by Fred Kaplan
CHAPTER SEVEN
As My Father Would Observe
(1846–1849)
AT THE END OF MAY 1846 THE DICKENS FAMILY DEPARTED FOR THE Continent again, this time to Switzerland. Their sixth child, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, had been born in October 1845. He had been named after the French-born count, arch-dandy, and amateur artist, the intimate friend of the Countess of Blessington, and after Dickens’ favorite contemporary poet. Both namesakes had attended the christening. Robert Browning remarked that “‘Alfred’ is common to both the godfather and the—devil-father, as I take the Count to be.” He noted acerbically that his biological father’s Unitarianism did not prevent him from participating in a ritual of sponsorship that involved allegiance to the Church of England. Unlike Browning, Dickens hardly noticed such personal inconsistencies and did not take formal religious matters seriously. He did take special pleasure in his son having such distinguished godparents. And he was forced to take seriously Catherine’s objection to his desire that they go to Italy again. She did not want her husband to be near Augusta de la Rue. He explained to his disappointed friends that Catherine’s bad health in Genoa—she “was never very well there”—made it necessary that they go someplace else. For the present, he would “take a middle course … and, coming as near you as I could, pitch my tent somewhere on the Lake of Geneva—say at Lausanne, whence I should run over to Genoa immediately.”1
During his remaining weeks in England, he was engaged for his “sins … to dinner every day.” His sins were those of popularity and companionability. His obligations included attending his brother Alfred’s wedding in the middle of the month, the pleasure of which was undermined by his fear that his sister Fanny was seriously ill. After examining her, Elliot-son relieved the family anxiety with his opinion that her lungs were not affected. Though Dickens complained that he got “up every morning with an odious shadowing-forth of the evening that is to follow,” he had ahead of him a clear calendar for the year.2 There was a new novel to begin, “vague thoughts” of which had been making him restless since March and which had been on his mind since the previous November; there was another Christmas story to write; and with his propensity for social pleasures it was certain that he would find new companions to accompany him on afternoon walks and to fill his evenings.
He genuinely regretted having to turn down a farewell dinner invitation from Lady Blessington. In her late fifties, the portly widow had high literary aspirations, entertained lavishly, and ran an engaging salon at Gore House. She lived beyond her resources in a mysterious ménage with Count D’Orsay. Dickens found them both attractive, their attention flattering. They were also an entrée to Whig aristocracy, and his dining out was both an expression of his sociability and his compensation for a lower-middle-class childhood. Though he gradually learned to protect his time, he found invitations difficult to resist. By going abroad again, he would be out of the way of having to decline any invitations at all. By renting Devonshire Terrace, he would save money and take advantage of the power of the English pound on the Continent. He would gain time to write. He would have the stimulation of new places and new people, of the vast expanse of Alpine brilliance, of Europe again. And he had it in mind to go to Paris for the winter and spring, to experience fully the city whose wonders had dazzled him when he had made two brief visits on either end of his Italian year.
The trip was done efficiently, a combination of travel and sleep that got them to the Hotel Gibbon in Lausanne on June 11, 1846. The final days were spent in three horse-drawn coaches from which they had splendid views of the mountains. After a brief temptation to look for a place in Neuchâtel, he decided on Lausanne, which had more “booksellers’ shops crammed within the same space” on its “steep up-and-down streets” than any other place he had seen, and was closer to Geneva, “in case I should find, when I begin to write, that I want streets sometimes.” He rented for ten pounds a month a small, scantily furnished “perfect doll’s house” called Rosemont, “which could be put, bodily, into the Hall of our Italian Palazzo.… In the most lovely and delicious situation imaginable,” nestled into “the hill that rises from the lake,” it had just enough bedrooms for the family with one to spare for guests. After rearranging the furniture, as he did wherever he stayed, even if for only one night, he relaxed into the beauty of the view of the lake and the “eternally changing range of prodigious mountains—sometimes red, sometimes grey, sometimes purple, sometimes black; sometimes white with snow; sometimes close at hand; and sometimes very ghosts in the clouds and mist.” The profusion of flowers overwhelmed the garden “in a cluster of roses.” He had the pleasant sense of being in a new country in which he felt remarkably comfortable. It was so “leafy, green, and shady,” with even more singing birds than “in the richest parts of Devonshire,” with excellent country roads, and with “green woods and green shades” that reminded him of the warm shadows of his childhood in Kent.3
Unlike Italy, this was an ordered, rational environment, a landscape and culture that matched his need for harmonious arrangement, without the confusions and superstitions of Catholicism. Like England, this was Protestant good sense at its best, with the advantage of splendid scenery. Even the initial hot weather soon cleared. Cool breezes from the mountains brought him to his writing table refreshed. By late June, he was “contemplating terrific and tremendous industry—am mightily resolved to begin the book in Numbers without delay—and have already begun to look the little Christmas Volume in its small red face.” He cleared his desk of various correspondence and quickly wrote for his children half of a brief child’s version of the New Testament. Suddenly, in the first weeks in July, he “BEGAN DOMBEY!”4
