Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  No surprise if she fails to arouse him, for David’s love for Agnes is Dickens’s love for his beloved Mary—long in her grave, long revered as his tutelary saint. Removed to a higher sphere, sanctified, etherealized, and adored, Mary could not decently be imagined as descending into “the fury and the mire of human veins.” Even alive she had been above all that; now, infinitely more so. It would be improper for anyone to love Mary or to imagine Mary herself loving anyone “in that way.” Her last embrace had been in Dickens’s arms, a sacred memory, and he could not tolerate the notion of her in the profane embrace of another man. Similarly, David Copperfield himself has no sexual interest in Agnes, but cherishes her jealously nonetheless.

  Agnes has a determined suitor, the novel’s villain Uriah Heep. By presuming to desire Agnes “in that way,” Uriah ignites David’s most violent hatred. Uriah’s intentions are actually honorable. Unlike David’s dear friend Steerforth, whom David easily forgives for corrupting and abandoning little Em’ly, Uriah is no rake seducer; he wants to marry Agnes. But this respectable ambition enrages David: “I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire and running him through with it … the image of Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal’s,… made me giddy.” David consistently imagines Uriah as satanic and serpentine, even phallic: “He seemed to swell and grow before my eyes,” David recalls of the evening when Uriah announces his intent to court Agnes.

  David Copperfield’s loathing of Uriah perhaps betrays a recoil from some element of his own nature, an uneasiness with a sensual demon lurking within. Yet Agnes is David’s destined wife, and he cannot approach her with any taint of sexual desire. The defeat of Uriah’s designs suggests a purification of David himself, a necessary expulsion of libido; yet even with Uriah’s threat to Agnes erased, David cannot yet claim her. One complication is that though he has by now outgrown Dora’s allurements, he is still married to her. Conveniently, Dora soon dies, and with her death David’s destined union with Agnes approaches yet closer. Even now, however, he is not worthy of her. He must observe a decent interval of mourning and penance, and for three years he wanders alone through Europe, ending with lofty alpine meditations in Switzerland.

  Morally, his continental exile is not simply a decorous period of mourning, but is penitential, forty days in a wilderness. His undisciplined heart must be chastened by suffering. Like the protagonists of allegories like Everyman and Pilgrim’s Progress, David carries a heavy burden: “I felt its whole weight now; and I drooped beneath it, and I said in my heart that it could never be lightened.” He identifies his burden as grief, not sin or guilt, but even the cadence and phrasing of the Authorized Version (“and I said in my heart”) suggest that his suffering is a penance for youthful folly and a test of his perseverance. David himself refers to his wanderings, random and aimless as they seem (“… foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets …”), as “a pilgrimage”: a journey through a dark night of the soul, “a ruined blank and waste, lying wide around me, unbroken, to the dark horizon.” The road to Agnes, which is the road to holiness, leads through the Slough of Despond.

  Agnes, meanwhile, waits and waits, like Twelfth Night’s Viola, who “never told her love” but “sat like Patience on a monument,/Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?” (2.4). One of Agnes’s divine attributes, a needful grace for an erring youth like David, is her unwavering fidelity and hope; like God, she never gives up on the prodigal. Perhaps Dickens imagined the spirit of Mary Hogarth patiently awaiting him.

  “Reader, I married her,” David Copperfield might finally, after sixty-two chapters, echo the triumphant final chapter of Jane Eyre (published just before Dickens began David Copperfield). But David’s marriage to Agnes is more than a romantic triumph; more, even, than a sacrament. It is a mystical union, uniting David to the divine, the source and end of his own being. With Agnes “clasped in my embrace,” he exclaims, “I held the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had; the centre of myself, the circle of my life, my own, my wife; my love of whom was founded on a rock!” The Gospel allusion suggests the religious meaning of David’s union with Agnes; his love for Dora had been that of the foolish man who built on sand. David’s marriage to Agnes re-enacts Dickens’s marriage to the spirit of Mary Hogarth, that symbolic union which was his strongest incentive to what did not come easily, a chaste otherworldliness. David’s progress toward Agnes echoes (in distinctly Victorian terms) St. Augustine’s Confessions, which narrates his progress from concupiscence to chastity. Like David, Augustine was an amorous youth: “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me,” he recalls, and David might echo, except that David’s genteel England is no Mediterranean cauldron of vice, but a flowerpot of propriety and respectability. Yet for a susceptible romantic boy, Dora is temptation enough.

