Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in his journal in November, was at least partly correct. “Truth is not his object for a single instant.… As an account of America it is not [to] be considered for a moment.… We can hear throughout every page the dialogue between the author and his publisher, ‘Mr Dickens the book must be entertaining,—that is the essential point. Truth! damn truth.’” Distorting Dickens as much as American Notes distorted America, Emerson had no sense of how incapable Dickens was of not believing that his version was the absolute truth. Longfellow, who read his copy in Dickens’ study in October and who had recently gotten over an “attack of anti-English spleen,” was able, fortunately, to respond almost as happily to American Notes as he did to the pleasure of being a guest at Devonshire Terrace. But Dickens’ commitment to his version of the truth lost him other American friends. An essay in the Foreign Quarterly on the inferiority of American poetry, written by Forster but closely identified with Dickens, seemed another gratuitous insult. The American sections of Martin Chuzzlewit bitingly tore at what had been only surface wounds. Some, like Poe, became hostile. Some, like Irving, distanced themselves quietly by forgoing opportunities to visit and ceasing to correspond. Others, like Felton and Colden, whatever their opinion of his depiction of America, remained firm friends. They may have been as tacitly forgiving as Longfellow must have been when Dickens disingenuously told him in late September 1842, anticipating his visit, that “I have decided (perhaps you know this?) to publish my American Visit.”38

  With eager hospitality, Dickens brought Longfellow together with his circle of London friends. At Drury Lane, they saw Macready perform and shook hands with the actor in his dressing room. Dickens introduced Longfellow to Maclise, Stanfield, and Cruikshank at dinner, to Rogers at breakfast, and, a few days later, when they dined at Macready’s, to Carlyle, with whose social views Dickens increasingly identified, then to the ailing Thomas Hood, to whose home he brought both Longfellow and a copy of American Notes. Longfellow met Landor on a rapid visit to Bath the day before the American’s departure, and of course Forster, the member of the Dickens circle with whom he became most intimate and with whom he sustained a long correspondence. He reminded Forster a few years later that the two of them had been “the jolliest of all the youths at Dickens’s table in the autumn of ’42.”39 Dickens rounded the circle of his hospitality by taking him, under police protection, on a night excursion through the most sordid London slums and on a day tour of Rochester and environs. When he saw Longfellow off at Bristol the day after the publication of American Notes, neither of them could have anticipated that their next meeting would be twenty-five years later.

  Fortunately, there were also new English friendships, more sustaining because of their proximity. The old circle tightened in some parts, loosened in others. The bond with Macready was strengthened by the test of Macready’s own departure for America in September 1843. Fearing to contaminate his friend by their being seen together soon after the appearance of the American sections of Chuzzlewit, Dickens painfully forwent seeing him off at Liverpool. But the late-August farewell party that he hosted in Greenwich was a smashing success, with Dickens at his sociable and oratorical best and Macready responding “more feelingly than eloquently.”

  With Forster, differences of temperament remained complementary. If anything, their intimacy increased, with walks, rides, and night excursions, with dinners at Devonshire Terrace and at their clubs matched by impromptu dinners that Forster hosted at his crowded chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Dickens often “mixed the salad.” Forster’s increasing bouts with illness, which had begun as early as 1837, particularly violent rheumatic fever, and the likelihood of a weak heart, made him feel even more keenly the value of this friend.40

  Though the bond between Dickens and Maclise remained as strong as ever, the painter was becoming less reliable. With the death of his mother in 1842, he had grown increasingly moody and obsessive. Solipsistic, even reclusive, he disappeared for long periods either to work or to brood. At his best, he was a jovial, carousing companion. Often, though, he rejected activities and people. “I am very wretched in going away,” Maclise complained, “for I hate strange houses and strange people. And I suppose I shall be expected to make myself agreeable.” Dickens also saw less of the busy Talfourd, though they remained warmly cordial, despite Talfourd’s vanity and his amusing deference to his pretentious, tyrannical wife. The companionship of the genial, undemanding Stanfield, whose health had weakened and whose commitment as a Catholic convert had strengthened, became even more valued. Having especially enjoyed Carlyle’s company at Macready’s dinner party, Dickens hoped they would come “to know each other well.”

  The circle expanded significantly, though, with the addition of two new friends. One of them, the artist John Leech, he had had a brief correspondence with when, writing the early numbers of Pickwick, he had needed to replace Robert Seymour. Leech had had great success providing illustrations to the new comic weekly Punch. Appreciative of both Leech’s and Punch’s genius, Dickens soon found the shy, thin, sincere, and good-natured artist, who also had an improvident father, a delightful companion. Dickens met in 1843 Leech’s employer at Punch, the editor Mark Lemon, and the two quickly became warm friends. Burly, fat, full-bearded, both humorous and passionate at the same time, Lemon was a shrewd, thoughtful editor keen on liberal social positions. Uncle Porpoise, as he came to be called, was a dedicated paterfamilias. Like his new friend, he loved good food and entertaining company. He found Dickens as fascinating as Dickens found him companionable.41

