Dickens dreamed of his own prison door opening, bringing in springtime, love, liberation, renewal. As with Clennam, the bringer would be a woman.
Had she lived, Mary Hogarth would have been that missing friend and companion, she who had sympathized “with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I knew ever did or will.” But though dearly beloved still, Mary was a memory of faded vividness, an inspiration of waning force. Since her death two decades earlier, the river of life had carried Dickens far downstream. In “The Holly-Tree,” a Christmas story written concurrently with the early chapters of Little Dorrit, he recalled his nightly dreams of Mary in the months after her death. The story’s narrator tells of dreaming every night of “a very near and dear friend” who has died, just as Dickens dreamt of Mary after her death; but the narrator’s dreams, like Dickens’s, had ended as soon as he disclosed them: “I lost the beloved figure of my vision in parting with the secret. My sleep has never looked upon it since, in sixteen years, but once”—this one later occasion perhaps recalling Dickens’s vision of Mary in Genoa in 1844. But despite his lingering memory of those dream-hauntings, it may suggest a dulling of their power that they should be reduced to an anecdote in a potboiler Christmas story.
Yet if Mary’s power had declined, no one had replaced her as his patroness—certainly not Maria Beadnell. Perhaps Maria’s disappointing reappearance in 1855 turned his thoughts back to Mary: to his love for her, to her love for him—“the very last words she whispered were of me.” Amy Dorrit’s redemptive influence on Arthur Clennam suggests Mary’s continued inspiration. Appearing to him in prison, Amy is “a living presence,” who “called him by his name.” As she kneels at Clennam’s feet, Amy is obviously “a living presence”; the phrase is pointless with reference to her, but pregnant with suggestions of Mary as an abiding presence to Dickens.
The 1856 story “The Wreck of the Golden Mary” reverts to Mary Hogarth. Adrift with the wreck’s survivors, the hero recalls the beloved girl whom he had lost years earlier, explaining that he is “a single man (she was too good for this world and for me, and she died six weeks before our marriage-day).” Sliding toward death after days adrift in an open lifeboat, he dreams that she returns to him: “… her hands—though she was dead so long—laid me down gently in the bottom of the boat, and she … swung me to sleep.” The approach of death turns our thoughts to those we love most deeply, and just as he had held the dying Mary in his arms, Dickens happily imagined Mary, in turn, receiving him into death with a gentle embrace.
In the meantime, he could only dream that, as with Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam, someone might glide into his life, a womanly spirit to reawaken his dead feelings. “Such tricks hath strong imagination/ That if it would but apprehend some joy,/It comprehends some bringer of that joy,” Duke Theseus remarks in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1). Little Dorrit shows Dickens wistfully imagining the bringer of a transforming joy, a second coming of Mary Hogarth.
The young woman about to revolutionize his life, however, would be quite different.
CHAPTER 6
Enter the actress, stage left
Dickens wrote the final chapters of Little Dorrit in May 1857.
A month later, he was startled to hear of the death of a longtime friend, Douglas Jerrold. A prominent and controversial journalist, playwright, and wit, Jerrold had been for many years a leading writer for Punch, the comic and satiric magazine. Dickens had known him for two decades; the week before Jerrold’s death, they had made a day’s outing to Greenwich together.
As Jerrold had left his widow poorly provided for, the Jerrold family would welcome financial help—or so Dickens assumed. This was not quite the case, as it happened, but without bothering to check he immediately launched a memorial fund to assist Mrs. Jerrold and her unmarried daughter. Opening an office, enlisting prominent literati and theatrical figures as sponsors, and organizing an ambitious program of benefit events, he happily plunged into this new project.
After his two years’ steady application on Little Dorrit, Jerrold’s death was a fortuitous boon for Dickens, the Jerrold Fund providing an outlet for his restless energies, a distraction from his discontent. Through the summer of 1857, the Fund kept him busily occupied. He had fixed two thousand pounds as its goal, to be raised by a series of benefit performances—a public lecture by William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, as well as two public readings by himself of A Christmas Carol. He also decided to revive a play he had produced a few months earlier with his amateur troupe, of which Jerrold had been a sometime member.
