The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  So, to the two categories of book – the ones that take us on a journey, and the mannerists/stylists who delight us with their pyrotechnic skills – we need to add at least one other category: the writers who have been there before us and, seemingly, for us: the ones whose experiences make sense of our experiences, or whose books hold up a redemptive mirror to our own lives.

  That Larkin is such a writer does not need explanation. That Dickens is one such, however, while jerking our attention with queer names and queer characters – this tangle needs a little bit of teasing out. That is what this book has tried to do.

  If Dickens remains immortal, it is, among other reasons, for his profound understanding of the inner child who remains with all of us until we die. Clearly, however, he had a special status in his own times, different in kind from that enjoyed by any other writer, however popular. Even at the time, those who considered themselves grown-up were inclined to patronize his achievement.

  The vulgarity of Dickens, his appeal to the yokels, that is not in doubt. ‘My dearest Georgy,’ he wrote on 29 August 1858, from Dublin:

  The success at Belfast has been equal to the success here. Enormous! I think them a better audience on the whole than Dublin, and the personal affection there, was something overwhelming. I wish you and the dear girls could have seen the people look at me in the street – or heard them ask me, as I hurried to the hotel after the reading last night to ‘do me the honor to shake hands Misther Dickens and God bless you, Sir; not ounly for the light you have been to me this night; but for the light you’ve been in mee house, Sir (and God love your face!) this many a year’… I have never seen men go in to cry so undisguisedly as they did at that reading yesterday afternoon. They made no attempt whatever to hide it, and certainly cried more than the women. As to the Boots at night – and Mrs Gamp too – it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me laugh so, that sometimes I could not compose my face to go on.13

  The nineteenth century was a problem, a solution for which its wisest heads sought a solution: socialism, or a return to Catholicism, or an embrace of science, or what not. Dickens did not provide that solution, but he provided what was comparable to the mythologies of a pre-literate age. It is not an original thing to say. G. K. Chesterton, more than a hundred years ago, wrote, ‘Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the great mythologists and perhaps the greatest.’14

  There was no need for him to write a detailed documentary about the law. The Case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and the fog-bound Court of Chancery, a mythologized version of the ‘real’ thing, spoke louder than what is normally meant by satire. Likewise, the Circumlocution Office and Sir Tite Barnacle, the mythologized version of bureaucracy. Because mythology, we can see it everywhere in post-Dickensian settings, which are quite different from Victorian society. His prisons, his heartless bureaucracies, his impenetrable and unending legal procedures were Kafkaesque before Kafka was conceived.

  His contemporary readership picked up on this, and saw that Dickens was doing more than a journalist or a political campaigner could do. He was, among other things, making the optimistic assertion that in spite of the dehumanizing effects of overcrowding, industry, cities, political systems, every man, woman and child goes on being not only an individual, but, potentially, a comic individual. There are many tears, some of them wrung from us so gratuitously that we protest even as they flow, in the pages of Dickens. The overwhelming message, however, is something that used to be considered very British: the default position of a sane person is to find life funny, rather than the reverse.

  The Victorians, creators of a human horror story that was horrific in a way only they knew how to make worse – slums, treadmills, racist imperialism, the lot – understood this, with their music halls, their usually unfunny humorous periodicals, their pantomimes and vaudevilles, their excruciating Gilbert and Sullivan. When Dickens grates upon the modern ear, he does so because he is so inescapably a man of his own times, a representative of them, the most imaginative and inventive such representative, but one who cannot escape their often alien outlook – his wish for criminals’ backs to be scarified, the racism of his response to the Governor Eyre incident, so blatant as to have almost a quality of innocence.

  When they put him in his grave and left it open for thousands to stream past, that is what the crowds were responding to. In the three most overtly political of the novels, Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities and Hard Times, he had confronted the phenomenon of the crowd and power. In the first two, he looked back to moments in the previous century when mass hysteria dehumanized men and women, leading to behaviour of which, merely as individuals, they would have been incapable. Some of his finest writing is to be found both among his descriptions of the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge and of the convulsions of revolution in France in A Tale of Two Cities. The Victorians shared Dickens’s dread of the same thing happening again, should crowd-mania possess the ever-swollen populace. The population of Coketown, the disgruntled industrial proletariat, likewise sends shivers into the middle-class bosom. ‘Whenever a Coke-towner felt he was ill-used – that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts – he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would “sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic”. This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.’ [HT II 1].

  Dickens’s response, to the proletariat struggle, as to those destitute and threatened with the workhouse, is broadly consistent – namely, that it was his function, as a charitable citizen and as an artist, to continue asserting the value and distinctiveness of every individual. Hence the great tragedy of Betty Higden – I am with Swinburne there, considering it one of Dickens’s finest moments.

