Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  He had little choice but to turn back to novel-writing. It was a reluctant decision: had someone offered him twelve thousand pounds for six months of readings in England, he would not have hesitated.

  His fiction-writing drive had declined. His letters show little evidence of the restless energy he usually felt when a new novel was fermenting. Instead, “I am always thinking of writing a long book, and am never beginning to do it” (as he told Wilkie Collins in August 1863). For the first time in his career, he hesitated before the marathon strain of a long novel in monthly numbers. He was fifty-one; for decades he had driven himself hard. When his old friend and traveling companion Augustus Egg died in the spring of 1863, Dickens catalogued the losses since he and Egg had acted together in The Frozen Deep six years earlier:

  Think what a great Frozen Deep lay close under those boards we acted on! my brother Alfred, Luard, Arthur, Albert, Austin, Egg—even among the audience, Prince Albert and poor Stone—all gone!…

  However, this won’t do. We must close up the ranks and march on.

  His correspondence during these years often reverts to this martial metaphor of life as a battle with heavy casualties.

  He had long believed in the moral and curative powers of hard work. Could it be that he was finally inclined to ease up a little, to indulge in the lotus pleasures of Ellen’s company?

  In the autumn of 1863, however, eight or nine months after returning from France with her, he began to rally his energies. “I am exceedingly anxious to begin my book. I am bent upon getting to work at it.… I see my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn,” he told Forster in October but then admitted: “If I don’t strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again; and have to go through all this uneasiness once more.” He began writing in earnest after Christmas, and in mid-January of the new year, 1864, he was “hard at work upon a new book”—Our Mutual Friend.

  Our Mutual Friend alternates between two plots, only slightly connected, but both concerned with concupiscence and reformation. The primary plot, the “one main line” he mentioned to Forster, dramatizes the lower and grosser forms of concupiscence, particularly lust for money—the fortune-hunting of a flawed heroine, the crude greed of a wooden-legged bounder. As addressed to an acquisitive Victorian culture of ever more getting and spending, this plot had (and retains) an undoubted pertinence. With its straightforward didacticism, it has been the more popular plot among critics.

  But there is little moral tension in this plot; for as it winds through its various confusions and reverses, the rights and wrongs are never in question. No sane person doubts (in principle) that greed, avarice, and love of money are evil. But Dickens did not feel that such sins had much application to himself: though he enjoyed and assiduously pursued money, both to support others (including his mistress) and to indulge himself, he never thought himself corrupted by it, and saw nothing of himself in the novel’s grasping characters. Like many reformers incensed at others’ vices, he conveniently overlooked his own, and the novel’s satire on money-love is undercut by the comfortable bourgeois fantasy of its conclusion, in which the hero recovers his avaricious father’s fortune and establishes his little family in an opulent London mansion purchased with money he has not earned.

  The second plot of Our Mutual Friend has nothing to do with money, however, and much to do with Dickens and Ellen. The theme is sexual love: its power to destroy, its power to ennoble.

  This plot centers on the daughter of a rough Thames waterman who makes his living scavenging, with a specialty in recovering drowned bodies. His beautiful and virtuous daughter, Lizzie Hexam, meets and innocently captivates the genteel idler Eugene Wrayburn. While the main plot features a flawed heroine, the second focuses on a flawed hero.

  As with Faust, which had moved Dickens to tears in Paris, the Lizzie Hexam action dramatizes emotions and conflicts knocking about in his own heart. Faust itself had continued to echo within him, in fact, and helped shape his feelings about Ellen into a plot. Like Faust, “sad and solitary,” Our Mutual Friend’s Wrayburn is languishing at novel’s opening, bored and purposeless; and, further like Faust, he is fired with new energy when he encounters a lovely young woman of humble station. Both heroines are warm, responsive, vulnerable, and yielding—to different degrees. While Marguerite yields herself to Faust, Lizzie flees her dangerous attraction to Wrayburn; no descendant of Mary Hogarth would actually fall into sin. But though retaining her chastity, Lizzie surrenders emotionally: “She tried hard to retain her firmness, but he saw it melting away under his eyes. In the moment of its dissolution, and of his first full knowledge of his influence upon her, she dropped, and he caught her on his arm.” But from her weakness rises her strength: her unselfish love conquers the cynical Wrayburn.

  It testifies to the complexity of Dickens’s feelings that both the hero and the villain reflect his love for Ellen. Wrayburn’s antagonist Bradley Headstone also wants Lizzie—violently. “I love you,” he declares to her:

  “What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.”

  Headstone sets out to court Lizzie “with a bent head hammering at one fixed idea”—like Dickens, himself a hard-hammering character, pursuing Ellen five years earlier. “The more you see of me,” Dickens had once told his wife, “the better perhaps you may understand that the intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me, is one of the qualities that makes me different—sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil—from other men.” His own eagerly passionate nature appears in Headstone’s desire for Lizzie, “an immoveable idea since he first set eyes upon her”:

  It seemed to him as if all that he could suppress in himself he had suppressed, as if all that he could restrain in himself he had restrained, and the time had come—in a rush, in a moment—when the power of self-command had departed from him. Love at first sight is a trite expression quite sufficiently discussed; enough that in certain smouldering natures like this man’s, that passion leaps into a blaze, and makes such head as fire does in a rage of wind, when other passions, but for its mastery, could be held in chains.

