‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘What do I touch?’
‘Your heart.’
‘Broken! I am tired, I want diversion, and I have done with men and women. I sometimes have sick fancies and I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play. There, there! play, play, play! You can do that. Call Estella. At the door.’
To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house, bawling Estella to a young lady neither visible nor responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty so as to roar out her name, was almost as bad as playing to order.
Miss Havisham and Estella – Sol Eytinge
Estella answered at last, and her light came along the dark passage like a star.
Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her pretty brown hair.
‘Let me see you play cards with this boy.’
‘With this boy! Why, he is a common labouring-boy!’
‘Well? You can break his heart.’
‘What do you play, boy?’
‘Nothing but Beggar my Neighbour, miss.’
‘Beggar him,’ said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards. I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me.
[Music.]
Many years later I tapped in my old way at the door of Miss Havisham’s room. ‘Pip’s rap,’ I heard her say, immediately; ‘Come in, Pip.’
She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress. Sitting near her, with the white shoe, that had never been worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant lady whom I had never seen.
The lady whom I had never seen before lifted up her eyes and looked archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella’s eyes. But she was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly, that I fancied, as I looked at her, that I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and common boy again.
‘Do you find her much changed, Pip? She was proud and insulting, and you wanted to go away from her. Don’t you remember?’
Estella laughed and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a boy still, but she lured me on.
[Music.]
Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, Miss Havisham turned to me and said in a whisper: ‘Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her? Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!’
‘Hear me, Pip. I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!’
‘I’ll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!’
[Music under – ‘Autumn Leaves’ reprise.]
Some people say that ‘Estella’ was Ellen Ternan. I think Miss Havisham was Dickens himself.
He died in 1870. He described himself to his great friend John Forster as ‘a misplaced and mis-married man, always, as it were, playing hide-and-seek with the world and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden when he was born’.
I would like to leave you with his tenderest portrait – Miss Flite from Bleak House. Miss Flite is a crazy little old lady who, every single day, attends the High Court of Chancery, awaiting a judgement on her inheritance, a judgement that may never come…
Miss Flite: Bleak House, 1852–53
‘I have lived here many years. I pass my days in court; my evenings and my nights here. I find the nights long, for I sleep but little, and think much. That is, of course, unavoidable; being in Chancery.
Miss Flite – Phiz
‘I am sorry I cannot offer chocolate. I expect a judgement shortly, and shall then place my establishment on a superior footing.
‘At present, I don’t mind confessing (in strict confidence), that I sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance. I have felt the cold here. I have felt something sharper than cold. It matters very little. Pray excuse the introduction of such mean topics.
‘Ah, my birds. I began to keep the little creatures with an object that you will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgement should be given. Ye-es! They die in prison, though.
‘Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings, that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again.
‘But I expect a judgement. Shortly. My father expected a judgement. My brother. My sister. They all expected a judgement. The same that I expect. Ye–es. Dead of course.
‘I must tell you a secret. I have added to my collection of birds. Two more. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others.
‘With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach!’
The End
George Edmunds’ Song by Charles Dickens (‘Autumn Leaves’)
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
How like the hopes of childhood’s day,
Thick clust’ring on the bough!
How like those hopes in their decay–
How faded are they now!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
Wither’d leaves, wither’d leaves, that fly before the gale:
Withered leaves, withered leaves, ye tell a mournful tale,
Of love once true, and friends once kind,
And happy moments fled:
Dispersed by every breath of wind,
Forgotten, changed, or dead!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
The Women in the Boxes
Betsey Trotwood
My aunt was a tall, hard-featured lady but by no means ill-looking. There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and carriage amply sufficient to account for the effect she had made upon a gentle creature like my mother; but her features were rather handsome than otherwise, though unbending and austere. I particularly noticed that she had a quick, bright eye. Her hair, which was grey, was arranged in two plain divisions, under what I believed would be called a mob-cap; I mean a cap much more common then than now, with side pieces fastening under the chin. Her dress was of a lavender colour, and perfectly neat, but scantily made, as if she desired to be as little encumbered as possible. I remember that I thought it, in form, more like a riding-habit, with the superfluous skirt cut off, than anything else. She wore, at her side, a gentleman’s gold watch, if I might judge from its size and make, with an appropriate chain and seals; she had some linen at her throat not unlike a shirt-collar, and things at her wrists like little shirt-wristbands.
