Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  As it turned out, the fragile, ethereal Christiana Weller lived another sixty-six years, outlasting Dickens himself by a full four decades, but in 1844 he despaired of her life; there was no hope, he insisted, unless she were promptly removed to Italy—to which sunny land Dickens himself, curiously enough, had already made plans to travel:

  I would point out, in very tenderness and sorrow for this gentle creature, who otherwise is lost to this sad world which needs another, Heaven knows, to set it right—lost in her youth, as surely as she lives—that the course to which he [Christiana’s father] is devoting her, should not be called her life but Death; for its speedy end is certain. I saw an angel’s message in her face that day that smote me to the heart.

  Even worse than losing her to death, however, would be an earthly separation—losing her to distance, time, and forgetfulness:

  But at the worst, contemplating the chance … of what is so dreadful, I could say in solemn and religious earnestness that I could bear better her passing from my arms to Heaven than I could endure the thought of coldly turning off into the World again to see her no more; to have my very name forgotten in her ears; to lose the recollection of her myself but at odd times and in remorseful glances backwards; and only to have the old thoughts stirred up at last by some indifferent person saying “You recollect her? Ah! She’s dead.”

  The idea of Christiana “passing from my arms” was an ambiguous fantasy, recalling Mary Hogarth dying in his arms, but also suggesting an idea of Christiana alive and wrapped in his embrace—for though she might be a “spiritual young creature,” Dickens’s feelings for her were not wholly spiritual. His impulse to idealize young maidens was strong, and he was reluctant to admit any admixture of sexual feeling in his adoration. But he plainly regretted that Christiana was inaccessible to him.

  When he was in the full flush of his infatuation with Christiana, a wealthy friend named T. J. Thompson wrote with the surprising news that he planned to court her. Dickens threw himself into vicarious courtship: “If I … felt as irresistibly impelled towards her as I should if I were in your place and as you do, I would not hesitate, or do that slight to the resolution of my own heart which hesitation would imply. But would win her if I could, by God.” To Christiana herself, however, he observed of his friend Thompson that were Dickens himself not “beyond the reach—the lawful reach” of Christiana, it would be “the greatest happiness and pleasure of my life to have run him through the body. In no poetical or tender sense, I assure you, but with good sharp Steel.”

  The erotic violence of this fantasy coexisted curiously with his adoration for Christiana as a soaring soul, angel-winged:

  Hours of hers are years in the lives of common women … it is in such a face and such a spirit, as part of its high nature, to do at once what less etherial creatures must be long in doing … as no man ever saw a soul or caught it in its flight, no man can measure it by rule and rod.

  She stirred his mystical feelings: “I had as high and confident a Faith (O Heaven what a boundless Faith it is!) in Her, and that whatever she worked out would be for Good. I know, I do know it, as well as if I had known her from her cradle. As, in the spirit, I have.” His sense of an uncanny supernatural connection with Christiana—an intimation of having known her in spirit long before meeting her in the flesh—recalls his awareness of Mary Hogarth in the mists of Niagara Falls just two years earlier.

  One skeptical critic notes disapprovingly “the frantic tone of his flirtations with younger women like Christiana Weller.” Frantic he may have been, but frantic was only one aspect of Dickens’s response to Christiana. His feelings echoed the reverential sentiments prompted by Mary Hogarth’s death, with the addition of a more plainly romantic strain. She excited desire, fervor, frustration, even pain—for the “recollection of Miss Weller … has its tortures too”; but also adoration and even worship. Something of this mixture of emotions appeared in his response to Thompson’s announcement that he intended to court Christiana. “I swear to you,” Dickens wrote, “that when I opened and read your letter this morning … I felt the blood go from my face to I don’t know where, and my very lips turn white. I never in my life was so surprised, or had the whole current of my life so stopped, for the instant, as when I felt, at a glance, what your letter said.”

  Why should he have been so startled and appalled to learn that an unmarried friend—a widower the same age as he (and wealthy)—wanted to court “a very beautiful girl”? At least one reason must have been his shocked discovery that while he had adopted Christiana Weller as an object of worship (and perhaps of never-to-be-consummated desire), someone else wanted her as wife and bedmate. Better to lose one’s beloved to death, as with Mary Hogarth, than to another man. Mary was forever preserved from violation; Christiana would be lost to marriage, sex, and procreation. Nothing could be so radically disenchanting as an angel’s decline into a wife: Satan’s plunge from heaven was hardly more precipitate.

