Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  At this point in his life—an eighteen-year-old youth from an erratic family, ambitious and possessing great initiative and vigor, devoted in turn to hard work and theatrical pleasures—came the fateful moment when he met Maria Beadnell.

  Unlike his own improvident family, the Beadnells were genteel and stable—perhaps to a fault. Mr. Beadnell was a clerk and later manager with Smith Payne & Smiths, a well-respected bank located in the City, London’s financial district; the Beadnells lived next door to the bank, at 2 Lombard Street. The Lord Mayor’s mansion was almost across the street; around the corner were the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. It may be risky to draw inferences from this august neighborhood, but a heavy respectability may have brooded over 2 Lombard Street. Maria, fifteen months older than Dickens, was the youngest of three Beadnell daughters. She was small and attractive, to her family the “pocket Venus.” Several amateur, stylized sketches of her as a girl exist, but no credible likeness; this was before the days of photography. Maria was very likely pampered and spoiled, and no doubt vain and flirtatious. She is usually and probably accurately described as a “coquette”; the besotted Dickens himself once accused her of “light butterfly” feelings. Perhaps girlish capriciousness was, initially, one of her charms.

  What design or accident brought them together in the spring of 1830 is a mystery, and for the first year of his courtship the evidence is slender. His friend Kolle, courting Maria’s sister Anne, may have introduced him to the Beadnells. In any case, Dickens was soon welcomed at 2 Lombard Street and became a frequent visitor. A sketch he wrote a few years later, “The Steam Excursion,” features a sociable young bachelor, Percy Noakes, who “seldom dined at his own expense,” and its description of Percy probably recalls Dickens’s own evenings as a dinner guest at the Beadnells’: “He used to talk politics to papas, flatter the vanity of mammas, do the amiable to their daughters.… he was always ‘willing to make himself generally useful.’”

  Young Dickens may at first have been accepted as a suitor, for Maria’s parents could scarcely have been blind to the infatuation of the young puppy hanging about their Lombard Street parlor in the evenings. If in doubt, they had only to glance at Maria’s album, to which he contributed several verses. The nature of a young lady’s album—“a blank book in which to insert autographs, memorial verses, original drawings, or other souvenirs” (OED)—fairly guarantees that its contents will be light, complimentary, and often flattering, so that Dickens’s contributions must be read in their context. Even so, his special interest in Maria seems plain even in the first of his verses, a strained acrostic on her name, concluding with a trite but probably heartfelt couplet: “Life has no charms, no happiness, no pleasures, now for me/Like those I feel, when ’tis my lot[,] Maria, to gaze on thee.”

  A second poem, “The Devil’s Walk,” composed about eighteen months after he had met Maria, describes the Devil, passing “not far from Lombard Street,” as struck with contrition by her beauty:

  He saw at a window a face so fair

  That it made him start and weep

  For a passing thought rushed over his brain

  Of days now beyond recall,

  He thought of the bright angelic train

  And of his own wretched fall.

  This seems to allude to Milton’s Satan admiring Eve in Paradise; perhaps Paradise Lost had been on Dickens’s reading list at the British Museum.

  The most ambitious of his early verses, however, was a contribution to the album of Maria’s sister Anne. This poem, “The Bill of Fare,” extending to some 350 lines of rhyming couplets—long enough to make its doggerel rhythms quite wearisome—is a comic sketch of the guests at a dinner party at 2 Lombard Street: “a small party,” but eighteen people are named and described, concluding with Dickens himself, self-characterized as “a young summer cabbage, without any heart,” because he had lost it “a twelve month ago, from last May.” As “The Bill of Fare” was written in the autumn of 1831, it gives us Dickens’s own dating of his infatuation with Maria as May 1830, as it probably began with their first meeting.

