Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Unlike the prince’s kiss, Maria’s was casual and, to herself, meaningless. She fluttered off; but looking back, Dickens acknowledged her fateful impact: “Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me,” he told her, “I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted little woman—you—whom it is nothing to say I would have died for, with the greatest alacrity!” In such eager gallantry lay the origin of one of his most potent myths, the lover’s self-sacrifice. A quarter century later, for example, the idea of Sydney Carton’s sacrifice of himself for Lucie Manette would inspire A Tale of Two Cities. In Dickens’s love for Maria, desire was exalted and transfigured by innocence and devotion, and he clung to this ideal.

  Two years after declaring in his last desperate letter to Maria that “I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself,” Dickens became engaged to another young woman, Catherine Hogarth, and married her the following year.

  His successful courtship of Catherine suggests a fairly rapid recovery from Maria. Yet poor Catherine scarcely scratched, let alone erased, Maria’s influence. He later blamed Maria for a permanent alteration in his sensibility:

  My entire devotion to you, and the wasted tenderness of those hard years which I have ever since half loved half dreaded to recall, made so deep an impression on me that I refer to it a habit of suppression which now belongs to me, which I know is no part of my original nature, but which makes me chary of shewing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young.

  Wounded once, he would not commit himself so wholeheartedly a second time, and the unlucky Catherine became an unknowing victim of the love he had “wasted” on Maria.

  What if anything did Catherine know of the enchantress who preceded her? Dickens never told her about the blacking factory, and perhaps she knew nothing of Maria either. Did she suspect that behind his brisk, businesslike wooing of her there lurked a ghostly rival, a girl who a little earlier had “represented the whole world to me”? Catherine herself had a more modest claim on his affections. “Unresolved, apprehensive, intoxicating sexual attraction is what Dickens learned” from Maria, suggests David Parker, long-time curator of the Dickens Museum in London. Dickens’s feelings about Catherine were less intense. Having burned for Maria, he was now content with, or resigned to, lukewarm romance. His letters to Catherine before their marriage reveal “only longing for companionship, contentment, tranquillity,” Parker observes. “Intense, erotic passion, longing, and frustration are nowhere to be found.”

  With Maria, Dickens had known ecstasy and suffered despair; with Catherine, he avoided risk by lowering his expectations. Having lost Maria, he had lost “the freshest and the best, forever” (as Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby feels after losing Daisy). There was no choice but to move on. No longer an ardent boy, by 1835 Dickens was a rising professional writer, and he wanted a comfortable, respectable home in which to enjoy his prosperity. For such a home he needed a good income and an agreeable, genteel wife—but while his income was growing, the wife was lacking. For all his genius, and despite his sentimental radicalism, his domestic expectations were entirely conventional. Catherine’s family was more distinguished and cultivated than Maria’s; Mr. Hogarth was a lawyer, journalist, and music critic. Within a few years Dickens would far surpass him, but at twenty-three or twenty-four he was much impressed by his prospective father-in-law, who seemed almost a stronger draw than his fiancée herself: “I have … fixed Saturday next, for my marriage with Miss Hogarth—the daughter of a gentleman who has recently distinguished himself by a celebrated work on Music, who was the most intimate friend and companion of Sir Walter Scott, and one of the most eminent among the Literati of Edinburgh.” Catherine in her own right was an attractive, affectionate young woman—a prudent choice. But he would have disdained prudence had he not shipwrecked so badly with Maria.

  Loving Maria was a rich experience; losing her was more valuable yet. Within a few years, The Pickwick Papers brought him profit and acclaim, and for the rest of his life he was prosperous and celebrated. But just as his memories of the blacking factory lingered as a reminder of abandonment and hopelessness, so Maria haunted him as a lost golden ideal, a proof that worldly success alone was sadly inadequate: “There was no triumph, after all, without a girl concerned” (Fitzgerald observed in “‘The Sensible Thing’”). Many years later—middle-aged, busy, famous—Dickens still clung to the idea of the young Maria. In 1855, forty-three-years-old and father of nine, he confessed that he had revisited the site of her old home on Lombard Street “within these twelve months, hoping it was not ungrateful to consider whether any reputation the world can bestow, is repayment to a man for the loss of such a vision of his youth as mine.” In David Copperfield’s lament that “the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting,” we hear the whisper of Dickens’s own disappointment.

