Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  The Mary Anne Leigh imbroglio excited him to histrionic bluster (“I care as little for her malice as I do for her”), but it had an almost schoolgirl quality to it as well. Since he had already made his denial to Maria in person, why repeat it in writing the next day? Most likely because Mary Anne’s alleged duplicity offered a happy pretext for again writing to Maria and trying to coax a response from her. He was desperate to stay in touch, to prevent her from slipping away from him. He writes, he explains, to ask her permission to send Mary Anne “a violent note” of protest at her “interference.” In fact, he admits, he has already written such a note and simply seeks Maria’s consent to post it. “I need hardly say that if it be sent at all it should be at once and I therefore hope to receive your decision tomorrow.” The hoped-for letter conveying Maria’s permission was certainly of greater interest than his protest to Mary Anne Leigh. “I have once again to beg your immediate answer,” his letter to Maria concludes. It was smuggled to her by his trusty ally Kolle, who as Anne Beadnell’s fiancé was a welcome visitor to 2 Lombard Street—as Dickens at this point was not.

  As he hoped, Maria replied promptly, and after waiting anxiously for the postman’s knock he indited a reply at once, neglecting any salutation: “I cannot forbear replying to your note this moment received Miss Beadnell.” Her note had evidently been quarrelsome and accusatory—which for his purposes was good enough, providing an excuse to respond and a subject for expostulation. His principal subject was, again, the useful Mary Anne Leigh.

  In all of Dickens’s usually well-turned correspondence, there is scarcely a more vehement and galloping effusion than this letter, cluttered with dashes and underscoring, lacking in coherence, clarity, and punctuation: “It is quite a mistake on your part but knowing (and there cannot be a stronger proof of my disliking her) what she was knowing her admirable qualifications for a Confidante and recollecting what had passed between ourselves I was more than hurt more than annoyed at the bare idea of confiding to her of all people living.” The triviality of the dispute is overwhelmed by the rush and clatter of the rhetoric. As he knew, sparks thrown off by conflict might ignite amatory feelings, and even hostility was preferable to indifference.

  Amidst her latest complaints and accusations, Maria had asked to see Dickens’s letter of rebuke to Mary Anne Leigh before she would sanction its posting. He was happy to oblige; submitting the letter for her approval would involve another exchange of letters. He paused long enough in his tirade to discuss practical arrangements, again making use of the obliging Kolle: “To return to the question of what is best to be done”—actually, this question had not been raised—“I go to Kolle’s at 10 oClock tomorrow Evening and I will inclose to you and give to him then a copy of the note which if I send any I will send to Marianne Leigh.” After this businesslike interruption, he returned to complaint and self-pity. If worship and gloves would not win Maria, perhaps anger, or feigned anger, would stir her. Beyond the torrent of rhetoric, his goal was simply to revive her interest. Concluding, he gave up all bellicose pretense: “Towards you I never had and never can have an angry feeling.”

  His letter to Mary Anne Leigh was duly conveyed to Maria for her inspection and approval, along with a brief covering note to Maria herself, encouraging her to respond. In his aggressive previous letter, he had haughtily declared that “I do not ask your advice. All I ask is whether you see any reason to object.” Now he humbly invited her comments and correction: “Of course you will at least on this point (I mean Marianne Leigh’s note) say what you think without reserve and any course you may propose or any alteration you may suggest shall on my word and honor be instantly adopted.” To keep the correspondence with Maria alive, he sought permission to reply to her reply, if she should condescend to make one: “Should anything you may say (in returning her note) to me make me anxious to return any answer, may I have your permission to forward it to you?” That he needed permission to write to her shows how desperate his chances with Maria had become—for even had her parents forbidden her to correspond with young “Dickin,” Maria felt free to disobey when so inclined. But her whims had first to be consulted.

  She graciously and perhaps maliciously granted him permission to post his insulting note to her good friend Mary Anne Leigh. Better yet, she signified that he might write to her, Maria, again. That she wanted to hear anything he had to say about himself is doubtful, but she was naturally curious to hear what Mary Anne Leigh might say about her. Dickens’s hopes rose; the Mary Anne Leigh controversy, a mere bubble, had effected something far more important, a renewed correspondence with Maria. At the same time, he worried about the logistics of this correspondence, for Kolle, “my only means of communicating with you,” was about to wed Maria’s sister Anne. When Kolle’s daily calls at 2 Lombard Street ended, Dickens’s conduit to Maria would disappear. Panicked that the Beadnells’ door was about to be bolted against him, he seized on her permission to write and immediately drafted yet another letter.

  This letter, he told Kolle, was “a very conciliatory note sans pride, sans reserve sans anything but an evident wish to be reconciled.” The time for controversy was past: it would be a poor bargain to win the argument and lose the girl. The rights and wrongs of the Mary Anne Leigh issue were in any event unimportant, and he had no heart for further mock battles with Maria. The contretemps had created an opportunity; now was the moment to seize it: “I am most desirous of forwarding a note which had I received such permission earlier, I can assure you you would have received ’ere this.” He abandoned the political complexities and acerbic tone of his earlier polemics:

  I will allow no feeling of pride no haughty dislike to making a conciliation to prevent my expressing it without reserve.—I will advert to nothing that has passed; I will not again seek to excuse any part I have acted or to justify it by any course you have ever pursued, I will revert to nothing that has ever passed between us.

