Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  In late January, his father had been ill, “low and weak,” though not as “exceedingly unwell” as his mother had indicated. He had visited again, and described his sickbed with an economical tenderness that suggested how much he had on his mind and in his feelings the alternate versions of his father that had afflicted him since childhood: the lovable Mr. Micawber and the hateful Mr. Murdstone. Fanny’s son had died at the end of January, and he comforted the religious Burnett with the good but unexceptional news that “he has rejoined his mother, and for ever cast away his early sorrows and infirmities.” Early in March, the Leeches’ twenty-month-old daughter, the baby who had been born in the Victoria Hotel on the way back from Manchester, died, “spared from greater uneasiness and pain.”53 The autobiographical impetus, the self-identification, was strong. The boy who had believed himself to have been the victim of “boyslaughter” but who had lived to be especially sensitive to the deaths of children was preparing himself and being prepared to create his favorite child, whose early life would dramatize the neglect, the loss, the desolation, and the death threats of his own.

  Finishing the first number late in March 1849, he was pleased with what he had done. Moving ahead with the second, he completed it by early May, though he soon lost the head start. By the summer, he was writing each number immediately prior to its month of publication. Though he made outlines or memoranda (“Mems,” as he called them), a practice he had started with Dombey, he found that the pain he felt depicting David’s childhood resulted in his writing in fits and starts at the beginning. In mid-April, struggling with the creation of the Murdstones and his idealized mother’s destruction, “the long Copperfieldian perspective look[ed] snowy and thick.” Anxious about whether the book would be successful, he took an obtuse position with his publisher about pricing policy simply out of nervousness. On the twelfth of May, the Dickenses gave a dinner and then a music party, attended by Thackeray, Forster, Jerrold, Browne, Rogers, the Carlyles, and others, a moment of social and communal affirmation. Fortunately, the sales of the first number, and those that followed, were favorable, though not as good as Dombey’s, as Forster had anticipated. But they were sufficiently strong so that Dickens felt reassured, sensible enough to realize that Copperfield, as a departure from his previous work, would need to build its own audience. He now raised for serious consideration his long-simmering commitment to edit a new periodical for Bradbury and Evans. He wanted to be liberated from such strong dependency on the sales of his novels.

  By June 21, he had finished the third number, containing the death and burial of David’s mother. “Quite confident in the story,” he planned the special features of the next three. The fourth was particularly challenging since it incorporated a large portion of the autobiographical fragment, which had been the core of the original conception. “Fourteen miles to-day in the country,” he told Forster, “revolving number four!” By mid-July, after a brief working holiday in Broadstairs, in response to feeling bruised and ill from “an awkward fall … on my weak side … the left, where there is an inflamed kidney sometimes,” he finished it. “I really think I have done it ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.” The pain of the childhood kidney weakness went away after he had completed the most painful part of the novel. The bruises healed. “I am getting on like a house afire in point of health.”54

  But as he brought David through the trauma of childhood, his own health and healing powers were on his mind, prompted by two aspects of his summer holiday. With Leech, he went for three days in mid-July to the Isle of Wight to find a summer house, particularly encouraged by a new friend, James White, a nonpracticing clergyman who lived and owned property there. A successful minor playwright who had inherited a substantial estate from his wife’s father, White had written a series of historical dramas that had brought him into the Dickens circle through Macready, who had produced one of them in the spring of 1846. A vain, moody, but good-hearted man, he and his wife, whom Dickens liked (“He is excellent, but she is better”), were eager to have the Dickenses for summer neighbors. Both Leech and Dickens thought Wight and the Whites wonderful. Making up his mind almost immediately, Dickens took “a most delightful and beautiful house,” called Winterbourne Villa, “belonging to White, at Bonchurch—cool, airy, private bathing, everything delicious—I think it is the prettiest place I ever saw in my life, at home or abroad.” Leech took a smaller house close by that also belonged to their friend.55 Thackeray, his wife in a mental institution, his domesticity and passions unsatisfied, saw the Dickens entourage arriving on the pier at Ryde, “the great Dickens with his wife his children his Miss Hogarth all looking abominably coarse vulgar and happy.”

