Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  His collaboration with Miss Coutts continued through most of the 1850s, focusing on Urania Cottage, but also on education, housing, and sanitary reform. The relationship was curiously personal, though apparently he knew little about his reserved friend’s private life, particularly her proposal of marriage to the Duke of Wellington, forty-five years her senior. When the Duke died in 1852, Dickens’ expression of his revulsion at “the semi-barbarous” ostentation of the funeral procession did not take into account that he was writing to an intimate of the deceased.

  A frequent guest at her home, he allowed, probably as a condition of the relationship, the former Hannah Meredith (who had married William Brown in 1844) to expand the two some into a ménage of pleasant badinage as well as serious philanthropy. He also borrowed Mrs. Brown’s obstinacy and habit of making statements in question form for his portrait of Rosa Dartle, just as he took the physical characteristics of the dwarf Miss Mowcher from a well-known London character, who claimed to be deeply affronted by the depiction of someone whom readers might associate with her as a facilitator of seductions. Threatened by a lawsuit and his conscience, he repaired “Miss Mowcher’s injury—with a very bad grace, and in a very ill humour.” Miss Coutts, though, was not for caricature. The partial support of Charley, who had entered Eton and whose school bills she paid, she was the sole support of Urania Cottage.

  Besieged by solicitations, he mediated between her philanthropic impulses and a bewilderingly large number of requests. His recommendations were humanitarian rather than radical. His liberalism did not admit a contradiction between the Westminster Ragged School, “a maze of filth and squalor, deserted by all decency,” and the diamond ring that he wore on his finger and some people at the school “took occasion to admire.” Miss Coutts’s sense of propriety was more deeply conservative than Dickens’. There were touchy points of potential conflict, particularly the role of religion in social reform. And she let him know that she considered his amateur theatricals, “the mournful spectacle of your friend upon the boards,” unseemly for a man of his position, an objection he joked away when his attempts to persuade her otherwise failed.14

  By early 1852, Dickens had taken up her idea of creating working-class housing by clearing a London slum. At first he consulted with a new friend, Inspector Charles F. Field, who had been the source for three articles he had written and who had made regularly available to him a police escort for his late-night visits (sometimes with friends) to high-crime areas of London. Dr. Southwood Smith, an irrepressible enthusiast who spoke with “extreme rapidity and rush of words,” was consulted. A Unitarian minister and medical doctor who had served as adviser to the Poor Law Commission, Smith also wrote and agitated ceaselessly on the subject of sanitary reform. Dickens had already benefited in 1842 from Smith’s having brought to his attention the report on the working conditions for children and women in coal mines. Despite his being “too voluble and dashing,” he assured Miss Coutts that Smith was “a very sound man, indeed.” So too was Dickens’ brother-in-law Henry Austin, a civil engineer, who, in alliance with Smith and the influential Dr. Edwin Chadwick, the chairman of the Poor Law Commission, had formed the Board for Sanitary Reform. A prolific propagandist, Austin involved Dickens, who had only a limited amount of time to spare, in these activities. Dickens worried, though, that both Chadwick and Smith, in their “harping so much on the past” in their legislative efforts, would associate the board with “an unjust notion of impracticality.” In contrast to his uncompromising stance on social issues in the 1830s and 1840s, he had decided that “the wise thing is to take less, and make it the best that can be.”15

  Emphasizing the desirability of large multifamily buildings to conserve open space and make sanitary services more practical, Dickens outlined for Miss Coutts the basis of what became the Nova Scotia Gardens and the Columbia Square apartments, which were opened in 1862. But abysmal slum conditions of the sort that he dramatized in the depiction of Tom-all-Alone’s in his next novel, Bleak House, were not easily abolished. Despite his conscious optimism, he revealed his sense of the intractable misery, the overwhelming social odds such efforts were challenging, in his description to Miss Coutts of a slum that he had visited while looking for potential sites to be cleared. “It is intensely poor in some parts; and chiefly supported by river, wharf, and dock employment; and by some lead mills.… No more road than in an American swamp—odious sheds for horses and donkeys, and vagrants, and rubbish in front of the parlor windows—wooden houses like horrible old packing cases full of fever for a countless number of years. In a broken down gallery at the back of a row of these, there was a wan child looking over at a starved old white horse who was making a meal of oyster shells. The sun was going down and flaring out like an angry fire at the child—and the child, and I, and the pale horse, stared at one another in silence for some five minutes as if we were so many figures in a dismal allegory.”16

