Yet even as he moved on, Maria lingered in memory and fancy: the passion of his youth, the flame that had ignited his most intense feelings, the face of desirability, the goad to his ambitions and striving. Her image sometimes flared up vividly. Years later, he testified:
Sometimes in the most unlikely places—in Scotland, America, Italy—on the stateliest occasions and the most unceremonious—when I have been talking to a strange face … I have suddenly been carried away at the rate of a thousand miles a second, and have thought “Maria Beadnell!”
Such startling moments—“Maria Beadnell!”—suggest the incendiary power of her memory.
“I could not,” he later wrote her, “—really could not—at any time within this nineteen years, have been so unmindful of my old truth, and have so set my old passion aside, as to talk to you like a person in any ordinary relation towards me.” The precise “nineteen years” seems to refer to a specific occasion; and as he was writing in 1855, perhaps his last meeting with Maria had been in 1836. Perhaps, however, he was referring to his marriage, in April of that year, to Catherine Hogarth.
Sometime in the late summer or early autumn of 1834, soon after he had been hired by The Morning Chronicle, Dickens met George Hogarth, a senior journalist who had joined the newspaper’s staff at about the same time. Taking a liking to his young colleague, admiring his abilities, and perhaps mindful of his own unmarried daughters, Hogarth invited him to his home, where Dickens encountered the Hogarth girls. With almost fairy-tale plotting, he would become fatefully linked with the three elder sisters. The oldest became his wife and the mother of his ten children; the youngest became his companion, housekeeper, confidante, and (virtually) deputy wife, supplanting her older sister in all connubial roles but that of sexual partner.
But the middle of the three elder sisters, Mary Scott Hogarth, whom he knew much more briefly, became a transcendent force in his life, a sacred memory: muse, angel, even deity.
In 1834 only the eldest Hogarth sister, eighteen-year-old Catherine, was old enough for serious courting; encouraged by her parents, Dickens set about to win her. Unable to do anything halfheartedly, he wooed her with dispatch. He had finally relinquished any hope of Maria Beadnell, though he was still mourning her in the “Fable” he wrote for Ellen Beard’s album in the autumn of 1834, perhaps only a month or two before he met Catherine. No doubt his unhappy experience with Maria explains his brisk, businesslike courtship of Catherine: scorched once, he would not put his hand in the fire again.
She was willing. In February 1835, he invited her to a party for his twenty-third birthday, and she “enjoyed it very much—Mr Dickens improves very much on acquaintance[;] he is very gentlemanly and pleasant.” They became engaged a few months later and married the following April, just as his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, began appearing in monthly numbers.
Together, marriage and Pickwick transformed Dickens’s life: 1836 was his annus mirabilis, both professional and personal, as the struggling young journalist was launched into both fame and family. The early numbers of Pickwick Papers enjoyed only modest success, but it soon became popular beyond all expectation, and “Boz” became a literary celebrity: like Lord Byron a quarter century earlier, he awoke one morning to find himself famous. His domestic life also prospered. Within days of his marriage to Catherine, she was pregnant, and early the following year, just as he was beginning a second novel, Oliver Twist, she gave birth to their first child, Charles Junior.
To help with the baby, Catherine’s sister Mary, “a young and lovely girl,” came to stay with them in their modest chambers on an upper floor of Furnival’s Inn—not a hostelry, but a set of buildings which had once housed law students.
Dickens had known Mary since his earliest visits to the Hogarths in the autumn of 1834, when she was fifteen. During the following months, she served as an occasional companion and chaperone as Dickens courted her sister; and after he and Catherine married, Mary often stayed with them in their chambers in Furnival’s Inn, sometimes for weeks at a time. Six weeks after the wedding, she wrote to a cousin that “I have just returned home from spending a most delightfully happy month with dearest Catherine in her own house!” Dickens grew fond of Mary, and the liking was mutual: “I am sure you would be delighted with him if you knew him he is such a nice creature and so clever he is courted and made up to by all the literary Gentleman [sic].” As Catherine’s confinement approached, Mary stayed at Furnival’s Inn often during the autumn of 1836.
