Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  His response to her death had an additional focal point in the novel that he had begun to write in January 1837, the month of the birth of his first child, “a son and heir,” Charles Culliford Boz Dickens. In a sense his first novel, Oliver Twist, unlike Sketches and Pickwick, was conceived as a fiction unified by a plot, which he had the idea for as early as December 1833.14 Years later, Cruikshank, who did the illustrations, claimed that the notion of presenting the story of an orphan among London thieves had been his. Oliver Twist is so powerfully autobiographical that the “illustrious” George’s claim seems irrelevant. Written almost entirely in the year and a half after Mary’s death, the novel dramatizes some of Dickens’ deepest emotional patterns. It is a successful inward voyage of reconciliation of a sort that he was to make much more readily and regularly in his fiction than in his life. His own experience had made the child figure central to his imagination, the sensitive youth whose sense of his worth is assaulted by a hostile world from infancy onward. The assault precedes adolescence, and adolescent experience is a late stage of the reenactment of early-childhood loss. The most powerful expression in his fiction of such loss and deprivation is to be born an orphan or near orphan, as are Oliver, Pip, Little Nell, David Copperfield, and Esther Summerson, or to have lost one parent, like Nicholas Nickleby, Florence Dombey, and Amy Dorrit. In the first of his fictional child heroes, he contrasts the emotional impact of his own mother’s distance and rejection with the absence of Oliver’s, as if to say that a dead mother is preferable to a deadening one. Unlike his own, Oliver’s mother dies while giving birth to her son. It is a tragic sacrifice that Dickens provides as an expression of the unqualified love of the perfect mother for her only son. Like Mary, she dies “Young Beautiful And Good,” and her angelic presence at crucial moments in the novel provides Oliver with both an assurance of his self-worth and, since it is she he resembles, a visible connection with the world of love, benevolence, and innate moral values.15

  Neither an obstacle nor an enemy, his father has been removed considerably before Oliver’s birth. That convenience allows Dickens to focus on his relationship with his idealized mother and on the conflict between potential substitute fathers, the benevolent Mr. Brownlow and the devilish Fagin. In providing Oliver with a vicious brother, his father gives him the opportunity to demonstrate that he is innately good and Monks innately bad. Dickens may have found it emotionally attractive to identify with the father’s good son, to create a drama of alternate children, or of the one child divided into two children, in which the child whom he believes himself to have been shows himself worthy of love and respect. In Mr. Brownlow, Oliver eventually finds a loving father, who fills “the mind of his adopted child … his own son … with stores of knowledge” of the sort that Dickens fantasied about when he believed that he would grow up to be a learned man. Father and son “were truly happy.”16

  In the beautiful seventeen-year-old Rose Maylie, conceived a little more than a year after Mary’s death, he created an elegiac representation of his lost but ever-present sister. Like Mary, Rose seems made for heaven. “Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element.… The very intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and was stamped upon her noble head, seemed scarcely of her age or of the world.” Unlike Oliver’s mother or Mary Hogarth, Rose is destined for fulfillment and happiness here on earth. She “was in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood … the smile; the cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home; for fireside peace and happiness.” In the reconciling magic of fictional representation, he both elegizes Mary and affirms that she is alive. “In all the bloom and grace of early womanhood,” Rose Maylie marries and becomes “the life and joy of the fire-side circle and the lively summer group.”17

  HAVING BEEN DEEPLY PAINED BY THE POVERTY OF HIS CHILDHOOD, conditioned by his father’s impecuniousness, Dickens needed more financial security than the Morning Chronicle and his payments from Macrone and Chapman and Hall provided. He wanted to devote himself full-time to writing fiction. Though his confidence as a writer and his sense of what it was possible for him to achieve had grown considerably, his remembrance of what it had been like to have had very little made it impossible for him to assess his position realistically. His awareness of his own market value for a short time, particularly before the success of Pickwick, lagged behind the reality. Between May and November 1836, he did himself considerable damage, abetted in his self-laceration by the widespread practice of publishers’ purchasing full copyright rather than sharing profits through a royalty system and also by his own intemperateness. Afraid that the sun might go into eclipse, he wanted to make as much hay as possible while it still shone. He had little experience, though, with market predictions. Excitable, always eager to seize the day, insistent on resolutions even before the full problem had been revealed, he made a number of burdensome commitments.

