Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  The necessary preliminaries were disposed of: finishing Chuzzlewit, the last double installment done by the middle of June 1844; rapidly renting Devonshire Terrace and moving into a rented house for three weeks; attending Christiana’s concert at the Royal Academy, where, years before, while still a drudge in the blacking warehouse, he had heard Fanny perform. He also took a few days recreational yachting on Albany Fonblanque’s yacht, despite his tendency to seasickness, and said hasty good-byes to friends and acquaintances. He said farewell en masse in Greenwich to over forty people on June 11 at a dinner that Forster had arranged. His intimate circle attended, except Macready, who was in America, as well as his extended community, most of whom two years before he had been so eager to return to. For reasons of health, Tennyson and Bulwer declined. Thackeray, who was in Ireland, could not attend. Carlyle also stayed away “from the inconvenience of a noisy, crowded dinner in Greenwich in the dog-days,” though “I truly love Dickens; and discern in the inner man of him a tone of real Music.” Unexpectedly, brought by Stanfield, “the great painter Turner” came. He “had enveloped his throat, that sultry summer day, in a huge red … handkerchief which nothing would induce him to remove. He was not otherwise demonstrative, but enjoyed himself in a quiet silent way, less perhaps at the speeches than at the quiet lights on the river.”12

  Having made up his mind to “see the world,” Dickens bustled off to Dover in the “Magnificent Carriage” that he had purchased to carry his party of twelve. With them was a highly recommended courier, Louis Roche, a vigorous Frenchman whose skills and companionship he profited from and enjoyed throughout the year and on his next European trip. On June 2, 1844, they crossed the Channel. At Boulogne, proud of his French, which was more literary than conversational, he asked a bank clerk at length for currency and was answered in perfect English, “‘How would you like to take it, sir?’” The party spent two delightful but hectic days in Paris, which made “an immense impression” on him. He thought it “the most extraordinary place in the World” and promised himself that he would return for a substantial visit. The entourage descended by road to Chalon sur-Saône and then by steamboat to Lyons, “a great Nightmare … a fit of indigestion … an awful place.” Finally, via a dusty road, they made their way to “dirty and disagreeable” Marseilles. There they had their first sight “of the beautiful Mediterranean.” Dickens was already beginning to feel the benefits of change, the widening of vision, the heightening of perception. “Surrounded by strange and perfectly novel circumstances, I feel as if I had a new head on side by side with my old one.” By late the next afternoon they “were steaming out in the open sea. The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning on deck; the night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea and sky, unspeakable.”13

  Coasting close to the shore, they passed Nice the next morning. In the afternoon, their destination came into view in the distance, Genoa, bright and beautifully cupped in the curve of its sparkling bay. It had been chosen by a confused, ill-informed process of recommendation and elimination. Angus Fletcher, the sculptor who had joined them in the Highlands, was waiting at the dock, and temporarily settled with them in a “perfectly lonely, rusty, stagnant, old … pink jail,” the Villa Bagnerello in the suburb of Albaro, two miles from Genoa. The impractical sculptor, who was living in Italy, had rented it for an absurdly high sum. Its main advantage was a magnificent view of the Gulf of Genoa, the Alps on one far horizon, hills with forts on another, and the ocean right beneath them. “You go through the courtyard, and out at the gate, and down a narrow lane to the sea.” Dickens’ senses reeled with the perfume of the orange trees, the profusion of grapevines, the panorama of rose leaves, the intense blue of the sky, the “impatient and fierce” sun. The disorientation was delightful. The unfamiliar, despite the heat, was bracing. He felt “something of the lofty spirit of an exile.… I don’t exactly know what I have done for my country in coming away from it, but I feel it is something, something great—something virtuous and heroic.”14