The play was The Frozen Deep, written to order by Wilkie Collins with much editorial intervention by Dickens himself. Several years earlier, he had begun staging home theatricals during the Christmas season, and in Dickensian fashion they grew increasingly elaborate. In the spring of 1856, he had been seized by the notion of a more ambitious production yet. Still occupied with Little Dorrit, he recruited Collins to write a play, a dramatized study of a troubled but noble soul, which Dickens would produce, direct, and stage-manage. Of course he would also take the leading part, for which he added an especially stirring scene. “When the Play was put into rehearsal,” a member of the production recalled, “for many weeks one particular scene was omitted, and when at last Dickens introduced it (it was a scene in which he had the stage all to himself) it was a most wonderful piece of Acting. Anything more powerful, more pathetic, more enthralling, I have never seen.”
The Frozen Deep is a romantic melodrama about arctic exploration. A decade earlier, an expedition commanded by the explorer Sir John Franklin had disappeared in the Canadian arctic while searching for a Northwest Passage. Nine years later, evidence turned up suggesting (to no one’s surprise) that Franklin and his party had perished; shockingly, however, the evidence also suggested that in the party’s losing struggle to survive, some had resorted to cannibalism. Dickens was incredulous, indignant at this slur on British fortitude and honor—he was a staunch admirer of sailors and soldiers especially—and in a series of articles in Household Words he defended Franklin and his men against the charge of cannibalism. The Frozen Deep carried this defense onto the stage, dramatizing a heroic ideal of gallant men battling adversity.
But as Dickens conceived it, The Frozen Deep was actually more about Dickens than about Sir John Franklin. His extensive revisions to Collins’s draft suggest how closely he identified himself with the play’s angry but noble hero.
The word “elaborate” is scarcely adequate to describe the preparations for the first production of The Frozen Deep, on Twelfth Night 1857. Using a large room in his London home, Tavistock House on Tavistock Square, Dickens had a bank of bay windows removed and an annex constructed to extend the stage, thirty feet wide, into the garden. Large backdrops were painted for each of the three acts, and two boys were employed to climb above the set and sprinkle down paper snow. The lighting effects required such a maze of gas lines and jets that an anxious inspector “reported great additional risk from Fire,” and Dickens’s insurance company threatened to raise his premiums. A small chamber orchestra provided an overture and “melodramatic music” specially composed for the play. A professional costumer was hired, along with a peruquier—a wigmaker. To justify so much preparation and expense, four performances were scheduled, each for an audience of ninety, by invitation only. The fortunate few comprised not only family and friends of Dickens and his cast, but (despite his democratic sympathies) numerous illuminati and heavyweight dignitaries like the Duke of Devonshire, the wealthy heiress Miss Coutts, the Dean of St. Paul’s, the President of the Royal Academy, the Lord Chief Justice, the Chief Baron “and half the Bench”—“Judges enow to hang us all,” observed Douglas Jerrold, who attended the final performance. The drama reviewers from several newspapers, including The Times, were invited and encouraged to write reviews—which they did. Dickens hoped that when word of the play was bruited about in courtly circles, Queen Victoria might command a private performance at Windsor—w
hich she did not.
Why did he determine to mount such a circus spectacle for what had formerly been a festive but modest family occasion? Perhaps the lavishness and complexity of the arrangements substituted for a lack of genuine holiday spirit. More importantly, immersing himself in his self-created heroic role distracted him from the less happy role of being himself. He loved at all times to lose himself in dramatic impersonation, and now more than ever. He enjoyed making a splash, too (“It has been the talk of all London for these three weeks,” he boasted); and if the splash included tears, so much the better. “Our audiences have been excellent, with a wonderful power of crying,” he gloated. Certainly the stir of preparations and rehearsals, beginning two months before opening night, proved an active and sociable escape from the solitary hours spent at his desk writing Little Dorrit, as well as a diversion from his fitful moods. Struggling to analyze his feelings, he explained with unusual vagueness:
As to the play itself; when it is made as good as my care can make it, I derive a strange feeling out of it, like writing a book in company. A satisfaction of a most singular kind, which has no exact parallel in my life. A something that I suppose to belong to the life of a Labourer in Art, alone, and which has to me a conviction of its being actual Truth without its pain, that I never could adequately state if I were to try never so hard.