  “’Tis better to have loved and lost,” Tennyson argued, “than never to have loved at all.” For Dickens, certainly, both loving and losing were invaluable gifts. The sorrow of losing Maria would help to protect him from the shallow complacencies lurking in the worldly success to come. In the years ahead, beneath his prosperous life and the busy world of his fiction—crowded with comedy, irony, eccentricity, sentimentality, populism, melodrama, and indignation—brooded a sorrow that lay “too deep for tears.”

  When Dickens’s letters to Maria were first published, in 1908, their editor observed that “one of the strangest features of the whole romance is that Dickens appears to have lived for years in a perpetual dream, in which he could never picture the girl he had loved in any real or imaginative situation apart from that in which he had known her in his boyhood.” Dickens was not only unable to imagine Maria except as he had known her as a girl; he could imagine happiness itself only in the form of Maria at twenty. She had seized his imagination early, and for years no other woman loosened her grip. Love may be beautiful the second time around, but no later passion can be so revolutionary as the first, or so indelible.

  Maria introduced Dickens to romantic love itself—exhilarating, overpowering, all-absorbing, transforming. She introduced him as well to loss and regret, and became his image of the illusory fulfillment that the fancy pursues but life denies. In his early novels, every hero gets his girl, but Dickens knew that this gratifying consummation was contrary to general experience—certainly to his own.

  A quarter century after he lost Maria, Dickens wrote two endings for Great Expectations. In the second, a wish-fulfillment conclusion that he had been persuaded to write by a friend, he rewarded his hero Pip by bringing him together, finally (and improbably), with his long-loved Estella.

  But in the original ending, Pip sees Estella only once again after he has lost her, in a random and brief encounter many years later. With this glimpse of his old flame, and with his great expectations now only a sad memory, Pip continues down the street, still alone, into a loveless future.

  CHAPTER 3

  So perfect a creature never breathed:

  Mary Hogarth

  Macheath, the rogue hero of The Beggar’s Opera, fondly recalls his roaming days, when “My heart was so free,/It roved like the bee”:

  I sipped each flower,

  I changed ev’ry hour.

  Had Dickens been similarly cavalier, he might have shaken the dust of Maria Beadnell from his feet and strolled on to a new flirtation. After all, he was a rising young man with sufficient charms of appearance and manner; and there were flounces enough in London.

  But he was too earnest in his nature, and too bewitched.

  The year after Maria’s cool farewell, he wrote some verses for a twelve-year-old girl named Ellen Beard, younger sister of a fellow reporter and close friend, Thomas Beard. Ellen had evidently asked her brother’s clever colleague to contribute to her album. At first declining, Dickens eventually obliged with a tale in the manner of Aesop, in forty-
eight lines of rhyming verse, gloomily titled “A Fable (Not a gay one).”

  “A Fable” begins with a Mr. Pen and a Miss Paper discussing Pen’s refusal to write a verse for her. Pen laments:

  Could I behold skies, streams, and flowers

  With childhood’s laughing, tearless eye,

  I might write strains for a Lady’s ear,

  But my thoughts are so weary grown,

  They ne’er could charm your bosom, my dear.

  They’re almost too sad for my own.

  Then, stepping out of his fable, Dickens turns to address young Ellen herself:

  Ellen, I’ve caught the Pen’s disease;

  And as my hopes are quite as dim,

  I’ll try the same excuse if you please

  As succeeded so well with him.

  There’s this distinction betwixt the two:—

  Ye Powers above befriend me!

  While he is easily made anew,

  There is not a knife can mend me.