  What other facts about Dickens and Maria can be squeezed from “The Bill of Fare”? In describing the dinner guests, Dickens first imagines each one as an item on the menu—that’s why he himself is a summer cabbage. Mr. Beadnell is a “good fine Sirloin of beef,” Mrs. Beadnell “an excellent Rib of the same,” and Maria and her sister Anne “two nice little Ducks.” This culinary conceit, borrowed from Oliver Goldsmith’s satiric poem “Retaliation,” is soon exhausted, however, at which point “The Bill of Fare” turns to a new fancy, also borrowed from “Retaliation.” Imagining the assembled diners as dead, Dickens supplies epitaphs for each. (Goldsmith’s poem imagines his fellow diners not as dead but as passed out under the table, drunk—but this jest might have seemed too bacchanalian for the bankerly Beadnells.)

  Befitting his position at the head of the table, Mr. Beadnell is buried first, with a suitably flattering epitaph: “an excellent man,” “most hospitable, friendly and kind,” a man without an enemy. Apart from these genial qualities, vaguely sketched, he is “a good politician,” with strong political views. Controversy and agitation over electoral reform, culminating in the Reform Bill of 1832, was in the news at the time, and Beadnell père’s views were well known to his family and guests:

  His opinions were always sound and sincere

  Come here! ye reformers, o’er him drop a tear

  Come here, and with me weep at his sudden end,

  Ye who’re to ballot and freedom a friend.

  Beadnell would seem to have been a political bore, and like “The Steam Excursion’s” Percy Noakes, Dickens no doubt had “to talk politics to papas”—at least to the tiresome papa at number 2 Lombard Street.

  By this time, moreover, Dickens’s ears were routinely battered by political rhetoric. From court proceedings at Doctors’ Commons, he had advanced to reporting debates in the House of Commons; and thus daily (and often nightly) he was now listening to and recording torrents of Reform Bill oratory. The experience quickly soured him on politicians and their speechifying; and Mr. Beadnell’s dinner-table harangues must have seemed an unnecessary extra dose. (After reporting his last debate, Dickens never again entered the House of Commons.) No one deeply in love can care much about politics, moreover; absorbed by Maria, Dickens was unlikely to relish Reform Bill table-talk. “How can I, that girl standing there,/My attention fix/On Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics?” William Butler Yeats would later ask rhetorically (“Politics”), and listening to Mr. Beadnell hold forth while Maria herself glittered nearby, Dickens would surely have agreed.

  Years later, he gently mocked Maria’s mother, recalling that she never managed to get his name right (“Mr. Dickin”); and her epitaph in “The Bill of Fare” begins with bland enough praise: “… whose conduct through life/As a mother, a woman, a friend, a wife/… Can but be summ’d up in one Word—Perfection.” Yet the tribute to Mrs. Beadnell then takes a personal turn: “… when living she was, I then knew her well./It chances to’ve been by the fates brought about,/That she was the means of first bringing me out.” Exactly what Dickens meant by being brought out is unclear, but the phrase seems to recall a specific kindness. Mrs. Beadnell must at first have welcomed him into the Beadnell household and circle of friends, allowing him to fall in love with Maria. When she actually did die, eighteen years later, Dickens recalled her “many old kindnesses, bestowed upon me when I was a mere boy.” “The Bill of Fare” concludes its eulogy of Mrs. Beadnell by stressing the sincerity of his gratitude for her early hospitality and “her kindness since then”: “I think what I say—I feel it, that’s better.” The earnestness of his gratitude, the stress on its authenticity, suggests an esteem for Maria’s mother lacking in the eulogy of Mr. Beadnell.

  In reading “The Bill of Fare,” however, we turn with most interest to the mock epitaph for Maria herself, seeking hints about her personality and Dickens’s struggle to win h
er. Alas, the thirty-four lines devoted to her scarcely yield thirty-four insights. The first dozen lines wind through a hyperbolical lamentation of no particular meaning whatever, unless they constitute a joke. While Maria’s sister Anne has just been characterized as good-humored and agreeable, “a truly delightful, and sweet tempered girl,” the extravagant rhetoric of Maria’s epitaph, following Anne’s, suggests that the difficult younger sister demanded a higher pitch of flattery. The poem then elaborates Dickens’s grief for Maria’s mock death: “My bright hopes and fond wishes were all centered here/Their brightness has vanished, they’re now dark and drear.” Since other evidence suggests that his courtship of Maria had indeed encountered difficulties, this conventional-sounding lament may have had actual pertinence.

