Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  DESPITE HIS FLAIR FOR FLAMING WAISTCOATS, LONG HAIR, AND gold chains, Dickens embraced authorship as a profession and marriage as an institution with the discipline of an upper-middle-class entrepreneur. He wore the gray regularity of Victorian sobriety much before he and his contemporaries turned in their bright clothes for dark evangelical seriousness. In the red waistcoats that his American hosts found “rowdy,” he expressed that aspect of himself that Victorian discipline could not contain. Forcing himself to write regularly every morning from nine or ten to three in the afternoon, to harness the muse economically, to take care of a large correspondence, to make his organizing presence felt daily in the life of his household, to find ways to be useful to the larger community, he felt the strain of mediating between his energy and his narrow outlets, between the spontaneity and freedom of his imaginative life as an artist and the restraints of his domestic patterns and values.

  By midafternoons, he was eager for long walks or rides, the physical exertion that would exorcise his restlessness. In the evenings he would be pleasant though sometimes moody company at home, at his clubs, frequently at the theatre with Forster, Maclise, and Stanfield. Quick to anger, particularly when he thought himself attacked, he had “a strong spice of the Devil” in him. To protect against the pain of criticism, he made “a solemn compact” with himself not to read reviews. He boasted in 1843 that he had never deviated from “this Rule … for five years.” His reaction to America in 1842 and his preoccupation during the next two years with its response to him revealed how much he underestimated his own intemperateness and obsessiveness. His restlessness expressed aspects of himself that he was unable to comprehend or control. He often felt “at a great loss for a means of blowing my superfluous steam off.” He needed to exert himself to use his compulsions creatively. Particularly restless when in the early stages of a book, he could not absorb his energy fully into his imaginative activity. Writing sessions were often followed by self-dramatized hikes. His long walks became, at periods of special tension, marathons, whose point was exhaustion. “I performed an insane match against time of eighteen miles by the milestones in four hours and a half, under a burning sun the whole way. I could get no sleep at night, and really began to be afraid I was going to have a fever.”1

  He turned some of his restless energy toward falling in love in ways that did not threaten his domestic security. In his idealization of Mary Hogarth as the perfect sister of his soul, he found a way to spiritualize romantic love. His relationship with Catherine had had from the beginning little romance and less spirit. It was simply one of the necessary foundations of his adult self-definition as a successful member of the middle-class community, entitled to its respect and rewards. He was young, handsome, and famous. He was also, by 1840, the father of three children, the support of a substantial establishment, and the husband of a frequently pregnant wife who settled quickly into the slack life of guaranteed fidelity. He felt the power of his attractiveness to people in general, to women in particular. With an eye for beauty, with a need to be appreciated, with a strong impulse to get from others the admiration that he felt his mother had denied him, he could be as romantic in flirtations as he could be businesslike in his work. He rarely resisted pretty women.

  Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three he had broken his “heart into the smallest pieces, many times.” What he referred to as his “very small Cupid” became active again in the 1840s. Before going to Broadstairs in 1840, he met twenty-year-old Eleanor Picken, “known as Emma,” at the home of his friend Charles Smithson, Thomas Mitton’s partner. An aspiring artist and the daughter of a minor Scottish writer, the blond-haired, attractive, lively Emma accepted the invitation of her relative, Mrs. Smithson, to spend the summer with the family in Broadstairs. Eager to surround himself with friends, Dickens found a house for the Smithsons next door to his own. With self-parodic intensity, conflating life and the theatre, he flirted with Emma and pretended to be in love with her red-haired friend Millie. This “sentimental flirtation” combined exaggerated rhetoric with uncontrolled energy in which the multileveled performance spoke of self-consciousness and deep disquiet.