  (The final lines allude to the worn nibs of quill pens, mended with a knife.)

  “A Fable” reveals that it was no secret among Dickens’s circle that he still carried a torch for Maria; even his friend Beard’s little sister apparently knew about it. The verses in Ellen Beard’s album are signed “Boz,” a pen name he first used in print in August 1834, and she received the album as a gift on September 20 of that year. “A Fable” probably dates from late September or October 1834—well over a year after Maria jilted Dickens in the spring of 1833. There was no roving like the bee for Dickens, sipping each flower.

  In retrospect, his writing career seems inevitable: Destiny anointed him a great novelist. In 1833, however, it was by no means obvious that the young shorthand reporter, grinding away at parliamentary debates and spurned by the girl he loved, would ever write anything.

  It was the unwilling girl herself whom we can thank for nudging him into writing.

  The first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets carried the notoriously cryptic dedication: “To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr. W. H.” The identity of Mr. W. H. and his role in begetting the sonnets remain mysteries. Not so with the chief begetter of Dickens’s earliest stories—and indirectly the novels to follow—Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations. It would seem a heavy responsibility for a light young woman like Maria Beadnell. Yet a single champagne bottle launches a battleship.

  Only a few months after Maria repulsed him, Dickens wrote his first story, “a little paper,” which an obscure magazine accepted and published. Proud and encouraged—“I have had a polite and flattering communication from The Monthly people requesting more papers,” he told his friend Kolle—he soon wrote another, and the rest followed.

  Mundane circumstances helped to nudge him into writing. The summer parliamentary recess of 1833, extending into October, left him idle and without income. “I am always entirely unemployed during the recess,” he observed in June, the month after Maria had dropped him. “I need hardly say that I have many strong inducements for wishing to be so as little as possible.” With more time on his hands than money in his pocket, he thought it a good time to step beyond his shorthand reporting and attempt to augment his income. His “first effusion” in The Monthly Magazine, a light story titled “A Sunday Out of Town,” was published anonymously and earned him nothing, however; the Monthly was “‘rather backward in coming forward’ with the needful,” he told Kolle, and threatened to send future articles elsewhere. Nonetheless, he continued to submit sketches to the Monthly, nine over the next fifteen months, and the Monthly continued to publish them without payment.

  Perhaps he was taking the long view, hoping that his sketches in the Monthly would eventually open the door to other periodicals (as they did). For the time being, authorship alone was consoling. Years later, he recalled that his eyes “dimmed with joy and pride” when, in December 1833, his first article appeared “in all the glory of print.” Since the article was unsigned, however, his celebrity was limited to the small circle of his family and friends. Not until his sixth article in the Monthly, eight months later, were any of his contributions signed—and then only with the pen name “Boz.”

  All this would seem to have little to do with Maria, to whose loss Dickens was apparently resigned. He could scarcely hope to attract her notice by anonymous articles in an unknown magazine she would probably never see.

  So he immediately took steps to bring his authorship to her attention. When his first sketch appeared in print, he invited himself over to the Kolles’: “I intend with the gracious permission of yourself and Spouse to look in upon you some Evening this week,” he wrote Kolle. “I do not write to you however for the purpose of ceremoniously making this important announcement but to beg Mrs. K’s criticism of a little paper of mine (the first of a Series) in the Monthly.… I haven’t a Copy to send but if the Number falls in your way, look for the Article.” With a circulation of only six hundred, the Monthly was unlikely to fall in Kolle’s way—but Dickens could ensure that it did by taking along a copy on his prospective visit.

  His eagerness that Mrs. Kolle in particular read his sketch might seem puzzling, were it not that Kolle’s wife was Maria’s sister Anne. While Dickens may have respected Anne’s literary insight, more likely he wished to get the sketch into her hands in order that it find its way into Maria’s. “All that any one can do to raise himself by his own exertions and unceasing assiduity I have done,” he had assured Maria six months earlier, “and will do.” “A Sunday Out of Town” was proof that he was striving still. Anne Kolle probably saw Maria frequently—the Kolles lived only a mile from Lombard Street—and she could be relied on to carry along news of Maria’s old beau.