  And there follows the avowal that Dickens had wished to make all along: “I never have loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself.… the Love I now tender you is as pure, and as lasting as at any period of our former correspondence.”

  He would not complicate matters by arguing, pleading, or justifying: “I could say much for myself, and I could entreat a favourable consideration in my own behalf but I purposely abstain from doing so because it would be only a repetition of an oft told tale.” His object was simple: “There is nothing I have more at heart, nothing I more sincerely and earnestly desire than to be reconciled to you.” In years to come, Dickens’s letters would exhibit a uniformly robust self-assurance and assertive will. At twenty-one—passionately in love, and desperate—he was humble and pleading: “I am sure nothing I could say would have the effect of influencing your decision in any degree whatever. Need I say that to me it is a matter of vital import and the most intense anxiety?” With Anne Beadnell’s wedding to Kolle just a few days off, he feared that Maria would not find the time to reply “within anything like the time which my impatience would name.”

  And so, dispatching this missive—a last throw of the dice—to his beloved Maria, he waited anxiously: “Let me entreat you to consider your determination well whatever it may be and let me implore you to communicate it to me as early as possible.”

  What was a question of the greatest anxiety to Dickens was of little urgency to Maria. Three days later, Kolle married her sister Anne. Maria certainly attended the wedding, as did Dickens as Kolle’s best man. Had he received Maria’s response by then? Even if she had not yet replied, her demeanor at the wedding would have made plain her answer—a decisive “no.” The felicitous occasion of Anne Beadnell’s and Henry Kolle’s wedding must have been, for Dickens, a day of gloom and despair.

  And on the Kolles’ wedding day, May 22, 1833, the story of his youthful romance ends. Years later, he reminded Maria that “I wrote to you for the last time of all, with a dawn upon me of some sensible idea that we were changing into man and
woman, saying Would you forget our little differences and separations and let us begin again? You answered me very coldly and reproachfully,—and so I went my way.” Maria’s chilly note has disappeared. The Kolles’ wedding was probably the last time he saw her for at least a year, and possibly much longer.

  Why did Dickens lose the girl whom he wooed so long and so ardently?

  In his final letter to Maria, he mentioned “differences” and “misunderstanding”: “We have had many differences.… I have now done all I can to remove our most unfortunate and to me most unhappy misunderstanding.” But the basic problem was probably little more than Maria’s waning interest: she simply did not care enough for her earnest, hard-working young suitor to desire a continuance of his attentions. He was sadly aware of the imbalance in their affections: “If you had ever felt for me one hundredth part of my feeling for you there would have been little cause of regret, little coldness little unkindness between us”; and many years later he observed “that you never had the stake in that serious game which I had.” Their fatal misunderstandings, whatever they might have been, were probably factitious issues invented or exploited by Maria.

  One of her concerns was perhaps Dickens’s modest means, lack of worldly standing, and impecunious family; she was a pampered young woman with high matrimonial expectations. That her suitor was over a year her junior may also have displeased the young belle. In his essay “Birthday Celebrations,” Dickens claimed to recall his twenty-first birthday:

  It was a beautiful party.… Behind a door in the crumby part of the night when wine-glasses were to be found in unexpected spots, I spoke to Her—spoke out to Her. What passed, I cannot as a man of honour reveal. She was all angelical gentleness, but a word was mentioned—a short and dreadful word of three letters, beginning with a B—which, as I remarked at the moment, “scorched my brain.”

  The anecdote is probably exaggerated, if not fabricated; but as it tallies with several undoubted facts—Dickens’s worship of Maria, her seniority, his twenty-first birthday party, and the end of his courtship soon after—it may contain an essential truth.

  Ultimately, however, Maria’s feelings remain a mystery. Years later, Dickens recalled her sister Anne “writing to me once (in answer to some burst of low-spirited madness of mine), and saying, ‘My dear Charles, I really cannot understand Maria, or venture to take the responsibility of saying what the state of her affections is.’” If his recollection of Anne Beadnell’s letter was correct—if she had been puzzled by the feelings of a younger sister with whom she was intimately acquainted—it is unlikely that we will do any better.

  In failing to gain or at any rate retain Maria’s affections, he was no less successful than his competitors. In one of his final letters to her, he reproached her for playing him off against other suitors: “I think I never should … encourage one dangler as a useful shield for—an excellent set off against—others more fortunate and doubtless more deserving.” He may have been recalling this frustration years later, when Great Expectations’ Pip makes a similar accusation against Estella. But while Estella practices on her suitors by design, Maria was probably vain enough simply to enjoy the competitive adulation of multiple danglers.