  Genoa, and Italy itself, seemed neither noble nor heroic. At first, it was not even comfortable. The city that had seemed so resplendent in the distance, on closer view was “mouldy, dreary, sleepy, dirty, lagging, halting, God-forgotten.…” Italy was still in the malaise of centuries, an unprofitable colony caught between Austrian occupation and French influence, divided into principalities, with most of its patriots, like Giuseppe Mazzini, in exile. To the Whiggishly liberal Dickens it was “a country gone to sleep, and without the prospect of waking again!… It seemed as if one had reached the end of all things—as if there were no more progress, motion, advancement, or improvement of any kind beyond; but here the whole scheme had stopped centuries ago, never to move on any more, but just lying down in the sun to bask there, ’till the Day of Judgment.” He had no desire, though, to be political. He had no issues or ideals to exercise. Whereas he had had great expectations about republican America, he had no illusions about Austrian-occupied Catholic Italy. What reputation had promised—natural beauty, warm climate, ancient ruins, compliant people, cheap prices—Italy fulfilled. It also provided immense flies and mosquitoes, rudimentary sanitation, and intense heat during the summer months, which he either had not been warned against or had not taken warnings of seriously enough. Despite the heat and the inevitable tiredness after settling in, he managed enough energy to remember that he had a new Christmas book to write, which it would be best to do in August, September, and October, and to make general plans to travel through northern Italy in November, to go to Rome and Naples in February, to return to Rome for Easter, and then to spend a month in Paris before returning to England. Meanwhile, for the first time in his life, he enjoyed being lazy, going about “in a dreamy sort of way,” reclining “on the rocks in the evening, staring the blue water out of countenance,” strolling up the narrow lanes, and watching “the lizards running up and down the walls.”15

  Setting himself up to write each morning in the most attractive bedroom in the house, he was only a little nervous when it became clear that the writing was hardly coming at all. “The sun is off the corner window … by a very little after twelve; and I can then throw the blinds open, and look up from my paper, at the sea, the mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards.… It is a very peaceful view, and yet a very cheerful one. Quiet as quiet can be.” Soon it seemed too quiet, oppressively quiet. There was entertainment in Genoa: the commercial streets, the Teatro Carlo Felici, the puppet theatre, the English church, dancing parties at the French consel general’s, entrée to the diplomatic and the British community. In Albaro, there was recreation, particularly swimming, whose pleasures he discovered for the first time, enlivened by outlandish costumes and Fletcher’s amusingly absurd performances. “He always gives a horrible yell, when he first puts his foot in the sea … with his very bald head & his very fat body; limping over the sharp rocks in a small, short, tight pair of striped drawers.”

  In the midst of all these amusements, Dickens’ five-year-old daughter, Katie, suddenly became seriously ill. Cuddling against the ministering hand of her father, she allowed no one else to give her medicine. With his usual seriocomic self-definition, he had for a few years already been referring to himself as “the physician.” After a very difficult time of it, Katie gradually recovered. Dickens attempted to heal himself as well when, late in August, for no ostensible reason, he had “a short but sharp attack of illness,” severe pain associated with the renal colic of his childhood. “It came on with the old unspeakable and agonizing pain in the side and yielded quickly to powerful remedies.”16

  His calls to friends now went out regularly, urgent invitations to Mitton, Maclise, Stanfield, Forster, even Edward Tagart, his minister at the Little Portland Street Unitarian Church, who had mentioned the possibility of traveling to Italy. The one certain visitor for a stay of a few weeks was his brother Fred, whose dandyish instinct he tempted by telling him that “‘Boots’ are cheap here; and you can’t d
o better than come and buy ’em.” In the second week of September 1844, he was happy to have the excuse to travel by steamer to Marseilles to meet and escort Fred back, introducing him en route to “fleas of elephantine dimensions … gambolling boldly in the dirty beds” of the inns they stopped at. Having grown a moustache, he was annoyed to see that Fred had grown one also. “Either he or I must fall. Earth will not hold us both.” Though they returned to Albaro, where Fred almost drowned on his first swim in the bay, Dickens had already arranged to move on the first of October into the Palazzo Peschiere in the heart of Genoa, an immense villa with painted walls and ceilings, with “a great vaulted roof higher than that of the Waterloo Gallery in Windsor Castle” and surrounded by the most delightful gardens, which he claimed would be easier to heat than the “pink jail” and which he had gotten cheaply. He needed more noise, more life, the semblance if not the fact of streets. “I seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire-terrace; and could take root no more until I returned to it.”17 He still found it difficult, even after having moved into town, to get started on his new Christmas book.

