Inevitably, her own fires erupt. Unhappily married, courted by a suave idler, she abandons her husband—and then jilts her would-be paramour too. (Edith Dombey had done the same.)
Early in Bleak House, as Lady Dedlock sits by the fire at the stately London house of the Dedlocks, she casually glances at a handwritten affidavit lying on the table next to her chair. She starts in surprise—impulsively asks “Who copied that?”—and then faints, with a faintness “like the faintness of death,” she murmurs. She has recognized the handwriting of her old and, she thought, dead lover; alive, as it turns out, but scraping out a mean living by copying legal documents.
Her instantaneous recognition of his handwriting, years after he has vanished, might seem a melodramatic improbability, except that one day in February 1855, casually glancing at his own mail, Dickens was startled to recognize the handwriting of his old flame, Maria Beadnell—now Mrs. Henry Winter.
As I was reading by my fire last night [he wrote her], a handful of notes was laid down on my table. I looked them over, and, recognizing the writing of no private friend, let them lie there, and went back to my book. But I found my mind curiously disturbed, and wandering away through so many years to such early times of my life, that I was quite perplexed to account for it.… At last it came into my head that it must have been suggested by something in the look of one of those letters. So I turned them over again,—and suddenly the remembrance of your hand, came upon me with an influence that I cannot express to you. Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream.
Uncannily, Lady Dedlock’s recognition of an old lover’s handwriting anticipated the same scene in Dickens’s own life.
It was an evening in deep winter when, sitting before his fire (like Lady Dedlock), Dickens glanced at Maria’s handwriting, and the shock of recognition sent him into the past with a rush of feeling. In the twelve thick volumes of his published letters, nothing matches the intoxicated excitement of the three long letters he wrote Maria that winter. It is ironic that his only surviving love letters are not to Mary Hogarth or Ellen Ternan, nor even to the pretty young Maria Beadnell, but to a middle-aged woman he hadn’t seen in years and who had in the meantime grown (in her own words) “toothless, fat, old, and ugly.”
But it was of course not this matron about whom Dickens felt so excited. What stirred him was the vivid memory of the young Maria Beadnell, and even more of the young Charles Dickens who had loved her so ardently:
I have always believed since, and always shall to the last, that there never was such a faithful and devoted poor fellow as I was. Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me, 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! I never can think, and I never seem to observe, that other young people are in such desperate earnest, or set so much, so long, upon one absorbing hope.… The sound of it [“Maria”] has always filled me with a kind of pity and respect for the deep truth that I had, in my silly hobbledehoyhood, to bestow upon one creature who represented the whole world to me. I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy.
Maria’s letter prompted a poignant nostalgia for that long-vanished time of “fancy, romance, energy, passion.” For such loss, what gain? Genius, fame, adulation, prosperity, comfort, friends, loyal wife, loving daughters and sister-in-law, a profusion of sons, good health—nothing could compensate. He hungered for a revival of passion: for someone to die for gladly, and with the greatest alacrity!—someone about whom he could feel desperately earnest. Even the intense miseries of baffled love—“wretched” happiness—were better than emptiness. Mrs. Henry Winter, formerly Maria Beadnell, had unsuspectingly reignited the torch.
The anticipation was all; the upshot was brief and deflating. Hinting that he was open to a liaison, he arranged to meet with Maria, but recoiled to discover her no longer twenty-one and lovely. The torch was instantly quenched. Rather than tragic, like Lady Dedlock’s re-encounter with her past, Dickens’s reunion with Maria Beadnell was simply disillusioning. But it reaffirmed his kinship with Lady Dedlock, with whom he shared not just a good eye for handwriting but, even more, a strong commitment to dead lovers.
The brief revival of his flame for Maria has often been regarded as a folly. Dickens himself fostered this view by introducing into his next novel, Little Dorrit, a warm-hearted but silly character, Flora, inspired by Mrs. Winter. Thus Maria Beadnell, as girl and matron, inspired two of Dickens’s most endearing female characters, Dora and Flora.