  The last ten lines of Maria’s epitaph focus on a “small form that she folds to her breast” as she lies in death. Like the pampered Belinda of Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” Maria seems to have reserved much of her affection for her lapdog Daphne, “the little dog that,/Would eat mutton chops, if you cut off the fat.” This description of the cosseted Daphne may yield our clearest glimpse of Maria herself. Her childlike doting on her spaniel, no doubt a charming whimsy, nonetheless suggests her own petted immaturity. Her devoted suitor can only have been frustrated to see her lapdog enjoying Maria’s endearments while he suffered her petulance and neglect.

  The poem’s eulogy for Maria concludes: “I’d resign all my natural graces,/E’en now, if I could with ‘Daphne’ change places”—that is, folded to Maria’s breast. Did Dickens, one wonders, ever find himself so favored?

  His own epitaph comes last: “A sweet pair of eyes sent him home to his grave.”

  One wonders how Maria’s family responded to the amateur verse and satiric banter of “The Bill of Fare.” They almost certainly heard it declaimed by its pert young author himself, for he loved to read his own works to an audience, and “The Bill of Fare” probably featured as after-dinner entertainment for the Beadnells and other guests at a dinner party like that described in the poem itself—perhaps a celebration of Maria’s twenty-first birthday in the autumn of 1831. Dickens favored dapper clothing and colorful waistcoats, and we may imagine him festively dressed for the occasion as he recited his witty verses in the heavily upholstered and heavily curtained Beadnell drawing room to a well-fed and well-wined audience, most or all of whom figure in the poem and will recognize its many private jokes and allusions. After composing and revising for weeks and rehearsing repeatedly, he has his lines virtually memorized.

  As he performs that evening, he has mixed feelings. He is a proud author—Dickens was never modest about his achievements—and his select audience chuckles appreciatively; but he keeps an apprehensive eye on the beautiful Maria, wondering how she will respond to what is, after all, primarily a tribute to her.

  When he wrote “The Bill of Fare,” Dickens had been doting on Maria for a year and a half, but none of his letters to her from those months survives. The first to do so was probably written soon after “The Bill of Fare,” for it mentions that he is returning Anne Beadnell’s album, in which he had just transcribed his verses, while in a postscript he hopes Maria likes the poem and urges her to credit its declarations of admiration and affection. The note’s ostensible purpose, however, is to request Maria to lend him a glove to serve as a pattern for his glovemaker, whom Dickens has commissioned to make a pair of gloves for Maria. She has already lent one glove for this purpose, but the glovemaker has “made some stupid mistake” about them. When can he present her with the new gloves?—as he is “most anxious indeed to see you.” (More than twenty years later, he still remembered these gloves, reminding her that “I once matched a little pair of gloves for you which I recollect were blue ones.”)

  He is especially eager to deliver the gloves to Maria in person, because he wishes to talk to her about “the Annual.” Annuals were small keepsake anthologies of verse, prose, and engravings, published for the New Year and designed as Christmas gifts for daughters or sweethearts. Their seasonal marketing helps to place the glove letter—dated only “Wednesday Morning”—in the closing weeks of 1831. Beginning in the 1820s, the vogue of annuals lasted two or three decades (“the epidemic of illustrated annuals … raged with considerable flimsiness and platitude for about twenty years,” one contemporary later observed). It is curious to see the great novelist-to-be so eager to give his beloved such a trifling, dilettante literary production as the annuals were. In 1831 they were at the peak of their popularity, however, with more than sixty different volumes published for the following year. With so many on the market, it is impossible to know which one Dickens hoped to give Maria; perhaps that was the very question he wished to discuss with her. He was not at all sure, though, that she would deign to receive such a gift from him. “Let me entreat of you do not refuse so slight a token of regard from me,” he urged her; “surely you will not refuse so trivial a present: a mere commonplace trifle; a common present even among the merest ‘friends.’” His pleading suggests Maria’s power—and, perhaps, her fickleness.

