Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  Born in Suffolk, David finds the first gift of love in Kent. Dickens provides him with a second mother, his Aunt Betsey. Her love and generosity resolve his initial familial and financial problems. Her “object in life … is to provide for [his] being a good, a sensible, and a happy man.” Unlike Peggotty, whom she initially dislikes, Betsey Trotwood represents the social class to which David aspires, the security of the middle class that his experience with poverty has made particularly attractive. Through the instrument of her bankruptcy (in which she is faultless and which turns out to be a temporary deceit) Dickens compels David to discover Dickens’ virtues. Like his creator, he has the capacity “to concentrate [himself] on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels,” to try “with all my heart to do well… whatever I have tried to do in life…. There is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was.” David’s rise to middle-class status through professional achievement, described in a distancing, nostalgic retrospect, has some of the effortlessness of an assertion of the indomitable will. His voice in the present tense of his adulthood is calm, self-satisfied, an expression of Dickens’ ideal of a life without anguish, disappointment, restlessness, or incompletion. As David moves toward the age of the author, he seems increasingly a mythic version of what his creator would have liked to have become. Dickens could most readily afford to see himself with emotional honesty in the past rather than in the present. “My own dreams are usually of twenty years ago. I often blend my present position with them, but very confusedly, whereas my life of twenty years ago is very distinctly represented.”4

  What passionately concerns Dickens, though, is the reworking of the history of his inner life to deal with his dissatisfactions in the present. For “a man’s happiness, after all, [doesn’t] depend upon himself. With employment for the mind—exercise for the body—a domestic hearth—and a cheerful spirit—there may be many things wanting to complete his happiness—and he may be confoundedly miserable—as I am.…”5 Such misery resulted partly from the gap between his Romantic aspirations and his Victorian assumption of stolid domestic responsibility. It resulted partly from a lifelong sense that his unloving mother had left a void he could not fill, and for which he needed to find ways to compensate. And it resulted from his increasing need for a companionship that Catherine could not provide. Fantasizing about some one friend whom he had never had, union with whom would make him emotionally complete, he created in David Copperfield an imaginative, though fragile, antidote to his restlessness, anticipating his rejection of Catherine eight years later. In his idealized version of the history of his “undisciplined heart,” he provides David with a synoptic version of his own amatory experiences, beginning with Lucy Stroughill. Then there is Little Em’ly, with touches of flirtatiousness, vague hints of Maria Beadnell, who quickly participates in his tendency to transform lovers into sisters. When she becomes a fallen sister, David helps raise her to redemption. In an early passion, he falls in love with “the eldest Miss Larkins,” about whom David expresses some of the same anguish that Dickens had expressed in his letters to Maria Beadnell. The dominant early passion, though, is for Dora Spenlow, in whom he combines elements of all those women in his life who have most disappointed him. Finally, there is Agnes Wick-field, the ultimate sister, with touches of both Mary and Georgina Hogarth, who eventually fulfills his strongest erotic impulse, the sister-wife, his companion of the mind and the heart.

  Like his mother, Dora is flighty, selfish, and verbally childish. Like Maria, she is spoiled, teasing, and flirtatious, her father’s favorite, with a companion-confidante somewhat like Maria’s friend Mary Anne Leigh. Like Catherine, or the version of her that he became obsessed with, she is clumsy, careless, and, worst of all, an inappropriate companion of the mind and heart for David, who falls madly in love as an expression of his own romantic projections before he realizes that he has misjudged himself and her. “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.” Her limitations force him to take upon himself “the toils and cares of our life, and [have] no partner in them.… The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were changed at all.… I loved my wife dearly, and I was happy; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting.” The qualities of character, developed in adversity, that help him to achieve professional success and to realize that he has chosen unwisely are the qualities that distance him from his wife. Dickens then provides David’s “child-bride” with a fatal illness and David with the perfect replacement, the woman he should have married in the first place. Redeeming the mistakes that only experience can reveal, in the death of Dora he can be relieved of an otherwise irremovable impediment to his happiness, a woman he has married because of his “undisciplined heart,” a misjudgment that arose from the deepest sources of his immature personality. Aware that she is dying, so much does she love David that she attempts to arrange for his union with Agnes.

  Combining the qualities of both the spiritual and the erotic ideal, Agnes is completely suitable in mind and heart, the sister or soul mate and the perfect wife, a romantic partner and a paragon of feminine virtues, an intellectual companion and an absolutely competent housewife. Like his sister Fanny, she embodies the myth of a happy childhood of companionship. She has “found a pleasure… while you have been absent, in keeping every thing as it used to be when we were children. For we were happy then, I think.” “Heaven knows we were!” David responds.6 A heavenly light shines from her face, by which he can see her angelic nature “pointing upwards,” like Mary’s happy face in Dickens’ dreams, like the resonance of her voice that he had heard in the roar of Niagara Falls. Like Georgina, she remains by David’s side, his happy domestic supporter and companion. Within the thinly concealed autobiographical fantasy of the novel, Dickens temporarily alleviated some of his most pressing emotional problems. But the fantasy expressed concealed wishes, as well as a reconstituted personal history, that fiction alone could not discharge, and the novel is prescient with the turmoil that was to come.

