His theology was nebulous. “The mystery is not here, but far beyond the sky,” he advised a correspondent in 1850, admonishing her to “be earnest,” turn her attention to practical concerns, and not waste time “brooding over mysteries.” After all, he reasoned, Christ himself went busily about his Father’s business, which was rather in the nature of social work: “Our Saviour did not sit down in this world and muse, but labored and did good.” Restless, active, and worldly, Dickens was not reflective. Heaven was out there and England was here. A supernatural presence amidst the foggy streets of London, a mysterious interpenetration of spirit and matter—no such dreamy possibilities interested him.
He thought the Gospels plain enough for practical purposes. Samuel Johnson found the New Testament “the most difficult book in the world, for which the study of a life is required,” and Dickens’s contemporary John Ruskin dismissed the notion of Scripture’s self-evident clarity:
The Protestant reader … remains entirely ignorant of, and if left to his own will, invariably destroys as injurious, the deeply meditated interpretations of Scripture which … have been exalted by the trained skill and inspired imagination of the noblest souls ever enclosed in mortal clay.
But Dickens had no patience for the meditations of any soul, noble or otherwise, before his own time. His lifelong disdain for “the wisdom of the past” was perhaps integral to his genius, but his philistinism cut him off from a rich legacy of reflection and insight.
His Christianity was sentimental and pragmatic; for Dickens, Graham Greene scoffed, “Christianity is a woman serving soup to the poor.” An often-quoted passage narrating the death of Jo the crossing sweeper in Bleak House, who is coached through the “Our Father” as he is dying, followed by the narrator’s exclamations of indignation against the system which neglected Jo, summarizes Dickens’s Christianity: social amelioration for the living, consolation for the dying. Any religious question beyond these was beside the point. The Church itself was largely beside the point—clergy, liturgy, ritual, sacraments, the whole thing; above all, theology and dogma. He could enter into the feelings of a lonely child, an angry woman, a hunted murderer—but he could not understand a sensibility that regarded religious truths as an urgent concern. “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling;… it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe,” Dorothy Sayers would argue. “It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism.” But nothing could have appealed less to Dickens than “hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine.”
Like furniture, he felt, religion should be useful and comfortable. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs,” Flannery O’Connor wrote. “They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” Dickens’s religion was of the electric-blanket variety, however. His Christ was motherly and compassionate: “No one ever lived, who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable, as he was,” he explained to his children. The disruptive, prophetic Christ—“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division”—does not figure in Dickens’s Christology. His creed was what Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr would later define as the theology of romantic liberalism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Dickens was a novelist rather than a theologian, however, and for his novels, Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one!” was sufficient theology. Whether it sufficed for Dickens himself is a different question.
A perceptive Victorian reviewer observed that Dickens had the idea that “Christianity is a scheme to make things pleasant; and this notion runs throughout all his books.… That it should satisfy a man of a vigorous mind shows that this mind is only concerned with the superficialities of things.” But the religion of uplifting sentiments did not satisfy the vigorous mind of Dickens, even in his sunniest years. His sentimental, demystified Christianity was too poor a thing, emotionally and imaginatively, to engage his senses, his fancy, his ardor, or his idealism. William Makepeace Thackeray, his fellow novelist and sometime friend, “used to say of Dickens that emotion ran through him as deeply and fully as blood.” Passionate and romantic, Dickens needed a God who was more than just the estimable manager of a universal soup kitchen; he needed, rather, a deity to love with intensity and warmth—as ardently as he had loved Maria Beadnell.
The voice of T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes” is moved by “the notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing.” Dickens cherished a similar idea of divinity. His God required, humanly speaking, a woman’s nature (though not that of a coquette like Maria).
With Mary Hogarth’s death, Dickens found the human face of his strongest religious feelings.
Her death elicited a hidden stream of reverence and adoration in his nature. His grief softened with time, and grass grew over her grave in Kensal Green, but her spirit remained a vivid presence. Like most people, Dickens expressed his deepest religious feelings not in theological terms but in images and devotions and loyalties. “The gentlest and purest creature that ever shed a light on earth,” Mary became his ideal of affectionate sisterly and daughterly love, sweetness of temper, loyalty, domestic warmth, quiet moral strength, self-denial, absolute purity. For Dickens, these were more than simply human virtues; they were attributes of holiness. While he was indifferent to the mysteries of Christianity, the memory of Mary awoke his capacity for worship. He could admire Christ the social worker, but he loved the spirit of Mary.