Little direct evidence of her character or personality has survived, with the exception of two surviving letters she wrote to a cousin. Her voice sings out with particular charm in the earlier of them, written when she was sixteen, a letter which is mostly a rapid stream of brief newsy updates on relations and acquaintances in London—prominent among them her newly married sister Catherine and Catherine’s husband, the rising young writer Charles Dickens, with whom Mary has been staying for the past month in their chambers in Furnival’s Inn—“not exactly a house but a suite of rooms opening from one to another … they have furnished them most tastefully and elegantly.” Mary includes tidbits, affectionate in tone, or at least complimentary, about such family connections as a Mr. Clay, Peter, her brothers William and James, and “my dear Cousin Twins,” Teenie and Jane. She is especially fond of her three-year-old brother and sister: “I wish you could see my little darling pets the twins—they get more beautiful every day and so clever it is quite amusing to hear and puzzling to answer the questions they ask.” Turning to “our London friends,” however—whom Mary’s cousin in Scotland knew from a recent visit to London—she indulges in mild satire: “Mrs Rintoul is quere [sic] as ever and her two sweet children as interesting,” while “Mrs Lawrance and her sisters are just as pedantic and Eliza Rose as wonderful (in their eyes at least) as before.” Perhaps during her stay at Furnival’s Inn, Mary had acquired a touch of her brother-in-law’s comic irony, just then appearing in the early chapters of Pickwick Papers. Though very much the effusion of a sixteen-year-old girl, Mary’s letter suggests a bright, lively, warm personality, though no angel. Reading her gay, high-spirited chatter to her cousin, one can easily understand Dickens’s affection.
When his son was born on Twelfth Night 1837, he spent most of the day, he fondly recalled, with Mary:
Mary and I wandered up and down Holborn and the streets about, for hours, looking after a little table for Kate’s bedroom.… I took her out to Brompton [where the Hogarths lived] at night as we had no place for her to sleep in; (the two mothers being with us). She came back again next day to keep house for me, and stopped nearly the rest of the month.
Mary returned home at the end of January and wrote to her cousin about Catherine’s distress at being unable to nurse her new son, along with other family news. She soon returned to Furnival’s Inn, however, and over the next few months stayed there so often that looking back, Dickens remembered her as an integral and precious member of the little household, “the grace and ornament of our home for the whole time of our marriage,” he wrote later. “From the day of our marriage,” he told another correspondent, “the dear girl had been the grace and life of our home, our constant companion, and the sharer of all our little pleasures.” Though heightened by nostalgic afterglow, his recollections make clear that he had grown very fond of Mary.
So fond that some have wondered if she had begun to steal his affections from Catherine—a suspicion enhanced by his own later assertion that his marriage had been unhappy from the start, and that “Mary … understood it … in the first months of our marriage.” But this claim seems exaggerated: during those months, Mary had in fact reported that her sister and Dickens “are more devoted than ever since their Marriage if that be possible,” and that he “is kindness itself to her and is constantly studying her comfort in every thing.” To Dickens, Mary had become a well-loved younger sister; there is no evidence of any dangerous attraction, much less impropriety.
In March 1837, he moved
his small but growing family to a larger house at 48 Doughty Street, now the Dickens House Museum. Doughty Street, gated at either end, was a good though not swank neighborhood of row houses near Mecklenburgh Square.
Here he might savor his prosperity and bright expectations in greater space and comfort. We glimpse an evening with the Dickenses in the recollection of a guest who dined at Doughty Street when they had been living there for only a month:
Dinner in Doughty Str. I the only stranger. Mr Dickens sen [Dickens’s father], Mr Hogarth [Catherine’s father], Miss Dickens [Dickens’s older sister Fanny], the Misses Hogarth [Mary and her younger sister Georgina]. It was a right merry entertainment; Dickens was in force, and on joining the ladies in the drawing room, Dickens sang two or three songs, one the patter song, “The Dog’s Meat Man”, & gave several successful imitations of the most distinguished actors of the day. Towards midnight, it was Saturday, I rose to leave, but D. stopped [me] & pressed me to take another glass of Brandy & water. This I wd. gladly have avoided, but he begged Miss Hogarth [Mary] to give it me. At the hand of the fair Hebe I did not decline it.