  One evening at dusk, on the pier, after they had been dancing, “he was in high spirits.” Filled with “a demon of mischief,” as if possessed—so Emma described it years later—he suddenly “flung his arm around me and whirled with me down the inclined plane of the jetty towards a … pole … at the extreme end,” where “he intended to hold me … till the wild waves overwhelmed us.” Gripping her tightly, despite her screams, as if acting one of his favorite roles, he urged her to “‘let your mind dwell on the column in the Times wherein will be vividly described the pathetic fate of the lovely Emma P———, drowned by Dickens in a fit of dementia! Don’t struggle. Poor little bird! you are powerless in the claws of such a kite.… Think of the sensation we shall create!’” Cold and frightened, her “best dress,” her “only silk dress,” about to be ruined by the water that surged over their feet, she shrieked, “‘Mrs. Dickens! help me!—make Mr. Dickens let me go. The waves are up to my knees!’” “‘Charles!… How can you be so silly? You will both be carried off by the waves … and you’ll spoil the poor girl’s silk dress.’” He responded parodically with the rhetoric of romantic melodrama—“‘Dress! … Talk not to me of dress! When the pall of night is …’” Struggling “out of his grasp,” she fled to her friends, “almost crying with vexation.” They greeted her with quiet disapproval, as if she were responsible for the incident. After marrying the next summer, she saw less of Dickens, though she became warmly friendly with his brother Frederick. In Broadstairs, when not flirting or working, Dickens amused himself in the evenings with elaborate charades and vigorous dancing, in which Fred competed with him. “I feel that I could act a pompous ass to perfection! Let us get up some charades, and test our histrionic powers!”2

  The bright beauty of Frances Colden, whom he “would go five hundred miles to see … for five minutes,” remained in his mind’s eye long after he had last seen her in New York. There was an advantage to falling in love with married women whose husbands might be sufficiently honored by his playful amorousness to accept it as both the price and the confirmation of friendship. His passions were often public performances, at dinners, in letters, both ostensible artifice and emotionally real, because, to him, performance was everything. Mrs. Colden had joined Catherine and the other select ladies who were permitted to hear the speeches at the New York dinner for Dickens. Though often irritated by such requests, he had taken the opportunity of responding to her plea, conveyed by Catherine, for a lock of his hair, not only sending it but having it set in a small brooch accompanied by a flirtatious letter. To Maclise, experienced in falling in love with beautiful women, he could put his passion into perspective, for “David Colden is as good a fellow as ever lived; and I am deeply in love with his wife.” In a letter to her husband, he could refer to Frances as “the beloved Mrs. Colden, if I may make so bold as to trust that expression to your keeping.” To Mrs. Colden, “My better Angel,” he could write deeply expressive comic letters, signed “CupiD,” urging her to “take no heed” of her husband. The passion of his romantic feeling often was socialized by its humorous rhetoric. He concluded a three-stanza comic “Love Song” with

  But vain reflection! who could rear,

  On scaffold, pier, or starling,

  A creetur half so bright or dear,

  As my unmentioned Darling!

  No artist in the World’s broad ways

  Could ever carve or mould ’un,

  That might aspire to lace the stays

  Of charming Mrs……..3

  By wish and proxy, such erotic lacings came easily to the novelist. As words, they made dangerous realities into acceptable fictions. As passions, they were never acted on physically. As feelings, they expressed his desire to love and be loved in an active, spontaneous way, the romance that his marriage did not provide.

  When he entered the
large assembly hall of the Mechanics’ Institute in Liverpool to take the chair in late February 1844, the organist played “See the Conquering Hero Come.” It was Dickens, though, who was soon conquered by the piano soloist, Christiana Weller. Preoccupied the previous November and December with A Christmas Carol and Martin Chuzzlewit, he had persuaded the Liverpool committee to postpone their annual Christmas soiree so they could have a speech from him on the importance of education for the working class. “Rustling like the leaves of a wood,” in an absolutely packed hall, the “ladies … in full dress and immense numbers,” 1,300 people rose to receive him. The enormous place was decorated with flowers and “Welcome Boz … in letters about six feet high.” Resplendent in a “white and black or magpie waistcoat,” he created an immense sensation. His message, from his favorite contemporary poet, was that “Kind hearts are more than coronets,” a fitting theme for a working-class educational movement that his life and fiction embodied. Meeting the nineteen-year-old piano prodigy for the first time, his kind heart responded strongly. In introducing Christiana to the audience, he remarked that he felt “some difficulty and tenderness in announcing her name.” Within twenty-four hours he went from keeping “his eyes firmly fixed on her every movement” to telling his friend Thomas James Thompson, “Good God what a madman I should seem, if the incredible feeling I have conceived for that girl could be made plain to anyone!”4

