‘Ah dear! When Gamp was summonsed to his long home, and I see him a lying in the hospital with a penny-piece on each eye, and his wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I should have fainted away. But I bore up. If it wasn’t for the nerve a little sip of liquor gives me I never could go through with what I sometimes has to do.
‘“Mrs Harris,” I says to my friend Mrs Harris at the very last case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, – “Mrs Harris,” I says, “leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don’t ask me to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged, and then I will do what I am engaged to do, according to the best of my ability.”
‘“Mrs Gamp,” she says in answer, “if ever there was a sober creeture to be got at eighteen-pence a day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks – night-watching being a extra charge – you are that inwallable person.”
‘“Mrs Harris,” I says to her, “don’t name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears ’em.”
‘Thank you sir. How are you Mr Mould? Everything be nice and comfortable about the deceased. You know me of old, I hope, and so does Mrs Mould, your ’andsome pardner sir and so does the two sweet, young ladies, your darters; although the blessing of a daughter was deniged myself, which if we had one, Gamp would certainly have drunk its little shoes right off its feet.
‘But them two sweet, young ladies of yourn, Mr Mould, as I knowed afore a tooth in their pretty heads was cut, and have many a time seen – ah! the dear creeturs! a-playing at berryins down in the shop and a-follerin’ the order-book to its long home in the iron safe. Young ladies with such faces as your darters thinks of somethin’ else besides berryins’; don’t they, sir? Thinks o’ marryin’s; don’t they, sir?
‘You ought to know that you was born in a wale, and that you live in a wale, and that you must take the consequences of sich a sitivation.
‘I takes new bread, my dear, with jest a little pat o’ fredge butter and a morsel o’ cheese: and whatever you do, young woman, don’t bring me more than a shillingsworth of gin-and-water, when I rings the bell a second time; for that is always my allowange, and I never takes a drop beyond.
‘Rich folk may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for them to see out of a needle’s eye. That is my comfort and I hopes I knows it. Drat the old wexagious creetur, I a’most forgot your piller, I declare! There! Now you’re as comfortable as you need to be, I’m sure! and I’m going to be comfortable too.’
[Seated in the chair asleep. Opens eyes.]
That was Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, and I am Miriam Margolyes from Clapham.
Mr Mould the undertaker was a great admirer of Mrs Gamp. He said she was ‘the sort of woman you would bury for nothing and do it neatly’.
I’ve had a passion for Dickens all my life. I learnt from him that literature is not peripheral to life: it is the stuff of life itself. Dickens distilled his life’s experience into the most marvellous essence and particularly the women in his life fuelled the women in his books. I want to share with you my relish in their humour, their variety, their vitality. Everybody thinks of Dickens as the warm, jolly, family man, the paterfamilias, the inventor of Christmas. ‘God Bless us every one,’ says Tiny Tim.
Mrs Gamp – Fred Barnard, 1879
[Music under.]
But there was a tormented, demonic side to his nature that had its roots in the darkness of his childhood.
Kate Perugini, his favourite daughter, wrote to George Bernard Shaw, ‘If you could make the public understand that my father was not a jolly, jocose gentleman walking about the earth with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me.’ I want to oblige Kate tonight.
Dickens could write about the gripe of poverty, about people living on the underbelly of life, on the edge of existence because he had been there himself.
Do you know the Klems from The Uncommercial Traveller?
I am waited on by an elderly woman with a chronic sniff, who, at the shadowy hour of half past nine o’clock of every evening, gives admittance at the street door to a meagre and mouldy old man whom I have never yet seen detached from a flat pint of beer in a pewter pot.
The meagre and mouldy old man is her husband, and the pair have a dejected consciousness that they are not justified in appearing on the surface of the earth.
They come out of some nook when London empties itself and go in again when it fills. They make their bed in the lowest and remotest corner of the basement and they smell of bed, and have no possessions but bed: unless it be (which I rather gather from an undercurrent of flavour on them) cheese.
The most extraordinary circumstance I have traced in connection with this aged couple is that there is a Miss Klem, their daughter, apparently ten years older than either of them, who also has a bed and smells of it, and carries it about the earth at dusk and hides it in deserted houses.
I came into this piece of knowledge through Mrs Klem’s beseeching me to sanction the sheltering of Miss Klem under that roof for a single night, ‘between her takin’ care of the upper part in Pall Mall which the family of his back, and a ’ouse in Serjameses-Street, which the family of leaves town ter-morrer’.
I gave my gracious consent, and in the shadowy hours Miss Klem became perceptible on the doorstep wrestling with a bed in a bundle. Where she made it up for the night I cannot positively state, but I think in a sink. I know that with the instinct of a reptile or insect, she stowed it and herself away in deep obscurity.
[Music.]
This vaguely ecclesiastical structure is a copy of Dickens’ own reading desk, which he designed himself and toured with all over England and America with his dramatic readings. These were immensely successful: in 1868, when he went to New York, over 25,000 people came to hear him, and he made far more money out of his readings than he ever did out of his writings.