By the end of the month, when he sent the opening four chapters of Dealings With The Firm Of Dombey And Son, Wholesale, Retail, And For Exportation to Forster, he had outlined the novel’s basic development, creating for the first time in his career an overall plan, revealing a coherence and a cohesiveness from the beginning of writing the book. When completing The Old Curiosity Shop, with resonances of Mary Hogarth in the death of Little Nell, he had been “very melancholy to think that all these people are lost to me for ever, and I feel as if I never could become attached to any new set of characters.” The new novel also dramatically demonstrates his fascination with imaginary lives so real to him that his own self-definition demanded incessant renewal, new life for him through the creation of life for others. As he wrote, his spirits were brazenly high. Touching with unselfconscious frankness on both the imaginative source and the financial importance of such “dealings,” he joked to his friend Henry Porter Smith, an ex-soldier turned executive of the Eagle Life Assurance Company, “you wouldn’t entertain a proposal for ensuring imaginary lives, would you? If so, I would submit the name of——.” Additionally, during this period of what he described as “extraordinary nervousness” in getting the book started, Catherine became pregnant again.5
The excitement of plunging “head over heels into the story” did not eliminate a “besetting anxiety … of quite an intense kind.” Were Bradbury and Evans competent to handle a novel in twenty monthly parts, the mechanics and the economics of which were crucial to a novelist keenly aware that his financial solvency depended upon wide sales? As publishers of the Daily News, they were tarred with his distaste for anything that had to do with that newspaper and with his distrust of their inexperience as book publishers. He feared that their preoccupation with the newspaper would deflect their attention from him. So great was his concern that he raised with Forster the thought of having them enlist the more capable Chapman and Hall, for whom the machinery of monthly numbers was “as familiar … as the ticking of their own watches.”6 Some of the anger of his break with his former publisher had cooled. He had also determined, though, to give highest priority to practical considerations. These all were real issues, of course. But whenever he began a new novel it was necessary for him to have something to be anxious about, something onto which to
deflect some of his restless nervousness about the primary task at hand.
Dickens had not anticipated how hard he would find it to get both Dombey and a new Christmas book started at the same time—so difficult that as the weeks went by he began to confront the possibility that he would have to abandon his commitment to do a Christmas book that year. But he would not give up easily. The idea for The Battle of Life was clear to him by mid-July, his imagination focusing on the use of a description of a battlefield to represent the transitory nature of life and memory and on an elaborate deceit that would enable two sisters eventually to marry satisfactorily. Unlike his previous Christmas books, it would be a domestic, nonsupernatural tale, though he also had in mind “a very ghostly and wild idea” that he would “reserve for the next Christmas book.” At one moment, he felt “the suddenest and wildest enthusiasm” for the idea, at another “solitary and anxious consideration,” partly because it seemed to demand greater length than a small Christmas book would allow, partly because his preoccupation with his new novel made him feel that he had too little time and energy for it. “It would be an immense relief to have it done, and nothing standing in the way of Dombey.” He wanted to finish it as soon as possible. Under such pressure, he could wishfully joke about not being able “satisfactorily [to] account for … not having been born to a fine property.”7
By the end of August, he was hoping to get the writing started. In late September, after a very busy month, he painfully confronted the possibility that “there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK!… I have been brooding and brooding over the idea that it was a wild thing to dream of, ever: and that I ought to be at rest for the Dombey.” For the first time he approached the consideration of his own limitations. The novelist who had worked on Oliver while still writing Pickwick, Nickleby while still doing Oliver, and who had within a seven-year period completed five lengthy novels and various other literary tasks, who had thrived on the simultaneity of multiple literary challenges so that no amount of imaginative work seemed to daunt him, suddenly found his energy and emotional willfulness insufficient to his obligations. “If I don’t do it,” though, he told Forster, as if exhorting himself, “it will be the first time I ever abandoned anything I had once taken in hand; and I shall not have abandoned it until after a most desperate fight.” The hot weather had returned. He felt a constant slight pain in his side. Suddenly he felt so debilitated by depression that he worried he was in serious danger of not getting anything done at all.8 But to allow the book not to be written now was to permit indefinitely the possibility that some task was too great for him, that his energy was limited.
So he pushed on, aware of the resistance that made “getting on FAST” so difficult. As long as he still had the Christmas book to do, his progress on Dombey would be excruciatingly slower than his nervous system demanded. Never having attempted to write a full-length novel in parts while away from London, he suspected, and then concluded unequivocally, that his slow pace was due to “the absence of streets” and crowds. He felt no diminution of his creative powers, and his self-appreciative responses to the Dombey world he was creating reveal his awareness of being at the top of his form. But getting on quickly seemed impossible. “I can’t express how much I want” city streets. “It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place … and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! … My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them.”9 The absence of the usual stimulant to his imagination left him restless in a self-consuming way.