Dickens’ Women has travelled widely, and played many venues across the world. It was seen in thirteen different places in India. In Visakhapatnam, during a Question and Answer session after the show, a tall, elegant gentleman rose to his feet, smacked his forehead, and demanded to know in an anguished voice, and with great vehemence, ‘Where, oh where is Betsey Trotwood?’ Where indeed? The truth is that Betsey, along with many other much-admired female characters, was stowed away, in a room in Clapham, in a series of cardboard boxes, containing material that had been read, relished, and then sadly discarded, because there wasn’t room for her in the evolving script.
Dickens’ friend, and biographer, John Forster called Betsey ‘a gnarled
and knotted piece of female timber sound to the core’.
It is believed that she was based on Miss Mary Pearson Strong, who lived at Broadstairs, Kent, and who died on 14 January 1855; her former home used to house a Dickens Museum.
Aunt Betsey Trotwood appears early in the novel which Dickens considered to be his best work, David Copperfield. She arrives at the home of her dead brother’s pretty, gentle, young widow. The sad young woman is heavily pregnant with the eponymous hero, David.
My father often hinted that she seldom conducted herself like any ordinary Christian; and now, instead of ringing the bell, she came and looked in at the identical window, pressing the end of her nose to that extent, that my poor dear mother used to say that it became flat and white in an instant.
She gave my mother such a turn, that I have always been convinced that I am indebted to Miss Betsey for having been born on a Friday.
It has been said of Dickens that he had to make his characters humorous before he could make them real. This is certainly true of Betsey. Initially, even her tragic history is told with a lightness of touch.
Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage, ‘handsome is, as handsome does,’ – for he was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey and even once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs’ window.
Determined that the soon-to-be-delivered baby is to be a girl named Betsey Trotwood Copperfield, the formidable aunt terrorises the amiable doctor Mr Chillip (another glorious Dickens name):
‘The baby,’ said my aunt, ‘How is she?’
‘Ma’am,’ returned Mr Chillip ‘I apprehended you had known. It’s a boy.’
My aunt never said a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr Chillip’s head with it, put it on bent, and walked out and never came back.
She does return later in the book. After his young mother’s death in childbirth, David is sent by his unfeeling stepfather to work in a warehouse. Just as in the blacking factory of Dickens’ own childhood, the unfortunate workforce wash and label wine bottles. Dickens dips his pen in his own heart’s blood and, as David, writes:
I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made a sign on my behalf. But none was made; and I became at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinsby.
When David runs away from Murdstone and Grinsby he makes his way to Dover, to Aunt Betsey Trotwood.
Again and again, and a hundred times again, since the night when the thought first occurred to me and banished sleep, I had gone over that old story of my poor mother’s about my birth, which it had been one of my great delights in the old time, to hear tell, and which I knew by heart. My aunt walked into that story, and walked out of it, a dread and awful personage; but there was one little trait in her behaviour which I liked to dwell on, and which gave me some faint shadow of encouragement. I could not forget how my mother had thought that she felt her touch her pretty hair with no ungentle hand; and though it might have been altogether my mother’s fancy, and might have had no foundation whatever, in fact, I made a little picture out of it, of my terrible aunt relenting towards the girlish beauty that I recollected so well and loved so much, which softened the whole narrative. It is very possible that it had been in my mind a long while, and had gradually engendered my determination.
Rescued from the function of being the ‘terrible aunt’, Betsey becomes that rarity among Dickens’ women, a mature woman who is sensible, kind, wise and genuinely good. She is neither satirised, nor idealised. She is shown to be tactfully helpful to all; to Mr Dick, whom she cares for having saved him from the asylum into which his brother had cast him; and to David, for whom she defies the evil Murdstones and whom she clothes, houses, loves and, most glorious of all, sends to school. She does, however, rename him Trotwood (shortened to Trot), an echo of the female child he failed to be. She is instrumental in saving the Micawbers, and Little Em’ly. Well, she succeeds in sending them to Australia, which was meant to equal salvation.