This reminiscence gives us a rare view of the happy days of Dickens’s early prosperity. He himself (stimulated by brandy) was the fire under the bubbling pot. His conviviality; his love of popular music, even street chants; his love of the theater; and his histrionic flair emerge “in force.” And the guest’s particular mention of Mary Hogarth, beguiling him to accept a stirrup cup, suggests more than a long panegyric about her young feminine charms. The gaiety of this Saturday evening at 48 Doughty Street, and especially Dickens’s own high spirits, helps explain his response to what soon followed.
A week later, Mary Hogarth, the fair Hebe, was dead.
On the next Saturday evening after the cheerful dinner, Dickens took Catherine and Mary to the theater. Soon after they returned to Doughty Street, Mary collapsed. “We lost no time in procuring medical assistance, or in applying every remedy that skill and anxiety could suggest,” Dickens reported. “The dear girl however sank beneath the attack.” The next day, she died, only seventeen years old. “You cannot conceive the misery in which this dreadful event has plunged us,” he lamented.
Mary’s death and Dickens’s grief, known mostly from his own accounts, form a well-known chapter in Dickens’s biography. Much more is known about his grief, in fact, than about Mary herself. The story of her death was simple enough, as he described it:
On the Saturday Evening we went to the Saint James’s Theatre; she went up stairs to bed at about one o’Clock in perfect health and her usual delightful spirits; was taken ill before she had undressed; and died in my arms next afternoon at 3 o’Clock.
But behind this bare statement, as matter-of-fact as a deposition in a coroner’s inquest, lay the most grievous bereavement Dickens would ever know.
Mary’s youth, happiness, and apparently glowing health made her death particularly stunning. “She was taken ill without an instant’s warning,” he wrote, and “died in such a calm and gentle sleep, that although I had held her in my arms for some time before, when she was certainly living … I continued to support her lifeless form, long after her soul had fled to Heaven.” The circumstances seem almost designed to evoke his strongest feelings: Mary’s sudden, inexplicable collapse after a happy evening together, her gentle slide into death, her murmuring his name as she died in his arms—“Thank God she died in my arms, and the very last words she whispered were of me.” Dickens the novelist could scarcely have invented a more affecting scene. All his fictional deathbeds are indebted to the poignant memory of Mary quietly slipping away in his arms.
He survived her by more than three decades. During those years, death claimed many of his friends, both his parents, most of his brothers and sisters, and two of his own children; but his grief for none of them approached his desolation in May 1837. No other event in his early life resonated so potently.
He purchased a burial plot for Mary in Kensal Green Cemetery and composed an (ungrammatical) epitaph: Young, beautiful and good, God in His mercy numbered her with his angels at the early age of seventeen. “Her body lies in the beautiful cemetery in the Harrow Road,” he wrote a month after her death:
I saw her grave but a few days ago, and the grass around it was as green and the flowers as bright, as if nothing of the earth in which they grew could ever wither or fade. Beneath my feet there lay a silent but solemn witness that all health and beauty are but things of the hour.
In 1837, Kensal Green Cemetery was new, a fifty-four-acre expanse of greensward in “the then still rural district of Kensal Green” (according to the cemetery guide), far from the overcrowded city churchyards of London that Dickens would later deplore in Bleak House. Mary’s grave was among Kensal Green’s earliest. For Dickens, it became hallowed ground, and to stand before her gravestone today is to stand on the same spot on which he stood sorrowfully in May 1837 and many times after.