  It was not a completely happy summer, though it started well, with picnics, long walks, excursions throughout the island, whose “views … are only to be equalled on the Genoese shore of the Mediterranean.… No such scenery in England, certainly.” Leech agreed. “This is such a place—perfect freedom—do as you like, beauty everywhere, and in everything.” They were entertained at tea by Lady Jane Swinburne on the rambling gardens and lawns of the house where the “golden-haired son of the Swinburnes,” home from his first term at Eton, played with his children, who found the island a sporting paradise. At White’s home, they had games, dinners, amusements, including “a mighty conjuring performance” by Dickens “for all the children in Bonchurch.” They played “great games at rounders every afternoon, with all Bonchurch looking on.” With Leech and Georgina, Dickens “attended an examination of the childrens and Infant School.” To Leech’s “horror” a child brought him “(in the presence of all the rank and beauty of Bonchurch) a sum in arithmetic of the most terrific nature to look over, and see if it was correct. I looked at it for some time, went through pantomime expressions of decided approval—and passed it on to Dickens who immediately (to my confusion) found no end of blunders.… Miss Hogarth I have found out sent this fiend in childish shape to me.” On the first of August they watched the queen sail past from her summer home in Osborne on her way to Ireland. Talfourd visited late in August, glowing with the happiness of his elevation to the bench. The three friends celebrated with “a most cheerful dinner,” and what seemed to the ebullient Talfourd a wonderful walk to Ventnor and back “by a mountain course, over the bare downs—all the way talking as authors talk.”56

  Late in the summer Leech had a serious accident. While bathing, he “was knocked over by a bad blow from a great wave on the forehead.” He was alternately unconscious and unable to sleep, having suffered a severe concussion, which Dickens described as “congestion of the brain.” Despite “twenty of his namesakes on his temples” as well as ice packs, bleeding, and other medical attention, he became worse. “His restlessness had become most distressing, and it was quite impossible for him to maintain any one position for five minutes.” Deeply worried, Dickens spent hours at his bedside. With medical powers of his own, he finally persuaded the distressed Annie Leech, who had called for him at 2:30 A.M., to allow him to try to mesmerize her husband. “It was more than half an hour before I could so far tranquillize him … by the magnetism … as to keep him composed.… Then, that effect began, and he said he felt comfortable and happy … and in a few minutes fell fast asleep.” Later in the morning, the doctor pronounced him greatly better. Dickens slept at the Leeches’ the next night, “to be called if he were restless,” and the next day mesmerized him again.57 He had not practiced his mesmeric powers since leaving Italy. They were undoubtedly still there, still available to him.

  One of the initial attractions of Bonchurch had been Dickens’ belief that it had a healthy climate. For some time he had been drinking each morning and evening a pint of water, convinced that it was good for his health and that he had been free from illness because of the practice. He had also been taking a cold shower each morning, partly to brace himself for the day, mostly because he believed that the body responded favorably to that invigoration of the nervous system. I
ndoor showers had to be created with cisterns and gravity pipes. In Broadstairs, he delighted in his favorite shower. At Winterbourne Villa, he felt semiecstasy at a 150-foot-high waterfall (in a passion of enthusiastic boasting it gained 350 feet) that he had a carpenter transform into a partly enclosed “perpetual shower bath” under which he stood every morning “to the unbounded astonishment of the aboriginal inhabitants.”