  The previous February, her father, eager to elicit his support, had brought the name of his talented daughter to Dickens’ attention. Christiana had been appearing with her elder sister as a child prodigy since 1834, with immediate success for her “brilliancy of execution.” Strikingly attractive, her “highly prepossessing appearance” added an irresistible dimension to her musical skills. That night, at the town hall, Dickens also met her father, Thomas Weller, and the next day he “invited himself” and his friends to lunch at the Weller home.5 The friends included Thompson, whom he had met in 1838. A widower with two children who had been left a fortune by his Liverpudlian grandfather on the condition that he never work, Thompson enjoyed the best of London life and continental travel, a comfortable, cultured man who collected books and art. Though he and Dickens were of the same age and shared a passion for liberal reform, Thompson was free not only to fall in love but to act on his desire.

  As soon as he left Liverpool, Dickens confided to Thompson that he could not even joke about Christiana. “For she is too good; and interest in her … has become a sentiment with me.” He had no doubt, though, that his obsession would make him appear a madman to “sober people.” From London, “perfectly exhausted, dead, worn-out, and Spiritless,” he confided to his sister that his happy recollection of Christiana “has its tortures too.” His depression resulted partly from separating himself from her. But the huge audiences that had “been driving [him] mad at Liverpool and Birmingham, with their loving cheers” had also allowed him to feel how pleasurable it is “to walk out of the room where one is shut up for so many hours of such a short life, into a sea of agitated faces, and think that they are always looking on.” One face from that necessary audience looked at him with loving distinctness. He added to the amorous verses he had written in her scrapbook a volume of Tennyson’s poems, “given to me by Tennyson himself,” with an assurance that he would do anything in his power to help “the spiritual creature” who “started out alone from the whole crowd the instant I saw her, and will remain there always in my sight.” A week later, Thompson, who had stayed on in Liverpool, confided to Dickens that he had fallen in love with Christiana. As Dickens read the letter, he “felt the blood go from my face to I don’t know where, and my very lips turn white. I never in my life was so surprised, or had the whole current of my life so stopped, for the instant.”6

  Shocked partly because he had not imagined that Thompson could be as passionate as himself, he had mistaken either Thompson’s nature or the power of love. He also felt both a proprietary right to Christiana and the superior enduring power of his attachment to her, as if his special ability to possess her permanently in his imagination counterbalanced his inability to have her physically. “I know that in many points I am an excitable and headstrong man, and ride O God what prancing hobbies!—and although I knew that the impression she had made on me was a true, deep, honest, pure-spirited thing, I thought my nature might have been prepared to receive it, and to exaggerate it unconsciously, and to keep it green long after such a fancy as I deemed it probable you might have conceived had withered.” Suddenly shifting emotional gears, he responded to Thompson’s request for advice and encouragement in the face of a hesitant Christiana and a resistant father with his own unreserved expression of what he would do if he were in Thompson’s position. He would attempt to “win her if I could, by God,” immediately! “I would answer it to myself, if my world’s breath whispered me that I had known her but a few days, that hours of hers are years in the lives of common women.”7 Though he had taken much of a year to court his earthly wife, he would condense a year into days for Christiana.

  With resonances of the fate of Mary Hogarth, he saw in her the likelihood of an early death. He had seen “an angel’s message in her face that day that smote me to the heart.” There is no evidence, though, that she had any illness other than in his imagination. That fear should be used, he advised his friend, to persuade her possessive father that her best chance was for Thompson to take her to Italy, where “repose, change, a mind at rest, a foreign climate would be, in a springtime like hers, the dawning of a new existence.” Having himself decided to go to Italy, he urged Thompson, for Christiana’s sake, to take her there for “the quiet happiness we might enjoy abroad, all of us together, in some delicious nook.… Such Italian Castles, bright in sunny days, and pale in moonlight nights, as I am building in the air!” Thompson married Christiana Weller in October 1845. The novelist attended the wedding, wearing a bright waistcoat in which, he joked, he would “Eclipse the Bridegroom.”8 Despite Dickens’ disapproval, Frederick was to marry Christiana’s younger sister in 1848. Though Christiana and her husband eventually came to Italy, it was after he had already left. That she lived to the age of eighty-five is not likely to have had anything to do with his “Italian castles” and his rescue fantasy.