Knocking down the sets after the final performance at Tavistock House, he more straightforwardly reported himself “in the depressed agonies of smashing the Theatre.” It was now, he lamented, “a mere chaos of scaffolding, ladders, beams, canvases, paint-pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas-pipes, and ghastliness. I have taken such pains with it for these ten weeks in all my leisure hours, that I feel, now, shipwrecked.”
Happily, however, Douglas Jerrold’s death five months later offered a fine opportunity to revive The Frozen Deep—to revisit the excitement and cheering hurly-burly of staging the play and the gratification of more weeping audiences. Within hours of hearing of Jerrold’s death, Dickens announced his plans for a benefit performance of the play; charity coincided with pleasure. The Tavistock House sets had not in fact been smashed, but dismantled and preserved. They were readily available for re-use, the cast was still at hand (and presumably willing), and Dickens was eager.
For the benefit performances, he engaged a small London theater called the Gallery of Illustration. Perhaps his failure to lure the Queen to The Frozen Deep in January nagged at him, for, having decided to re-stage the play, he sent an invitation to Windsor and after brief negotiations the Queen agreed to attend a private performance at the Gallery. This occasion was a fine success. “The Queen and her party made a most excellent audience,” Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina reported; “so far from being cold, as was expected, they cried and laughed and applauded and made as much demonstration as so small a party (they were not more than fifty) could do.” Three public performances followed, also receiving laudatory reviews.
The cast for these performances in July 1857 was much the same as that of the Twelfth Night production in Tavistock House. Dickens’s two daughters and two sisters-in-law played most of the female parts; Catherine, formerly a member of his troupe, was by now too stout and ponderous to participate. His sons and various friends took the male roles, with Wilkie Collins as the romantic lead. But the actual hero—Richard Wardour—was of course Dickens himself.
Jilted by a young woman, Clara, whom he has long loved, Wardour has sunk into bitter vindictiveness, swearing vengeance on the unknown man who has stolen Clara’s affections, should their paths ever cross. As bad luck would have it, of course, their paths do cross: Wardour and Clara’s betrothed, Frank Aldersley, sail together on the same arctic expedition, each unaware of the other’s connection with Clara. The expedition’s ships, like Franklin’s, become icebound in the Canadian arctic; and just as a small party sets out to seek help, Wardour discovers that Aldersley is Clara’s betrothed, the man he has been seeking. Aldersley and Wardour disappear together into the falling snow (shaken down by the stagehands perched above), Aldersley ill and weak, the grim, vengeful Wardour carrying a loaded rifle.
A terrible suspense—for once separated from the main party, Wardour will surely shoot or otherwise dispose of the drooping Aldersley, we fear, and in the final act a ragged Wardour in fact reappears on stage sans Aldersley, rejoining the rest of the party, who have meantime been rescued and are encamped on Newfoundland awaiting return to England. With fine implausibility, the play’s women including Clara have just shown up in Newfoundland as well.
Suspicion immediately falls on the unaccompanied Wardour. “Why are you here alone? Where is Frank, you villain!” demands a stalwart ship’s captain (actually the rotund Mark Lemon, editor of Punch). “Where is Frank?”
Faint with exhaustion and starvation, Wardour staggers off—but presently returns carrying Aldersley whom, far from murdering, he has succored at the cost of his own strength. Depositing Aldersley at Clara’s feet, Wardour gasps, “He’s footsore and weary, Clara. But I have saved him—I have saved him for you!”