  By mid-August, though, he was worried by “a monstrous cold, which has now resolved itself… into a cough,” an ailment he seems to have had since his arrival. He went to see a doctor, who used a stethoscope, Elliotson’s recent importation from France. Probably he feared consumption, concerned that Fanny’s illness was an indication of a general family propensity toward tuberculosis. Though he finished number four in July and wrote five and six in August and September, he felt a general lassitude and depression that worried him. It seemed perfectly reasonable to him to blame his physical and mental state on the peculiar climate of the Isle of Wight. Maintaining the privacy of his mornings for writing, whatever the social alternatives, he was deeply absorbed in mediating between and combining his life and his fiction. That he was writing a series of episodes in which his fictional alter-ego experiences variants of the most painful episodes of his own childhood may have had something to do with how he felt. But that did not occur to him) “I am perfectly convinced, that, for people suffering under.a wasting disease,” the Isle of Wight “is madness altogether.” The doctors who prescribed the climate were mad or stupid. “The whole influence of the place … is to reduce and overpower vitality.… Naples is hot and dirty, New York feverish, Washington bilious, Geneva exciting, Paris rainy—but Bonchurch, smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here, in a year. It’s not hot, it’s not close, I don’t know what it is, but the prostration of it is awful. “ As soon as he could, with his family and the ongoing manuscript of David Copperfield, he fled to Broadstairs, where the air was “brisk and bracing.”58

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No Need for Rest

  (1849–1853)

  WHEN COMPLETING DAVID COPPERFIELD, DICKENS EXPERIENCED A powerful aftereffect that left him confused about “whether to laugh or to cry … strangely divided … between sorrow and joy.” He felt that he had been turned inside out, his inner life now visible, in partly disguised forms, in the shadowy world of ordinary daylight. The story he had written was so deeply personal that “no one can believe [it] in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.” Having transformed his private memories and his emotional life into a public myth about himself, particularly his development from an abandoned child into a great popular artist surrounded by love and success, he felt the excitement both of exposure and catharsis. Exorcising the wounds of childhood and young adulthood, he also dramatized the unresolved problems of his personality and his marriage, anticipating the turmoil that was to come. Though energized by the process of writing, he was also exhausted by “heaps of Copperfieldian blots,” by that “tremendous paroxysm of Copper-field.” Toward the end, he felt “rigid with Copperfield … from head to foot.” When he finally put down his pen in October 1850, he took up his “idea of wandering somewhere for a day or two.” Almost inevitably, he went back “to Rochester … where I was a small boy.”1

  In David Copperfield he re-created in mythic terms his relationship with his mother, his father, his siblings, particularly Fanny, and with his wife and his wife’s sisters. The novel was more precious to him than his own children because the favorite child was himself. Soon after beginning, he confessed that he had stuck to that fictional name through the exploration of alternative titles because he had, even at the earliest stage, recognized that he was writing about himself. His passion for names also expressed his need to pattern and control. After the birth of Katie in 1839, he assumed the right to name all his children (Catherine had “little or nothing to say” about that). The elaborate christening of Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens provides the representative example of the novelist imposing his literary constructs on other people’s lives as well as his own.2 When it came to his family, he did not admit of any distinction. When it came to his novels, the distinction between self and other was subordinated to the dramatization of the many varieties of the single self. Changing Charles Dickens into David Copperfield had the force both of unconscious reversal and of minimal autobiographical distancing. At the heart of the novel was a partly mediated version of himself that represented his effort to claim that he had come through, that all was well with him as he approached the age of forty.

  There was much, though, that was troublesome. He had fatherhood with a vengeance, particularly difficult for someone who both embraced and rebelled against patriarchy. He had a superficially successful marriage that provided him with neither romance nor companionship. He had ostensibly left behind a childhood whose experiences and memories still galled him in the present. He had a future whose patterns promised to be similar to those he already knew, his opportunities for adventure limited by his personal and professional obligations, by the restraints of success, and by the pressure to keep earning at a high level. No longer a young man, he assumed, becoming an honored public figure of prominence and distinction, a Victorianism that he was not fully ready for and that the artist within him was uncomfortable with, perhaps even rebelled against. There were the first visible signs of middle age. The mobility of his face had now the counterpoint of some permanent lines. His luxuriant hair began to show a receding silky thinness. Having been forced from an early age to look after himself, he now had to look after others as well as to anticipate the trials of middle age, though he had hardly had the pleasures of a real childhood. Time and nature were re-creating him along their own lines, and the social world that he had built as a secure pleasure house contained more restraint than he had anticipated. In fact, he had anticipated very little.