  She gave her heart to none of them, however; or if she did, the man so happily distinguished failed to reciprocate. After discarding Dickens, she did not marry for another twelve years. Perhaps at twenty-one or twenty-two she was temperamentally unready to settle on anyone, Dickens or otherwise. Other suitors, moreover, perhaps less blindly enamored, may have harbored doubts about her. We should be cautious of judging Maria on small evidence: refusing to fall in love with Dickens is no evidence of a character flaw, and she may have had some vague intuition of his unsuitability for her, and hers for him. But apart from her light girlish charms and prettiness, she apparently possessed no exceptional strength of personality or character. It is a reassuring affirmation of the unreasonableness of human affections, that a Goliath like Dickens should have been so entirely baffled and defeated by a butterfly.

  Like the early disappointments of many others, however, the greatest sorrow of his youth was a fortuitous blessing. To begin, it probably saved him from an unhappy marriage. He did not match himself particularly well anyway, as it turned out, but it is easy to imagine marriage to Maria as equally if not more disastrous, and even sooner—easy to imagine because, in fact, Dickens himself imagined it for us, in the marriage of David Copperfield’s hero to Dora Spenlow, a young flit inspired by Maria. David’s giddy infatuation is disabused when Dora’s silliness, so charming in the girl, proves less delightful in the wife. In the years after losing Maria, Dickens reflected on the might-have-been of marriage to her, and conceived reservations. It is probably fortunate that he married her only in fiction, for in novels an unwanted wife can easily be erased—David Copperfield’s no-longer-useful Dora is dispatched to an early grave as unhesitatingly as Maria dispatched young Dickens himself.

  If losing Maria was a blessing for the would-be husband, it was a blessing too for the novelist-to-be. He later wrote that, bitter as he felt about his mother’s betrayal in the blacking factory episode, yet “I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am.” Maria Beadnell was an even more fateful experience: while he suffered in the blacking factory for about a year, he was enslaved to Maria for more than three years—a long time in youth, “when four years are equal to four times four.” The influence of such intense emotions—for so long, at a susceptible age, on so impressible a nature as Dickens’s—was profound. Twenty years later, he still shrank from the pain: “I began to write my life .… But as I began to approach within sight of that part of it [Maria], I lost courage and burned the rest.” He did not actually burn the rest, but the memory of losing Maria brought his memoirs to a stop, never to be resumed.

  As the beneficiaries of Dickens’s genius, we should be thankful that just as he was entering manhood he fell in love with so reluctant a flame as Maria, for by engrossing his attention for three ardent years she deflected him from more sterile pursuits. Love may be futile, but never fruitless. He might have become inured to the petty disputes of Doctors’ Commons, for example, and slid into a career in law; he might have interested himself in the parliamentary debates he recorded and squandered his gifts on politics. But the heliocentric glow and attraction of Maria—“the most disinterested days of my life had you for their Sun”—eclipsed law and politics. It was perhaps a narrow escape, for Dickens was vulnerable to quotidian fits of political indignation. Oliver Goldsmith had jested that Edmund Burke, “born for the Universe, narrow’d his mind,/And to party gave up, what was meant for mankind” (“Retaliation”). Maria saved Dickens from any such reproach. Her father’s dinner-table monologues could scarcely interest him, when she outdazzled the candles.

  He owed her more than just a happy escape from a wrong calling, however. When he met Maria, he already knew himself to be bright, energetic, and capable; but his ambitions had been mundane: economic security, status, a place in the sun. Falling in love spurred him to heroic endeavor. Looking back, David Copperfield would boast that “whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.” So too Dickens: his steel resolve and inexhaustible striving owed much to Maria Beadnell. “I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity,” he later told her, “with one perpetual idea of you.”

  She taught him how passionately he could love, and how hard he could work. “All that any one can do to raise himself by his own exertions and unceasing assiduity I have done, and will do,” he reminded her as his hopes dimmed in 1833; and years later, he remarked that “I have positively stood amazed at myself ever since!” He would recollect his self-amazing exertions in David Copperfield. Aflame with love, and poor, David resolves to “take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the fo
rest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora.” The Dickens family history of improvidence and insolvency must have worried Maria’s parents; a suitor for their youngest daughter should possess both present means and good prospects. Maria herself no doubt expected the same (David Copperfield’s Dora dissolves in grief when David confesses his poverty). Worldly desire for money and gentility might have awakened Dickens’s energy and genius, but Maria was a far more highly charged motive.

  She departed; the strenuous exertion persisted. It was an ambiguous legacy. Driving himself hard, chopping his way through difficulties, he had neither leisure nor motive for reflection. Yet his love for Maria brought wisdom of a different sort. He had little formal schooling—“small Latin, and less Greek,” like Shakespeare. His reader’s ticket at the British Museum gave him access to Goldsmith, Joseph Addison, Shakespeare, and other classic English writers: it was his closest approach to a university education. But Maria taught him what he could never have learned at the British Museum or Oxford. For three years, when he was young and highly susceptible, his emotions swirled around a young woman, and what he learned of love—of its devotion, desire, longing, and absorption, as well as misery, unhappiness, and despair—he learned from loving and losing her. Like Sleeping Beauty, her amatory nature awakened by a prince’s kiss, Dickens was launched into manhood by the charmed kiss of Maria Beadnell.