  BY LATE NOVEMBER 1849, CATHERINE HAD BECOME PREGNANT again. Their ninth child, named Dora Annie after David’s “child-wife,” was born in August 1850. Though he would have preferred no child at all, he felt pleased that at least it was a daughter. Since the births of Mamie and Katie it had seemed to him a dull succession of sons. Shortly after her birth, “working nine hours at a stretch” for numbers of consecutive days, he was preoccupied with killing his daughter’s fictional namesake. “I have still Dora to kill—I mean the Copperfieldian Dora,” he wrote to his wife from Broadstairs, where he had gone with the children to escape the heat and to get on with the novel. Remaining in London for her confinement, Catherine was slow in recovering from the pregnancy. She felt exhausted, depressed, and vaguely ill. Toward the end of the month, he insisted that “Mrs. Dickens is in a noble condition,” the baby fragile but stable. Soon, though, Catherine was sufficiently ill for her husband and the doctors to separate her from Dora. She had “alarming disposition of blood to the head, attended with giddiness and dimness of sight … confusion and nervousness.” She had had these symptoms at intervals for three or four years. Fearing for the life of her frail daughter, she was exhausted after having had in fifteen years nine successful pregnancies and at least one miscarriage. Youthful plumpness had been transformed into matronly obesity. And her precarious sense of self-esteem had eroded considerably in her relationship with an energetic perfectionist who dominated the life of the household with a competence that left her little room for herself. Soon taken to Malvern, a small but increasingly popular health resort, she underwent the cold-water cure, a series of baths and wrappings acclaimed for their restorative powers, particularly for the nervous system. The children were put under the care of Georgi
na and the servants. Catherine was “put … under rigorous discipline of exercise, air, and cold water.”7

  Feeling that the practical responsibilities both of family and of professional life were all on his shoulders, he carried on assiduously with various projects, including a new journal, which had gotten started early in 1850, raising funds for the Guild of Literature and Art through regular theatrical performances by the revived amateur company, and searching for a new house, since the lease for Devonshire Terrace was to expire soon. The absence of a romantic partner was even more noticeable during Catherine’s illness, particularly since he had the additional chore of regularly traveling between London and Malvern.

  Late in March 1851, he learned that his father had a serious illness. Though Wilkins Micawber could be exiled to Australia, John Dickens had remained in London with the intractability on which real life insists. Continuing to work for the Daily News, he presumed on his son for occasional minor debts, his pension and salary sustaining his and his wife’s ordinary expenses in their Keppel Street flat. To the extent that Dickens had been able in David Copperfield to put to rest any of the ghosts of the past, he had done so with his father. Not even the irony, though, of his being fatally ill with an “active disease of the bladder,” of the sort that he had falsely claimed was a serious disability in 1824, could make it any less painful to his son that his genial, well-intentioned, and self-indulgently harmful father was dying. “He had kept his real malady so profoundly secret, that when he did disclose it his state was most alarmingly advanced.…” On March 25, 1851, John Dickens was subjected without chloroform to “the most horrible operation known in surgery, as the only chance of saving him. He bore it with astonishing fortitude, and I saw him directly afterwards—his room, a slaughter house of blood. He was wonderfully cheerful and strong hearted.” His son’s hands were shaking uncontrollably. “All this goes to my side directly,” Charles complained, “and I feel as if I had been struck there by a bludgeon.”8

  The next morning Charles went to Devonshire Terrace from Keppel Street. He wanted to see the children, particularly Dora, who was “quite charmed” to see him, and there was some amateur theatrical business to take care of. It was raining incessantly, the streets “in a most miserable state. A van containing the goods of some unfortunate family, moving, has broken down outside—and the whole scene is a picture of dreariness.” He may have remembered the many times in his childhood his family had moved and his coming up from Chatham to London on a wet day, packed into a damp stagecoach. The Dickens family was in search of another house. And John Dickens had “slept well last night, and is as well this morning … as anyone in such a state, so cut and slashed, can be.” He returned to Malvern with no illusions about his sixty-five-year-old father’s immediate fate. He was again in London toward the end of the month for three days of rehearsals.

  On the evening of March 29, returning to town, he and the messenger sent to get him passed one another on the railway. Charles went straight from the station to Keppel Street. When he arrived close to midnight his father “did not know [him], nor anyone.” John Dickens “began to sink about noon … and never rallied afterwards.” For three sleepless nights his exhausted son watched him. He died early in the morning of March 31. Charles immediately went up to Highgate Cemetery to arrange for a grave. He told Thomas Mitton, who had known John Dickens long and well, that his “poor father’s death” had added “more expence” to the “much distress” that it had caused him. “But, of that, in such a case, I say nothing.”9 He had already said much.