  From his adult perspective, he combined fiction and autobiography into an expression of the truth about his emotional life at the end of the 1840s. Telling his own story, the artist-writer, like the adult David Copperfield, imagines his own birth, beginning with a prelapsarian fantasy of perfect harmony with his mother. His father has died before he is born, a convenient extermination of an ideal who is not given the opportunity to disappoint his son. John Dickens is distanced by being divided into two unsatisfactory father figures, Murdstone and Micawber, neither of whom is David’s real father. The boy’s infantile idyll with his mother is soon shattered by her remarriage, an expression of her own infantilism, dependency, and ambivalent feeling for her son, who is shocked to discover that he alone cannot satisfy his mother’s needs. Like Dombey, Murdstone represents Dickens’ view of the father as an unfeeling mechanism of discipline whose life gains its shape and strength from restraining himself and others. Micawber radiates with the more subtly dangerous attractions of a father whose intentions are essentially loving but whose weaknesses undermine family stability. Micawber, though, is not David’s father. David’s father is safely dead. Though at great cost, his mother’s second husband, Murdstone, is neutralized, and Micawber becomes the friend whom David can help, eventually off to Australia, where he is out of sight if not out of mind. A Falstaffian figure, with innumerable touches of language and outlook derived from John Dickens, Micawber is neither allowed the power to hurt David nor disallowed the warmth of his basic benevolence.

  David’s mother dies under the heartless regimen of her second husband, whose cruelty provides Dickens with a mechanism for making David an orphan. Just as Dickens sends Micawber to Australia, he sends David’s mother to the grave. But the fictional mother that he buries, broken-hearted, is a counterimage of his feelings about his own. She is the mother that Dickens would have preferred to have had. An idealized representation of unselfish maternity, she is forced to desert her son from her first marriage, a hapless innocent caught in the web of Murdstone’s sexual and social authority, without the strength to liberate herself except through the grave, to whi
ch she also takes her second son. Though he is Murdstone’s progeny, David’s “baby brother” is an image of his sense of loss and abandonment, the mother he hardly had, the sibling who came between them. “So I lost her. So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at school—a silent presence near my bed—looking at me with the same intent face—holding up her baby in her arms.” As an adult, he remarks that “if the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better…. The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.” In his childhood and into his adult life, David is sustained by a “fanciful picture of my mother in her youth, before I came into the world. It always kept me company.” When remembering how Elizabeth Dickens had sat him on a railing when he was a small boy in Rochester to watch the prince regent go by, the adult Dickens parethentically, as if it were a constant emotional epithet, remarked, “my mother, may God forgive her.”3

  Using passages from the autobiographical fragment, Dickens propels David through a fictionalized version of his early school experiences and then into the infamous blacking factory in the form of a wine warehouse, to which Murdstone consigns him, supposedly to make his way in the world but really to degrade and humiliate him. Whereas Dickens felt like an orphan, David is one. David’s vision of himself as a scholar and a gentleman, like Dickens’, is tested by adversity. Unlike his creator, though, he becomes headboy, the culmination of a school career normal for the children of the privileged, and he looks “down on the line of boys below me, with a condescending interest in such of them as bring to my mind the boy I was myself, when I first came there.” Dickens also draws with autobiographical vividness on his vocational development, associating David with the law, with stenography, with Doctors’ Commons, with parliamentary reporting, with writing short fiction, and then with becoming a famous novelist. The narrator-author, though, is never deflected from his intent to write a story of inward vocation, the story of the development of a wounded child whose good heart and happy progress have been impeded by lost and false parents, social distortions, mistakes of perception, and emotional inexperience. Reality is turned into fable, loss into blessing, trouble into convenience, weakness into strength, restlessness into energy, and emotional confusion into clarity by the gift of love.