdett-Coutts to Limehouse in the East London Docks to see the ragged schools that had been established there, in disused coach factories, granaries, distilleries and warehouses, for ‘the sweepings of the street’. Burdett-Coutts had lately provided £90,000 to build the Westminster church of St Stephen’s Rochester Row, as a memorial to her father, and she wanted to establish a parish school alongside it.
So they looked at the schools, and then they parted. Burdett-Coutts (unlike Dickens, a fervent churchwoman) went off and started her parish school. Dickens, who had recently confronted the failure of his newspaper the Daily News, and was on the verge of travelling to Switzerland with the family to get out of England for a few months, wrote his friend one of the longest letters of his life.
In it, he proposed the establishment of a refuge for women, with a view to their eventually being sent to Australia ‘for marriage, with the greatest hope for their future families, and with the greatest service to the existing male population, whether expatriated from Britain or born there’. This was a full four years before David Copperfield, in which David’s childhood sweetheart, Little Em’ly, would be seduced by his schoolboy hero, Steerforth. When they were playing together on the beach at Yarmouth in Chapter 3, Little Em’ly, prancing on the wooden sea-barrier, with the waves crashing beneath her, very nearly fell into the sea. David reached out a hand and rescued her. David and Dickens know what her fate is going to be, though as yet the reader does not. David and Dickens know that Em’ly will lose her virtue to the caddish Steerforth. By reaching forth his hand, young David saved the child Em’ly from drowning, but:
There has been a time since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her preservation could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to have held it up to save her. There has been a time since – I do not say it lasted long, but it has been – when I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been. [DC 3]
It is difficult not to associate this passage with Dickens’s later obsession with the murder of the prostitute Nancy in Oliver Twist, and his frequent enactments of the murder, not only on the stage, but in the privacy of his own garden. For David Copperfield, Em’ly, having lost her ‘purity’, would be better dead. Those who would like to believe that this habit of mind belongs exclusively to the creepier margins of the Victorian psyche have only to dwell on the innumerable cases, in our own day, of the murders of sexual victims, the killers unable to bear the loss of innocence which their own predatory behaviour has inflicted upon the child or young adult. It is, of course, their own loss of innocence they are wishing to eradicate, but this is not obvious to those who are plunged into the quagmire of sexual guilt and resentment. If, as hinted in that 1859 nitrate of silver, Dickens himself had ‘fallen’, and if he was among the very many Victorian men who frequented prostitutes, this was all the more reason for his wanting to help the young women of Urania Cottage.
Jenny Hartley, author of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, makes the telling point that, in his manifesto-letter, outlining to Burdett-Coutts his plan for the refuge, the whole scheme appeared to leap from his brain ready-forged. ‘Like the Daily News, which he had been planning to edit (an ill-conceived notion, and the main reason for his flight to Switzerland), like the amateur dramatics he put on and persuaded his friends to act in with him – and even more like his novels and stories, this home for fallen women would be another total world for him to control.’6 That perception, both of the integral character of the plan, and of it being a vehicle for Dickens’s control, are points very well made. Hartley’s book (2008) is one of the finest recent works on Dickens’s philanthropic work. As she reminds us, the scheme for Urania Cottage and the trajectory plotted for Little Em’ly in David Copperfield are all but identical. Em’ly ‘falls’, and then is ‘rescued’ and taken to Australia by her uncle Daniel Peggotty, Mrs Gummidge and Martha Endell. ‘Theer’s mighty countries, fur from heer. Our future life lays over the sea… No one can’t reproach my darling in Australia.’ [DC 51]
Dickens’s manifesto, spelt out in the May 1846 letter, was that the more enlightened prison governors, such as Captain G. L. Chesterton of the Middlesex House of Correction, and Lieutenant Tracy of Cold Bath Fields, would recommend young women who showed signs of repentance and a desire for a new life. The proposed household would have only a dozen or so inmates at any one time. ‘Order, punctuality, cleanliness, the whole routine of household duties – as washing, mending, cooking – the establishment itself would supply the means of teaching practically, to every one.’ When they were ready, the young women would be shipped out to the colonies or dominions where, Little Em’ly-like, they could begin life afresh: ‘No one can’t reproach my darling in Australia.’
Burdett-Coutts provided the money – £1,000 in the first instance; when Urania Cottage was up and running, she was spending £72,000 a year on it. Every year, Dickens would go through the figures with her and account for the uttermost farthing. When he and his family returned to England in 1847, after a pretty painful time abroad (see Chapter 6), he found the house: Urania Cottage in Shepherd’s Bush. It was a villa that could accommodate thirteen young women, and which was surrounded in those days by fields, and with outbuildings that he could envisage being converted into a wash-house.
A matron and a second-in-command were engaged. Mrs Holdsworth, the first matron, was forbidden, on the pain of dismissal, to discuss the young women’s past lives. ‘Dealing gently’ should be the rule. ‘These unfortunate creatures are to be tempted to virtue.’7 Dickens took charge of all the household practicalities. It was he who talked to the builders about alterations. It was he who went shopping for the furniture, the bookcases, the books. It was he who bought the household linen, the carpets and curtains; he who chose the women’s clothes. From the first moment of their arrival, they were to be clad in new clothes. ‘I have made them as cheerful in appearance as they reasonably could be – at the same time very neat and modest.’8 This was in marked contrast to their prison uniforms or the shaven heads and penitential garments of contemporary asylums of ‘Magdalens’.
Some of the young women who came to be part of the Urania Cottage experiment were able to turn their lives around. Others were incorrigible, and would be sent away for stealing, or would simply abscond. They were by no means all prostitutes, nor had all of them been in prison, but they
had all, one way or another, fallen foul of the system, and Dickens, Burdett-Coutts and the matrons of the institution were patently doing their best to help, though sometimes with what would seem to the twenty-first-century sensibility ‘a tough love’.
Visitors would be allowed, but restricted. Parents could come once a month, other visitors every three months. Inmates would be assessed each week for good behaviour. There was a points system, which enabled inmates to ‘bank’ points so that when they left, they did so with money saved. The virtues looked for were ‘Truthfulness, Industry, Temper, Propriety of Conduct and Conversation, Temperance, Order, Punctuality, Economy and Cleanliness’.9 Dickens’s near-mania for tidiness and cleanliness was observed by his daughter Mamie. At home, ‘he made a point of visiting every room in the house once each morning and if a chair was out of its place, or a blind not quite straight, or a crumb left on the floor, woe betide the offender!’10
The distinction between a desire to control and a desire to benefit the young women roped into the Dickens/Burdett-Coutts scheme is not easily drawn. In All the Year Round, Dickens wrote about how shocked he had been, when he took a house on the edge of Regent’s Park, to realize that one often met with loud braying and coarse language, within the earshot of his children and their nurse. The Police Act made swearing in public a criminal offence. Dickens deliberately set out to the park to find someone in breach of this regulation and was satisfied to find a girl of seventeen or thereabouts, surrounded by a ‘suitable attendance’ of blackguard youths, in whose presence she let forth a stream of blasphemies and obscenities. Dickens followed them for a mile or so, while they abused him, until he met a policeman. The youths at this point melted away and Dickens apprehended the young woman.