At which point Wardour sinks to the ground—and Dickens, who imagined so many pathetic deaths in his novels, acted out one on stage. “Nearer, Clara—I want to look my last at you,” Wardour-Dickens exclaims as death closes in. “My sister, Clara!—Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!”—and Clara obligingly does so.
That The Frozen Deep indulges in overwrought, almost garish emotionalism is plain; reading the bare text of this sentimental play in library calm a century and half later, one can scarcely understand its éclat in 1857. The explanation lies partly in the Victorians’ love of melodrama and their less inhibited tears, no doubt, but also in Dickens’s exuberant performance as Richard Wardour. (When staged professionally at the Royal Olympic Theatre nine years later, The Frozen Deep failed dismally.)
In Dickens’s early novel Nicholas Nickleby, a theatrical manager named Crummles, unimpressed by an actor playing a black man with only his face and neck blackened, fondly recalls a “first-rate tragedy man … who, when he played Othello, used to black himself all over. But that’s feeling a part and going into it as if you meant it.” A first-rate tragedy man himself, Dickens felt the part of Wardour, and meant it. “Most awful are those wild looks and gestures of the starved, crazed man,” one reviewer described his performance; “that husky voice, now fiercely vehement, and now faltering into the last sorrow; that frantic cry when he recognizes Clara; that hysterical burst of joy when he brings in his former object of hatred, to prove that he is not a murderer; and that melting tenderness with which he kisses his old friend and his early love, and passes quietly away from Life.” The Times’ reviewer reflected that no “mere actor, unless under the influence of some extraordinary sympathy with the part assumed,” could have portrayed Wardour with such “elaborate detail” as Dickens had done. The reviewer’s intuition (or perhaps he had been coached) of Dickens’s “extraordinary sympathy” with his role was accurate. He might disguise himself as an arctic explorer—donning a parka, hefting a heavy rifle and glooming through arctic snows—but in Wardour’s savage mood, tempered by his higher generosity, Dickens was dramatizing himself, enacting his own malaise and his own heroic aspirations. A few months later, he would write that “all last summer I had a transitory satisfaction in rending the very heart out of my body by doing that Richard Wardour part.”
For all its stagy melodrama, The Frozen Deep had much in common with the novel Dickens was writing at the same time. In Little Dorrit, a despairing man is redeemed by a woman’s love; The Frozen Deep shows a despairing man redeemed by his love for a woman. Redemption from spiritual despondency was by 1857 a pervasive theme in Dickens’s creative activity, both writing and acting. Neither novel nor play concerns itself with the mundane question of the hero getting the girl; the issue in each is quasi-religious, salvation through love. Far worse than not winning the woman is having no woman to love. The Frozen Deep’s Wardour triumphs in losing the girl.
&n
bsp; For though embittered by loss of his beloved and tossing off misogynist sentiments, Wardour continues to love Clara—as a memory, a dream, a destination: “I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else,” he explains, lapsing into his final delirium:
I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, homeless—till I find her! Over the ice and over the snow, tossing on the sea, tramping over the land—awake all night, awake all day—wander, wander, wander, till I find her!
Were these lines written by Wilkie Collins, one wonders, or are they Dickens’s addition?—for they suggest Dickens himself wandering through a personal arctic in search of the woman who would reignite his passion; the woman for whom he might happily sacrifice himself.
In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, the protagonist is similarly frozen, his loveless purgatory expressed by images of a gray frigid wife, a cold kitchen, and a wintry New England landscape as bleak as the arctic setting of The Frozen Deep. Ethan Frome has been cold for so long that he can scarcely recall the sensation of warmth. He had visited Florida years earlier, he remarks, “and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it’s all snowed under” (Prologue).
So too Dickens. It had been twenty years since the beautiful sorrow of Mary Hogarth’s death, even longer since the wretched happiness of his love for Maria Beadnell. Since then, the snows had piled up. Maria’s reappearance had proved a false spring. Like the morose Richard Wardour, Dickens was wandering, wandering, wandering over ice and snow, tossing and tramping, until he could regain the lost intensity of loving that elusive her!
Charles Dickens in Love Page 17