In purchasing the Kensal Green plot for Mary, he intended one day to be buried beside her, “my dear young friend and companion for whom my love and attachment will never diminish, and by whose side if it please God to leave me in possession of sense to signify my wishes, my bones, whenever or wherever I die, will one day be laid.” When Mary’s brother George died a few years after Mary, Dickens relinquished his Kensal Green plot only with great reluctance: “It is a great trial to me to give up Mary’s grave; greater than I can express.… The desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now, as it was five years ago; and I know (for I don’t think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never diminish.… I cannot bear the thought of being excluded from her dust.” His desire for post-mortem intimacy with Mary curiously anticipates Heathcliff’s desire to mingle his remains with Catherine Earnshaw’s in Wuthering Heights. When the grave was to be opened for burial of Mary’s brother, Dickens intended to “drive over there, please God, on Thursday morning … and look at her coffin.” He did not wish to be thought superstitious: “I neither think nor hope (God forbid) that our spirits would ever mingle there,” he assured his friend John Forster; but despite this protest and despite Andrew Marvell’s assurance that “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none … do there embrace,” Dickens seems to have imagined and sought a sepulchral embrace with Mary, a final, eternal union with his beloved in the grave.
After the first shock of grief, he resolved not to shrink from painful memories of Mary, instead vowing to indulge “a melancholy pleasure in recalling the times when we were all so happy—so happy that increase of fame and prosperity has only widened the gap in my affections,” as he wrote several months later. His worldly fortunes were ascending, but he was already regretting happier times. “I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival’s Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon an evening’s work in our merry banterings round the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of a whole world would be.” On New Year’s Day 1838, eight months after Mary’s death, he noted his gratitude for “Increased reputation and means—good health and prospects,” but added that “if she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable companion—sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I knew ever did or will—I think I should have nothing to wish for, but a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one day through his mercy rejoin her”; and a little later, “I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers three Stories high [in Furnival’s Inn]—never if I roll in wealth and fame”—a pessimistic prediction which proved entirely accurate. Dickens’s optimism did not die with Mary—his spirits were elastic—but her death struck when his life was most hopeful, and when he was most unprepared for such a loss. He would not have grieved so intensely had her death not surprised him so completely.
He dwelt on her almost obsessively. After she died, he dreamed of her “every night for many months—I think for the better part of a year—sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a
living creature.… I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or other. And so it did.” Six months after her death, he told Mary’s mother:
I have never had her ring off my finger by day or night, except for an instant at a time to wash my hands, since she died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind so long. I can solemnly say that waking or sleeping I have never once lost the recollection of our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall.
Three months later yet, he wrote to Catherine from the north of England: “Is it not extraordinary that the same dreams which have constantly visited me since poor Mary died, follow me everywhere?” And six years later, he still thought of her perpetually, testifying that “she is so much in my thoughts at all times (especially when I am successful, and have prospered in anything) that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is.” When he died, he was wearing her ring.
Dickens lost Mary Hogarth four years after he had lost Maria Beadnell. Losing these two young women when he was a young man established his idea of the feminine: a critical element of his fiction, for women became the soul of his novels.
Mary Hogarth, in fact, became his religion. His Christianity, by contrast, was pallid.
Dickens knew the King James Bible well, at least the Gospels (he disapproved of the Old Testament), and also the Anglican Prayer Book. But the Church of England bored him, much as Sunday-morning services stupefy young David Copperfield: “In time my eyes gradually shut up; and, from seeming to hear the clergyman singing a drowsy song in the heat, I hear nothing, until I fall off the seat with a crash, and am taken out, more dead than alive.” At one time Dickens even joined a Unitarian congregation, admiring their social activism: “I have carried into effect an old idea of mine, and joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement, if they could; and who practice Charity and Toleration.” He soon slid back into a nominal Anglicanism, however, and his final years found him grumbling about the sermons of the local vicar. But the Church played no vital role in his life, and its doctrines and practices have little role in his novels. For fictional purposes Dickens favored a nostalgic, non-dogmatic sort of Anglicanism, especially in the reassuring form of sleepy rural churches and churchyards.
Charles Dickens in Love Page 8