  And so it comes as no surprise that when Christiana married Thompson the following year, Dickens’s worship of her quickly waned. Less than a year after the wedding (which he attended sporting a garish striped waistcoat specially tailored for the occasion), he found her ethereal perfections sadly diminished: “Mrs. Thompson disappoints me very much. She is a mere spoiled child, I think, and doesn’t turn out half as well as I expected. Matrimony has improved him, and certainly has not improved her.” She was even less improved by pregnancy: “She seems … to have a devil of a whimpering, pouting temper—but she is large in the family way, and that may have something to do with it.” His disillusion was complete: whereas Christiana the young maiden had enthralled him, Mrs. T. J. Thompson the pregnant wife bored and annoyed him—much like his own often-pregnant wife.

  A few months after he met Christiana Weller, another curious episode occurred.

  In July 1844, he took his family to Italy for a lengthy stay, settling in Genoa. There he met Augusta de la Rue, an Englishwoman married to a Swiss banker. Madame de la Rue suffered from “convulsions, distortions of the limbs, aching headaches, insomnia, and a plague of neurasthenic symptoms, including catalepsy,” all caused by a Phantom, or “myriads of bloody phantoms of the most frightful aspect,” which pursued her. Learning of her troubles, Dickens set about with characteristic self-confidence (“I have a perfect conviction that I could magnetize a Frying-Pan”) to exorcize her Phantom through hypnotism.

  He had earlier become interested in the novel science or art of mesmerism, or “Animal Magnetism,” and had already practiced “magnetizing” his wife and his sister-in-law Georgina. Now he turned his magnetic attentions to Madame de la Rue, conducting mesmerizing sessions with her that became frequent and consuming and continued for almost six months. When he and she were apart for several weeks, he hypnotized her telepathically, or thought he was doing so (echoing his belief in his uncanny connections with Mary Hogarth and Christiana Weller). Once reunited, he and Madame de la Rue became virtually inseparable: “Wheresoever I travelled in Italy, she and her husband travelled with me, and every day I magnetized her; sometimes under olive trees, sometimes in Vineyards, sometimes in the travelling carriage, sometimes at wayside Inns during the mid-day halt.” His mesmeric therapy sessions ended only when he returned to England.

  Dickens himself is the sole source for what Madame de la Rue revealed during her hypnotic trances, and his surviving reports, generally in the form of letters to her husband, may suppress awkward details. But whatever he may or may not have learned about her buried life, his enthusiastic invasion of her psyche suggests a probing, even prurient interest in the fantasies and desires of a mature married woman. The sexual implications of the mesmerist’s power over his female subject undoubtedly appealed to him. Whatever the formal probity of his conduct with Madame de la Rue, he was surely aware of the seductive possibilities. On this point, we can trust his wife’s instincts. With the many intense tête-à-têtes between her husband and the fascinating Madame de la Rue, under o
live trees, in vineyards, and elsewhere, Catherine not surprisingly suspected something amiss, divining that psychic intimacy might easily progress, if it had not done so already, to physical intimacy. Her jealousy, in turn, fed his growing annoyance with her; he had no patience with her reasonable wifely anxieties.

  A fireside story Dickens wrote several years later, “To Be Read at Dusk,” luridly illuminates the de la Rue episode. Set in Genoa and Rome—the two sites where he had most often mesmerized Madame de la Rue—the story involves a just-married young Englishwoman “haunted” in dreams by “the face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with black hair and a grey moustache … looking at her fixedly, out of darkness.” She dreams of this face for three nights running before her marriage, though it is “not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw.” But after her marriage, the phantom face materializes in the form of a Signor Dellombra (“of the shadows”) who visits the old palazzo in Genoa where the young bride and her new husband are staying. Meeting Dellombra, the beautiful Englishwoman swoons, “nearly terrified to death, and … wandered in her mind about her dream, all night.” In the character of the sinister Dellombra, Madame de la Rue’s malign Phantom and the Phantom’s mesmeric antagonist—Dickens himself—converge. Eventually—seduced, abducted, or both—she is carried off by the sinister Dellombra. “To Be Read at Dusk” betrays Dickens’s awareness of the mesmerist’s sexual menace and his dangerous sway over a female subject. Though Dickens advertised his hypnotic influence on Madame de la Rue as benign and indeed curative, the story’s mesmeric Dellombra is, to the contrary, a sinister seducer.