  One of the clergymen in the Abbey at the time of Dickens’s funeral was the Reverend William Benham, then teaching history at Queen’s College, Harley Street, one of the first schools founded for the education of girls in Victorian London, by Benham’s mentor, F. D. Maurice. He later became the vicar of Margate, where he was also chairman of the Schools Board in the town. It was in 1877 that the Reverend George Wharton Robinson became the headmaster of Margate High School, and brought his young wife to live with him there. Her mother had died the previous year. The new bride, to celebrate her life with her young schoolmaster husband, had already lost a lot of age, and by the 1881 census she would have become a mere twenty-eight years old, two years younger than her husband. In their wedding certificate of 1876, neither husband nor wife supplied an age, and the prosaic truth – that she had been thirty-seven when she married her much younger husband – was something that was perfectly easily concealed. In spite of illness in the year before their wedding, she was robust enough to bear two children: Geoffrey, born when simple fact would have declared her to be approaching her fortieth birthday, and the second, Gladys, long after that unheeded anniversary was past.

  In spite of the couple both being ill – George would eventually resign his headmastership for nervous reasons, and she was ‘frail’ – they ran their school with brio and imagination. Mrs Robinson organized plays and concerts, and helped with productions at Margate’s Theatre Royal – Romeo and Juliet, Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen and Alive or Dead?, a dramatized version of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Nobody thought to enquire into the Mystery of Mrs Robinson, and, indeed, there was no reason to suppose that there was one. No one needed to know that her own father, as a not very successful actor, had appeared at the Theatre Royal Margate, or that, during the 1840s, the most famous novelist in Britain had frequently come over from Broadstairs to attend productions there.

  Everyone loved Dickens, didn’t they? There was nothing suspicious about Mrs Robinson reading aloud from the novels to the children in her husband’s school. It was a badge of pride for the school that Mrs Robinson – who, being now only in her twenties, must have been a mere child when she knew th
e famous man – had been acquainted with the writer and was able to ask his sister-in-law, Miss Georgina Hogarth, to present the prizes at Margate High School.

  But for Mrs Robinson, all was not well. She was troubled in her conscience. And when she got to know the Reverend George Benham – visitor to the school in his capacity as chair of the Schools Board, as well as vicar of Margate – she began to confide in him. The story all tumbled out. After the years had passed, Benham, a keen Dickensian, met a fellow enthusiast who told him he was planning to write a biography. Benham repeated what Mrs Robinson had told him. It was indiscreet, but she had not been making a formal confession, so there was no exact breach of professional decorum. Perhaps he felt the truth ought to be told; perhaps, learned and devout man though he was, he was a blabbermouth who simply could not keep the story to himself: that she had been Dickens’s mistress; that he had set her up in a house; that he visited her two or three days a week; that, even during his lifetime, she had felt deep remorse about the relationship, and that her remorse had made them both miserable; and that now ‘she loathed the very thought of his intimacy’.

  Yet the mesmerist from beyond the grave still worked his enchantment, and even after admitting her true story to Canon Benham, she appeared on the stage of the Theatre Royal Margate in a comedietta entitled Orange Blossoms, rounding the evening off with an impersonation of Mrs Jarley, the waxworks proprietress in The Old Curiosity Shop.

  Those who know the story of the novel will know that Little Nell and her grandfather were on the run from the evil attentions of the dwarfish villain, Daniel Quilp. Quilp has been bleeding the grandfather dry, because the silly old man is addicted to gambling and goes to Quilp for loans he cannot repay. As a result, Quilp is now the virtual owner of The Old Shop. But, more than that, he wants to possess Nell body and soul. Carnal knowledge of the little woman-child.

  The quill-pen of the dark, dwarfish, demonic little novelist had invented the story of Quilp and Nell long before our Nelly was known to the demonic Dickens. Nell had ‘loathed the very thought of his intimacy’ more than a decade before Nelly made that fateful journey to Manchester to take part in The Frozen Deep. Yet both Nelly Robinson and, now, Canon Benham, as he sat in the audience, must have had strange thoughts as they re-enacted the scene: Nell taking her cue from Mrs Jarley, the waxworks proprietress, and identifying the wax figures for the visitors.

  The waxworks were played by the children, one of whom was Nelly’s son Geoffrey, who knew nothing of his mother’s story until the 1920s when he was working as a second-hand bookseller in Slough. By then he had been through the First World War – wounded at Mons, posted to Persia on a secret expedition and, at the end of the war and after, in charge of a refugee camp for two years in the Persian port of Enzeli. It might be thought that beside the sufferings Geoffrey witnessed during those years, the discovery of the truth about his mother was shattering. He consulted Henry Dickens, by then a judge, who confirmed it was all true: that Nelly had been the novelist’s mistress, and that the age on her death certificate, sixty-five, was – like so much in the Dickensian world – a work of fancy.

  One asks oneself whether her husband was also made privy to the secret and whether it had a comparably devastating effect. In March 1886, George Wharton Robinson presided over a charitable reading called ‘An Evening with Charles Dickens’. Almost immediately afterwards, this hitherto healthy man of thirty-six suffered an unspecified type of nervous collapse. They sold the school and began to run into financial difficulties, living in a modest way, moving from modest flat to modest flat in Bayswater: Artesian Road, Sutherland Avenue and Maida Vale. In 1888, Robinson removed his name from Crockford’s Clerical Directory, implying that he no longer considered himself a clergyman, or that, perhaps, he had lost his faith. Perhaps, more shattering than to lose his faith in the Almighty, he had lost his faith in Nelly.

