Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  Dickens fame usually made him immediately welcome, a guest of distinction. Curiosity, in this case, was soon replaced by affection and delight with how unaffected he was with friends who took pleasure in sharing in his “extraordinary spirits,” his amusing conversation, and the parlor games that he insisted on. He entertained them with whist, the tricks of the conjuror, the charades of the amateur actor, and the serious magic of the mesmerist, who, when Elliotson visited in mid-October, “magnetized a man … among unbelievers, and stretched him on the dining room floor.” Among nonactors, he was a one-man performance. His respectable entertainments were usually irresistible. While delighting in being the object of attention, he warmly responded to the nonperformance personalities of Haldimand and Watson, whose honest silences and good hearts he admired and felt comfortable with. In mid-August, Haldimand took him to see “a remarkable case of a young man, deaf, dumb, and blind, who has been taught to speak, write and read,” at the local home for the blind that he had founded and to which he eventually left his fortune. In early September, on the evening before they were to depart for the St. Bernard Convent, Dickens, “in a state of great animation,” dined with his friends. The large party, led by Roche, went up to the convent together.14

  Some old friends visited, though not as many as he had hoped. In July, the historian Henry Hallam, who was said “to have got up in the night to contradict the watchman about the hour and the weather,” visited briefly with his niece Jane Brook-field, with whom Thackeray was in love. In August, the Thompsons became neighbors. Christiana was considerably pregnant, “a mere spoiled child … with a whimpering, pouting temper” who had not turned out “half as well as I expected.” The Talfourds arrived in October for a three-day visit. Also that month, Elliotson. “The pleasure of a generous friendship,” Dickens wrote to Jerrold, “is the steadiest joy in the world.” Actually, the most surprising visit was Tennyson’s in late August. At his namesake’s christening, the poet had declined Dickens’ invitation to accompany him to Switzerland, an inappropriate suggestion prompted both by his admiration for Tennyson as a poet and for the warmth he felt on his participation in the christening. Though Tennyson seems to have liked Dickens, he did not especially admire his novels and, ironically, feared that he would quarrel with him about his sentimentality. Probably he had Little Nell in mind. Having heard, perhaps from Hallam, that Tennyson was coming, Dickens anticipated “with fear and trembling” that he would not only be taken from his work “but required to smoke pipes by the Score.” Late in the evening of a hot day, cogitating about Dombey and The Battle of Life, he saw “two travel-stained-looking men … of whom one, in a very limp and melancholy straw hat, ducked perpetually to me as he came up the walk. I couldn’t make them out at all; and it wasn’t till I got close up to them that I recognised Tennyson.” He gave the poet and his companion, the publisher Edward Moxon, “some fine Rhine wine, and cigars innumerable.” The visit went well.15

  What went on best of all, though, once the Christmas book had been disposed of, was the writing of Dombey and Son, four numbers of which he had it in mind to complete before leaving Lausanne. The news from London was superlative. The sales had leveled off at over thirty thousand a number. This provided a provisional income, before accounts were settled, of one hundred pounds a month. The success seemed to him commensurate with the brilliance of what he was doing. He felt no false modesty on the matter, though his self-congratulations were mainly private. He did, however, begin reading sections of the novel to his friends in Lausanne. The first reading occurred on September 12, and was accompanied on Dickens’ part by no feelings of dangerously premature exposure. The sober Watson noted that “he read remarkably well and we are all of opinion that the beginning of this work is more interesting than the commencement of any of his other works. He has great expectations of it himself.” After reading the second number in October to his friends’”most prodigious and uproarious delight,” he half seriously proposed to Forster that he give public readings of his works in London, since a “great deal of money might possibly be made … in these days of lecturings and readings.” It would not be a gentlemanly thing to do. But “what do you say?” Should he take Miss Kelly’s theatre “or shall I take the St. James’s?” A few weeks later he carried on the serious joke by mockingly berating Forster for not exercising his usual good judgment and taking Covent Garden, which “is too large for my purpose,” a joke that had its ironic fulfillment years later in his reading in equally large theatres. But the small theatre of his friends was sufficient for the moment. He anticipated that he would leave Lausanne, “if all goes well, in a brilliant shower of sparks struck out of them by the promised reading of the Christmas book,” which he soon performed “with wonderful charm and spirit.”16

  By late October, the snow had already begun “closing in on all the panorama,” and he was anticipating what awaited him in Paris, including the bustle of city streets to stimulate his imagination and to relieve his restlessness. At Lausanne, the winds blew unimaginably hard. Paris warmly glittered in the distance, “as bright, and as wicked, and as wanton, as ever.” He also expected visits there from at least Forster and Jerrold. Though he regretted leaving his friends in Switzerland, he was not ambivalent about departure, partly because he felt that it was time to leave, partly because he felt certain that he would see them again, as visitors to Paris and London, and when he returned to Switzerland, as he imagined he would the next summer. He felt that he had “never left so many friendly and cheerful recollections in any place.” In the middle of November, on the last night before departure, he felt quite miserable saying good-bye. Seeing the world through the eyes of his own gifts and gift giving, he felt that there were very few “dots on the map of the world where we shall have left such affectionate remembrances behind.”17