  Beginning in March 1850, he had a direct vehicle for expressing his views on the child, himself, and the pale horse. The child as victim, the pale horse as the social order, and he himself as reformer became the crucial elements in his new journal, which he called Household Words. In his June 1844 contract with Bradbury and Evans he had agreed that at some time in the future, with the details to be determined then, he would edit a magazine that his publisher would add to its proud, profitable flagship. Levity and amusement would be in the service of a vision of the general improvement of the individual and society. Whereas Punch was humorous, the new journal would be serious entertainment, the journals complementing, not competing with, one another. From 1844 to 1849 this proposition had had the shadowy reality of an unrealized venture. Bitterly disappointed by his contretemps with the Daily News and deeply involved in his many philanthropic and writing projects, he did not press his commitment to become an editor again. In March 1849, “hard at work” finishing the first number of David Copper-field, he began serious negotiations about the journal. Having felt energized by the excitement of a new book, he may have felt that it was the right moment for him to get the magazine started.

  He had no illusion that it could be done without immense, willful effort on his part. He had come to believe, though, that he had developed “quite a remarkable power of enduring fatigue,” that the more energy he exerted the more he had. Though “my cut-out way of life obliges me to be so much upon the strain,” his alternation of intense work with hectic vacations, local stimulants like his daily cold shower, and occasional languid collapses kept him ready for any amount of activity. He began to elevate his energy and restlessness into the premise that they were the “condition on which I hold my inventive powers,” and he believed that any attempt to restrain them would be destructive to his creativity. Given his personality, his need for control and perfection would demand his services not only as general editor but as acquiring editor, copy editor, business agent, researcher, and writer. Added to his other responsibilities, the burden would be substantial. So too, though, would be the rewards. He was not in the least self-deceitful about his paramount desire in creating the journal that it “become a good property.” No matter how much hard work it entailed, “to establish it firmly would be to gain such an immense point for the future (I mean my future) that I think nothing of that.”17

  In early August 1849, on the Isle of Wight, his mind was “occupied … at intervals, respecting the dim design.” By September, it had become at least as clear as a shadowy “name and an idea.” He had made up his mind “that the Periodical must be set agoing in the spring.” Within a few weeks, he had developed his idea into the firm form of “a weekly journal, price … two pence, matter in part original and in part selected, and always having … a little good poetry.… The original matter to be essays, reviews, letters, theatrical criticisms, &c &c, as amusing as possible, but all distinctly and boldly going to what in one’s own view ought to be the spirit of the people and the time.” Despite its omission from his original overview, short stories a
nd novels in installments soon became part of the plan. By the end of October, he had a model number set up and he had begun to assemble a staff. In the ninth installment of David Copperfield, available at the end of December, the new journal was advertised as “Designed for the Entertainment and Instruction of all classes of readers, and to help in the discussion of the most important social questions of the time.” On March 30,1850, after the initial tensions of miscommunication and unsatisfactory production and proofreading, the first issue appeared. It contained “A Preliminary Word” and an article, “The Amusements of the People,” by Dickens, “Valentine’s Day at the Post-Office” and “A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters” co-authored by Dickens, an article by George Hogarth, the first of three installments of Lizzie Leigh, a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, and a poem by Leigh Hunt.18

  His co-author, his managing editor, and his indispensable assistant in running the journal was William Henry Wills. With a limited education, having begun his career as a woodcutter and drifted into journalism for financial reasons, he was the perfect second-in-command. He readily accepted that Dickens made all the decisions, especially after an early rebuke that commanded him not to “touch my articles without first consulting me.” An unsuccessful playwright, Wills, who had been born in 1810, had made himself known to Dickens in 1837 when he submitted an article, which Dickens rejected, and a brief poetic tale, which he published, to Bentley’s Miscellany. Temporarily blind in 1838, he received a small grant from the Royal Literary Fund. Fortunately, he was well enough to join the original staff of Punch and then to spend three years in Edinburgh, where he had the good luck to marry the charming, socially talented Janet Chambers, the sister of the publishers of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, of which he was assistant editor, and then return to London in time to sign on with the Daily News. Dickens took on the experienced journalist, on Forster’s recommendation, as assistant editor of Household Words at a salary of “Eight Pounds a week absolutely, and one eighth share” in the profits. “An extremely careful, methodical man,” he seemed perfect for the job. With “not the ghost of an idea in the imaginative way,” he had been chosen “for a union of qualities very necessary to the business part” of the journal. From the editorial office on Wellington Street, off the Strand and close to Covent Garden, the thin, tight-lipped, conventional, but infinitely loyal, patient, and competent Wills, who always wore “a very uncomfortable looking hat with a very narrow brim” when he stepped out, looked after the shop for almost twenty years.19