  The mixed metaphors of the final sentence—fire and chains—suggest Headstone’s loss of control, as the cool analytical rhetoric is swept aside by a “rush” of passion.

  Headstone is a monitory study of abandonment to passion—of desire breaking all restraints, indifferent to consequences. Headstone is the violent Dickens, his Mr. Hyde. When Headstone mentions the idea of marrying and settling down with a respectable schoolmistress, Lizzie encourages him: “Why have you not done so? … Why do you not do so?” He explodes:

  “Far better that I never did! The only one grain of comfort I have had these many weeks … is, that I never did. For if I had, and if the same spell had come upon me for my ruin, I know I should have broken that tie asunder as if it had been a thread.”

  The bachelor Headstone’s marital rupture is merely notional, whereas Dickens under the spell of Ellen had ruthlessly broken off an actual marriage of twenty-two years, with nine living children.

  After that violent severance, however, he walked more softly. As a schoolmaster, Headstone echoes Dickens in another respect: both performed to an audience and depended on its respect. “Do you suppose that a man, in forming himself for the duties I discharge, and in watching and repressing himself daily to discharge them well, dismisses a man’s nature?” Headstone demands. For both famous author and obscure schoolmaster, “a man’s nature”—a cautious euphemism for erotic desire—had to be segregated from professional life. The intimately personal crisis of Ellen’s pregnancy had had wider perils. “I have had stern occasion to impress upon my children that their father’s name is their best possession,” Dickens had written during the separation crisis of 1858, and his good name remained an essential asset for himself as
much as for his children. Headstone develops a routine of teaching boys by day and stalking his rival Wrayburn by night, a schism reflecting Dickens’s own two lives: the respectable, revered public figure, and the private man going his own wild way.

  Headstone’s passion for Lizzie destroys him. “You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water,” he raves; “you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to exposure and disgrace.” But Dickens was too anxious for his reputation, and too solicitous for Ellen’s privacy, to risk all. The Duke of Wellington is said to have defied blackmail by declaring “Publish and be damned,” but a writer and performer dependent on public approbation could scarcely afford such aristocratic disdain. During the separation crisis of 1858, Dickens had made the mistake of broadcasting his private affairs, an indiscretion that taught him a needful lesson. His “wild way” could be indulged only with careful circumspection. In Bradley Headstone, he imagined the devil of unrestrained desire dragging a victim down to destruction—as could happen when “a man’s nature” seized control.

  That same devil had clawed Dickens too; Ellen’s pregnancy was a result. A lighthearted, spoony fascination with little lilac gloves had led him (and her) into deep waters. Because he loved her dearly, he had to love her cautiously.

  Love is a flame that sometimes destroys—but that can cleanse and refine as well. Its purgatorial potential emerges through another character in Our Mutual Friend—the heroine Lizzie herself. Ellen Ternan had acquainted Dickens with the quotidian fevers of desire—its excitements, its compulsions, its violence, its suffering—but she had also led him deeper into love’s mysteries.

  Lizzie Hexam’s redemptive power begins, ironically, with Dickens’s fascination with corpses—especially drowned corpses.

  On his many visits to Paris, he relished visits to the morgue, a popular resort for French idlers and British tourists, where anonymous corpses, many of them murder victims or suicides, and more than half recovered from the Seine, were theatrically displayed for identification. A few years earlier, he had gazed with macabre fascination at one such corpse, “a large dark man whose disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner, comic, and whose expression was that of a prizefighter who had closed his eyelids under a heavy blow, but was going immediately to open them, shake his head, and ‘come up smiling.’” Shortly before beginning Our Mutual Friend, he wrote an entire essay about corpses, describing (among others) the body of a drowned woman he had once come across, dragged up onto the towpath of Regent’s Park Canal: “The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground.” He was struck by the almost-alive quality of corpses, as if death had unexpectedly interrupted them in mid-gesture and they might at any second resume living. But the cold, permanent and distant deadness of the dead was also fascinating. Observing a crowd gaping at bodies in the Paris morgue, he was struck by the gazers’ “one under-lying expression of looking at something that could not return a look.” The boundary between life and death was very narrow and at the same time infinitely wide, as vast as the universe—a paradox both comic and chilling.

