by Fred Kaplan
Arriving in London on November 30, 1844, after three weeks traveling through northern Italy and France with Roche, he “rushed into the arms of Mac and Forster.” The journey had been exorcism for his restlessness, the exhaustion that would give him energy. He had never “seen so much, and travelled so hard,” from Genoa to Parma, Florence, Venice, Bologna, Cremona, Milan, Fribourg, Strasbourg, and then Paris. Venice had overwhelmed him, a reality so surreal that not even the imagination could fully comprehend it. Only the metaphor of the dream experience could give language to what was inexpressible. Venice, though, “is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer.” He entered “the wonder of the world” by night, the “dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, damnable old place.” When he stood in the piazza on the morning of November 12, “in the bright, cold, bracing day … by Heaven the glory of the place was insupportable!” On the road, dust, dirt, and rain, uncomfortable carriages and long, unbroken stages. In the towns, mediocre to bad accommodations, swearing innkeepers, urban decay, peeling frescoes, decaying monuments, medieval ugliness, boring tourists.
There had been occasional pleasures: chapels, works of art, quiet villages, courteous warmth. In Verona, he read Romeo and Juliet. In Milan, he admired the Corso, the cathedral, and, after the opera, a ballet called Prometheus at the “splendid theatre of La Scala.” Soon “the Alps, stupendously confused in lofty peaks and ridges, clouds and snow, were towering in [his] path,” in the immediate distance the lovely islands of Lake Maggiore. His eyes tingling with the cold, he was dazzled by the snow in the daytime and at night by “the brightest moon I ever saw.” Crossing the Simplon Pass, he exalted in “daybreak on the summit … the Glory of which, making great wastes of snow, a rosy red: exceeds all telling.”23 Hardly sleeping except in carriages, he was ahead of the schedule that he had told Forster he would not fall behind, whatever the obstacles. On the twenty-eighth he was in Paris, which seemed “better than ever,” but disappointed not to find Macready there. Eager to cross the Channel, within twenty-four hours he was in London.
The first reading of the The Chimes had already taken place. Having authorized them to adapt it for the stage, he had had Forster read it to Gilbert à Beckett, a journalist and dramatist, and probably Mark Lemon, both of whom had been shown advance sheets. Known for his self-control, Beckett “cried so much, and so painfully, that Forster didn’t know whether to go on or stop.” On Sunday, the first of December, Dickens read it to Macready, who could not be present at the long-planned reading at Forster’s chambers. The most stringently professional public performer in his circle was “undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read—… what a thing it is to have Power.” On Tuesday, he read it at Lincoln’s Inn Fields to a roomful of friends, including Carlyle, Stanfield, Douglas Jerrold, Laman Blanchard (a veteran journalist and literary figure), his brother Frederick, and Maclise, who made a sketch of the scene. “There was not a dry eye in the house.… I do not think,” the painter wrote to Catherine, “that there ever was such a triumphant hour for Charles … for every face was either extended into the broadest possible of grins, or else altogether hidden behind [a] handkerchief.”
On Thursday, after dinner at Forster’s, he read it again, to a smaller group, including Fonblanque, who, as editor of The Examiner, was among those he hoped would be stirred into action by his humanitarian plea for social justice. It was as if he could not read it enough, like the Ancient Mariner, with a tale to tell and a compulsive need to have an audience. He boasted to Fanny that this “staggerer of a book” that he had written “for Christmas … has made a decided effect upon a very difficult audience to whom I have read it here.” Even “the printers have laughed and cried over it strangely.… When you come towards the end of the 3rd part you had better send upstairs for a clean pocket handkerchief.”24 When he left London a few days later, with the illustrations by Stanfield, Maclise, and Leech at the printers, publication set for December 14 and the stage adaptation to open on December 18, he could have reminded himself that the very different Tory audience, from the London Times on down, were likely neither to laugh nor to cry.
To his and his publisher’s delight, it was an outstanding commercial success. Still optimistic about such things, he maintained the illusion that, like A Christmas Carol, The Chimes also had made its mark in the public arena of humanitarian reform. If it did, it was only as a modest contribution to the century-long modification of the sensibility of the English ruling class that eventually allowed sympathy for suffering and deprivation to balance economic self-interest and class distinctions. The private readings, though, were an immense personal success. They strengthened his sense of the gratification available in direct contact with an audience. Whereas before he had acted only other people’s words, now he had seen that his own could be transformed into dramatic performances that would combine the pleasure he had felt when raised onto the table to perform comic songs for his father and his father’s friends and that derived from the most direct dissemination of himself as a serious author. Before leaving London, in this glow of acting enthusiasm, he had decided, with Forster and Stanfield, that they were going to put on a play as soon as he returned, and he told Forster for the first time about his youthful acting aspirations. “I have often thought, that I should certainly have been as successful on the boards as I have been between them.”25 After returning to Genoa, spending five days en route in Paris visiting Macready, and then sailing from Marseilles, he talked of it as a settled thing.