She was more even than a sacred memory and icon. In his frequent dreams of her in the months after her death, he sensed her mystical presence: “I should be sorry to lose such visions for they are very happy ones—if it be only the seeing her in one’s sleep—I would fain believe too, sometimes, that her spirit may have some influence over them, but their perpetual repetition is extraordinary.” In his dreams, she crossed and re-crossed the ether between human and angelic spheres: “I dreamed of her every night for many months … sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or other.” A few months after her death, coming across Sir Walter Scott’s reflections on his wife’s death, he transcribed them: “She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere; where we cannot tell—how we cannot tell,” Scott had written; “yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me”—to which Dickens added, “I know but too well, how true all of this is.”
Visiting Niagara Falls in 1842, he sensed Mary’s presence in the mists. An even more striking appearance was a “curious dream” he dreamed in Italy in 1844, seven years after her death. From the palazzo in Genoa where he was staying, he described his dream to Forster in a long and detailed letter:
In an indistinct place, which was quite sublime in its indistinctness, I was visited by a Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael;… I knew it was poor Mary’s spirit.
But attempting to embrace her, he was rebuffed: “I wept very much, and stretching out my arms to it called it ‘Dear.’ At this, I thought it recoiled; and I felt immediately, that not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have addressed it so familiarly.” The spirit’s recoil betrays Dickens’s assumption that the spiritual was averse to flesh. Though sympathetic, Mary’s spirit shunned his physical embrace, preferring to keep their relationship rarefied, spirit to spirit, like love among Milton’s angels: “Easier than air with air, if
Spirits embrace,/Total they mix, union of pure with pure/Desiring.…” Human bodies are not means but impediments to the love of angels, and of Mary.
The Genoa dream continued. Apologizing to Mary’s spirit for his presumption in trying to embrace her, Dickens requested evidence of her authenticity: “Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!”—and then, to detain her, posed a searching question. “What is the True religion?” he asked. When Mary hesitated, he prompted her, proposing his own vague ethical faith: “You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good?” But Mary refused to ratify this helpful suggestion, and Dickens ventured an unthinkable alternative: “… or perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?”
Mary assented: “‘For you,’ said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; ‘for you, it is the best!’ Then I awoke, with the tears running down my face, and myself in exactly the condition of the dream.” Since Dickens when awake harbored an inveterate fear and loathing of Catholicism, Mary’s advice was revolutionary indeed, hinting at a latent Catholic strain in his imagination, a suppressed awareness that her vivid presence revealed mystical realities beyond his thin gospel of progress and social amelioration. Had Dickens (like Ebenezer Scrooge) been more susceptible to midnight suggestions, his life might have taken a decisive turn.
Nonetheless, he was powerfully affected: “I was not at all afraid, but in a great delight, so that I wept very much,” he told Forster. Waking in tears, feeling “as if my heart would break,” he woke his sleeping wife to insist that she listen to multiple retellings of the dream, for purposes of later authentication: “I called up Kate, and repeated it three or four times over, that I might not unconsciously make it plainer or stronger afterwards.” His vision of Mary was one of the few recorded times that he felt himself in the immediate presence of the divine, which for him naturally assumed the form of a young woman—Mary Hogarth, of course, but in this case Mary Hogarth conflated with the Virgin. At its most exalted and intense, his religion was a kind of Mariolatry, an idiosyncratic worship not of the Virgin Mary, but of his own private virgin Mary.
In the Genoese palace where he dreamed of Mary, he observed curiously that “there is a great altar in our bedroom, at which some family who once inhabited this palace had mass performed in old time; and I had observed within myself, before going to bed, that there was a mark in the wall, above the sanctuary, where a religious picture used to be; and I had wondered within myself what the subject might have been, and what the face was like.” What was missing over the altar was probably a crucifix or other image of Christ, but in his dream the face of Mary Hogarth replaced Christ. In an irony, Dickens’s private religion found its closest parallel in devotional customs and imagery of Roman Catholicism, which by strong and fixed prejudice he detested. He would have been scandalized (if he had learned of it) by the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, enunciated by Pope Pius IX in 1854; but his own private faith in Mary Hogarth’s sinless nature was similar: “I solemnly believe that so perfect a creature never breathed.… She had not a fault.”
Mary’s death gave him an image of what he most admired and desired: gentle, self-abnegating feminine love. Strong-willed, ambitious, and driven, he craved softness, tenderness, sympathy, selfless and yielding devotion, absolute love—love to the end, and beyond. Two years after Mary’s death, he consoled a friend on the death of his daughter:
The certainty of a bright and happy world beyond the Grave, which such young and untried creatures (half Angels here) must be called away by God to people—the thought that in that blessed region of peace and rest there is one spirit who may well be supposed to love and watch over those whom she loved so dearly when on earth—the happiness of being always able to think of her as a young and promising girl, and not as one whom years and long sorrow and suffering had changed—above all, the thought of one day joining her again where sorrow and separation are unknown—these are all sources of consolation which none but those who have suffered deep affliction can know in all their force.