  In May 1836 he agreed to write for John Macrone, with whom his relations were cordial, a three-volume novel, to be called Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London. In the same month, he easily persuaded the publisher to employ his brother Fred, a “sharp young fellow,” now sixteen years old, as a clerk. In the early stage of writing Pickwick, without consulting anyone, let alone Chapman and Hall, he had committed himself to deliver this long novel “on or before the 30th. day of November next, or as soon afterwards, as I can possibly complete it,” for which he would receive the “sum of Two Hundred Pounds” for the first one thousand copies and half of the profits thereafter. The writer Macrone had signed to do Sketches had been a relative unknown learning his craft. By May 1836, the first series had been a decided success; “Boz” had appeared beneath the title of two Pickwick numbers; and he had other projects in hand. But the success of Pickwick, even its continuance, could not be guaranteed in May as it could be two months later. The terms of the contract were reasonable. He had the satisfaction of signing an agreement that would provide him with a share of the profits rather than only a lump-sum payment. But he would have been wise to sign no contract at all at this crucial time, especially one that provided no payment until the delivery of the manuscript. What advantage was there except that he had a contract for a book before its quality could be evaluated? It was a form of being in debt without having received any money. Both inexperienced in such matters, the author ambitious but hasty and insecure, the publisher pressed for funds and eager to sign promising manuscripts, Dickens and Macrone did themselves a mutual disservice. By August, Dickens knew that he had made a mistake. Pickwick sales were skyrocketing, imitations were being created, a loosely adapted dramatic version was being staged. Readers, in the grip of the novel’s power, were sending him suggestions for new episodes based on their own experiences. Chapman and Hall, anticipating an equally successful sequel, made a handsome proposal in the fall of 1836, which he verbally accepted.

  Unable to resist turning almost any prospect into an agreement, he had responded positively in August 1836, this time to an offer from Richard Bentley. An experienced publisher with more prestige than Chapman and Hall, the forty-year-old Bentley, who had begun as a printer, had been in partnership for some years with Henry Colburn. After a bitter quarrel, he had bought Colburn out and gone into business for himself at 8 New Burlington Street. His loss of Ainsworth to Macrone in 1834 did not seriously disturb his profitable list of reprints and successful authors. Assertive and quarrelsome, he had a strong sense of his importance, a quick temper, and a buoyant, aggressive personality. After consulting with “some confidential friends,” whose advice was no better than his own confused judgment, Dickens, perhaps flattered to be solicited by Bentley, proposed that the publisher raise his offer to five hundred pounds “for the copyright of a Novel in Three Volumes,” reminding him that he was “dealing with an Author not quite unknown, but who, so far as he has gone, has been most successful.” He seems temporarily to have forgotten the unhappy consequences of selling the full copyright of Sketche
s to Macrone. His misjudged aggressive-defensive comment that he “should be very sorry to appear anxious to drive a hard bargain, as nothing is more opposed to my habits and feelings,” expressed his self-defeating vulnerability. Shrewder than Macrone, Bentley easily persuaded Dickens to sign a contract that committed the author to two three-volume novels for which he would be paid five hundred pounds each with two crucial provisos: He was not to receive any of the money until the first manuscript had been delivered and he was to undertake “no other literary production … until the completion of the above mentioned novel.”18