He was far from finished, though, with Christmas books. In December 1845, he published The Cricket on the Hearth, A Fairy Tale of Home, whose structuring idea had initially been proposed as the title of a weekly periodical. It sold more than double the number of its predecessors. He was to write two more Christmas books, The Battle of Life in 1846 and The Haunted Man in 1848, neither of which was to give him as much pleasure or to be as commercially successful as the first three. After The Chimes, the emphasis, partly derived from Carlyle, was on the reformation of the individual heart more than of the social system. Pressured by the demands of a new novel in monthly parts, he found that he had insufficient time and energy to do both the novel and The Battle of Life. He also chafed under the burden of a dangerously expansive story structure, given the limitations that a Christmas book demanded. The Haunted Man moved away from sentiment into psychology. Fascinated by the idea of the double, he awkwardly worked a new psychological pattern—which was to become increasingly a part of his long fictions—into a Christmas context that had begun with Gothic supernatural machinery.
The Christmas genre that had originated with such social force for him increasingly became an inappropriate expression of the themes of displacement and tension that had been central to his fiction from the beginning. The Christmas spirit was grafted onto situations and expressed in ways that no longer unambivalently celebrated Christ on earth, goodwill to men. For Dickens, the Christmas book increasingly embodied the misplaced benevolence or the antibenevolence of his own father, an unreliable deity who unfairly, exploitatively, took money from him. He wanted to be given to, not taken from. The true cry of the heart of the Christmas books is “My Father, my Father, why hast thou deserted me?” Compensating for emotional impoverishment, he transformed Christmas spirit into financial profit, at first through the Christmas books and then through the shorter Christmas stories he was to publish in the journals he owned and edited in the next decades. Christmas had its important commercial element. That the poor, in his idealizations, were thrifty, sensible, caring, and capable of appreciating the meaning of Christmas and of Christ did not help provide them with sustenance. Attracted by the notion of himself as physician, he was attracted in his Christmas performances to that aspect of himself in which he could feel that he was a Christ-like healer and provider. The necessary healing, though, was his own, the necessary profit for himself. Despite the threats of an exploitative father and an absent mother, of a demanding family and of self-servi
ng publishers, his ambivalent triumph in such a circumstance was to become the supreme self-provider, the self-healer and self-sustainer. Through these Christmas books, he got sustenance of various kinds. It was a type of personal miracle.
WHEN THE PHYSICIAN RETURNED TO GENOA AT THE END OF DECEMber 1844, he found immediate cause to exert his special skills. His newest patient was ill again with a “severe … attack of her sad disorder.” Soon after moving into the Peschiere in October, he had met some neighbors, the Swiss-born banker Emile de la Rue, and his English wife, Augusta. Director of the Genoese branch of the banking firm founded by his grandfather, de la Rue was a well-educated, cultured businessman. He was a close friend of Camillo Cavour, later one of the founders of a united Italy, and he had married by 1830 the petite, attractive, but semi-invalided daughter of the religious leader of the British colony in Genoa. Socially prominent in local society, the childless couple entertained widely in their charming, comfortable apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo Brignole Rosso. Early in November, the day before Dickens left for northern Italy and England, he and Catherine had entertained a party of fourteen, including the de la Rues, almost certainly in return for hospitality extended to them. Deeply distressed by a mysterious neurological illness suffered by Augusta de la Rue, spasmodic muscular contractions of the face and extremities and convulsive seizures, Dickens had no desire to resist trying to help her.26
In early 1838 the newly famous author had attended one of John Elliotson’s demonstrations at London University of the power of mesmerism. Dickens soon discovered that he, too, had the ability to mermerize people. He combined friendship with the foremost English exponent of this new therapeutic science, originally conceived by Anton Mesmer, with a strong belief that here was both a true overview of the nature of power in the universe and a therapeutic tool to help people improve themselves. “I should be untrue … to … myself if I should shrink for a moment from saying that I am a believer, and that I became so against all my preconceived opinions.”27 Professor of the Principles and Practices of Medicine at the university, Elliotson had introduced the stethoscope to England, had experimented brilliantly with the use of drugs in disorders of the liver and kidneys, had campaigned against corrupt medical practices, and, distressed by the limitations of the therapies available to him, had insisted on permitting mesmeric experiments at the hospital. Controversy soon became scandal. The short, dark-haired, resourcefully energetic doctor was forced to resign his teaching position in 1839.
The scientific mesmerists believed that there existed an invisible fluid, like electricity, that suffused the universe, the harnessing of which would provide valuable psychological and physiological benefits. Through special techniques of concentration, receptive individuals could be mesmerized (the word hypnotism did not become available until 1845) so that their normal state of consciousness was replaced by mesmeric trance in which they were able to have extraordinary knowledge about themselves and others through contact with the mesmeric fluid. In such states of heightened consciousness, subjects were not limited by the normal restrictions of reason and physical perception. They could dismiss the sensation of pain, which would be helpful in surgery, since anesthesia had not been discovered yet. Various illnesses, particularly those of the nervous system, could be ameliorated if not cured by the power of the mesmeric force when therapeutically administered. Mesmeric operators, putting their subjects into trance, had the opportunity to be physicians of the mind, special benefactors of mankind. They also had the opportunity to misuse their skills. The fluid in and of itself was neutral. It could be drawn on for any conceivable purpose, scientific or superstitious, noble or self-serving, sober or sensationalistic. Obsessed with possibilities of erotic subjection and domination, the Victorians especially feared that sacred taboos about sexual relationships might be transgressed by male operators with their mesmerized female subjects.
