The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Mesmer’s was the era when, beginning with chemistry and the experiments of Joseph Priestley in England, and Antoine Lavoisier in France, modern science, properly speaking, began. The discovery of the elements, and the composition of matter, made an almost immediate technological difference to the world. Having discovered the chemical property of water, it was almost no time before it became possible to see the technological power of steam. The magnetic property of iron was no longer a mystery – it was something that could be demonstrated and explained in terms of chemistry and physics. From H2O to steam engines was a short step: within decades of the chemists’ theoretical studies there were mechanized factories; the Luddites were trying to put back the clock and destroy the spinning jenny and the powered loom; and railroads were steaming across the fields and plains of Europe and America. A new world had dawned.

  Mesmer believed it was possible to explain and categorize the human psyche in rather the way that it was possible to classify the inanimate universe. His ‘discovery’ of animal magnetism led to two propositions. First, there is a magnetic ‘fluid’ in the universe. Mechanical laws, working in an alternate ebb and flow, control ‘a mutual influence between the Heavenly Bodies and the Earth’.11 Animate Bodies partake of this fluid. Second, because it was now possible for science to identify the ebb and flow of this fluid, it was also possible to create a new theory about the power and influence of people upon one another. When one human being exercised power over another, they were exercising animal magnetism. It was possible, moreover, to demonstrate this power in a hypnotic manner.

  Mesmer’s ideas, like many other scientific ideas – for example, all the ideas of Cuvier or Lamarck about evolution – were held at arm’s length, or ignored, by the British intellectual community for most of the half-century that began with the American Revolution and included the French Revolution. It was only, really, in the late 1830s that either the evolutionary idea or the animal-magnetism idea got much of an airing in Britain, and most British medical opinion was decidedly suspicious of the idea of animal magnetism.

  An exception was John Elliotson, who held the Chair of the Principles and Practice of Medicine at the newly founded University College, in London, and who began to do mesmeric experiments on the wards of University College Hospital. Most notably with a pair of sisters named O’key.

  Elizabeth and Jane O’key were a pair of epileptic housemaids, unusually small and – just the way Dickens liked them – undeveloped and child-like. Elizabeth, dubbed the ‘prima donna of the mesmeric stage’, displayed ‘no evidence of her having made any approach towards puberty’.12 She was pale, sickly and melancholy; her hands were covered with warts, which she picked, so they were always raw and bleeding.

  Having initially supported his friend Elliotson, Thomas Wakley, pioneer coroner who exposed the evils of Victorian epidemics and the scandal of disease among the urban poor, founder-editor of The Lancet and a political radical, came to have his doubts as Elliotson, in putting the O’key sisters through their paces, lowered the tone of scientific experiment to that of vaudeville – and bawdy vaudeville at that. Elliotson chose to make his mesmeric experiments on the O’keys public, to avoid the implication that he was exercising an unwholesome power over vulnerable young females in private. This only led to the implication, in The Lancet and elsewhere, that the experiments were salacious. Both sisters, but especially Elizabeth, when placed under the mesmeric spell, became roguish with members of the usually all-male audience, addressing the Marquess of Anglesey, for example, as ‘white trowsers’, to the general amusement of the other observers. The O’keys, under the mesmeric influence, could lift heavy weights and display extraordinary telepathic powers; when blindfolded or when their line of sight was hidden by screens, they could tell how many fingers Dr Elliotson was holding up; there were many, rather footling, experiments, involving coins and pieces of metal, which were almost in the nature of conjuring tricks.