Maria had been a potent force in Dickens’s early life, a memory he had long and dearly cherished. In the winter of 1855, that fancy flared out forever. It was a sad disillusion—but also, perhaps, a liberation.
Soon after his reunion with Maria Beadnell, he began writing Little Dorrit, his eleventh novel. In the autumn he carried his family to Paris, where he continued writing monthly installments. Meanwhile, in letters to his friends John Forster and Wilkie Collins back in England, he described Paris’s diversions. Forster was steady, sober, moral, responsible, self-important; Collins openly kept a mistress (and would later juggle two at the same time). Dickens’s letters to Forster detailed his theatrical outings; those to Collins glanced at more louche adventures. In January 1856, for example, he told Collins that “my head really stings with the visions of the book [Little Dorrit], and I am going, as we French say, to disembarrass it by plunging out into some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes.”
Amidst these nocturnal adventures he wrote one of the most poignant chapters in Little Dorrit. The young heroine Amy Dorrit tells a feeble-minded companion named Maggie a fairy tale about a princess, a tiny spinstress, and a shadow. Amy’s tale is transparently allegorical. The shadow that the little spinstress—Amy herself—hides is her hopeless love for the novel’s protagonist, Arthur Clennam. The princess urges the spinstress to disclose the secret of the shadow, and the spinstress explains:
It was the shadow of Some one who had gone by long before: of Some one who had gone on far away quite out of reach, never, never to come back … no one so good and kind had ever passed that way,… She said, too, that nobody missed it, that nobody was the worse for it, that Some one had gone on to those who were expecting him.
Passing by one day and noticing the cottage empty, the princess discovers that the tiny spinstress has died. She looks in the cottage “to search for the treasured shadow”:
But there was no sign of it to be found anywhere; and then she knew that the tiny woman had told her the truth, and that it would never give any body any trouble, and that it had sunk quietly into her own grave, and that she and it were at rest together.
Silently pining for Clennam, Amy Dorrit meanwhile devotes herself to her selfish father moldering in debtors’ prison and humbly serves her shiftless brother and moody, self-absorbed sister, supporting all of them by drudging as a seamstress, her “heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!” As if her prison-tainted family were not burden enough, she also cares “with infinite tenderness” for the simple-minded Maggie. No heroine, not even David Copperfield’s Agnes, better embodies the “infinitely suffering, infinitely gentle” spirit of Dickens’s religion. “The least, the quietest, and weakest of Heaven’s creatures,” Amy Dorrit is a pattern of feminine devotion, self-abnegation, and purity; the Beatitudes incarnate. Even as Dickens’s nostalgia for Maria Beadnell received a fatal jolt, Mary Hogarth inspired another fictional saint.
Amy Dorrit’s moving tale of the tiny spinstress and the shadow appeared in the seventh monthly number of Little Dorrit, which Dickens finished in Paris in April 1856. The same week, he “paid three francs at the door of that place where we saw the wrestling,” he wrote to Collins, “and went in, at 11 o-Clock, to a Ball. Much the same as our own National Argyll Rooms”—glossed by the editors of Dickens’s lette
rs as “virtually a high-class brothel.” “Some pretty faces,” Dickens commented of the women, “but all of two classes—wicked and coldly calculating, or haggard and wretched in their worn beauty.” But one of the worn beauties fascinated him:
… a woman of thirty or so, in an Indian shawl, who never stirred from a seat in a corner all the time I was there. Handsome, regardless, brooding, and yet with some nobler qualities in her forehead. I mean to walk about tonight, and look for her.
Fresh from the affecting tale of Amy Dorrit’s hidden love, Dickens thus embarked on a prowl through midnight Paris, searching for an unknown woman of dubious credentials.
What exactly was he seeking? Casual sex? That would probably oversimplify the case. On the other hand, a polite wish to pay his respects to the woman’s “nobler qualities” also seems unlikely. Dickens himself seems to have been unsure of his motives, citing only a vague curiosity: “I didn’t speak to her there, but I have a fancy that I should like to know more about her. Never shall, I suppose.” Nor did he; or at any rate, there is no further mention of her in his letters—though he is unlikely to have divulged such an adventure to any correspondent other than Collins.