I suppose most people’s view of a typical Dickens heroine is somebody like Pet Meagles from Little Dorrit. ‘Pet was about twenty. A fair girl with rich brown hair hanging free in natural ringlets. A lovely girl, with a frank face, and wonderful eyes; so large, so soft, so bright, set to perfection in her kind, good head. She was round and fresh and dimpled and spoilt, and there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in the world.’
[Music.]
And then there’s Kate Nickleby from Nicholas Nickleby:
‘A slight but very beautiful and gentle girl of about seventeen.’
Mary Graham (from Martin Chuzzlewit), no more than seventeen, her figure slight as became her years but all the charms of youth and maidenhood clustered on her gentle brow.
Ada Clare (from Bleak House), with the fire shining on her, a beautiful girl of seventeen with such soft, blue eyes and such a bright, innocent, and trusting face.
And Alice (from The Sisters of York), a fair creature of seventeen. The heart of this fair girl bounded with youth and gladness, her gleesome voice and merry laughs were the sweetest music of their home. She was its very light and life.
[End music.]
Have you noticed they’re all about seventeen? That is because they were all based on Mary Hogarth, Dickens’ young sister-in-law, who came to live with Dickens and his wife Catherine when they were first married. And the important thing to remember about Mary is that she died… at seventeen. They had been to the St James’s theatre together – all three of them: Dickens loved to go out with a sister on each arm; he called them ‘my pair of petticoats, my two Venuses’, and they’d come home, happy and laughing; Mary had gone upstairs to take off her cloak, Dickens was walking upstairs behind her and suddenly she fell back into his arms – and died.
He had a pathological attachment to her: he wrote, ‘her last words were of me. I have lost the dearest friend I ever had… she had not a single fault and was in life almost as far above the foibles and vanity of her sex and age as she is now in Heaven.
’
He wanted to be buried in the same grave with her, and was most upset when her younger brother died first and was buried there instead.
‘It is a great trial to me to give up Mary’s grave, greater than I can express. I thought of having her moved to the catacombs and saying nothing about it… I cannot bear the thought of being parted from her dust.’
He composed the epitaph for her tombstone in Kensal Green cemetery, ‘Young, beautiful, and good, God numbered her with his angels at the tender age of seventeen,’ and she became in his writing the pregenitor of all those tiny, little, pre-pubescent, mini-breasted, child love-objects, like Dora, Ruth Pinch, Little Dorrit, Florence Dombey, Little Em’ly, and of course the most famous of all, Little Nell. I find them all rather icky, actually. So did Oscar Wilde.
He wrote: ‘One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing…’
And G.K. Chesterton, a brilliant Dickens commentator, wrote: ‘Around Little Nell, of course, a controversy raged and rages. Some implored Dickens not to kill her at the end of the story. Some regret that he did not kill her at the beginning.’
So I thought it would be nice to show Little Nell having some fun for a change (before she died) with Mrs Jarley, the owner of the Waxworks, from The Old Curiosity Shop.
[Music.]
Mrs Jarley: The Old Curiosity Shop
‘There, child, read that.’
Nell walked round and read aloud the inscription, in enormous black letters, JARLEY’S WAX WORK.
‘I never saw any wax-work, ma’am,’ said Nell. ‘Is it funnier than Punch?’
‘Funnier!’ said Mrs Jarley in a shrill voice. ‘It is not funny at all.’
‘Oh!’ said Nell, with all possible humility.
‘It isn’t funny at all,’ repeated Mrs Jarley.
‘It’s calm and – what’s that word again – critical? – no – classical, that’s it – it’s calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so like life, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, you’d hardly know the difference.
‘I won’t go so far as to say, that, as it is, I’ve seen wax-work quite like life, but I’ve certainly seen some life that was exactly like wax-work.
‘That, ladies and gentlemen, is Jasper Packlemerton of atrocious memory, who courted and married fourteen wives and destroyed them all by tickling the soles of their feet when they was sleeping in the consciousness of innocence and virtue.
‘On being brought to the scaffold and asked if he was sorry for what he had done, he replied yes, he was sorry for having let ’em off so easy and hoped all Christian husbands would pardon him the offence.
‘Let this be a warning to all young ladies to be particular in the character of the gentlemen of their choice.
‘Observe that his fingers is curled as if in the act of tickling, and that his face is represented with a wink, as he appeared when committing his barbarous murders.’
When Nell knew all about Mr Packlemerton and could say it without faltering, Mrs Jarley passed on to the fat man, and then to the thin man, the tall man, the short man, the old lady who died of dancing at a hundred and thirty-two, the wild boy of the woods, the woman who poisoned fourteen families with pickled walnuts, and other historical characters and interesting but misguided individuals.
‘Finally, that,’ said Mrs Jarley, ‘is an unfortunate Maid of Honour in the time of Queen Elizabeth, who died from pricking her finger in consequence of working upon a Sunday.