  Still unwell, Catherine remained in Malvern while the family buried its prodigal father. Since Dickens had returned to London, his exhaustion had been so great that he had been unable to rest. He was constantly out in the streets both on the business of his journal and house hunting. “I have sometimes felt, myself, as if I could have given up, and let the whole battle ride on over me. But that has not lasted long, for God knows I have plenty to cheer me in the long run.” Despite such self-assurances, he was depressed. He needed time to get used to his father being dead. Warmly sympathetic to his wife’s ill health, he was less so to Catherine herself. With Forster, he went to Malvern by the night express on the fifth of April and then returned on the fourteenth to fulfill an engagement to preside at the annual meeting of the General Theatrical Fund, an obligation he had tried to cancel. Going immediately to Devonshire Terrace to visit the children before going to the London Tavern, he held Dora in his arms and played with her for a few minutes. At dinner, he was greeted with acclamation. Surrounded by friends, supporters, and admirers, he made a witty, gracious speech, urging contributions to the providential fund to help poor and elderly actors. The theatre was too bright a place in his memory and in the lives of the members of the audience to allow those who provided such glitter and fantasy to suffer the difficulties of poverty and old age in an economically precarious profession. He reminded his listeners, some of whom knew of his father’s recent death, that “the actor sometimes comes from scenes of affliction and misfortune—even from death itself—to play his part before us.” While Dickens was speaking, a servant from Devonshire Terrace delivered to Forster, who was to speak next, the message that “Dora was suddenly dead.”10

  In anguish, Forster listened to his friend conclude. “How often is it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities.” He then proposed “prosperity to the General Theatrical Fund!” When the applause subsided, the pained Forster rose and gave a grandiloquent bravura performance, praising his friend, “mentioning that he knew he was present ‘at great personal sacrifice, which few men would have ventured to make.’” The solitary cry of humbug from “someone at the end of the hall” was quickly hushed. When the meeting ended, Forster and Mark Lemon told Dickens “the sad news.” Returning to Devonshire Terrace immediately, he went to look at his dead child. Forster and Lemon sat up with him by her body through the night. It was a comfort to him that she had died suddenly, painlessly. Given her frailty, “if, with a wish, I could cancel what has happened and bring the little creature back to life, I would not do it.” Now it occurred to him that “it was an ill-omened name,” that fiction sometimes anticipated life. Concerned about Catherine, he gently provided her, in a letter that Forster took to Malvern, with a series of ascending concerns about “little Dora who is very ill.… Remember what I have often told you, that we never can expect to be exempt… from the afflictions of other parents—and that if—if—when you come I should even have to say to you ‘our little baby is dead,’ you are to do your duty to the rest, and to show yourself worthy of the great trust you hold in them.” He was also, though, “not without some impression that this shock may do her good”; it might be a tonic to her fragile nervous system. The dead infant remained in an upstairs bedroom until she was laid in her grave three days later. The night before, about to go upstairs to strew flowers sent by a friend “over our poor little pet … he suddenly gave way” and wept uncontrollably in the presence of his children.11 The shock apparently did not help Catherine. She remained sick through the spring and summer.

  SEEKING TO BALANCE ILLNESS AND DEATH WITH COMPASSIONATE GOOD works, he continued the effort to find acceptable candidates for Urania Cottage. The earthly salvation of prostitutes seemed to him both a practical possibility, through moral retraining and emigration, and a social necessity. Emigration itself had its special difficulties. Prostitutes sometimes confused it with the transportation of convicts; corrupt crews and passengers might seduce the rehabilitated women back to their old ways on the voyage to South Africa or Australia. “In the course of [his] nightly wanderings into strange places,” he regularly spoke to prostitutes. While he was writing David Copperfield, their problems were especially vivid to him. He wanted to use the novel to turn the public’s “thoughts a little that way” in the hope of eliciting suppor
t for his efforts. Claiming, in his portraits of Little Em’ly and Martha Endell, that the problem of prostitution was essentially that of a male-dominated society in which class divisions and sexual exploitation determined that a certain number of women would be seduced into a state that made marriage improbable, he devoted a staggering number of hours to supervising Urania Cottage, to establishing rules and enforcing them, to working out overall policy, to arranging for safe passage abroad, and to finding promising candidates who were sufficiently aware that they “were trembling on the verge of destruction” to be motivated to submit to discipline but not “too miserable and low for our purpose.”12

  For those who have been unlawfully seduced, the collapse of self-esteem, he believed, almost inevitably led to self-destructiveness. Fallen women embodied the perversion of the true, high nature of women. If they could be caught before their natures had been brutalized and provided with a disciplined supportive environment, their essential goodness and attraction to purity, and the naturalness of marriage and motherhood as well, would assert itself. Since society offered few economic opportunities for women outside the home, those who had been deprived, by accident, by drunkenness, by poverty, by seduction, by crime, by the immoral elements within patriarchy, of an appropriate domestic environment inevitably turned to prostitution once their alternatives had been exhausted. He had no desire to make women economically independent of men, and expressed no sympathy for efforts to establish vocational schools or working communities for women. “Perfect penitence in these women” might express itself as “a kind of active repentance in their being faithful wives and the mothers of virtuous children.”13 Just as his awareness of how unideal his mother had been had led to his idealization of Mary Hogarth, his emotional elevation of the female, seeing in her the highest form of the moral sentiments, encouraged him to visualize the redemption of prostitutes exclusively in domestic terms.