  WHEN IN AMERICA IN 1842, HE HAD LONGED TO BE AT HOME AGAIN. Within a year of his return, he mentioned to a French visitor plans for a visit to France he was to make shortly. While the visitor had no sense of the relationship between Dickens’ inner life and his public performances, he intuitively saw in his appearance the possibility for role playing and alternative lives. For “the most popular novelist of the day” could easily have been taken for “the head clerk of a big banking house, a smart reporter of an assize court, the secret agent of a diplomatic intrigue, an astute and wily barrister, a lucky gambler, or simply the manager of a troupe of strolling players.”9 At one time or another, he played some version of all these roles, except, perhaps, the lucky gambler. The one that he most self-consciously cast himself as was “the manager of a troupe of strolling players.”

  He was always, though, the head clerk of a private banking house. William Hall’s careless reference to the penalty clause in the contract for Martin Chuzzlewit began the chain of events that led to his decision in November 1843 to go abroad for a year. But the inclination preceded the economic considerations. If he had made sufficient money from that novel, he would have unquestionably faded “away from the public eye for a year” to enlarge his “stock of description and observation” by seeing new countries before his family got any larger. “Already for some time I have had this hope and intention before me.” With some French but no Italian, he and Catherine began to take Italian lessons from Luigi Mariotti, an Italian writer in exile whom he had met on the Brittania and who described him as “a bright-eyed, ready-witted, somewhat gushing, happy man, cheered by the world’s applause, equally idolised by his wife … children … every member of his family.” At first, the happy man thought he wo
uld leave his publication arrangements intact, rent his house, settle with a small entourage in someplace “CHEAP and in a delightful climate, in Normandy or Brittany,” and then travel throughout France and Italy. He would write a travel book, based on letters he would send to Forster, just as he had done when he had visited America, or perhaps send letters from abroad for publication in the Morning Chronicle or another newspaper. Anticipating Forster’s objections, he granted that “leaving England, home, friends, everything I am fond of,” would be painful, “but it seems to me, at a critical time, the step to set me right.”10

  Having been insulted by Hall, Dickens himself had stubbornly insisted on invoking the penalty clause. By the spring of 1844, he had decided to find another publisher, though Chapman and Hall would have been happy to provide him with anything that a new publisher would. Bradbury and Evans, Chapman and Hall’s printer, hesitantly offered to take him on, with the hope that he would also edit a journal for them. Having run a flourishing printing business since 1830, they had no experience publishing books. Known as “the keenest man of business that ever trod the flags of Fleet Street,” Frederick Evans was the junior partner. The senior partner, William Bradbury, a tall, bright-spectacled, good-humored, Pickwickian figure, fit in well with the staff of Punch, one of a number of periodicals that the firm owned. Admiring Dickens’ work and its popularity, they had become part of his outer circle of professional friends, attending the Nickleby dinner in 1839 and since then presenting the Dickens family annually with a Christmas turkey.

  Soon they extended this seasonal association. A Christmas Carol had been a popular success in 1843. The unexpectedly small profits, though, disappointed him, and he had to borrow money. Furious, he blamed Chapman and Hall for inflating the cost of production, though he himself had dictated the format, and bungling the advertising, which Bradbury self-servingly referred to as “fatal negligence.” Having told Chapman and Hall to “keep away from me—and be damned,” he negotiated a contract with Bradbury and Evans ironically similar to the arrangement that he had made with Chapman and Hall four years earlier when he had wanted help in freeing himself from Bentley. On June 1, 1844, his new publisher agreed to advance him £2,800 against the security of a £2,000 life insurance policy and for “a fourth share in whatever he might write during the next … eight years.”11 His share in copyrights held jointly with his former publisher or by himself were turned over partly or in whole to Bradbury and Evans. With the ongoing income from some properties remaining with Chapman and Hall, from the money advanced to him by Bradbury and Evans, from the anticipated income from the book based on his Italian visit, the new Christmas book, and a cheap edition of his works, he had the money both to pay Chapman and Hall the £1,500 he owed them and to live abroad for a year.