  Before moving, he had been briefly ill again, with rheumatism in his back “and knotted round my waist like a girdle of pain.” After being awake most of the night, he had a frightening dream in which “poor Mary’s spirit” appeared, “full of compassion and sorrow” for him, the first time he had dreamed of her since February 1838. That she had the greatest compassion for him cut him “to the heart,” as if he were unworthy of her love. He asked her, “‘What is the True religion?’” a question he afterward speculated had been prompted partly by there being an altar in his bedroom, partly by his having listened to the bells from a local convent before falling asleep, partly by his having had the subject of Catholicism on his mind in general. Perhaps, he prompted her, afraid that she might go away, “‘the Roman Catholic is the best’? … ‘For you,’ said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; ‘for you, it is the best!’” Awakening with the tears running down his face, he “called up Kate, and repeated it three or four times over, that I might not unconsciously make it plainer or stronger afterwards.… I wonder whether I should regard it as a dream, or an actual Vision.”18 Having invested in Mary an idealization of womanhood that invoked the Roman Catholic idealization of another Mary and of the mother church, in his dream, Mary, the eternal woman, is his guide, his adviser, his protector. Her compassion pained him because it implied his unworthiness, the distance between himself and such a heavenly creature, the tension between the flirtatious man of earthly passions and the man who defined himself as a noble soul in pursuit of the highest ideals.

  Ruminating on the Christmas book that he still could not write, he had the supernatural on his mind. The previous fall he had found a topic that embodied his desire to create both a powerful social statement, “a Sledge hammer” that would respond to the abysmal treatment of the poor, and something appropriate for the Christmas season. With the encouragement of Chapman and Hall, he had created a new minor genre, the Christmas book, soon almost exclusively associated with his name. Published in mid-December 1843, A Christmas Carol was “a prodigious success.” While writing, he was “very much affected by [it] and had an interest in the idea, which made me reluctant to lay it aside for a moment.” Moralizing and Christianizing traditions of the supernatural drawn from Gothic fiction, he had created a social fable in which the supernatural structure of spirits and demons was taut enough not to offend Christians and loose enough to be acceptable to secularists.

  Having been brought up in a nominally Anglican household, he associated organized religion with stale custom at best, with repressive fanaticism at worst. He aspired to a religion of the heart that transcended sectarian dogma. To the extent that he was habituated to Anglicanism, he sometimes found it benign enough to provide him an institutional way of expressing his admiration for the moral and religious example set by the life of Jesus. His novels resonate with phrases from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, whose ritual affirmations of eternal life moved him deeply. At the same time, he was aggressively anticlerical, antidogmatic, and antisectarian. While not a rationalist, he wanted a reasonable religion that would not try common sense with excessive emphasis, let alone reliance, on miracles like the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and transubstantiation. In the context of liberal protestantism, he desired Jesus to be understood as an extraordinary human being rather than as the son of God. Searching for a community in which to express such views, in the winter of 1842–43 he had become a member of Tagart’s Unitarian congregation. “Disgusted with our Established Church, and its Puseyisms, and daily outrages on common sense and humanity, I have carried into effect an old idea of mine, and joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement, if they could; and who practise Charity and Toleration.”19