  London lacked a central arena like the Paris morgue for displaying unidentified bodies, but the Thames scarcely yielded to the Seine as an instrument of drowning. Dickens once spent a winter night on the Thames, first in a boat with a detachment of Thames Police, then on Waterloo Bridge. By night, the river was a gloomy underworld: “The air was black, the water was black, the barges and hulks were black, the piles were black, the buildings were black, the shadows were only a deeper shade of black upon a black ground.” The officer in charge of the boat was used to it. “And after all, this looks so dismal?” he scoffs. At night it is gloomy enough, Dickens replies:

  The Seine at Paris is very gloomy too, at such a time, and is probably the scene of far more crime and greater wickedness; but this river looks so broad and vast, so murky and silent, seems such an image of death in the midst of the great city’s life.…

  The river speaks in grim voices: “Uncomfortable rushes of water suggestive of gurgling and drowning, ghostly rattlings of iron chains, dismal clankings of discordant engines, formed the music that accompanied the dip of our oars and their rattling in the rullocks. Even the noises had a black sound to me—as the trumpet sounded red to the blind man.” To cap Dickens’s night on the Thames, the toll-taker on Waterloo Bridge chatted at length of suicides and attempted suicides launched from the bridge.

  Even by day the Thames was not the sweet and silver streaming river of earlier times. “You will have read in the papers that the Thames at London is most horrible,” Dickens had written to his Swiss friend a few years earlier: “I have to cross Waterloo or London Bridge to get to the Railroad when I come down there, and I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach distracting nature.” By mid-Victorian times, the Thames was a large open sewer into which “untreated sewage from 141 sewers between Battersea and London Bridge discharged 250 tons of fecal matter and other noxious substances” each day; and “because its river banks were shallow, only at the very highest of tides would the sewage be flushed out and down the river towards the sea. For the remaining twelve hours, the sewage lay in the river.”

  Aphrodite, goddess of love, sprang from the sea foam; Lizzie Hexam, heroine of Our Mutual Friend, emerges from a river of drowned bodies and sewage. Dickens’s earliest heroine, Oliver Twist’s Rose Maylie, a straightforward portrait of Mary Hogarth, dwelt in an edenic garden setting: “The rose and honeysuckle clung to the cottage walls; the ivy crept round the trunks of the trees; and the garden-flowers perfumed the air with delicious odours.” There is nothing rose-like about the bloated bodies that Lizzie helps her father recover from the Thames, rising from the sludge, scarcely perfuming the air like honeysuckle. “Pharoah’s multitude, that were drowned in the Red Sea, ain’t more beyond restoring to life” than their father’s latest corpse, Lizzie’s brother picturesquely observes. Rivers were Dickens’s favorite metaphor for the unceasing current of life, steadily carrying everyone down to the sea of death, but the Thames that flows through Our Mutual Friend is no poetic metaphor but rather a workaday agent of decay and drowning: “Everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water—discoloured copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green dank deposit—that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.” The river of Our Mutual Friend represents the muddy undercurrents of life: flesh, corruption, and mortality; human kinship with the bottom slime and ooze; feces, sweat, lust, and violence.

  But from this fetid river emerges the redemptive power of love. Dickens had come to understand love not just as a rarefied spirit, but as a mystery embedded in the flesh—“of the earth, earthy,” as he liked to say (quoting St. Paul).

  Lizzie Hexam is a daughter of the Thames, with its thick stew of mud, garbage, sewage, and corpses. “The very fire that warmed you when you were a baby, was picked out of the river alongside the coal barges,” her father reminds her. “The very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of it, I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another.” She shrinks from the river’s odor of mortality; yet, like it or not, she is of the river, rivery, and cannot escape it: “Whenever I am at Paris,” Dickens had written, only partly in jest, “I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there.” Lizzie too is implicated in what horrifies her. “To please myself, I could not be too far from that river,” she remarks, but adds, with curious ambiguity: “I can’t get away from it, I think.… It’s no purpose of mine that I live by it still.” Circumstances tie her to the river, but beyond them lurks a mysterious compulsion. The river is the blood in her
veins, and she cannot evade the dark currents of her own being.

  From her muddy origins comes Lizzie’s rich sexuality: she is among Dickens’s most erotic heroines. Unlike the fair Ellen Ternan, Lizzie is “a dark girl of nineteen or twenty” with a “rich brown cheek.” Observing her through a window, Wrayburn sees “a deep rich piece of colour, with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair, though sad and solitary, weeping by the rising and the falling of the fire.” For Dickens, Aphrodite was dark. Lizzie’s crippled friend Jenny Wren has long golden hair; loosened by Lizzie one evening, Jenny’s hair “fell in a beautiful shower over the poor shoulders that were much in need of such adorning rain.” But Lizzie’s hair is no golden rain shower: when Jenny in turn “loosened her friend’s dark hair,… it dropped of its own weight over her bosom in two rich masses”—two rich masses echoing her breasts, emphasizing her womanly allure.

  Yet despite her erotic fascinations, Lizzie is a pattern of feminine virtue: modest, loving, self-sacrificing, “pure of heart and purpose.” Dickens could assert her purity in no more emphatic terms than those in which he had defended his beloved Ellen during the separation crisis, when he had insisted that “upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young lady. I know her to be innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters.” He seems to relive his fervid defense of Ellen’s virtue when he has Eugene Wrayburn assert (to his friend Lightwood) that “there is no better girl in all this London than Lizzie Hexam. There is no better among my people at home; no better among your people.” Even Wrayburn’s out-of-character reference to the women of his family, “my people,” as a standard of feminine virtue echoes Dickens’s reference to “my own dear daughters.”