After a brief visit in early September to the St. Bernard Convent, in “a great hollow on the top of a range of dreadful mountains,” where he awoke early in the morning to the tune of “the solemn organ and the chaunting” with the thought that he “had died in the night and passed into the unknown world,” he began writing the Christmas book. The experience on the mountain had been revivifying. Perhaps the sight of “the bodies … found in the snow” and kept “standing up … during the short days and the long nights, the only human company out of doors, withering away by grains, and holding ghastly possession of the mountain where they died,” reminded him of the corpses of his childhood and brought him back into the possession of his own imaginative domain. Some of what he had seen in that “awful and tremendous place” remained in his memory for future use. He moved ahead satisfactorily with Dombey, but slowly with the Christmas book, and at the cost of some occasional giddiness and severe headaches, which were very unusual for him and which he again confidently attributed to the absence of streets. He was suddenly buoyed by the “BRILLIANT … success” of the first number of Dombey. By a little past the middle of the month, having felt “used up, and sick,” he was done with his severe double work, feeling “floored: wanting sleep.…” Even after he had sent the Christmas book off to Forster, he felt deeply the limitations of what he had done and the prison that he had placed himself in. He dreamed for a whole week that “Battle of Life was a series of chambers impossible to be got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night.”10
He did only a little other wandering during these late-summer and early-autumn months of 1846. The neatness and regularity of the Swiss countryside delighted him. The scenery also astounded and moved him. In late July, he took a four-day trip to Chamonix, where he found the valley, Mont Blanc, and the Mer de Glace beyond his wildest expectations, “Gothic pinnacles; deserts of ice and snow; forests of firs on mountain sides … villages down in the hollow, that you can shut out with a finger; waterfalls, avalanches, pyramids and towers of ice, torrents, bridges; mountain upon mountain until the very sky is blocked away.” He was amused and impressed with the Swiss fascination with rifle shooting, as if they were a nation of William Tells shooting targets for entertainment while at the same time keeping ready to resist tyranny. A visit early in August to the Castle of Chillon, with its torture chambers, “so terrifically sad, that death itself is not more sorrowful,” reminded him of feudal retrogression. “The greatest mystery in all the earth … is how or why the world was tolerated by its Creator through the good old times, and wasn’t dashed to fragments.” In late September, with Catherine and Georgina, he spent a few days in Geneva, and then again for over a week in late October, having finished The Battle of Life and “running away from a bad head ache.” Astonished by the civility of the bloodless anti-Royalist revolution that he had stumbled into observing, he admired the Swiss educational system, their “comfortable homes—great intelligence—and noble independence of character,” and he sympathized with the revolution. “There is no country on earth … in which a violent change could have been effected in the Christian spirit shewn in this place, or in the same proud, independent, gallant style.”11
One trip that he made alone was to Vevey in late August to meet the de la Rues, a quick journey from which he returned on the same day. Catherine’s likely disapproval did not decrease the warmth of the reunion. Though he told his friends that it was important, “with a view to my next day’s work, to return home that night,” no matter how late, probably his wife’s jealousy was at least an equally important spur for returning from that happy day on that day itself. He came back “rather drearily,” in low spirits, hoping that they would have many more such days, “please Heaven, somewhere or other.” By mid-August, he was comforting himself with the wishful belief that Catherine’s pregnancy was a false alarm. It soon became clear that it was “the real original Fire Bell.” He joked painfully to Macready, his soul mate in reproduction, that when he was asked by a lady if the mesmeric “influence might be exerted … for lessening the pain which ladies suffer, who love their Lords,” that he had implored his questioner “never to hint at the possibility of that operation being made easy, or I didn’t know what I myself, but mainly some of my friends (I meant you and Mrs. Macready) might come to
!”12
To his delight, he found some new friends with whom daily socializing was comfortable for the entire family. Within a few weeks of arriving, they became intimate with a wealthy bachelor and two wealthy couples residing in Lausanne, “very agreeable people indeed.” The hospitable, friendly English philanthropist William Haldimand, who owned a large estate just below Rosemont, with a beautiful house upon the lake, and the Swiss-born William de Cerjat, married to an Irish heiress, were permanent residents.13 The good-natured, enlightened, fifty-eight-year-old Haldimand, having served as a director of the Bank of England and as a member of Parliament, had settled near Lausanne in 1828. Well known for his generosity, he contributed handsomely to charitable projects, and, like the visiting author, was avidly interested in improving care for the mentally and physically ill. Richard Watson and his wife, Lavinia, with an immense family estate at Rockingham in Northamptonshire, were, like the Dickenses, spending only the summer and a little more in Switzerland. An elegant, generous, quietly courtly man, Watson had served both in the army and in Parliament, where he had supported the Reform Bill. Mrs. Watson, four years younger than Dickens, with three small children, was a charming, urbane, pretty woman, interested in ideas and art. He immediately felt a warm brotherly affection for her. On June 29, 1846, while a tremendous storm raged, the Haldimands introduced their new neighbors to their old friends, beginning an interchange of dinner parties and group excursions through the next months that created an extended family of sympathy.