Dickens, installed now in Paris, now in Boulogne, was finding the French, quick-witted and serious about their pleasures, intensely congenial, for he too was fast on his mental feet, and relished good food and drink, the theatre, the streets, the excitements of city life. The French admired him greatly in return. In 1856 Hachette arranged for a complete French-language edition of his works to date to be published. On 17 April Dickens reported, ‘I am going to dine with all my translators at Hachette’s.’ A year later the work was finished. The quality of the translation may have been variable, but as a publishing coup this was impressive.
The grand gesture, dear to Dickens, came easily to Second Empire Parisians. When the newspaper editor Emile de Girardin gave a banquet in Dickens’s honour, it culminated in
a far larger plum pudding than ever was seen in England at Christmas time, served with a celestial sauce in colour like the orange blossom, and in substance like the blossom powdered and bathed in dew, and called in the carte (carte in a gold frame like a little fish-slice to be handed about) ‘Hommage à l’illustre écrivain d’Angleterre.’ That illustrious man staggered out at the last drawing-room door speechless with wonder, finally; and even at that moment his host… remarked ‘Le dîner que nous avons eu, mon cher, n’est rien -il ne compte pas – il a été tout-à-fait en famille…’
Three months later Dickens took his family, or at least his womenfolk – wife Catherine, sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, daughters Mary and Katey – to dine at a favourite restaurant, Les Trois Frères, where, he wrote to Wilkie Collins, everyone was surprisingly abstemious, with one exception: ‘Mrs Dickens nearly killed herself,’ remarked her husband. If this was meant as a joke, it was not an affectionate one. The marriage, never passionate although abundantly philoprogenitive for many years, was no longer even that; the tenth child, ‘Plorn’, was now four years old, and there were to be no more.
Dickens was still addressing his wife as ‘My Dearest Catherine’ at the start of a letter in November 1856, but this seems to have been the last time. By then he was back in England, and he and Wilkie Collins were already embarked on their plan to put on a new play, The Frozen Deep, written by Collins, acted by both, and cast, designed and directed in every detail by Dickens himself. The Frozen Deep became the engine which broke up the Dickens marriage. There is a certain neatness about the process, for the theatre was always Dickens’s passion, and this play brought him something he could not resist, in the shape of a family of young actresses who spoke deeply to his imagination, Fanny, Maria and Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. They were three sisters, they were orphans, they had worked hard for their living since childhood, and they were girls of spirit, intelligence and charm. What’s more, they represented Art, Imagination, Fantasy, Music – all the things Dickens connected with the dead mother of the hero of Little Dorrit, a poor young singer who had been hounded to death by respectable people.
Once it had been Catherine’s family that had represented Art and Music, and she too had charming sisters; but now the Hogarths were demonized by Dickens, to be replaced by the Ternans as worthy recipients of his bounty. The spectacle of Dickens – the good, the great – going mad for love of a little actress, was extraordinary and terrible. A French writer – Victor Hugo, for example – could take in his stride wife and mistress. An English aristocrat – Lord Gardner – could defy public censure by fathering five children by Julia Fortescue, an actress friend of Dickens, and then marrying her -this in 1856. Even Wilkie Collins managed his irregular arrangements lightly enough. But Dickens was driven to take his affair with deadly seriousness, and when he could not preserve his privacy, he was impelled to justify himself, if necessary by large lies. In the process he turned his life upside-down, and behaved with inexcusable injustice and cruelty to a wife whose only faults seem to have been that she was dull and fat.
Carefully as the letters covering this period were destroyed and cut, the remaining evidence, well known as it now is, is still enough to make you wince. On 11 October 1857 he wrote to his wife’s maid about having a separate bedroom blocked off for himself, thereby exposing Catherine to humiliation within her own household. Two days later he wrote to the theatre manager Buckstone of his interest in Ellen Ternan’s stage career, enclosing a cheque for £50. In May 1858 he turned out a tissue of lies to Miss Burdett Coutts about the relations between Catherine and the children; in fact, it was Dickens himself who was eager to be rid of his sons. He had written of Alfred, in December 1856, when the child was eleven, ‘I have always purposed to send him abroad’; and poor Walter was dispatched at sixteen to India, in the middle of the Mutiny, to die there six years later without seeing either parent again.
Back to May 1858: at the end of the month Dickens wrote to beg his manager, Arthur Smith, to show to ‘anyone who wishes to do me right, or anyone who may have been misled into doing me wrong’ his letter stating that Catherine suffered from a ‘mental disorder’ and that she wanted a separation; and denying that the separation was in any way connected with ‘a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard’. He was having to battle with rumours about his relations with both his sister-in-law Georgina and Ellen Ternan, who is not named but clearly indicated. Later, Dickens denied the document he gave Smith was intended for publication – it became known as the ‘Violated Letter’; but his own written instructions speak against him. In June he published, in his magazine Household Words and in The Times, an equally extraordinary public statement about the separation. These days, such a statement might be part of the banal scandalmongering of the tabloids, but then its effect was like a thunderbolt; and it led to a breach with some of his old and dear friends, who simply could not take it.