  Like the young Augustine, David falls into desire; for however innocent and honorable his love for Dora, it is unquestionably sexual as well. Augustine takes a mistress, but (rather as David repents of marriage to Dora) eventually abandons her and embraces chastity—a difficult struggle. Even nearing his victory over the flesh, Augustine is tempted by whispers of sensuality: “Those trifles of all trifles, and vanities of vanities, my one-time mistresses, held me back, plucking at my garment of flesh and murmuring softly: ‘Are you sending us away?’” But turning away from these sirens, he meets “the austere beauty of Continence [Continentia], serene and indeed joyous but not evilly, honourably soliciting me to come to her and not linger, stretching forth loving hands to receive and embrace me, hands full of multitudes of good examples.”

  Agnes is David Copperfield’s Continentia. She becomes his bed-mate, but only nominally; more profoundly she represents chastity, self-restraint, spiritual serenity. By wedding her, David embraces his higher vocation. Augustine had begun his Confessions by anticipating the end of his journey: “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” At the end of his quest, David’s restless heart has also come to rest—not in God, but in Agnes. She is David’s religion, and Dickens’s too.

  David Copperfield was illustrated by Hablot Browne, the regular illustrator of Dickens’s early novels, who signed his work “Phiz.” Phiz’s final illustration for David Copperfield shows a domestic scene ten years after David and Agnes marry. They sit before the fire in a comfortably furnished Victorian parlor. It is the children’s hour, with three young children at their feet (the text implies at least one other, elsewhere) and toys strewn about; it is perhaps the last time in Dickens’s fiction that multiple children connote marital felicity. Dressed for dinner, David and Agnes await the nurse who will soon take the children off to bed.

  Yet even amidst the bourgeois trappings of this scene as imagined by Phiz—respectable, conventional, sedate—Agnes’s moral sway is evident. The fireplace is flanked by paintings of two scenes from David’s youth: on one side his boyhood home, the Rookery; on the other the Yarmouth boathouse of his old friends the Peggottys. Between them hangs a third painting, a large portrait of Dora, her hair flowing down to her shoulders in long dark ringlets. It is a pious tribute to the departed, but also a reminder of the undisciplined heart of David’s youth, when he had been fatally tangled in those enticing ringlets. By contrast, Agnes’s hair is pulled back and tightly bound. While David may look back on his youthful infatuation fondly, Agnes’s chaste, disciplined coif reveals his mature self, no longer susceptible to a girl’s flowing hair. Flanking Dora’s portrait on both sides of the mantel are two statuettes of winged angels, keeping guard against her provocative ringlets. All this is Phiz’s depiction of David’s marriage, not Dickens’s, but it captures the spirit of the novel’s conclusion.

  Dickens’s manuscript revisions suggest the same idea. His first thought was to begin the closing passage by having David exclaim, to Agnes, “Kiss me my dear!” But this romantic invitation struck the wrong n
ote, he reflected; perhaps he recognized, with horror, that it echoed the lusty close of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew—“Why there’s a wench! Come on and kiss me, Kate” (5.2). That Agnes should be insulted as a wench! Whether or no, “Kiss me my dear!” was plainly too amorous, inconsistent with her role as David’s “better angel” guarding him from sensual indulgences like kissing. Changing direction, Dickens expunged the kiss and substituted an earnest invocation, “O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed,” and a final image of Agnes pointing to Heaven.