  The bracketing of “friends” in quotation marks, as he begs her to accept his gift, implies that Maria and he were rather more than just friends, but the letter also hints at a cooling, or at least a chilly caprice, in her regard. He feels obligated to defend the propriety of asking her for a glove: “Pray do not think this wrong under existing circumstances.” The circumspect, underscored phrase evidently alludes to some unhappy alteration in their affairs. Correspondence between them must be kept clandestine—concealed not just from the Beadnells but from his own family as well, for he assures Maria that no one at his own home will know she has sent him either glove or letter: “I shall be very busy at home and alone all day tomorrow as my mother and sister will be in town.”

  Such hints reveal that Dickens’s courtship had once prospered—Maria had tolerated or even encouraged his use of the affectionate “My dear Maria,” for example, and he had written verses rejoicing in her favor:

  This charming spot my home shall be

  While dear “Maria” keeps the key,

  I’ll settle here, no more I’ll roam

  But make this place my happy home.

  Evidently the Beadnells had soon developed other ideas about the young shorthand reporter settling down in their Lombard Street parlor, however, and his visits to Maria were now limited and tightly chaperoned. It had become so difficult to speak with her privately, in fact, that he resorted to a secret correspondence, for several notes written in the summer of 1832 ask Kolle to smuggle letters to Maria. One of them suggests stage-comedy action at 2 Lombard Street. Soliciting Kolle to deliver a note to Maria, Dickens explains: “I should not have written it (for I should have communicated it’s [sic] contents verbally) were it not that I lost the opportunity by keeping the old gentleman out of the way as long as possible last night.” Spending an evening at the Beadnells with Kolle, Dickens as loyal friend has drawn off Mr. Beadnell’s attention, perhaps feigning interest in his wearisome political opinions, thereby sacrificing his own chance to speak with Maria—so that with papa distracted, Kolle can pay court to Maria’s sister Anne. Dickens can’t help but feel that Kolle owes him a favor in return: a much-needed favor, for though Dickens can speak to Maria among company, he is forbidden to write her. “You know so well my existing situation,” he reminds Kolle, “that you must be almost perfectly aware of the general nature of the note.”

  That Kolle knew the situation so well is unfortunate, for otherwise Dickens’s note might have explained it to us. Probably the “existing situation” was much the same as the “existing circumstances” of the earlier glove letter, namely a ban on correspondence between Dickens and Maria: such confidential exchanges might be thought to imply an engagement. For now, at least, Maria was willing to violate the ban and receive his contraband letters. Perhaps there were forbidden visits as well. According to a Beadnell family tradition, “Dickens was on several occasions hidden i
n the china cupboard at No. 2 Lombard Street.”

  Indeed, if Maria had given him no cause for hope at some point, even the relentless Dickens is unlikely to have persisted in courting her for three years. “The Bill of Fare” had lamented “happy days now pass’d away,” and during the waning days of their connection he sadly recalled palmy days in the past: “Situated as we have been once I have … too often thought of our earlier correspondence, and too often looked back to happy hopes the loss of which have made me the miserable wretch I am, to breathe the slightest hint to any creature living of one single circumstance that ever passed between us.” Later yet, reproaching Maria for chatting too freely to a friend, he wrote that “recollecting what had passed between ourselves I was more than hurt more than annoyed at the bare idea of your confiding the tale to her of all people living.”

  But what exactly was this secret tale? Stolen kisses? A clandestine engagement? Years later, he wrote to her: “How it all happened as it did, we shall never know on this side of Time; but if you had ever told me then what you tell me now, I know myself well enough to be thoroughly assured that the simple truth and energy which were in my love would have overcome everything.” Since he later burned every personal letter he had ever received, we will never know just what Maria (now Mrs. Winter) had said to elicit this stirring declaration; but she had apparently claimed that she had rejected him those many years past against her own inclination. Whether this was actually the case will, barring new evidence, forever remain a mystery.