Next he wrote to a Mrs Gore, claiming that his eldest son, Charley, remained with Catherine at his wish, whereas in fact it was in defiance of it; Dickens cracked the paternal whip over the children by insisting that it was to their advantage to stay with him. For good measure, Georgina joined in the campaign of lies about her own sister.
This orgy of self-justification leaves the reader with the sense of a giant raging against his own vulnerability. A giant he remains, even though one embarked on a course of self-destruction. There are still two of his greatest books to come – Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend – and still twelve years of his life to run. But from now on there is much more shadow than sunshine. A desperate fighting energy keeps him going, replacing the warm confidence of the young man who had seemed invincible when he captivated the whole country with his humour and his wrath.
The Times Literary Supplement, 1996
3. Dickens at Fifty
The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume X: 1862-1864 edited by Graham Storey
On 7 February 1862 Dickens was fifty. There was no great celebration. On this day, as on so many others, he was on the move. Two letters written on his birthday are printed here, one written from his London office in Wellington Street, opposite the Lyceum, where he kept a set of bachelor rooms; the other from his Kentish house, Gad’s Hill. Never a man to settle for long, now he seems driven. He had just finished a long reading tour, which brought him £1,000 a month, a great deal more than a novel. A novel earned only about £5,000 for more than a year of steady work. There was no novel in hand.
The separation from his wife Catherine, precipitated by his passion for a young actress, Nelly Ternan, had brought him neither happiness nor calm. Rather, it had made him suspicious of any intrusion into his privacy. Amongst the letters printed for the first time here – the editorial team has discovered many hitherto unpublished – is one of February 1864 to the artist Richard Lane, commiserating with him over the ‘disgraceful publication’ of some private letters. Dickens wrote, ‘The extraordinary abuse of confidence in the posting about of private letters which I have of late years constantly observed, has moved me to two courses; firstly, to destroy all the letters I receive from private friends, as soon as I have read them; and secondly to write as short letters as I possibly can.’
Lane was an old friend of the actor Macready, and moved in the same theatrical circles as Dickens. The ‘disgraceful publication’ that upset him is now untraceable, but Dickens’s letter shows just how embattled he had become against prying eyes. This means his letters are fewer and shorter than in earlier volumes, and no longer a reliable guide to his whereabouts. Like his fellow novelist and friend Wilkie Collins, he was making himself mysterious. Both men did a good job of it. Collins’s two common-law wives were unknown to the world for decades, and would probably have remained so had there been no children. We have to wait for 1867 for letters in which Dickens’s love for Nelly Ternan – ‘my Dear Girl’, ‘my Darling’, ‘drearily missed’ – is spelt out from America to his assistant and confidant, Wills (whose failure to destroy them would have enraged his boss).
For the moment we see nothing of this. In the present volume Dickens appears as a man who is not prepared to squander emotion on others. The death of his mother is noted with no softening recall of the past. The sudden death of his young son Walter in India does not move him to write even a line of comfort to Catherine: ‘a page of my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank’, he explained to Baroness Burdett-Coutts when she suggested he might. On the death of his mother-in-law he sends Catherine a note that could have been penned by a tradesman. The arrival of a first grandchild prompts no more than a terse joke.
Within the family, only Georgina, the sister-in-law who took his part against his wife and became his housekeeper, got through Dickens’s tough shell when she declared herself ill, suffering from a ‘heart complaint’ for which several doctors, summoned by Dickens, ministered to her. He was frightened into taking her to Paris for three months. It was an unorthodox cure, but it worked. Having grabbed his attention so successfully, Georgina made a complete recovery, and outlived Dickens by many decades, dying at ninety in 1916.
Georgina’s practical and emotional support was important to Dickens, but the person who most moved him was undoubtedly himself. In June 1862 he asked Forster for sympathy, evoking his childhood as a measure of his present unhappiness: ‘The never to be forgotten misery of that old time, bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad, ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the never to be forgotten misery of this later time.’ When he heard Faust performed in Paris, he was so painfully moved that he could hardly bear it, because the story of a rich man who seduces a girl with his wealth echoed his own story: no need to name Nelly either to Forster or to Macready and Georgina, who knew all about her.
Dickens was also moved to frequent self-admiration. Here he is boasting about Macready’s reaction to his reading of Copperfield:
when I got home after Copperfield I found him quite unable to speak, and able to do nothing but square his dear old jaw all on one side, and roll his eyes… ‘No – er – Dickens! I swear to Heaven that as a piece of passion and playfulness – er – indescribably mixed up together, it does – er – No, really Dickens! – amaze me as profoundly as it moves me. But as a piece of Art – and you know – er – that I – No Dickens! By God! – have seen the best Art in a great time – it is incomprehensible to me. How it is got at – er -how it is done – er – how one man can – well! It lays me on my -er – back…’
More than one correspondent is treated to these Mr Toad-like accounts of his own brilliance; the old exuberance lights up his language like fireworks.