  With Forster, Stanfield, and Maclise, Dickens took a week-long excursion into Cornwall in late October and early November 1842, partly as another ritual celebration of his return from America by this community of friends, partly because he had it in mind to begin his new novel in a stormy Cornish setting. They went into Devonshire by railroad, then traveled by horse and carriage, Dickens in charge of the schedule and the money, Stanfield the navigating, Forster the luggage. “Having nothing particular to do,” Maclise sang songs. They ate, and drank, and played. Descending into the depths of mines, Dickens pursued his social interest in working conditions. They explored “earthy old churches” and climbed “to the tops of giddy heights” below which “the unspeakably green water was roaring.” Maclise and Stanfield sketched, so that “you would have sworn we had the spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun.” The Spirit of Fun was later expressed in Stanfield’s watercolor of the four friends climbing the formidable Logan Rock and Thackeray’s caricature of them in their traveling carriage, drawn after he had heard embellished stories about their wild adventures.

  In the same spirit Dickens began his custom of celebrating Christmas, community, and his eldest son’s birthday at elaborate Twelfth Night parties at Devonshire Terrace. For the parties, he organized and participated in charades, magic shows, pantomimes, and elaborate amateur theatricals put on with an expertise that raised them to a professional level. Stanfield became the resident technical genius, first creating an elaborate toy theatre for Charley, which his fascinated father spent hours helping construct and playing with. At one party, at the Macreadys’, Jane Carlyle was whirled across the crowded dance floor by Forster, who had “seized her round the waist” and “made” her dance after she had refused an importunate Dickens, who had almost gone down on his knees to persuade her to waltz with him. She rubbed dancing shoulders with Maclise, “the gigantic Thackeray &c. &c. all capering like Maenades!!” When she “cried out ‘oh for the love of Heaven let me go! you are going to dash my brains out,’“ Forster replied, “‘your brains!! who cares about their brains here? let them go!’” A wildly enthusiastic dancer, Dickens found dancing exercise and exorcism. The Twelfth Night and other parties had many rhythms, including speeches, champagne, fancy dress, and late-night revelry. At a grand ball at the Procters’, Catherine looked “splendid … in pink and satin and Mr. Dickens in geranium and ringlets.”42 No Twelfth Night party was comp
lete without the slim novelist, an enthusiastic amateur magician, putting on a highly professional sleight-of-hand performance, with props and costumes, and the tall, burly Forster playing straight man to the man of magic. Like the manager of a play, he staged and directed parties with imagination and creativity.

  Back from Cornwall, he had begun “the agonies of plotting and contriving … A New Tale of English Life and Manners,” pacing up and down the house and irritably “smiting [his] forehead dejectedly.” He quickly gave up the Cornwall setting. After a tortured beginning, which produced a discursive first chapter, he got himself and the novel on track, creating Pecksniff and Tom Pinch and the Chuzzlewit brood, proudly reading the opening to Forster toward the end of the year and “blazing away” at his “new book.” The first number was published on January 1, 1843. After an adequate start, the sales of the next few numbers unexpectedly declined, making author and publisher uncomfortable, the first time that a novel of his had lost readers while in progress. Late in March, he resolved to send Martin to America, which he probably had been pondering for months. His fury and frustration with American criticism of him had not been put into perspective by distance. Constant reminders, after the publication of American Notes, of the viciousness of American journalism kept him in the mood to strike back. He often dreamed that he was “in America again … endeavouring to get home in disguise,” with “a dreary sense of the distance.” In a novel whose theme was the destructiveness of greed and selfishness, the depiction of his idealized English main character visiting the country of greed and hypocrisy writ large must have seemed to him not only appropriate but brilliant. There would be personal satisfaction in striking this blow, in stirring up the hornet’s nest. The American reaction came swiftly and almost unanimously. “Martin has made them all stark staring raving mad across the water.” Its strength shocked even Dickens, who wondered why the intelligent among the Americans could not see the truth in his portrait of American culture as essentially materialistic, immoral, greedy, hypocritical, and debased.43

  Just as he tested American equanimity, so too his publisher tested his. In June 1843, disappointed at the sales of Martin Chuzzlewit and exercising his accountant’s pervasive anxiety about business, Hall mumbled in a casual conversation that the firm might have to invoke the clause that allowed it to reduce his payments by fifty pounds per number if the sales fell beneath a given figure. With a “fire … burning” in his head, “so rubbed in the tenderest part of my eyeballs with bay-salt,” Dickens had made up his mind by the next day that the publishers whom he had warmly praised for years as honest and honorable were actually rascals. “I am bent,” he told Forster, “upon paying Chapman and Hall down.” That Hall had no real desire to invoke the clause and apologized made no difference. As soon as he could manage it, Dickens would repay the advances and settle any outstanding accounts. “And when I have done that, Mr. Hall shall have a piece of my mind.”44 Except for the Christmas book that he was to write in the autumn, while continuing with Chuzzlewit, he was not to publish with Chapman and Hall again until 1859. And when his financial expectations for A Christmas Carol were disappointed, in his general fury he unwarrantedly blamed them.