  Whether or not Mary’s appearance was a dream or “an actual vision” made no difference. He believed in dreams as embodiments of truth, of the imagination as the force that made invisible realities visible, attesting to the external reality of what the imagination perceived. Since 1838, he had been a believer in mesmerism or animal magnetism, whose major tenet was that there existed a physical though invisible force, like electricity, that accounted for experiences and phenomena reason and science could not explain.20 It brought him into closer contact with and encouraged a greater awareness of his unconscious life, providing a useful series of assumptions and metaphors about relationships between people and about cosmic givens that he gradually absorbed into his fiction. If magnetic force was ultimately amenable to rational investigation, the force itself and other such powers were the threshold to a sufficient credibility for the heavenly, the immortal, and the supernatural to allow at least occasional belief in a transcendent world. A Christmas Carol, though, did not demand more than the willing suspension of disbelief. The central emphasis was on human psychology and the felt realities of this world, the poverty, misery, miserliness, and misshapings as well as the generosity, lovingness, and redemptive capacities of the human heart.

  Summoning up all his willful stubbornness, he stared at his blank sheet of paper on a morning in early October 1844. Unpredictably, “in one fell sound,” the loud discordant noise of every church bell in Genoa suddenly seemed clanging, clashing, rushing through his ears and spinning his head and his unsettled ideas “in a whirl of vexation and giddiness.” Suddenly he had his title and his story. “We have heard THE CHIMES at midnight, Master Shallow,” he wrote to Forster. But he felt a restraint, a resistance. “Put me down on Waterloo-bridge at eight o’clock in the evening with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home … panting to go on. I am sadly strange as it is, and can’t settle.” Soon, though, he had his “steam very much up,” partly because his story possessed him, partly because he had decided that the distance between Genoa and London was not so great. “My whole heart is with you at home,” he wrote to Macready, who had just returned from America. By mid-October, when he sent Forster the first of what were to be four sections and a detailed overview, he had decided that he would add to his planned November touring schedule an additional journey that would bring him to London and the arms of his friends in early December.

  The new Christmas book would be “a great blow for the poor. Something powerful … but … tender too, and cheerful; as like the Carol in that respect as may be, and as unlike it as such a thing can be.” Now, “in regular, ferocious excitement with the Chimes,” he was up each morning at seven. After his cold shower, which he took each morning the moment he got out of bed, and then breakfast, he was at his desk, blazing away, “wrathful and red-hot, until three o’clock or so.” All his “affections and passions got twined and knotted up in it.” Given to self-dramatization outside as well as within his stories, he described himself as looking as “haggard as a Murderer.” By the third of November, with full work days and many long walks in constant heavy
rain, he had finished, “thank God,” and had had a “good cry.… I believe I have written a tremendous Book; and knocked the Carol out of the field,” though at the cost of almost having worn himself “to Death” by work and sleeplessness.21

  He was “still in the same mind about coming to London.” Among other things, he wanted to have the emotional reward of seeing the faces of his dearest friends respond to his reading The Chimes. Placing great importance on the affective quality of his writing, he felt a compelling desire to see his audience’s reaction to what he had written. Immersed in a solitary activity, he populated his fictional world with communities whose vividness and companionability paralleled the community for which he wrote, beginning with his family, his intimate friends, his extended circle, and then the audience of the English reading world as a whole. Like an actor, he wanted the pleasure of spontaneous applause, the immediate confirmation of his command of other people’s feelings. In Genoa, now with only Catherine and Georgina on whom to try it out, he felt keenly the absence of immediate responses. Even with the addition of a few friends from the foreign community, the circle was too small. He confessed to Forster that he wanted “to inflict the little story … on dear old gallant Macready with my own lips, and to have Stanny and the other Mac sitting by.” He particularly wanted Jane Carlyle present, whose “judgment would be invaluable,” and Carlyle himself, whose recent book, Past and Present, he had read closely and whose criticism of British materialism had influenced the writing of The Chimes. He anticipated that to the extent that Carlyle would like the “radical” tendencies of his story, to that extent English Toryism would be outraged and hostile. Lonely, homesick, filled with an “unspeakable restless something,” he urged Forster to “get up a little circle for me, one wet evening, when I come to town.”22