  Though he occasionally corresponded with the de la Rues in later years, his preoccupation with Madame de la Rue, like that with Christiana Weller, soon faded. As he admitted, he was prone to “prancing hobbies.” But together, the two episodes reveal not only the fitful nature of his fancies, but also new directions in his feelings. His wife was wise to worry: he was taking a fresh interest in women. His next novel, Dombey and Son, would betray this awakening.

  More than in any other Dickens novel, women dominate Dombey and Son. Saintly, forceful, or fierce, they overshadow their male counterparts.

  The strongest of them is the dark heroine, Edith Dombey—a revolutionary character for Dickens, and a portent. Her prominence was unplanned; Dickens himself must have been surprised. He had initially imagined her as a conventional type, a high-society husband-hunter, jaded and languid, “put through her paces, before countless marrying men, like a horse for sale,” as his working notes sketched her. “Proud and weary of her degradation, but going on, for it’s too late now, to try to turn back.” Anyone affecting weariness and boredom offended the earnest, intense, hard-working Dickens, and Edith is condemned as “proud and weary” again when she first strolls into the novel “carrying her gossamer parasol with a proud and weary air.” She had no large role in his plans; the novel’s designated heroine was rather the virtuous young maiden Florence. After writing the first few chapters, he sent his friend Forster a lengthy plan of the remaining chapters. In the outline, Florence is central; Edith is not even mentioned.

  But unexpectedly, she began to assume a heroine’s role. Perhaps Dickens was intrigued by his own early description of her as “very handsome, very haughty, very wilful.” He had never before created a beautiful woman of complexity or power. Though he had praised Phiz’s first depiction of Edith (and her mother) as “admirable—the women quite perfect,” within a few weeks he was advising Phiz to lend her greater consequence: “I should like Edith … to possess the reader with a more serious notion of her having a serious part to play in the story.”

  Small wonder if Phiz was confused, for Dickens himself was just discovering Edith’s potential. The maiden heroine Florence was too mild to ignite much trouble. Edith by contrast was radioactive: sensuous, fiery, angry, mysterious. Dickens grew fascinated. “The interest and passion” of the novel, Forster recalled, “when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, than had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think, excepting only the close of the Old Curiosity Shop” [with the celebrated death of Little Nell]; and he abandoned his annual Christmas book because (as Georgina Hogarth recalled) “he found that the engrossing interest of his novel as it approached completion made it impossible for him to finish the other work in time.” Edith’s advent had unexpectedly charged Dombey and Son with erotic tension and conflict. Matched against the two leading males, the autocratic Dombey and the crafty Carker, she baffles and humiliates both. Though intending that she would die in disgrace, the relentless Dickens relented and spared her. Edith lives to the end, defeated but unrepentant.

  He had divided feelings about his problematic heroine, and it is suggestive that his fascination with Edith is most eloquently expressed by the novel’s archvillain Carker. Carker is stunned by Edith’s beauty: “He had never thought Edith half so beautiful before. Much as he admired the graces of her face and form, and freshly as they dwelt within his sensual remembrance, he had never thought her half so beautiful.” The Devil himself can admire a lovely woman, and like Milton’s Satan admiring Eve—“That space the Evil One abstracted stood/From his own evil, and for the time remained/Stupidly good”—Carker’s malice is momentarily overawed by Edith’s beauty. Disapproving, Dickens nonetheless understood Carker’s susceptibility, his “sensual remembrance.”

  “Beauty” and “beautiful” are used to describe Edith some sixty times, though she appears in fewer than a third of the novel’s sixty-two chapters; even Dickens’s abundant verbal resources were challenged to convey her loveliness as he saw it in his mind’s eye. He imagined her dangerously dark, with “rich black hair,” “dark eyes” and “dark lashes,” “a dark smile,” “a dark glance,” “a frown so black,” “a dark gaze,” “dark and threatening beauty.” Angry, she burns with “dark pride and rage.” Confronting her detested husband, “she lifted her hand to the tiara of bright jewels radiant on her head, and, plucking it off with a force that dragged and strained her rich black hair with heedless cruelty, and brought it tumbling wildly on her shoulders, cast the gems upon the ground.” Frequent references to her breast and bosom—thirty-three, by one count—emphasize her sensuous richness.