  BY LATE NOVEMBER 1846, DICKENS WAS SITTING AT HIS DESK BEFORE a window in the small house that he had rented, after “the agonies of house-hunting,” at 48 Rue de Courcelles, watching the heavy snow fall in an unusually cold, blustery Paris winter. The wind entered the miniature “Paris mansion” as if it too were a tenant. “There’s not a door or window in all Paris—that shuts; not a chink in all the billions of trillions of chinks in the city that can be stopped to keep the wind out.” It felt to him as if he were experiencing real cold for the first time. “Everything that is capable of being frozen, freezes, in every room in the house, as hard as Marble.” The bleak weather that went on for months did not prevent him from tramping the wintry streets after his morning writing sessions. “A wicked and detestable place,” Paris seemed wonderfully attractive. Dinners, small parties, the Paris theatres, other entertainments, occupied his evenings. He dined with Lord Normanby, now British ambassador to France. Watson visited at the beginning of the new year. “Ages seem to have elapsed since we left Rosemont.” He wrote to Haldimand that “I hear you trying to speak through what now appear to me to be the fogs and hoarsenesses of my infancy.”18 While writing Dombey, he had constant reminders of his childhood, of his family, and in the heavy snows that muffled the sounds of the present and of the immediate past he heard more clearly the voices of memory.

  The sights of Paris occasionally provided striking external representations of his emotional obsessions. The morgue particularly attracted him. It brought together his preoccupation with death and an outward representation so stark and dramatic that it encapsulated his deepest feelings. Even in Paris, the wages of sin were death, death inexplicable, nontheological, a fact that from childhood on he had had as an obsessive part of his imagination and consciousness. To look at a corpse was to look at the ultimate, most threatening mystery, the body without spirit, the flesh without animating life, turned into meat for carrion, into the infant corpses in Rochester that had seemed to him as a child like pigs’ feet set out in a butcher shop, into the dead river-eaten bodies of suicides fished out of the Thames, into the victims of the devil-rat, Chips, into the corpses preserved by the cold at the great St. Bernard
Convent, into the row of dead sibling infants represented for Pip by the small tombstones in the graveyard in Kent. Unlike London, Paris had a central morgue where a large number of bodies could be viewed. It had become a morbidly fascinating tourist sight. “Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there … with its ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping all day long, upon that other swollen saturated something in the corner, like a heap of crushed over-ripe figs.” He went to the morgue many times during the winter “until shocked by something so repulsive that he did not have the courage for a long time to go back.”19

  Among the voices of memory, the voice of his sister Fanny spoke with particular plangency. Whether or not Elliotson’s diagnosis in May had been correct, there was now “no doubt whatever that Fanny is in a consumption,” an advanced case of tuberculosis. “Deeply, deeply grieved,” he had to face the probability that his favorite sister would die within a few years, even with the best available medical care. Two weeks after he had settled into his Paris apartment, thinking of his own depressed state in the fall and associating it and his sister’s illness with Mary Hogarth’s death, he decided to leave Paris “for family reasons” three months sooner than he had intended; he would return to London at the end of March 1847 rather than in June. He could respond to Fanny’s illness more helpfully at home than abroad, though he would be helpless to effect any real change. Given her condition and the medical treatment available, there was no basis on which to hope for recovery. Her singing and her music-lesson days were over. To add to Dickens’ sorrow, Fanny’s crippled eldest son, who had always had a fragile hold on life, seemed unlikely to outlive his mother by much, if at all.

  Death and childhood had been prominently on Dickens’ mind when he began Dombey. All his previous novels had had strong autobiographical elements, but Dombey and his next novel, David Copperfield, were to take the impulse into deeper, more effective, more discreet, and more revealing expressions. As his fame had increased, just setting the biographical record straight had become an occasional concern. In response to an American writer’s brief, “wildly imaginative” account of him that had appeared in 1842, he had whimsically threatened that he might “one of these days be induced to lay violent hands upon myself—in other words attempt my own life.” In 1838 and in 1845, he had provided two friendly biographers with brief corrective and controlling accounts, hinting that at some time he would himself provide fuller details. While in Lausanne in November 1846, Dickens discussed with Forster the possibility of writing a sustained autobiography. The desire was partly catalyzed by his preoccupation with episodes and feelings from his childhood that he was drawing on in the early episodes of Dombey, particularly the creation of Mrs. Pipchin’s establishment in Bath, where young Paul Dombey lives for a short time. The memories were not all good ones. The episode resonates with the pain that he had suffered during what he felt was his period of neglect and exploitation. “We should be devilish sharp in what we do to children.… Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very much, and that might go on the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft’s.”20