  Some of his anger resulted from the still raw wound of financial vulnerability, the memories of his childhood poverty inseparable from the pressures of maintaining an expensive family and entourage on his earnings as a writer. He gave brief consideration to editing a new liberal newspaper, which would satisfy both his desire to speak more directly and influentially on social issues and his need to find additional sources of income. A reliable salary would be helpful. When the potential sponsors proved unreliable or nonexistent, he gave up the idea for the time being. His never completely quiescent father became an economic embarrassment again. Using his son’s name, he sent begging letters to Chapman and Hall and to Coutts and Company. Charles had nightmares about him, his bitterness rising to the rhetoric of calling him a leech from whom he desperately desired to be relieved. “I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his ingratitude. He, and all of them, look upon me as a something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. They have no idea of, and no care for, my existence in any other light. My soul sickens at the thought of them.… Nothing makes me so wretched, or so unfit for what I have to do, as these things. They are … such a drag-chain on my life, that for the time they utterly dispirit me, and weigh me down.” He hated being manipulated into paying extra bills after the fact. He writhed in anguish at the knowledge that his father was using his name with people whose good opinion he feared losing. In addition to his parents, he was also heavily subsidizing his three brothers, his “blood-petitioners.”45 There would be another petitioner soon, this one of his own making. Catherine was pregnant again.

  Conceived in March 1843 and born in January 1844, Francis Jeffrey Dickens was a blessing of the sort of which he wanted no more. “I am constantly reversing the Kings in the Fairy Tales, and importuning the Gods not to trouble themselves: being quite satisfied with what I have. But they are so generous when they do take a fancy to one!” Years and more children later, he used the same verbal turn with an additional bitter twist, giving “a patriarchal piece of advice” to a young female friend not to “have any more children. If the childless Kings and Queens in the stories had only known what they were about, they would never have bothered the Fairies to give them families.” Competent in his business and social affairs, he was noticeably incompetent in managing his sexual life, perhaps because of some conflict, perhaps because of a failure of imagination. He jokingly expressed his unhappiness as if it were Catherine’s fault, for “I hope my missis won’t do so never no more: but that’s nothing to the purpose.”46 More likely than not, she played no determinative role, by nature and culture trained to respond to her husband. Though they usually used the phrases playfully, jokingly, he was “Bully” and she was “Meek.” Apparently he thought he preferred it that way.

  With his sister Fanny he got on, as he did with Letitia, better than with most other members of his family. Unlike Letitia, adequately supported by Henry Austin, Fanny needed occasional financial help. Henry Burnett’s and her own income from singing and music lessons had decreased since their move to Manchester. She soon had two sons, one of whom, Henry, was crippled. Charles’s resentment of Fanny’s being sent to school while he was left idle and then condemned to the blacking factory had long since disappeared or at least been submerged. When, in October 1843, he went “to be victimised on the altars of the Manchester Athenaeum,” where he gave a speech celebrating the importance of educating the lower classes, similar to speeches he gave early the next year in Birmingham and Liverpool, he stayed with Fanny and her family.”47

  The lost sister of blessed memory, whom he had dreamed of every night, was still sacred in his feelings and memory. By late 1842, she “has been my better Angel six long years.” Eager for another sister, he adopted a new one, encouraging the fifteen-year-old Georgina Hogarth, slightly younger than Mary had been when she joined his household, to live with them. He found a striking resemblance between Mary’s “mental features” and Georgina’s, for “so much of her spirit shines out in this sister, that the old time comes back again … and I can hardly separate it from the present.” Her mother and Catherine apparently found the arrangement satisfactory. The dependable, lively, moderately pretty Georgina would find ways to make herself useful while freeing the Hogarth budget from one of a large number of debits. Dickens clearly had no inclination to complain in this case about the cost. Probably by autumn 1842, certainly by Christmas, she had become a regular member of the household, one of his two “Venuses.” “When we were first married,” he told Longfellow, “there was another.” Unlike his mother, Georgina would never undervalue or reject him. Unlike Mary, she would never desert him, but would be a dependable companion for the rest of his life. Unlike Catherine, she was feminine without being sexual or maternal. She was also competent, physically graceful, and attractively thi
n. The new sister and the old were united in the faithful Ruth, the idealized sister of Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit. “As light of foot and heart as in old days,” she sits down beside her “tranquil, calm, and happy” brother, who plays at the organ a “noble music” that rolls “round her in a cloud of melody, shuts out the grosser prospect of an earthly parting, and uplifts her” brother “to Heaven!”48 In his own grosser world, though, he had become so obsessively restless that he had decided to travel abroad again, this time with the entire family. At the beginning of July 1844, the Dickens entourage left for Italy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  An Angelic Nature

  (1844–1846)