  She did her best to keep them afloat, offering lessons in French and elocution. Those who met the couple in those straitened times remembered that ‘George made of himself an absolute doormat to Ellen’.15 Eventually, much to her sister Fanny’s dismay, she sold her only substantial asset, the house in Ampthill Square that Dickens had bought for her in 1860. At least with the proceeds she could ensure that Geoffrey and Gladys would be financially secure. Geoffrey lived until 1959. Gladys survived until 1973, protesting to anyone who would listen, before she sank into senility, that the relationship between her mother and Dickens had been blameless.

  Those who find Dickens garish, vulgar, unrealistic, are those who consider ‘realistic’ to be synonymous with ‘real’. Much as they might enjoy Dickens, they are never going to do so as richly as those who see that he was a visionary – ‘His flexibility is that of a richly poetic art of the world.’16 It is touching that one of the presentations enacted by Nelly Robinson and the children on the stage at Margate should have been that of her near-namesake Nell Trent among Mrs Jarley’s waxworks.

  ‘Never go into the company of a filthy Punch any more,’ said Mrs Jarley, ‘after this.’

  ‘I never saw any wax-work, ma’am,’ said Nell. ‘Is it funnier than Punch?’ […]

  ‘It isn’t funny at all,’ repeated Mrs Jarley. ‘It’s calm and – what’s that word again – critical? – no – classical, that’s it – it’s calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility.’ [OCS 27]

  Did the last eight words of that sentence describe Nelly’s marriage? Did the years in Peckham, and Slough, and France – the secret years that, when she was speaking to Mr Benham, she so much repented – did they not return as richer, happier memories?

  Little Nell was trained by Mrs Jarley to give the commentaries upon the waxwork display to the visitors, and she became very good at it, able to excite the trippers with her descriptions of ‘Jasper Packlemerton of atrocious memory, who courted and married fourteen wives, and destroyed them all, by tickling the soles of their feet when they were sleeping in the consciousness of innocence and virtue’. [OCS 28] The waxworks themselves, however, were as adaptable as the commentary, and when they were being displayed, for example, to schoolgirls, their proprietress was capable of changing their identity. When the girls looked at what was supposed to be Mary, Queen of Scots, ‘in a dark wig, white shirt-collar, and male attire, was such a complete image of Lord Byron that the young ladies quite screamed when they saw it’. [OCS 28] Likewise, ‘Mrs Jarley had been at great pains to conciliate, by altering the face and costume of Mr Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr Lindley Murray as he appeared when engaged in the composition of his English Grammar, and turning a murderess of great renown into Mrs Hannah More.’ [OCS 29] Hannah More had been a writer and bluestocking on the outer edges of Dr Johnson’s circle, and in all likelihood the children at Mr Robinson’s High School in Margate used the English grammar composed by the American Quaker Lindley Murray. By making the children enact this scene, Nelly was playfully realizing how easy it was for people, as well as for waxworks, to assume other masks and identities, to become the person other people wanted you to be. Behind the respectable face of the grammarian, however, there grinned out the face of Grimaldi the mesmeric clown.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Obviously, the number of books and articles about Charles Dickens is vast. I have listed here only those books that are referred to in the text, or which I have found especially helpful.

  WORKS BY CHARLES DICKENS

  Collins, Philip (ed.), Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, London, Macmillan, 1981

  —— Charles Dickens: Sikes and Nancy and Other Public Readings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995

  Dexter, Walter (ed.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, The Nonesuch Dickens, 3 vols, London, Nonesuch Press, 1939

  Dickens, Charles, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, London, Richard Bentley, 1838

  Fielding, K. J. (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens, Oxford, C
larendon Press, 1960

  Hartley, Jenny (ed.), The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012

  Pascoe, David (ed.), Charles Dickens: Selected Journalism 1850–1870, London, Penguin Books, 1997

  Slater, Michael (ed.), The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, London, J. M. Dent, 1998

  —— (ed.), ‘Gone Astray’ and Other Papers from Household Words 1851–9, London, Dent, 1998

  Storey, Graham and Tillotson, Kathleen et al. (eds), The Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 vols, The British Academy Pilgrim Edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965–2002

  SECONDARY MATERIAL

  Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens, London, Sinclair Stevenson, 1990

  Adrian, A. Arthur, Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle, London, Oxford University Press, 1957

  Allen, Michael, Charles Dickens’ Childhood, Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1988

  Andrews, Malcolm, Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006

  Auden, W. H., Collected Poems, London, Faber & Faber, 1991

  Aylmer, Felix, The Drood Case, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964

  Balzac, Honoré de, Lettres à Mme Hanska, edition établie par Roger Pierrot, Paris, Laffont, 1990

  Betjeman, John, First and Last Loves, London, John Murray, 1952

  Bowen, Elizabeth, Eva Trout, London, Jonathan Cape, 1969

  Bowen, John, ‘Unmutual Friend’, TLS, 22 February 2019, p. 18