  Whether he actually began to jot down brief accounts of crucial episodes from his early life while in Switzerland or in Paris, he clearly had it in mind to do so. In the next two years, perhaps while writing Dombey, certainly before beginning David Copperfield, he created a fragment of an autobiography that Forster eventually saw, perhaps some part of it soon after March or April 1847, when he brought up the subject again in a more sustained and detailed way, and the entire thing in January 1849. In the spring of 1849, he drew upon some of it almost verbatim for the fourth number of David Copperfield. Thomas Holcroft, in his widely read Memoirs (1816), had revealed that Holcroft’s father’s impoverishment had turned his childhood into a difficult apprenticeship to poverty and misfortune. By the beginning of the writing of Dombey, Dickens clearly no longer had in mind an autobiography that would decorously set the public record straight, but an intimate, subjective, revelatory account of his life in the Romantic tradition, in which nothing important would be omitted and no one would be spared. Such an autobiography would be difficult to publish while his parents were alive. Apparently he had no intention of doing more than leaving it as an unpublished manuscript for his children and posterity, which “‘he always intended to do.’” Indeed, “in the final months of his life,” he talked “‘of taking it up again some day.’”21

  With his childhood and Fanny’s much on his mind, he absorbed into the heart of his novel-in-progress, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, many of the central relationships and situations of his early life. Soon after Paul Dombey’s birth his mother dies. Paul and his sister, surrogates for Dickens, thus are deprived of nurturing and are left the victims of an unloving father whose pride elevates the son into a mirror image of himself and degrades his daughter, Florence, into exile and neglect in her own parental home. In Dombey senior, he created a version of John Dickens transformed into a self-contained monster of personal pride and love of self, that very aspect that had resulted in Charles’s being sent to the blacking factory. Like John Dickens, Dombey becomes a bankrupt. The first step in his bankruptcy, ironically, is the death of his son, a projection of himself so intense that the son almost prefers to abdicate his life since so little of it is his own. As for many readers, the most moving episode in the story, the death of Paul from consumption, anticipating Fanny’s, was a moment of solemn resonance for Dickens, who thought of Paul as a living part of himself. “Paul is dead,” he wrote to Miss Coutts. “He died on Friday night about 10 o’Clock; and as I had no hope of getting to sleep afterwards, I went out, and walked about Paris until breakfast-time next morning.”22

  Florence alone deeply, unselfishly loves Paul. It is with her that his soul is in touch. Unlike Dickens’ sister, Florence Dombey lives, despite neglect, lovelessness, and victimization. A traumatized child whose feelings carry much of the resonance of his own accounts of his childhood, her essential goodness of heart, warmth of feeling, capacity for love, and nobility of nature allow her, in the idealizing resolutions of the novel, to triumph over adversity, to heal wounds, even to regenerate her father into a feeling, loving, repentant human being. Early on, he is a version of the nightmare father who devours his children. At the end, he is transformed into the benevolent father who loves his child more than himself, more than his own life. Believing in the superior “moral sentiments” of women, Dickens found it natural to create a female character whose moral sentiments are so deep and full that they embody his sense of himself at his best. Florence has none of his own bitterness, frustration, and vengefulness. His inability to forgive his mother and his unresolved anger at his father, which played themselves out ceaselessly in the crucial episodes of his life, have their fictional antimodel in the creation of a perfect sister to Paul and to himself, one of the many such sisters in his life and in his fiction.

  The intense fictional world of each morning’s writing did not obliterate the reality of Paris. Always eager to give the external world its due while the inner world sustained him, he made the best of the remainder of his winter abroad. Georgina rather than the pregnant Catherine accompanied him on daytime excursions, particularly to the glittering, infamous Palais-Royal. He was struck by the unmistakable contrast between English and French depravity. The Gallic alliance of cynicism and honesty compared strikingly with British hypocrisy. At first, he thought the French vapid, like the Americans at their worst, indifferent, careless, procrastinating, dishonest, with American “semi-sentimental independence” but without the characteristic “American vigour or purpose.” As workmen, they were completely inferior to the English, “fit for nothing but soldiering.” French charm, though, gradually lightened his criticism, creating an elegant environment for enjoyment and a general pleasure in life that contrasted favorably wi
th English sobriety, with the dark Sabbath of British earnestness, some of whose values he shared but whose atmosphere frequently oppressed him. There was pleasure for him in his sense that, by late January 1847, he had become “an accomplished Frenchman,” boasting that he had learned to speak like an educated native. Before he left in March he readily confessed to having “a much greater respect for the people than I had before.” In fact, he had sufficient Francophile enthusiasm to exclaim that, despite their “odd mixture of refinement and coarseness,” they were in many ways “the first people in the universe,” and French culture noticeably superior to British in its “general appreciation of, and respect for, Art.”23

  Though he had only minor contact with the luminaries of French artistic life, he admired Victor Hugo’s genius and liked him “best.” With Forster, he visited Hugo on an evening in which the latter reminisced about his childhood and graciously flattered him. Hugo’s wife impressed him, “a handsome woman with flashing black eyes, who looks as if she might poison his breakfast any morning when the humour seized her.” With Forster again, he had dinner with the novelists Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue. A friend of Count D’Orsay, Sue oddly covered socialist ideas with dandyesque dress. They visited Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Lamartine, and “the sick and ailing Chateaubriand.” He met and became friendly with the playwright Eugene Scribe, whose Irène ou Le Magnetisme he particularly admired. By himself and with friends, he went regularly to the theatres, delighting in the richness of the Parisian stage.