His benevolent Christianity of social improvement, for all its earnestness, inspired nothing like the emotions evoked by Mary, the impassioned yearning with which he reached out to embrace her spirit, his conviction of her abiding (and intercessory) love for himself, “whom she loved so dearly when on earth.” In his Genoa dream, Mary “was moved with the greatest compassion for me” and “was so full of compassion and sorrow for me … that it cut me to the heart.” His nature required more than just good feeling and uplift; he longed for a lover who would surrender herself unstintingly; a selfless love so keen that it could “cut” him—an image strangely akin to that of St. Teresa pierced with the arrows of divine love.
After Dickens’s death, his closest confidant John Forster, by no means a sentimentalist, recalled Dickens’s lifelong “loving devotion to one tender memory”:
With longer or shorter intervals this [memory] was with him all his days. Never from his waking thoughts was the recollection altogether absent; and though the dream would leave him for a time, it unfailingly came back. It was the feeling of his life that always had a mastery over him.… In the very year before he died, the influence was potently upon him.… Through later troubled years, whatever was worthiest in him found in this an ark of safety; and it was the nobler part of his being which had thus become also the essential. It gave to success what success by itself had no power to give; and nothing could consist with it, for any length of time, that was not of good report and pure.
Sweet are the uses of adversity. The death that wrung Dickens’s heart in 1837 proved a lasting grace, a gift to him and to his fiction. Mary Hogarth became his muse, his Beatrice, a glimpse of Heaven, the divine clothed in a pure and lovely female form.
“The first burst of anguish over,” he wrote a few years after her death, “I have never thought of her with pain—never. I have never connected her idea with the grave in which she lies”:
I have long since learnt to separate her from all this litter of dust and ashes, and to picture her to myself with every well-remembered grace and beauty heightened by the light of Heaven and the power of that Merciful Being who would never try our earthly affections so severely but to make their objects happy, and lead our thoughts to follow them.
Dickens was temperamentally excitable and philosophically unanchored. Had Mary Hogarth not died so young and so suddenly, his fiction might have gone on, novel after novel, striking out randomly at ephemeral grievances, the day’s newspaper topics. Her death gave him what he would otherwise have lacked, a moral and spiritual center. When Mary Hogarth died, Dickens was in the midst of writing two novels, both with monthly deadlines. Pickwick Papers had been under way for over a year, with six numbers yet to be written; meanwhile, he had launched Oliver Twist, the fourth number of which had just been published. Each novel stood at a critical turn: Mr. Pickwick had just been sent to debtors’ prison; young Oliver had just been introduced to Fagin’s den of thieves. Dickens had also become editor of a monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, in which Oliver Twist was being serialized. For almost anyone else, it would have been too much, and even Dickens sometimes felt harassed and overworked.
In the shock of Mary’s death, he had to put aside all these projects. “I have been so shaken and unnerved by the loss of one whom I so dearly loved that I have been compelled to lay aside all thoughts of my usual monthly work, for once,” he told a correspondent, and both Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist failed to appear the following month—the only time until his death thirty-three years later that he failed to meet a serial deadline.
He soon returned to both novels, however. Pickwick concluded several months later without further interruption. Oliver Twist still had many months to run in Bentley’s, and Mary’s death immediately made its way into the narrative. In the first number after her death, the benevolen
t old gentleman Mr. Brownlow wanders through his past, recalling
… faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty: calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay: and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from the earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.
Later, Brownlow laments that “The persons on whom I have bestowed my dearest love, lie deep in their graves;… the happiness and delight of my life lie buried there too.”
Such scattered tributes to Mary Hogarth were well enough, but Dickens finally could not resist the urge to introduce Mary herself. The plot had no need for a seventeen-year-old maiden, but the narrative was flexible, almost impromptu; and in April 1838, nearly a year after her death, a thinly disguised Mary Hogarth makes her appearance.
Oliver Twist had by now reached what would be its midpoint. Several chapters earlier, Oliver had been shot during Bill Sikes’s abortive burglary attempt at Chertsey. The following chapters, taking up other threads, had left Oliver’s fate in suspense. Now the narrative returned to Chertsey, opening with Sikes fleeing and snarling at the barking dogs set in pursuit of him: “Wolves tear your throats!… I wish I was among some of you; you’d howl the hoarser for it.” But then the action moves indoors, and in melodious counterpoint to Sikes’s harsh growls we hear “a sweet female voice” from above, “with a footstep as soft and gentle as the voice”: a voice which “quelled … in an instant” a tumult of “noise and commotion.” As the young lady owning this voice urges the family servants to succor the wounded burglar—Oliver himself—who has turned up on the doorstep, we recognize in her the Good Samaritan of Dickens’s favorite parable. “Poor fellow! Oh! treat him kindly, Giles, for my sake!” she pleads—a Good Samaritan with the added charms of feminine tenderness and beauty.
Charles Dickens in Love Page 9