  As if this were not sufficiently damaging, a little more than two months later Dickens signed another contract with Bentley. He apparently found the second offer irresistible, partly because it provided him with the opportunity to play a leading role in London literary life. It called for him to edit for one year, with a three-year renewal option, a monthly publication, The Wits’ Miscellany (soon changed, to everyone’s relief, to Bentley’s Miscellany). For twenty pounds per month, he would solicit articles, handle the correspondence, evaluate and select articles, and supervise revisions. He would also “furnish an original article of his own writing, every monthly Number, to consist of about a sheet of 16 pages,” for which he would be paid another twenty pounds. Cleverly, Bentley wrote into the contract that the publisher would have veto power over the inclusion of any article, which in effect made him co-editor. During the life of the agreement, Dickens could not edit any other periodical publication, by which Bentley meant not only a magazine but a novel published in monthly parts, with the exception of the ongoing Pickwick, but not excluding a sequel. Aware that he could postpone the sequel indefinitely, Dickens probably deluded himself into believing that Macrone had already or would soon release him from their three-volume-novel contract, whose terms now seemed ludicrous. Macrone had no such intention, and may have resented that Dickens had not given him the opportunity to respond to Bentley’s offers. Dickens may have assuaged his discomfort in regard to Macrone by remembering that his contract contained the phrase “or as soon afterwards, as I can possibly complete it,” which allowed him indefinite postponement. So too did his verbal agreement with Chapman and Hall. The sequel to Pickwick had no deadline or conditions. An agreement that he had recently made to write a children’s book for one hundred pounds was child’s play in both senses, an agreement he terminated when he signed his August contracts with Bentley.19

  Assuring Bentley that he felt completely satisfied that his new responsibilities “will not interfere with Pickwick,” though it was to Chapman and Hall that he owed that assurance, he also had other creditors and promises to deal with. He resigned from the Morning Chronicle immediately. The proprietor, and probably John Black also, expressed unhappiness at his abrupt departure, reminding him that he had promised additional contributions for which they felt they had already paid. He emphatically rejected the claim. The most outraged creditor was Macrone, who had already begun to feel nervous when Dickens agreed to do, at a high payment, some stories for the Carlton Chronicle, and then fell behind schedule with copy for the second series of Sketches, announced for October 1836. When Macrone learned of his two agreements with Bentley, he felt misused and betrayed. Their personal friendship and their business relationship began to collapse. Eager to salvage whatever he could, Macrone asked Ainsworth to act as intermediary. Ainsworth criticized Macrone’s short-sightedness and his hypocrisy in criticizing Bentley for stealing Dickens.20 Though he believed Dickens legally bound, Ainsworth also knew that the resolution had to be a negotiated settlement in which Macrone would get less than he had originally estimated. As leverage, Macrone threatened to put out a new edition of the Sketches in monthly parts, as he had the legal right to do, in imitation of and in competition with Pickwick. Dickens became furious. The negotiation was a complicated one. In June 1837, with the help of John Forster and the business wisdom of Chapman and Hall, Macrone was induced to cancel his contract for Gabriel Vardon and to sell to Chapman and Hall his copyright interest in the Sketches and all his stock, including Cruikshank’s plates, for £2,250. When the settlement was reached, Dickens and Macrone were no longer on speaking terms.

  Gradually over the next two years, Dickens’ labors for Bentley became as poisoned as his relationship with Macrone, and for some of the same reasons. Having entered into financially disadvantageous contracts with him, Dickens soon transformed Bentley into the “Burlington Street Brigand.” He treated both Macrone and Bentley as if only he were the mistreated party. Only his grievance was justified. The problems, though, were just as much moral and emotional as they were legal. He characteristically transformed a situation in which he was morally culpable into an emotive thunderstorm whose main point was that he had been abused and that his abusers were immoral. The result of such treatment was intense anger and resentment, the anger that allowed him to misuse legally and to assault emotionally both of his publishers.