  Elliotson came to believe that it was possible to use mesmerism as an anaesthetic, and to conduct surgical operations painlessly upon bodies who had been mesmerized. He also believed that his subjects, especially the O’keys, entered mysteriously into clairvoyant knowledge when under the influence. When Elizabeth O’key was led into the men’s ward of the University College Hospital, she asked hysterically why ‘Great Jacky’, the ‘angel of death’, was sitting on one of the patients’ beds. Then, having shuddered, she moved to another bed where she found ‘little Jacky’. The man on whose bed Great Jacky had been seen died that night; the companion of ‘little Jacky’ ‘escaped scarcely with his life’. It was at this point that the hospital authorities insisted upon Elliotson discontinuing his mesmeric experiments, and he forthwith resigned. On the very next day, 28 December 1838, at 6.30 p.m., Elliotson and Dickens dined together.13

  Elliotson became the godfather to Dickens’s second son. In accepting this role, Elliotson, a bachelor agnostic, made clear that he regarded his part in the child’s life as supplementary to Dickens’s bodily role.

  I shall be delighted to become father in God to your little bo peep. I should, however, have been compelled to forego this delight had you not absolved me from religious duties & everything vulgar – For nothing could I teach him in the vulgar tongue – nor would I have spoiled him for arithmetic by teaching him that three are one & one is three or defaced his views on the majesty of God by assuring him that the maker of the Universe once came down & got a little jewess in the family way.14

  As we saw in the chapter on Charity, Dickens never had much truck with the Christian orthodoxies, and indeed joined the Unitarian Church, a body that has, since the eighteenth century, discounted the central doctrines of God’s Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, and the Trinity, preferring to concentrate on the moral and social requirements of the New Testament, kindliness, forbearance and concern for the poor. There was, however, one clergyman in Elliotson’s circle, the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend, and he was so enchanted by Dickens that he actually composed a sonnet ‘To the Author of Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby & c’. Dickens became a frequent attendant at the mesmeric demonstrations not only of Elliotson, at his premises at 37 Conduit Street, but also of Townshend. Only the pressure of work would keep him away, as when he apologized for non-attendance on 6 January 1842 – he explained that he was in the process of ‘murdering that poor child’: that is, finishing off Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.

  Townshend’s book of 1840, The Facts of Mesmerism, could have been describing the obvious appeal of the fad to Dickens himself when he said, ‘Even the swimmer, who learns at length to surmount the boisterous surf, or to stem the adverse stream, will revel in the consciousness of awakened power. How much more must the mental enthusiast riot in the display of energies so long concealed, so wondrously developed.’15 Townshend, indubitably homosexual,16 longed to mesmerize Dickens himself, a plea that Dickens always refused – on the grounds that it might cause him headaches and interfere with his work.17 Clearly, the real reason was that Dickens did not wish to surrender himself to another’s power. He recognized that Townshend – who became a good friend – had prodigious mesmeric power, which extended not only to the human race. The mesmeric cleric, in the intervals of obsession with a fifteen-year-old Belgian, Alexis, whom Dickens nicknamed the magnetic boy,18 put on the most astonishing mesmeric demonstrations, ranging from Alexis’s clairvoyant powers to Townshend’s own capacity to hypnotize not only human beings, but also birds and animals. Under Townshend’s spiritual powers, tom tits and nightingales fell into trances and allowed themselves to be handled and tossed about like balls. Dickens, naturally, believed it was possible to develop comparable capacities of control within himself.19

  The following year, 1842, Dickens took his wife to America, by which time he had already learned – from Townshend and from Elliotson himself – how to perform as a mesmeric operator. Soon after he arrived in Boston, Dickens, presumably with an introduction from the London practitioners in the cult
, was invited by an American mesmerist, Dr Collyer, to witness his cases.

  Not long after this, while in Pittsburgh, Dickens ‘magnetized’ his wife Kate in the presence of two witnesses. Within six minutes of passes about her head with his hands, Kate became hysterical. She then fell asleep. Dickens found he could wake her easily, as taught by Elliotson and Townshend, by transverse movements of his thumbs over her eyebrows, and by blowing gently on her face.