  Agnes’s literary kin are figures like The Divine Comedy’s Beatrice—heroines who inspire and guide heroes on religious quests. That she appears in a secular Victorian novel rather than an openly theological allegory often misleads literary critics not attuned to religious language. But David Copperfield is not a literary critic and does not seek an interesting or complex wife—Dora had been interesting enough. After stormy seas, David seeks a calm, safe anchorage, a spiritual haven. “I come home, now, like a tired traveller,” he has told Agnes earlier, “and find such a blessed sense of rest!”

  The heroine of another allegory, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, is a princess named Una—“oneness.” Holiness is One: simple, straightforward, undivided, unambiguous, unalloyed, non-complex. In David Copperfield, holiness resides not in the muddled diversity of life, but in escape from it. After all, Mary Hogarth had fled life early, abandoning its wearying distractions and confusions. In spirit Dickens reached out to Mary; in fancy he married her in the union of David Copperfield and Agnes. Simply to embrace Mary was Dickens’s most transcendent idea.

  His nominal religion was an anemic protestantism, but an active fancy and acute sensibility needs something imaginatively and emotionally richer—for him, a religion with a woman’s face. God the Father seemed severe and judgmental; the merciful and forgiving Son was more attractive, but nonetheless male. Just before beginning David Copperfield, Dickens wrote a Christmas tale, The Haunted Man, in which a despondent protagonist, Redlaw, returns to his rooms one day to find a small homeless boy who has been sheltered by Redlaw’s kindly housekeeper Milly. Disappointed to see Redlaw instead of Milly, the boy cries: “Where’s the woman? … I want to find the woman.” Dickens too wanted to find the woman, to recapture the girl who had slipped away into her grave, to join himself to the woman who could steer him to blessedness. As a re-creation of Mary Hogarth, Agnes embodied a might-have-been happiness.

  Though she annoys critics, Agnes stirs David Copperfield’s most powerful emotions, just as Dickens’s highest mystical experiences, his moments of keenest awareness of the supernatural, were associated with Mary—her presence in the mists of Niagara Falls and in his Genoese dream. Reunited with Agnes after his three-year exile, David has no words for his feelings: “She was so true, she was so beautiful, she was so good,—I owed her so much gratitude, she was so dear to me, that I could find no utterance for what I felt.… My love and joy were dumb.” His embrace of Agnes is an ecstatic moment outside time and place, an ineffable experience beyond the powers of language, even for a successful novelist like David Copperfield, or a great one like Dickens.

  Dickens might imagine himself mystically married to Mary Hogarth, but when he laid down his visionary pen he descended into the dusty streets of life from which Mary was long vanished, and in which the serenity and purity of her spirit were elusive. After ten years with Mary’s fictional sister Agnes, David Copperfield enjoys perfect domestic joy; but after a dozen years married to Mary’s actual sister Catherine, Dickens was fretful. The gentle spirit of Mary whispered to him still, but he was distracted by other whisperings, as well.

  David Copperfield ends in tranquil triumph. David’s second marriage has replaced an inadequate wife, Dora, with an ideal partner. Escaping the consequences of his youthful mistake, he has grown in character and wisdom. Wisdom had indeed condemned Dora from the start: “Blind, blind, blind,” David’s Aunt Betsey mutters, and David comes to agree with her, understanding his infatuation with Dora as “the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart” and tacitly agreeing with her own deathbed insight that “it would have been better, if we had only loved each other as a boy and girl, and forgotten it.”

  Dickens himself would never achieve the moral serenity of David Copperfield’s conclusion. Though devoted to Mary Hogarth, his restless heart could not rest in her or anywhere else. Even as he rhapsodized over David’s perfect wife and blissful marriage, Dickens was ill at ease in his own marriage and discontented with his imperfect wife. “The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life,” David had brooded while married to Dora. “It was deepened, if it were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night.… The happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting.” At novel’s end, David basks in uxorious contentment; but Dickens’s own life remained mid-novel, his discontents unresolved and rankling.