  Dickens’ combination of insecurity, arrogance, and intemperateness had legally bound him to provide two novels for Bentley and to edit Bentley’s Miscellany, as well as to contribute a substantial article to each number, while at the same time he had Pickwick to complete and a commitment to write a sequel of about the same length, also to be published in monthly numbers. Fortunately, Chapman and Hall were essentially benign. Bentley, though, was self-protectively clever and pettily vindictive. Dickens wanted the disadvantages of the law to be subordinated to expressions of the spirit. The publisher wanted what he strongly believed he was entitled to. He saw no reasons other than business ones for altering contracts that he had not coerced Dickens into signing. Ultimately, he cooperated with Dickens only because a dissatisfied writer, ready to go to extremes, could so damage the product as to undermine, if not destroy, the publisher’s investment. Dickens’ sense of humor was revealingly, if unconsciously, on target when he commented to Bentley that “I like to assume a virtue, though I have it not.”21

  The August 1836 agreement to write two novels for Bentley was still operative, though Macrone continued to claim that he had the rights to Barnaby Rudge, the second of the two. In January 1837, Dickens protested to Bentley about liberties that he felt the publisher had taken with one of the contributions. Working regularly on Pickwick, writing for the Miscellany, selecting, revising, and proofreading articles and corresponding with authors, he became “extremely unwell” toward the end of January, “half dead with fatigue.” In spite of an infant and a depressed wife at home, he began work on his weekly contribution to the magazine. “I have thrown my whole heart and soul into Oliver Twist, and most confidently believe he will make a feature in the work, and be very popular.”22 With the exception of June and October 1837 and September 1838, an installment appeared every month from February 1837 to April 1839.

  Soon it became crucial, as a matter of self-esteem, that Bentley accept Oliver in lieu of one of the two novels Dickens had pledged himself to write in the agreement of the previous August. By midsummer 1837, Dickens began to pressure Bentley to have Barnaby count as the first contracted novel and the ongoing Oliver as the second. The publisher resisted. In August, Dickens responded by finding an excuse not to write an installment for the September Miscellany, perhaps on Forster’s advice. Having negotiated the agreement between Dickens, Macrone, and Chapman and Hall, Forster had became his adviser on all such matters, much to the annoyance of Bentley, who exaggerated both his role and his influence.23 Using his objection to Bentley’s contractually permissible editorial interference as his justification, Dickens raised the stakes in September. Claiming that he had been “superseded” in his position as editor, he resigned abruptly.

  Bentley immediately retreated. Dickens resumed his editorship and the novel. Late in September, the publisher reluctantly agreed that Oliver would count as the second novel, with the new, later delivery date of October 1838 for Barnaby. Dickens then proposed that Barnaby appear in the Miscellany rather than that he be obligated both for it and for a substantia
l contribution to the magazine. In January 1838, he edited for Bentley, for the flat fee of one hundred pounds, the Memoirs of Grimaldi, with the help of John Dickens, who mostly took dictation. It was partly a sentimental nod in the direction of the theatrical fantasies of his childhood. By the spring, Dickens was furious with the publisher, though Bentley had made all the concessions, for deducting small sums from his fees for the installments of Oliver because they were shorter than had been agreed upon. Having been ground down by Dickens, Bentley expressed his resentment in this and in other petty ways, such as not keeping appointments. In September, author and publisher signed a new agreement, basically repeating the provisions of the earlier contracts, though slightly more financially favorable to Dickens and with the stipulation that Barnaby appear in the Miscellany after Oliver. In January 1839, Dickens peremptorily insisted that there be a further delay in Barnaby, that the financial provisions be renegotiated, “for I do most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold myself released from such hard bargains as these.” Forster advised prudence and reconsideration. But Dickens had had enough of Bentley, of the frustration that must have been all the more difficult to bear because of his need to suppress the obvious fact that he was fully responsible for the contracts he had signed. With an aggressiveness characteristic of him when he was even partly, let alone fully, in the wrong, he castigated the publisher as a prelude to halting all communication with him. “I do not … I will not consent to extend my engagements with you.… If you presume to address me again in the style of offensive impertinence … I will from that moment abandon at once and for ever all conditions and agreements that may exist between us, and leave the whole question to be settled by a jury as soon as you think proper to bring it before one.”24