  The ‘success’ of this first experiment in animal magnetism slightly shocked him. Writing to his friend William Macready – Dickens recommended him to consult Elliotson and take mesmeric cures for his own weak health – the novelist assured the great actor that he wished him to be the witness ‘of many, many happy times’ when Dickens was able to cast this spell over Kate. Indeed, on their return from America he would often mesmerize his wife and other members of the family or friends. Not all his subjects were women. Macready himself recalled, ‘I did not quite like it, but assented: was very nervous, and found the fixedness of the position – eyes, limbs, and entire frame – very unpleasant, and the nervousness at first painful. Reasoned myself out of it, and then felt it could not effect me.’20

  Mesmerism as metaphor: surrender of the will: clearly, the submission of the mesmeric subjects to their operator was not overtly sexual, or even a metaphor for sex alone. Where this is leading us is closer to the understanding of the way Dickens operated – operates – as an artist. John Keats did not like poetry that has a design upon us. Well, the novels of Charles Dickens have a design upon us all right, and there is never going to be any doubt about who is in control. Every reader accepts him on his or her own terms or finds him repellent. Dickens wooed/wowed the crowds in his lifetime, and this is the way that his books still operate. This is where Mesmerism fits into the picture of Dickens as an Artist. This is the point of emphasizing the emblematic significance of Mesmerism in Dickens’s range of performance tricks.

  The sexual element, if not to the fore, was undoubtedly strong in all this. Witness the fact that Wakley and others found something obviously unsavoury about Elliotson’s public demonstrations of how he could make the apparently not-yet-pubescent O’keys pass into hysterics, swooning, crying aloud, and so forth.

  Dickens, likewise, though prepared to mesmerize, either literally or metaphorically, his children or his friends, found it most exciting to perform the bag of tricks on women. Clearly the most dramatic example of this occurred during his long Italian journey with his wife and children, in the autumn of 1844.

  In the course of the journey Dickens had befriended a Swiss banker by the name of Emile de la Rue, and his small, beautiful, child-like, nervous English wife. Another little child-woman on the edge of nervous collapse. You can sense Dickens becoming too excited. As they travelled through Italy, the Dickenses and the de la Rues pitched up together in various places, including Genoa and Rome. Dickens’s intimacy with Mme de la Rue caused Kate enormous distress. It is not entirely clear whether Dickens slept with Mme de la Rue. What was on display, and what was apparently tolerated by her husband, was Dickens’s desire for absolute control over a young, vulnerable woman who was suffering, in the diagnosis of a late-twentiethcentury psychiatrist, from ‘a hysterical conversion-cum-catatonic syndrome or demonic hallucinations and abnormal posturing and contortion’.21 He told M. de la Rue that ‘Kitty Clive, the actress, had said to Garrick (crying at his Lear) that she believed he could act a gridiron; while he (Dickens) had a perfect conviction that he could magnetize a frying-pan.’22

  Mme de la Rue, ‘a most affectionate and excellent little woman’, suffered from nervous tics and hallucinations. She constantly found herself on a green hillside, with a blue sky above her head. She suffered from appalling pain, and was under the impression that stones were being hurled at her by unseen hands. (In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the alcoholic stonemason Durdles pays the street urchin ‘Deputy’ (‘Winks’) to pelt him with stones as a way of guiding him home when he is hopelessly inebriated.) Dickens undertook to cure his ‘patient’ by mesmerism.23

  Mme de la Rue was his most successful ‘patient’. At Genoa, Kate became so disturbed by the amount of time Dickens was spending in Mme de la Rue’s bedroom at all hours of day and night that it was expedient for the novelist to take his family away for a while, in the hope of calming his wife’s ‘unreasonable’ behaviour. Thirteen years later, in 1857, when he was in the process of separating from Kate, Dickens wrote to M. de la Rue:

  Between ourselves… I don’t get on better in these later times with a certain poor lady you know of than I did in the earlier Peschiere days. Much worse. Much worse! Neither do the children, elder or younger. Neither can she get on with herself, or be anything other than unhappy. (She has been excruciatingly jealous of, and has obtained proof of my being on the most intimate terms with, at least fifteen thousand women of various conditions of life since we left Genoa.) Please to respect me for this vast experience.24

  Back in 1844, when they returned to Rome, the de la Rues joined the Dickenses in the Hotel Meloni. One night Kate woke up to find Dickens striding up and down their bedroom with all the candles ablaze. He had just come from Mme de la Rue’s bedroom, where he had been mesmerizing her and trying to calm her night fears. He had found her ‘rolled into an apparently insensible ball, by tic on the brain’. Within half an hour of submitting to Dickens’s will, the ‘excellent little woman’ was sleeping as calmly as a happy child.25

  Contemporary theories about animal magnetism lay at the core of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. John Jasper exercised just such mesmeric force over Rosa Bud as Dickens had utilized in the bedroom of Mme de la Rue.