  His next letter to Kolle, a week later, also contained news for Maria. He had been unable to make his promised call on the Kolles; business connected with his parliamentary reporting had taken him out of town for a week. He remained eager to visit, however: “As soon as I return, be it only for a Night, however, I shall shew myself at Newington [where the Kolles lived] and must take the chance of finding you at home.” Overwhelmed by his out-of-town business, “in the shape of masses of papers, plans, and prospectusses,” he could not predict when he would be free to return to London. Perhaps, conveyed to Lombard Street, this description of himself immersed in weighty-sounding affairs would impress Maria.

  His new writing venture was also much on his mind. He was flattered (and made sure to inform Kolle) that soon after its publication in the Monthly, “A Sunday Out of Town” had been pirated by another magazine, and he announced ambitious plans for more articles:

  My next paper will be “Private Theatricals” and my next “London by Night”. I shall then please God commence a series of papers (the materials for which I have been noting down for some time past) called The Parish. Should they be successful & as publishing is hazardous, I shall cut my proposed Novel up into little Magazine Sketches.

  This is the first surviving mention of a novel, though Kolle had apparently heard of the idea earlier. Were Maria to hear of these achievements and projects—and through Anne Kolle, she would—how could she not be impressed? Also intended for Maria was another remark. It was not business alone that kept him out of town, Dickens coyly noted, but also “pleasure in the shape of a very nice pair of black eyes.… Of course the call is imperative and must be obeyed.” Anne Kolle would certainly relay this piquant item to her younger sister.

  That Dickens’s thoughts still hovered moth-like around Maria is evident in another remark in the same letter. By December 1833, Anne Kolle was four or five months pregnant, and he concluded with an allusion to the approaching birth:

  When there is a vacancy for a Godfathership either to a young lady or young gentleman,—for I am not particular,—who can afford to have one poor Godfather will you bear me in mind?—Hint this delicately to your Missus.

  Maria would of course attend the chr
istening of a niece or nephew; and as godfather, Dickens could insert himself into the occasion. Perhaps he was laying plans to intercept her at the baptismal font. When a son was born to the Kolles the following April, Dickens—as he had suggested—was invited to be the boy’s godfather and attend the christening. Whether he saw Maria on that occasion remains a mystery. If he did, nothing came of the reunion.

  Such hints of Maria that lurk in his letters to Kolle show that Dickens could not easily escape the obsession that had so long possessed him. For months, even years, she remained a sorrow, a longing, a hope, a motive. He may have stayed in touch with Kolle only because Mrs. Kolle was now Dickens’s only link to Maria, otherwise out of reach behind the unwelcoming door on Lombard Street. Only gradually did his hopes expire. His last surviving letter to Kolle during this era was probably written in January 1835—by which time, having met and begun to court another young woman, he had finally resigned himself to a life without Maria. At this point, Mr. and Mrs. Kolle too dropped out of his life.

  As it turned out, the timing of Maria’s departure was critical. The following year, he obtained full-time employment with a well-established newspaper, The Morning Chronicle, giving him an augmented and steady income. No longer would his summers be idle and unremunerative. Had Maria let him dangle for a few months longer, rather than dropping him just before the parliamentary recess of 1833, he would have had less time, and perhaps less motive, to try his hand at writing sketches. And once he had become established in a busy, promising career as a professional journalist, he might never have attempted fiction at all.

  Though ardent and nostalgic, he was not one to repine. Maria “had pervaded every chink and crevice” of his mind for four years, but now he was forced to accommodate himself to a world in which she was no longer the consuming motive, but only a diminished (and diminishing) hope. Rejected, he was freed—almost compelled—to redirect the creative energies he had for so long devoted to her. Writing replaced wooing; disappointed desire redirected itself into comic invention. His earliest sketches were facetious vignettes of bourgeois life.