‘Observe the blood which is trickling from her finger; also the gold-eyed needle of the period with which she is at work.’
[Music.]
Dickens came from the lower middle class and he hated it. The anatomy of our English class system is such that the lower middle class is probably the worst class to be born into – because it lacks both the dignity of the working class and the confidence, the security of the middle class and anyone who has the misfortune to be born into the lower middle class can spend a lifetime trying to claw their way out of it… Dickens was a passionate and a determined and ultimately a successful social climber.
But his childhood was shrouded in debt and disgrace. His grandfather was forced to flee to France because he was caught embezzling the funds of the Navy pay office where he worked and his father John Dickens (he wasn’t a criminal, but he was a feckless man, hopeless with money – probably the model for Mr Micawber) was finally arrested when Dickens was twelve years old for owing the baker forty pounds. The whole family was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in London, all except for little Charles himself. His parents sent him quite alone to board with a Mrs Elizabeth Roylance, ‘a reduced old lady, long known to our family, in Little College Street, Camden Town, who took children in to board and had done so in Brighton’. She is the inspiration for Mrs Pipchin, here confronting little Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son.
This celebrated Mrs Pipchin was a marvellous ill-favoured, ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face, like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard grey eye, that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.
Forty years at least had elapsed since the death of Mr Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazeen, of such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade, that gas itself couldn’t light her up after dark. She was generally spoken of as ‘a great manager’ of children; and the secret of her management was, to give them everything they didn’t like, and nothing that they did. Which was said to sweeten their dispositions very much.
‘Well, Sir,’ said Mrs Pipchin to Paul, ‘how do you think you shall like me?’
‘I don’t think I shall like you at all,’ replied Paul. ‘I want to go away. This isn’t my house.’
‘No. It’s mine,’ retorted Mrs Pipchin.
‘It’s a very nasty one,’ said Paul.
‘There’s a worse place in it than this though,’ said Mrs Pipchin, ‘where we shut up our bad boys,’ for Mrs Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday nights.
And there with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange, Paul sat as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming.
[Music.]
Dickens saw himself for the rest of his life as a deprived child. He wrote of Florence Dombey – but really it was himself – ‘not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love.’
The core of resentment which he felt stems from his feelings about his mother. The family was always terribly poor, always struggling with debt, and Elizabeth Dickens was always fanatically trying to keep up appearances – like Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield:
‘I never thought before I was married, when I lived with papa and mama, that I should ever find it necessary to take a lodger. But Mr Micawber being in difficulties, all considerations of private feelings must give way.
‘Mr Micawber’s difficulties are almost overwhelming just at present and whether it is possible to bring him through them, I don’t know.
‘If Mr Micawber’s creditors will not give him time they must take the consequences; and the sooner they bring it to an issue the better. Blood cannot be obtained from a stone, neither can anything on account be obtained at present from Mr Micawber.
‘With the exception of the heel of a Dutch cheese – which is not adapted to the wants of a young family – there is really not a scrap of anything in the larder.
‘I was accustomed to speak of the larder when I lived with papa and mama, and I use the word almost unconsciously. What I mean to express is, that there is nothing to eat in the house.
‘I have pawned the plate myself. Six tea, two salt, and a pair of sugars, I have at different times borrowed money on, in secret, with my own hands, and to me, with my recoll
ections, of papa and mama, these transactions are very painful. There are still a few trifles that we could part with. Mr Micawber’s feelings would never allow him to dispose of them; and Clickett being of a vulgar mind, would take painful liberties if so much confidence was reposed in her. Master Copperfield, if I might ask you…?
‘My family may consider it banishment, if they please; but I am a wife and mother, and I will never desert Mr Micawber.
‘That, that is my view of the obligation which I took upon myself when I repeated the irrevocable words, “I Emma, take thee, Wilkins”. I read that service over with a flat-candle on the previous night, and the conclusion I derived from it was, that I could never desert Mr Micawber.
‘And though it is possible I may be mistaken in my view of the ceremony, I never will!’
Dickens is so wonderful with names. Wilkins makes it perfect.
You can see from his notebooks how Dickens arrives at the various names. Mrs Pipchin for example started off as Mrs Tipchin, then Mrs Alchin, Mrs Somechin, Mrs Pipchin.
After the family came out of the Marshalsea prison they were still desperately poor and his parents sent Dickens to work for six shillings a week, in a blacking factory at number 30, Hungerford Stairs, just off the Strand.
It was the worst time of his whole life. He could never pass by that address, for the rest of his life, without crossing the road, and he never spoke of it to anyone.
The extraordinary thing was that even as a little boy he had such a sense of himself, such a belief in his own destiny, that he felt humiliated because the passers-by could see him through the factory windows, pasting the labels on the blacking bottles.
He felt it the more keenly, because his sister Fanny had just won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music and while he was toiling away in the dirt, she was learning the graces of music and piano.
Dickens' Women Page 3