  If heroines like Agnes Wickfield show Dickens’s admiration for the quiet sway of feminine gentleness and compassion, Edith’s anger reveals his uneasy interest in erotic power. Her gypsy coloring and dark moods betoken the moral twilight she inhabits. Instructing Phiz, Dickens explained that Edith is “quite a lady in appearance, with something of a proud indifference about her, suggestive of a spark of the Devil within.” When she defies Carker, he demands: “What devil possesses you?”—to which she replies: “Their name is Legion.” Nothing could be further from Mary Hogarth heroines like Agnes, whom Dickens regularly compares to angels.

  Edith “is about thirty—not a day more,” Dickens further instructed Phiz: “handsome, though haughty-looking—good figure—well dressed—showy—and desirable.” Nowhere in the novel is Edith (or anyone else) described as “desirable”; the word had a sexual edge that Dickens might venture in a private letter to another man, but not in a novel to be read aloud in the parlor. In earlier novels, seductive feminine charm had been modeled on the young Maria Beadnell; Dolly Varden in Barnaby Rudge is a Maria-like girl, for example: pretty, coquettish, and “plump,” provocative in a flirtatious, succulent way. “When and where was there ever, such a plump, roguish, comely, bright-eyed, enticing, bewitching, captivating, maddening little puss in all this world, as Dolly!” Dark, reserved, mysterious, Edith Dombey’s beauty is entirely different. No one would presume to call her a “little puss.”

  One of the most striking images of Edith appears in a confrontation with the insidious Carker. As she turns on him angrily, we see her from his point of view:

  “Sir,” returned Edith, bending her dark gaze full upon him, and speaking with a
rising passion that inflated her proud nostril and her swelling neck, and stirred the delicate white down upon a robe she wore, thrown loosely over shoulders that could bear its snowy neighbourhood.

  Brooding bitterly, “she plucked the feathers from a pinion of some rare and beautiful bird, which hung from her wrist by a golden thread, to serve her as a fan, and rained them on the ground.” In Phiz’s black-and-white illustrations, Edith’s rich sensuousness is only sketched; to imagine her as Dickens did, we would do better to turn to the highly colored portraits of his contemporary Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the most sensual of the Pre-Raphaelites. With thick flowing hair, voluptuous coloring, and abstracted musings, Rossetti’s women radiate eroticism. His later mistress and model Jane Morris—beautiful, dark-haired, stern—might have sat for a portrait of Edith.

  Why did Dickens grow fascinated by this highly charged character of his own imagining? She corresponded to no woman in his life, certainly no woman he had ever loved; Edith is as unlike Maria Beadnell as she is unlike Mary Hogarth. With her dark haughty beauty, she does not even seem the kind of woman to whom Dickens was especially attracted. Maria had been a light, even silly, coquette, Mary a virtuous and cheerful maiden, a “winning, happy, amiable companion.” Edith is neither coquettish nor amiable, and certainly not saintly.

  Her origins lie not in any woman Dickens loved or even knew, perhaps, so much as in the woman missing from his life. She seems a feminine counterpart to Signor Dellombra in “To Be Read at Dusk”—a dangerously erotic dream, a creation of unfulfilled desire. Beautiful, darkly sensuous, defiant, vulnerable, aloof, passionate, Edith embodies the imaginative power of Eros—enigmatic, labyrinthine, creative. As the young wife of “To Be Read at Dusk” was mesmerized by the dark Dellombra, Dickens was himself seduced by Edith.

  He had for years been a proponent, virtually the Victorian proponent, of optimism, bonhomie, conviviality, good cheer, warm feeling, uplifting sentiment. Now he was wandering into new regions of feeling. “The Woman had once been supreme,” Henry Adams observed, “… not merely as a sentiment but as a force.” With Edith Dombey, Aphrodite stepped into Dickens’s fiction as a force, and the spirit of Mary Hogarth, ever at his side, must have been surprised to observe this portent, and apprehensive too.