Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  A few years later, A Christmas Carol added to Dickens’s celebrity, casting him in yet another role, as national patron of Christmas cheer and good feeling. But all the various aspects of Dickens, all the busy manifestations of his genius—comic sparkler, reformer and satirist, sentimentalist, champion of the lonely child, purveyor of punchbowl and Christmas turkey—seemed to leave him little time for romance. His energies were expended in so many other directions, perhaps, that he scarcely had time for amorous diversions; or perhaps, one might guess, like many ambitious men he had no capacity for strong personal affections. His early novels, in any event, evince little interest in that powerful engine of human affairs—and of literature—love. The novels’ nods to romance, in getting their young heroes and heroines suitably married, are invariably conventional and tepid. Dickens was thirty-one when he wrote A Christmas Carol, and from the evidence of his novels and stories to that point, one might have supposed that he had never been in love, had never known any feelings of desire, passion, or urgency.

  In fact, he had loved ardently as a young man—and unsuccessfully. After the failure of that early romance, he was reluctant to revisit the painful feelings in his fiction. But there was another reason he found it difficult to deal with the complex emotions of sexual love. His strongest religious feelings held the feminine spirit in high reverence. For Dickens, the essence of femininity was love, but a love that was self-denying and otherworldly, too ethereal to descend into lower regions of impulse and desire. A pure maiden’s love was daughterly or sisterly, never erotic, and only reluctantly did he concede romance and marriage to his young heroines. His contemporary John Ruskin accused Dickens of killing Old Curiosity Shop’s heroine Little Nell for the market, as a butcher kills a lamb; but it would be more accurate to say that his concession to the market was rather to marry off his heroines. Marriage condemned them to the sorry exigencies of husbands and children; it might gratify the expectations of his readers, but it violated his own idealistic cult of the maiden.

  A glance at Shakespeare suggests Dickens’s dilemma. With no notion of his heroines as rarefied spirits, Shakespeare made them prompt to fall in love, ready to marry, and quick to seize opportunities. Having known Duke Orsino for only a few days, Twelfth Night’s Viola decides that “myself would be his wife” (1.4). Having just met Orlando, As You Like It’s Rosalind foresees him as “my child’s father” (1.3). Though Rosalind and Viola are irreproachably chaste maidens, Shakespeare did not imagine them possessing any high sanctity or ethereal detachment, nor did he see their sexual warmth opposed to their virtue. By contrast, Dickens savored the celibate sisterly and daughterly vocations of his heroines and shrank from any suggestion of amorous motives. Marriage might be an honorable vocation, as well as a novelist’s obligation, but it was nothing he relished, philosophically, and he surrendered his heroines to their earnest suitors with jealous reservations. He would have preferred that they remain vestal.

  His religion of feminine self-abnegation had its roots both in his own nature and in the culture of his time, but it was given its specific shape by the death of his beloved young sister-in-law Mary Hogarth when he himself was a young man, a loss affecting him so strongly that for the rest of his life she remained his principal icon of holiness. Dickens critics often disparage his fixation on Mary Hogarth as encouraging his propensity for insipid angelic heroines. Certainly her influence was deep and long-lasting. But even if the saints of his religion were excessively spiritualized maidens—Orwell scoffed at them as “legless angels”—at least they gave Dickens a religion, and one with a generous code of compassion, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. As a theology, it was slight; as an ethic of humility and self-giving, it had much to recommend it. He might have done worse. From time to time he fell into other agitations and enthusiasms, but only in passing; he never worshiped the gods of politics, prosperity, technology, or science.

  Dickens’s three loves are three different stories: each revolving about a young woman who had nothing to do with the other two; each occupying a different era of his life; each with a different plot and outcome. And yet taken together, his three loves form a single story, extending across forty years, from his youth to his death.