Dickens had no such fear. In 1842, while traveling in America, he had demonstrated for the first time his own mesmeric skills. Having been “holding forth upon the subject rather luminously” to some travel companions, he magnetized Catherine “into hysterics” within six minutes of making hand passes about her head, and then, to his alarm, into mesmeric trance. He successfully repeated the experience the next night. Increasingly fascinated by his own powers, after his return to England he began regularly to mesmerize friends and members of his family, sometimes for their social amusement, sometimes to alleviate illness.28 The scientific mesmerists believed that during magnetic sleep mysterious healing and regenerative processes occurred. Since these powers had a healing effect, especially on nervous and mental disorders of the sort that had a hysterical origin, it seemed sensible to Dickens to offer his services to Augusta de la Rue. Apparently he had no difficulty persuading her to give it a try, and, at first, there was little resistance from Catherine. Emile warmly supported Dickens’ efforts to help his wife, and tried unsuccessfully to learn to mesmerize her himself.
“Happy and ready to come to you” on a moment’s notice, at any hour, in late December 1844 and throughout January 1845 he mesmerized Augusta de la Rue frequently, even at four in the morning, sometimes with her husband present, often not, going back and forth between the Peschiere and the Palazzo Brignole Rosso like an “anxious Physician.” When she was put into mesmeric sleep, her convulsions stopped. Her body returned from its rigid misformations into relaxation and natural form. After a month, she “began to sleep at night—which she had not done for years, and to change … in appearance.” The etiology of her disease fascinated him. While in trance, she spoke at length, often freely associating, describing her dreams, hallucinations, anxieties, usually in the symbolic language of displacement, connecting her illness with a “Phantom” who often pursued her. It was absolutely essential, he believed, “that this Phantom,” which her incapacitating “thoughts are directed to, and clustered round,” should “not regain its power.”29 While she was in trance, he engaged in extensive dialogue with her, asking questions, eliciting descriptions of her nightmares, searching for clues to her illness in her trance visions, in her dreams, and in her anticipations, some of them suggestively clairvoyant. Her brother “Charles” became an obsessive part of her trance anxieties, soon replaced by her physician “Charles,” whose brotherly commitment had levels of intensity that neither doctor nor patient could readily unravel. Certain of his friend’s noble intentions and eager to help his wife, Emile de la Rue constantly consulted with Dickens. When the Dickenses left Genoa in late January for Rome and Naples, Emile mailed him detailed, ongoing accounts, sheets from his diary, of his patient’s condition. The de la Rues had agreed to join him in Rome in late February. Dickens urged them to come as soon as possible.
Catherine, though, was not at all eager for the de la Rues’ company. She had become uncomfortable both with the amount of time her husband spent with such an attractive woman and with the intensity of the relationship. Because of the proximity of their residences in Genoa, she soon felt that her domestic and marital primacy had been diffused if not assaulted, as if her husband had two homes, in each of which he spent part of the night. She may have been only slightly less distressed when, on the road from Rome to Siena, he often had “a strange and uncommon anxiety upon” him about Augusta de la Rue. He had arranged with his patient that he would think about her, mesmerizing her in his imagination every day for one full hour, starting at 11 A.M. At first Catherine knew nothing about the arrangement. They were traveling by carriage, Dickens within, Catherine up above for air. Concentrating on his patient, he was surprised to hear Catherine’s muff fall. She had gone accidentally into mesmeric trance, her eyelids quivering in a convulsive manner. Her jealousy both infuriated and disgusted him. Having imagined that she had lost her husband’s love, Catherine may have also thought that he and Madame de la Rue were having an affair, perhaps with Emile’s approval. Fascinated with his own powers, insistent upon seeing himself as a thoroughly noble human being, Dickens refused to un
derstand her jealousy, resentment, and sense of neglect. Characteristically, he took refuge in feeling insulted by her suspicions. The experience was on one level “part of such a strange and mysterious whole,” an explanation of cosmic energy, on another an absorbing flirtation with analysis.
During his separation from Madame de la Rue, he continued to be obsessed with her. In Rome, on the last day before Carnival, he awoke at two in the morning in a state of “horror and emotion,” an anxiety connected with Madame de la Rue and her condition so intense that he thought about her “while awake and asleep” for the next three days and nights. He had “a sense of her being somehow a part of me, as I have when I am awake.” She and her phantom were now his own creations. Needing desperately to mesmerize her directly, he urged the de la Rues to come to Rome immediately. When they were finally on their way, he insisted on coming out some distance to meet them. “Look out for a Gallant Figure, apparently possessing an Angelic Nature. All others are counterfeits.”30