  One symptom of discontent was the sudden resurgence of his passion for Maria Beadnell. When out of the blue she renewed their correspondence in 1855, four and a half years after the final chapters of David Copperfield, the old flame flared up again—indeed, leapt as high as when he had been twenty. He was so rapturously excited about her reappearance that his sober friend Forster expressed incredulity and disapproval, in the same dubious tone as that of David’s skeptical Aunt Betsey clucking about Dora. Dickens in turn rebuked Forster for his unsympathetic phlegm:

  I don’t quite apprehend what you mean by my over-rating the strength of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling, and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is, and that this began when I was [eighteen]; that it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four;… then you are wrong.… And so I suffered, and so worked, and so beat and hammered away at the maddest romances that ever got into any boy’s head and stayed there, that to see the mere cause of it all, now, loosens my hold upon myself.

  Too much of his younger self had been invested in Maria; ghosts of that golden era now rose to tempt and torment him. “I cannot see the face … or hear the voice,” he told Forster, “without going wandering away over the ashes of all that youth and hope in the wildest manner.” Dickens had just turned forty-three when Maria wrote to him.

  Half a century earlier, William Wordsworth had mourned (in “Tintern Abbey”) his own lost youth—“That time is past, and all its dizzy raptures”—consoling himself, however, that “Other gifts/Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,/Abundant recompense.” This abundant recompense, Wordsworth congratulated himself, was “the philosophic mind.”

  For David Copperfield, youthful ardor is replaced by something better than philosophy—namely, by Agnes.

  There were no happy consolations for Dickens, however. He had lost the dizzy raptures of his youth, he had lost Maria Beadnell, he had lost Mary Hogarth—and he had certainly not acquired anything like a philosophic mind.

  CHAPTER 5

  I counted up my years … and found that I should soon be grey

  David Copperfield was unique in its revisiting of Dickens’s younger days—the blacking-factory ordeal, his shorthand reporting, his rise to prosperity; above all, in its re-creation of Maria Beadnell and Mary Hogarth. But while the novel’s hero was especially susceptible to feminine influence, the prominence of women was not new to Dickens’s fiction. Female characters had dominated David Copperfield’s immediate predecessor.

  He had begun this earlier novel, Dombey and Son, in 1846. Though Maria Beadnell had by then been out of his life for a dozen years and Mary Hogarth had been dead for nearly a decade, they remained the only two women who had any power over his imagination. But in the two years before Dombey and Son, several incidents revealed an awakening interest in other women.

  Two years earlier, for example
, he had become infatuated with a girl named Christiana Weller. “I know that in many points I am an excitable and headstrong man,” he admitted, “and ride O God what prancing hobbies!” But the flammability of his emotions was only one lesson of the Christiana Weller episode.

  He had met her in early 1844, at a benefit soiree for which she performed on the piano. She was eighteen, on the edge of womanhood—like Mary Hogarth. He was instantly enamored, composing doggerel verses for Christiana that concluded: “I love her dear name which has won me some fame,/But Great Heaven how gladly I’d change it!” Changing her name was out of the question for him, but not since Mary Hogarth’s death had his feelings been so roused. He told Christiana’s father that “I read such high and such unusual matter in every look and gesture of the spiritual creature who is naturally the delight of your heart and very dear to you, that she started out alone from the whole crowd the instant I saw her, and will remain there always in my sight.” More earnestly yet, he told a friend that “I cannot joke about Miss Weller; for she is too good; and interest in her (spiritual young creature that she is, and destined to an early death, I fear) has become a sentiment with me. Good God what a madman I should seem, if the incredible feeling I have conceived for that girl could be made plain to anyone!” With his notion that Christiana was “a spiritual young creature,” “too good” for a long life, she approached the rarefied sphere of Mary Hogarth.