One yearns to know more about Miss Mary Pearson Strong and her influence on Dickens. Dickens’ son, Charles, recalled how Miss Strong fiercely defended her property from donkeys, which inspired the brilliant set piece:
‘I won’t be trespassed upon, I won’t allow it. Go away! Janet, turn him round. Lead him off!’ and I saw from behind my aunt, a sort of hurried battle-piece, in which the donkey stood, resisting everybody, with all his four legs planted different ways, while Janet tried to lead him round by the bridle, Mr Murdstone tried to lead him on, Miss Murdstone struck at Janet with her parasol, and several boys who had come to see the engagement, shouted vigorously. But my aunt suddenly descrying among them the young malefactor who was the donkey’s guardian, and who was one of the most inveterate offenders against her, though hardly in his teens, rushed out to the scene of action, pounced upon him, captured him, dragged him, with his jacket over his head, and his heels grinding into the ground into the garden, and, calling upon Janet to fetch the constables and justices, that he might be taken, tried, and executed on the spot, held him at bay there. This part of the business, however, did not last long; for the young rascal, being expert at a variety of feints and dodges, of which my aunt has no conception, soon went whooping away, leaving some deep impression of his nailed boots in the flower-beds, and taking his donkey in triumph with him.
If one were to disagree with Kate that her father ‘didn’t really understand women’, it would be in contemplation of Betsey and her continuing love for her cruel husband. She is not corroded by her love, as is Miss Havisham. The errant husband is a recurring, mysterious presence in the novel. Betsey confides in the young David:
‘Betsey Trotwood don’t look a likely subject for the tender passion,’ said my aunt, composedly, ‘but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He repaid her by breaking her fortune, and nearly breaking her heart. So she put all that sentiment in a grave, and filled it up, and flattened it down.’
‘My dear, good Aunt!’
‘I left him,’ my aunt proceeded laying her hand as usual on the back of mine, ‘generously. I may say at this distance of time, Trot, that I left him, generously. He had been so cruel to me, that I might have effected a separation on easy terms for myself; but I did not. He soon made ducks and drakes of what I gave him, sank lower and lower, married another woman. I believe, became an adventurer, a gambler, and a cheat. What he is now you see. But he was a fine looking man when I married him,’ said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone, ‘and I believed him – I was a fool! – to be the soul of honour!
‘… I give him more money than I can afford, at intervals, when he reappears, to go away. I was a fool when I married him; and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn’t have this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was.’
My aunt dismissed the matter, with a heavy sigh, and smoothed her dress.
‘There my dear,’ she said. ‘Now you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won’t mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story and we’ll keep it to
ourselves, Trot.’
Philanthropic Ladies
In The Miracle of Christmas, a collection of Christmas stories by Charles Dickens and others, there is a story of strange sentimentality by Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American writer, and authoress of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is called ‘Christmas in Poganuc’ and features a blonde, blue-eyed little girl, of nauseating cuteness, called Dolly. Dolly features prominently in ‘People of Poganuc’, Mrs Beecher Stowe’s semi-autobiographical collection of stories which was published in 1878.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially across America from 1850 to 1852. Dickens may have been less than enthusiastic about Mrs Stowe’s talents as a writer, but he ardently praised her virtues as a campaigner, and in an article in Household Words, written jointly with Morley, he declared Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be ‘a noble work; full of high power, lofty humanity’. Then he dipped his pen in its most brilliant, satirical ink, and with all the power of his wicked genius he created Mrs Jellyby, the anti-slavery campaigner in Bleak House (published 1853).
‘Mrs Jellyby,’ said Mr Kenge, standing with his back to the fire, and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth rug as if it were Mrs Jellyby’s biography, ‘is a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an excessive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives – and the happy settlement on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.’
Dickens' Women Page 6