  His first love ended, his second began, in loss. “Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman won or woman lost?” William Butler Yeats would wonder in “The Tower.” “If on the lost, admit you turned aside/From a great labyrinth …”—the labyrinth, that is, of fully embodied love, with its ambiguous fusion—often confusion—of soul and body. For much of his life, Dickens’s imagination brooded tenderly over the two women he had lost, richly poignant memories, sanctified by loss, regret, and time. One became the image of his own vanished youth, the other a ministering angel. Under their charm, his early novels seldom ventured into the labyrinth of Eros. For many years, he loved not a woman, but two vanished spirits.

  But twenty years after the death of his young sister-in-law, Dickens fell in love a third time, with revolutionary impact. His affair with a young actress altered his life: fracturing his marriage; rupturing long friendships and business partnerships; drawing him into a double life of public celebrity and esteem on one hand, of guilt, sin, and secrecy on the other. With Ellen Ternan, he entered the labyrinth. This love was no fond memory, no wistful dwelling on a lost ideal, but a passion that possessed him for a dozen years and ended only with his death. Under its influence, his fiction ventured into new regions of feeling. The earlier women he loved gave him models of the Coquette and the Virgin; his later novels probed the mysteries of Venus.

  His liaison with Ellen Ternan unsettled basic and longstanding assumptions. His feminine ideal, with the face of Mary Hogarth, had for years inspired him with reverence for maiden devotion and self-surrender. Pure love was a feminine spirit, so chaste and celestial that it could have no sweaty business with male lovers. Soul and body were uneasy partners; the upward-tending spirit did not embrace, but only tolerated, its bondage to the flesh. It was all very well for light coquettes—of the world, worldly—to flirt and allure. But Dickens’s fictional heroines enact a divine love, sacrificing themselves, Christ-like, to unworthy and ungrateful males—fathers, grandfathers, brothers. If Orwell’s “legless angel” jest oversimplifies these heroines, it is true enough that they seldom seem troubled by desire or temptation; and that they selflessly dedicate themselves to their weak or wretched male kin, rather than wasting their time on lovers.

  Dickens never relinquished his cult of the sanctified feminine spirit, but his passion for Ellen Ternan gave flesh to this spirit. She inspired him to devotion, but also enmeshed him in desire; she exalted him, but also entangled him.

  Several centuries earlier, John Donne had reflected on love’s intermixture of soul and flesh:

  Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use

  To say, which have no mistress but their Muse,

  But as all else, being elemented too,

  Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

  (“Love’s Growth”)

  For Dickens, Love had never been so fully “elemented”—embodied—as in his desire for Ellen Ternan. The Virgin and Venus, the Muse and the Mistress, love in contemplation and love in action—as these contraries jostled one another in his imagination, his novels grew richer.

  Dickens died on a beautiful June afternoon in 1870, at his country house, Gad’s Hill, in rural Kent. He had collapsed at dinner the day before, after writing much of the day in the upper story of his summer retreat, a miniature Swiss chalet on the grounds of Gad’s Hill.

  The next day, he lay unresponsive on a sofa that had been carried into the dining room. Ellen Ternan was summoned. Those of his children within a few hours’ reach of Gad’s Hill kept vigil; the attending doctors shook their heads gravely. “The sweet scent of the flowers he had so much admired floated in through the open doors of the new conservatory,” his daughter Katie recalled. “Just before 6 o’clock the breathing became less, and at ten minut
es past that hour he gave a deep sigh, a tear rose to his right eye and trickled down his cheek—and he was gone from this world.”

  A deep sigh and a tear—for what? For leaving the world on a sunny June day, the air sweet with early summer? For the novel left unfinished? For the inevitable regrets of a busy, crowded life?

  There was much to regret, certainly, but much accomplishment too. Westminster Abbey awaited him.

  Yet the prospect of a grave in Poets’ Corner might have seemed cold consolation, forty years earlier, to a young shorthand reporter who cared for nothing in the world but the pretty, capricious daughter of a London banker. Perhaps his final tear had something to do with that sorrow too.