You can’t help liking Dickens in spite of his vanity and his harsh, unfeeling treatment of others. His response to the death of Prince Albert is a perfect piece of good sense. ‘With a sufficient respect for the deceased gentleman, and all loyalty and attachment towards the Queen, I have been so very much shocked by the rampant toadyism that has been given to the four winds on that subject, and by the blatant speeches that have been made respecting it, that the refuge of my soul is Silence.’ Pressed to contribute to the Prince’s memorial, he refused, describing Albert briskly as ‘neither a phaenomonon [sic], nor the Saviour of England’, but ‘a good example of the best sort of perfectly commonplace man’. The Prince of Wales, for good measure, was characterized as ‘a poor dull idle fellow’. Dickens, like Beethoven, knew that genius took precedence over rank, and would not pretend otherwise.
Sunday Times, 1998
Dead Babies
Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century by Laurence Lerner
At once meditation, anthology and critical discourse, Laurence Lerner’s book considers the way in which child death became a popular literary subject in the nineteenth century; how poets and novelists presented and used it as a theme in their work; and how this use related to the deaths of real children. A sombre theme, and Lerner never forgets that real children died and real parents suffered, most of them in silence, and that ‘a book about the words that deal with grief should respect silence’.
Amongst writers, the Shelleys, the Coleridges, the Wordsworths, the Dickenses, the Tennysons, even Byron all lost children. Mrs Gaskell’s only son died early, all six of Margaret Oliphant’s children predeceased her, and the Brontës saw two elder sisters die young. There are private letters of great poignancy, and poems and passages in novels relating to all these losses, among them Helen Burns’s death in Jane Eyre, Tennyson writing of his stillborn son and Wordsworth’s great sonnet ‘Surprised by Joy’, said to refer to his daughter Catharine, which carries a charge of emotion so great that, as Lerner notes, most readers assume it is addressed to the memory of a wife or sweetheart. ‘The difference between writing about sexual love and about parental love is simply irrelevant to the expression of this emotion,’ he notes. It is an important point that is not often made: that love for one’s children may be at least as passionate as sexual love.
Dickens did not pretend that the death of his infant daughter Dora was a great tragedy to him; he felt he had too many children already, and she was the ninth. All the same, it was Dickens who made a runaway success of literary child deaths. The entire population blubbed into their handkerchiefs for Little Nell in 1841 and then again for Paul Dombey six years later. Since then we have had Oscar Wilde’s One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing’, and Huxley’s remarks about ‘sticky overflowings of the heart’; Leavis on Dickens’s self-indulgence, and John Carey on his sickliness. But not all the handkerchiefs have been put away. Phillip Collins told Lerner that when, quite recently, he read the death of Paul Dombey aloud to a teachers’ conference, ‘the chairman was reduced to tears so overwhelming that he couldn’t give the vote of thanks’. And Gavin Ewart’s poem ‘Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental’ takes up the question from a different perspective, and in doing so defends Dickens powerfully. Ewart described the near-death of his infant son, removed to hospital, and his little daughter looking into the cot and saying ‘Baby gone!’:
A situation, an action and a speech
so tear-jerking that Dickens might have thought of them –
and indeed, in life, when we say, ‘It couldn’t happen!’
almost at once it happens. And the word ‘sentimental’
has come to mean exaggerated feeling.
It would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then.
Just so. On the other hand, you have only to compare Dickens’s pathos with Mrs Gaskell’s lines about her son (in a letter of 1848) to feel the difference between pasteboard and painful truth. This is Gaskell:
I have just been up to our room. There is a fire in it, and a smell of baking, and oddly enough the feelings and recollections of three years ago came over me so strongly – when I used to sit up in the room so often in the evenings reading by the fire, and watching my darling darling Willie, who now sleeps sounder still in the dull, dreary chapel-yard at Warrington. That wound will never heal on earth, although hardly anyone knows how it has changed me. I wish you had seen my little fellow, dearest dear Annie. I can give you no idea of what a darling he was – so affectionate and reaso
nable a baby I never saw.
Dickens, writing for the public, brought out all the religious rhetoric – the idea that young children were instantly converted into angels, thanks to God for Immortality, glimpses of Heaven and Christ – where Gaskell, the wife of a minister, could only rehearse her memories and her unassuaged grief. There is the faint suggestion that her wound might be healed somewhere other than on earth, but it seems perfunctory. The reality for her is ‘the dreary chapel-yard at Warrington’. Angels and immortality do not enter into it.
Mrs Gaskell did not, like some of the women Lerner cites, try to convince herself that God had been testing her faith and obedience to his will by killing off her child and requiring her to submit. Some of the religious strategies used in the course of the nineteenth century to account for God’s will in the suffering and death of children, not to mention the grief of the parents, make curious reading. The testing of the mother’s faith by demanding she give up her child meekly and without complaint, as Abraham sacrificed Isaac, is perhaps the most horrible. There was also the view that, since Heaven was such a pleasant place, parents could be consoled by looking forward to being reunited with the dead child there; although the idea of being eternally reunited with an infant seems less than blissful, unless they imagined angelic nursemaids too.
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