  As Rosa Bud explained to her friend Helena, the Asiatic new girl at Miss Twinkleton’s academy:

  He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. [MED 7]

  Helena Landless is going to be the physical protectress of the vulnerable Pussy. ‘The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and the wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form.’ [MED 7] No shyness here about the word ‘bosom’. Landless, the surname of Pussy’s protectress, and of Helena’s brother who falls instantly in love with Rosa at first sight, is an unusual name. It must have been suggested by the name of Nelly – Ellen Lawless Ternan. The relationship between Jasper and Rosa Bud reflects the ‘dark’ side of Dickens’s possessive love for his much younger mistress. The fantasy that took shape in the form of this particular fiction was created by Dickens’s preoccupations in the last year of his life. His fictions had long been fed by the thought of older men taking child-brides or tiny female companions who were not as sexless as they appeared, or child-women – as in the case of the doll’s dressmaker upbraiding her drunken father, or Little Nell restraining her grandfather’s calamitous gambling habits – who had reversed their roles. At the same time, there had also been the story of Miss Wade rescuing Tattycoram from the smothering possessive love of the Meagles (Dickens recognizing the negative and repellent nature of the benignant, jolly old charitable figures in his fictions).

  We misunderstand the word ‘Life’ if we think that the ‘Life’ of Charles Dickens is one of two things. One is the prosaic, outward surface of his life, the events that actually occurred to him, and in which he was involved – in Dickens’s case, the childhood in Chatham and London; the horrors of Warren’s Blacking warehouse and the Marshalsea; the marriage to Catherine Hogarth; the public and charitable involvements of his hyper-energetic life. Secondly, the ‘Life’ of a novelist could be the uses to which the novelist put these experiences – John Dickens in the Marshalsea, turning into Mr Dorrit. C
learly, in a rough and ready sort of way, this is what happens in the ‘Life’ of a novelist, and almost all biographies of novelists do indeed consist of this juxtaposition of supposedly ‘real’ experiences and the reproduction of these experiences in fictive form.

  So, in a book such as Michael Painter’s two-volume biography of Marcel Proust, we watch the patient assembly of the ‘originals’ from which the imaginative author fashioned the fictional Baron de Charlus, Mme de Guermantes, and so forth.

  Actually, what is happening in the ‘Life’ of a novelist is something much less straightforward than this, and the reductive attempt to draw the connections between ‘real’ and fictional life leads to various levels of clumsiness. Who, in a sense, cares that Sherlock Holmes might or might not have been based on a particular teacher at Edinburgh encountered during Conan Doyle’s medical training? This tells us precisely nothing about Sherlock Holmes, who is an immortal figure – unlike the dead and (all but – save by Conan Doyle obsessives) forgotten ‘original’.

  Clearly, unless a writer is composing works of science fiction or what is shelved by the booksellers under ‘fantasy’, the real world will be used as a canvas, the world as actually encountered by the writer. A sense of place was important to Dickens, and he evoked town and landscape with unforgettable clarity. A certain type of reader will always be interested in visiting the places that appear to have inspired their favourite novelists. Is Pemberley Chatsworth? What was the original of Mansfield Park? Sometimes the identification of imagined place and its original in real life becomes so powerfully confused that the ‘real’ place is actually subsumed in the imaginary: witness Illiers in Normandy being renamed Combray. Presumably it is only a matter of time before Laugharne in South Wales becomes the Llareggub of Under Milk Wood.