  CHAPTER 2

  Deep as first love, and wild with all regret:

  Maria Beadnell

  In May 1830, the obese and sclerotic King George IV lay dying in Windsor Castle, his approaching end unlamented. Waiting to succeed him was his sixty-four-year-old brother, soon to be William IV. The Duke of Wellington, hero of the Napoleonic era and now prime minister, had turned sixty-one-years-old on the first of May. A few weeks later, the young Princess Victoria turned eleven.

  Some time that same month, eighteen-year-old Charles Dickens, a youth of no importance, met a girl named Maria Beadnell.

  In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, the young hero falls in love with a girl named Rosalind, who eventually jilts him. But:

  Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love affairs, but of a different sort.… Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for Rosalind. (2:2)

  Perhaps every man has a Rosalind; in any event, Dickens did, and she was Maria Beadnell. “In his youth,” he later wrote of Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam, “he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been … lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her.” “This woman” was a character based on Maria; and in Clennam, Dickens was clearly remembering her impact on him a quarter century earlier.

  He had pursued her eagerly and earnestly for over three years, until she brusquely sent him on his way. But she lingered in his imagination. “Ever since that memorable time,” Dickens (like Little Dorrit’s Clennam) “had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred place.” For years he cherished not only the idea of the girl he had lost, but also the memory of his own younger self in love with her. “When I became a man,” St. Paul observed, “I put away childish things”; but Dickens even as a middle-aged man could not untangle himself from his youthful passion for Maria. When, many years later, long out of touch, she wrote to suggest they renew their friendship, he was swept up in excitement, seeing no obstacle to picking up where they had left off two decades earlier—although both were now married. “You open the way to a confidence between us,” he replied, “which still once more, in perfect innocence and good faith, may be between ourselves alone.” However innocent, the confidence “between ourselves alone” evidently excluded their spouses.

  Dickens’s biographers generally treat his love for Maria Beadnell as a juvenile folly, ultimately unimportant. When he met Maria again twenty-two years after their youthful rupture, his fascination with her “shivered and broke to pieces” instantly—a sadly comic disillusion that seemed to suggest that his infatuation had been a mere bubble from the start.

  There is a more practical reason that the biographers slight Maria: little is known about her, or about Dickens’s pursuit of her. Researchers pursue the footprints they can follow, and Maria Beadnell’s footprints are few and faint. One indefatigable biographer, Peter Ackroyd, concluded his exhaustive researches with the admission that “information about Maria Beadnell is not easy to acquire.” Her very appearance is largely a mystery. Ackroyd’s Maria is “dark-haired” with a “slightly plump beauty”; another biographer sees her as “blond, petite, and conventionally pretty.” Both Marias—brunette and blonde—are fanciful, however: no reliable portrait or specific description of Maria as a young woman exists. Dickens’s only relevant comment, years later, was that “there used to be a tendency in your eyebrows to join together.”

  He himself is only occasionally visible during the three years he pursued her. There are no missing years in his early biography, as in Shakespeare’s; but for the obscure young man courting Maria Beadnell, the sources are fragmentary. It was good fortune that a friend named Henry Kolle, a young man courting Maria’s sister and a loyal ally in Dickens’s own romance, kept the letters that Dickens wrote him at this time—for at the time almost no one else thought Dickensian ephemera worth saving. Of the thirteen surviving letters that he wrote in 1832, for example, when he was twenty-years-old, nine are to Kolle. He probably wrote dozens or hundreds of notes to Maria herself, but only a few survive, while her letters to him, whatever they amounted to in quantity or interest, he returned to her or later burned.

  But as often with Dickens, lack of evidence does not imply lack of importance; while, conversely, mountains of evidence may document a small matter. Dickens the businessman, for example, is visible in hundreds of surviving letters, contracts, account-book entries, and bank records detailing his arrangements with publishers. But in those fertile regions of imagination from which his novels emerged, the petite Maria dwarfed his publishers.