Wandering through his own private “half-deserted streets … of insidious intent,” he was evidently moved by some mix of boredom, curiosity, restlessness, and desire; but whatever prompted him, his quest for the handsome demimondaine reveals Dickens fascinated with a woman very different from the pure, gentle, self-denying Amy Dorrit with whom his working hours were occupied. In this vaguely Jekyll-and-Hyde divergence, pursuing the saintly Amy by day and the exotic courtesan by night, the devoté of Mary Hogarth adopted at dusk a more sinister muse.
From Paris, he wrote to Forster:
However strange it is to be never at rest, and never satisfied, and ever trying after something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and that one is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out! It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. As to repose—for some men there’s no such thing in this life.… The old days—the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it perhaps—but never quite as it used to be. I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one.
The skeleton was his marriage.
On the same day that he wrote to Forster of his restlessness, he wrote to Collins ridiculing his wife’s excitement about the new-born son of Napoleon III: “I find Mrs. Dickens flying to the window whenever a fast carriage is heard, and then pretending to be so calmly looking toward the Ave de l’Etoile, that I know her to be on the watch for something from the Tuilleries”—that is, for a carriage carrying the infant prince. “Flying” to the window was an exaggeration, however, for Catherine was too stout to take wing. Her appetite was robust. “Last Friday,” he told Collins, “I took Mrs. Dickens, Georgina, and Mary and Katey [his two daughters], to dine at the Trois freres. Mrs. Dickens nearly killed herself, but the others hardly did that justice to the dinner that I had expected.” One reason he emphasized Amy Dorrit’s slight girlish figure was perhaps his wife’s stoutness. Employed as a seamstress, Amy Dorrit each day smuggles her dinner back to her father in debtors’ prison, herself going hungry. Her fasting obliquely commented on his wife’s self-indulgence at table. It is hard to imagine that he still found her sexually attractive.
He too was hungry, not for the cuisine at the Trois frères but for change. At the beginning of Little Dorrit, Arthur Clennam has just returned from twenty years of barren, lonely exile in China. Dickens and Catherine had been married just twenty years. Parisian adventures like that of the houri with the Indian shawl failed to appease his restlessness, and he indulged more outlandish fantasies. Earlier he had considered retreating to the Alps:
I have visions of living for half a year or so, in all sorts of inaccessible places, and opening a new book therein. A floating idea of going up above the snow-line in Switzerland, and living in some astonishing convent, hovers about me.
In Paris, he reverted to this fancy of retreating to “the top of the Great St. Bernard.… Two or three years hence, perhaps you’ll find me living with the Monks and the Dogs a whole winter—among the blinding snows that fall about that monastery. I have a serious idea that I shall do it, if I live.” But a few months later, he announced that after finishing Little Dorrit he might settle in Australia.
Writing of Dickens’s mood in the 1850s, his friend Forster would recall that “An unsettled feeling greatly in excess of what was usual … became at this time almost habitual, and the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find in his home.” This delicate mention of domestic discontents, as if the gravy at Tavistock House were lumpy or the linens wrinkled, alluded rather to Dickens’s growing alienation from Catherine. The solid, sensible Forster counseled patience. Writing that “I don’t know in what strange place, or at what remote elevation above the level of the sea, I might fall to work next,” Dickens anticipated Forster’s prudent advice:
Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year—though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.
By 1856, Dickens gloomed and boiled by turns.
Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam is the most wearily middle-aged of his heroes. It would be perilous to attribute Clennam’s disappointments and melancholy to his author, but the resemblances are unmistakable. Dickens was forty-three when he began writing the novel; Clennam is “a grave dark man of forty” (though only a year later, in the novel’s time, he claims to be five or six years older). Whatever his exact age, he feels old: “I counted up my years, and considered what I am, and looked back, and looked forward, and found that I should soon be grey. I found that I had climbed the hill, and passed the level ground upon the top, and was descending quickly.” Falling in love with a young woman nicknamed “Pet,” Clennam sees her as a last chance for rejuvenation. Marrying her, he might erase twenty lost years of exile and, nourished by her youth and vivacity, become twenty again himself. But meeting him on the banks of the Thames and handing him roses, Pet reveals that she is betrothed to a younger man. Afterwards, alone, Clennam “walked on the river’s brink in the peaceful moonlight, for some half-an-hour,” and then “put his hand in his breast and tenderly took out the handful of roses … bent down on the shore, and gently launched them on the flowing river. Pale and unreal in the moonlight, the river floated them away.” In Dickens’s favorite metaphor of life as a river, Clennam watches as Pet’s roses—youth, beauty, love—drift downstream and out of sight.
In fact, losing Pet proves a blessing, leaving Clennam free eventually to marry Amy Dorrit. Like young David Copperfield, he has been blinded by sexual allure, for Pet (rather like Dora) is “a fair girl with rich brown hair hanging free in natural ringlets. A lovely girl … round and fresh and dimpled and spoilt.” But Clennam’s fundamental need is not amorous arousal. Erotic temptations, however innocent, distract him from his higher destiny, union not with Pet but with the true heroine, Amy Dorrit. She, like David Copperfield’s Agnes, has loved our erring hero all along, waiting like a loving God for the lost soul to accept her love.
Of all Dickens’s heroines, Amy Dorrit is the most childlike in appearance, the meekest, the most timid, the most retiring, the humblest. Even her tiny stature suggests an extinction of ego, great love contained in a small vessel. In his 1856 Christmas story, “The Wreck of the Golden Mary,” written while he was also writing Little Dorrit, the sea captain hero assures his shipwrecked companions that God will greet them in death not only as they are, burdened with a lifetime of failures, but also as the innocent children they used to be:
“We were all of us
,” says I, “children once; and our baby feet have strolled in green woods ashore; and our baby hands have gathered flowers in gardens, where the birds were singing. The children that we were, are not lost to the great knowledge of our Creator. Those innocent creatures will appear with us before Him, and plead for us. What we were in the best time of our generous youth will arise and go with us too. The purest part of our lives will not desert us at the pass to which all of us here present are gliding. What we were then, will be as much in existence before Him, as what we are now.”
This idiosyncratic notion of the intercessory power of childhood helps explain the imaginative roots of Amy Dorrit, who combines two types that moved Dickens strongly: the innocent child and the gentle, selfless maiden.
At novel’s end, Clennam and Amy marry, but their wedding is merely a postscript to the miracle of Clennam’s rebirth several chapters earlier. Arrested for debt, he has been languishing in prison when Amy enters quietly, waking him from a despairing stupor:
She came towards him; and with her hands laid on his breast to keep him in his chair, and with her knees upon the floor at his feet, and with her lips raised up to kiss him, and with her tears dropping on him as the rain from Heaven had dropped upon the flowers, Little Dorrit, a living presence, called him by his name.
The last phrase echoes Isaiah: “But now saith the Lord … Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name” (Is 43:1). Like the grace of God, freely offered, Amy Dorrit offers Clennam redemption—from debtors’ prison, literally, but more importantly from the prison of his loveless death-in-life. Enriched by a legacy, as she thinks, she begs him to let her pay his debts:
“But pray, pray, pray, do not turn from your Little Dorrit, now, in your affliction! Pray, pray, pray, I beg you and implore you with all my grieving heart, my friend—my dear!—take all I have, and make it a Blessing to me!”
Amy Dorrit’s love has awakened Clennam’s own capacity for love: “To believe that all the devotion of this great nature was turned to him in his adversity, to pour out its inexhaustible wealth of goodness upon him,… inspired him with an inward fortitude, that rose with his love. And how dearly he loved her, now, what words can tell!” Though still imprisoned, he has been liberated. Nowhere else in Dickens’s fiction does his cult of the beatific feminine so nearly echo the Christian mysteries of Grace and Redemption.
Charles Dickens in Love Page 16