  In the spring of 1830, the eighteen-year-old Dickens was a shorthand reporter in an archaic corner of the English judicial system called Doctors’ Commons, a medieval relict comprising an overlapping collection of courts with jurisdiction over matters ranging from wills and divorces to collisions at sea. Dickens later described it as “the place where they grant marriage-licenses to love-sick couples, and divorces to unfaithful ones; register the wills of people who have any property to leave, and punish hasty gentlemen who call ladies by unpleasant names.” Earlier, clerking in a law office, he had taught himself a difficult shorthand system and with this skill found employment recording and transcribing the proceedings of the Doctors’ Commons courts. It was respectable but dreary, glamorless work. He lived at home with his parents, though their address varied from year to year as precarious finances kept them on the move from one house to another. He had written nothing and given no particular indication that he would.

  But he was energetic, ambitious, and hopeful, conscious of good abilities and determined to avoid the pecuniary embarrassments of his father. Willing to work hard and impatient of dull employments, he yet lacked a vocation. His early letters show a confident flair, and his hard-earned mastery of shorthand would presently create opportunities in journalism; but even when he became a journalist, it was several more years before he began writing, as opposed to reporting. Although as a boy he had been an eager novel-reader, he was aware that his education was incomplete, and as soon as he became eligible—the day after his eighteenth birthday—he applied for admission as a reader at the British Museum.

  Despite their straitened finances, the Dickens home seems to have been congenial. The oldest son, Charles had two sisters and three brothers. He was particularly close to his older sister Fanny, training as a musician. He himself had more vernacular tastes in music. He loved traditional songs and ballads, and his gusto for popular music, as well as the musical vivacity of the Dickens home, is evident in invitations he issued to friends. When he was twenty, for example, he wrote to his friend Kolle: “Are you going out of town next Saturday? Because if you are not we propose to get one or two young men together for the purpose of knocking up a song or two.” Another invitation to Kolle, actually a note deferring an invitation because of one of his family’s relocations, suggests how central the piano was to their evening entertainment:

  Will you excuse my postponing
the pleasure of seeing yourself and Brother until Sunday Week?—My reason is this:—as we are having coals in at the new place, cleaning &c we cannot very well remove until Tuesday or Wednesday next. The Piano will most likely go to Bentinck St. to day & as I have already said we cannot accompany it—So that the Piano will be in one place and we in another.

  Dickens himself had no special musical talent but delighted in music-making and singing among friends and family. (Snatches of over two hundred popular songs would appear in his novels.)

  Above all, however, he loved the theater, as both spectator and actor. He attended plays whenever possible. One letter to Kolle apologizes for missing an invitation: “I am exceedingly sorry that I was so unfortunate as to select last night for my annual visit to Drury Lane [Theatre] as I should have very much preferred having a chat and Cigar with you.” The underscored “annual” no doubt alludes ironically to the frequency of his visits to Drury Lane, one of only two London theaters licensed to stage spoken drama. There were other theaters, however, for operas, operettas, pantomimes, and the like, and he frequented them as well. As a young man he attended hundreds of such performances, and though theater-going was relatively less expensive then, he no doubt spent much of his modest income on theater tickets.

  He also enjoyed amateur home theatricals. One of his earliest writings to survive is a fragment of a burlesque he wrote for such an entertainment, titled O’thello. Only his father’s lines, cues, and songs survive, Mr. Dickens having the foresight to save his handwritten part; later, probably pressed for funds, he sold the manuscript scraps when his son was renowned. The rest of O’thello has vanished, and no record of its performance survives. More is known about another theatrical evening, featuring a play called Clari; or the Maid of Milan, which Dickens organized soon after he turned twenty-one. By almost every account, he was a talented amateur actor; by some accounts, of professional ability. He was undoubtedly an exuberant performer. Almost every aspect of dramatic presentation excited him. As a spectator he laughed and wept without inhibition, while in his own theatricals he threw himself into the arrangements, the rehearsals, and the acting.