  In negotiating with Bradbury and Evans, Dickens remembered how bitterly he had resented being a salaried employee rather than a participant in the profits of Bentley’s Miscellany. Aware of Mark Lemon’s dissatisfaction with his financial arrangement as editor of Punch, Dickens soon helped him draft a letter setting out why he should be given a share in the profits. In his own case, Dickens was determined not to let the moment of maximum influence go by. The contract that he forced on the publisher stipulated that they were to receive a one-fourth share, John Forster, as consulting and contributing editor, one eighth, Wills another one eighth, and himself, in addition to his salary, one half the profits. His annual salary of £500 and Wills’s of £416 were to be “charged as expenses of publication and not deducted from their respective shares.”

  To contributors, he was determined to pay the best going rates, and more if necessary. Initially, he pursued authors like William and Mary Howitt, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell avidly, courting them with flattery, which had some of the powerful unction of coming from a man whom his prejudiced but not completely inaccurate friend, Walter Savage Landor, described as “the best known man among the living,” at least in England, not excluding the Duke of Wellington. He was especially successful in seducing Mrs. Gaskell, whom he called “Scheherazade” and whose work he deeply admired as a feminine and domesticated version of his own. Particularly attractive to his middle-class audience, she became one of his most frequent contributors. With a sure sense of the taste of his readers, he immediately turned to her for contributions, even offering to travel to Manchester for no other purpose than to discuss the matter, allaying her anxiety about undertaking “short tales” by asserting that he was “morally certain that nothing so true and earnest as your writing, can go wrong under your guidance.”20 The diffident wife of a Unitarian minister, she cooperated mainly because of her respect for the editor. Despite some tensions, they were to have a mutually advantageous professional relationship for the next eight years.

  By the second weekly issue, Household Words was a clear success. “It is expensive, of course, and demands a large circulation.” The sales, though, justified the investment. After the initial unsteady figures (some purchasers may have been disappointed at discovering that they had not bought the first installment of a new novel) it maintained an average weekly sale for the next nine years of close to forty thousand copies. The addition to Dickens’ income above earnings from the novels he was to write and the royalties he received from the cheap edition or from reprintings was substantial. More reliable than his other sources, it did not depend on his own writing, and though it was also subject to the vagaries of the reading public, who could choose to buy or not, it provided an assured regular income earned under much less competitive, high-pressured, and fragile circumstances than his income from writing fiction. Under Wills, the office ran with a smoothness that took its grease from Dickens’ constant oiling of contributors, his ideas for articles, his own work, and his unflagging insistence that the articles be factually accurate, the subjects interesting, the level popular, informative, and entertaining, and the writing first-rate. His own contributions ranged from the delicately personal “A Child’s Dream of a Star,” a fictionalized reminiscence of his sister Fanny, which he created for the second issue because he felt that there was “a want of something tender,” to his article “Home for Homeless Women,” which he persuaded the reluctant Miss Coutts to allow him to publish, to the approximately 120,000-word A Child’s History of England, which he dictated to the increasingly invaluable Georgina during the next two years and published in thirty-nine installments from January 1851 to October 1853.21

  Reading every submission, marking up many of the proof sheets of articles and stories, impatiently disparaging bad writing, especially verbosity, Dickens was an avid, even merciless editor of other people’s prose. Once he good-humoredly commented on “the dreadful spectacle I have made of the proofs—which look like an inky fishing-net.” He did not hesitate to suggest tactfully to authors where they might do better, even to the much-appreciated Mrs. Gaskell, who allowed Household Words “always [to] make titles for me.” If he could have, he also would have corrected her proclivity for falls and unhappy endings, for “I wish to Heaven her people would keep a little firmer on their legs!” Having titled one of her stories “The Heart of John Middleton,” he told her he had remarked to Wills that he “wished you had not killed the wife.” Since she was in town, he sent Wills out to ask her if he might change the ending. “‘Oh Mrs. Gaskell’s not in town,’” he reported on returning, “‘and won’t be here ‘til next Thursday.’ ‘Very good,’ said I. ‘Then we will print the story as it stands, and not trouble her.’ Which was accordingly done.”

  Flooded by submissions, many of them amateurish, he soon built up a stable of authors, supplemented by a small staff who did article assignments on their own and on his initiative, receiving a regular salary and working directly under Wills. The two most important staff members were Henry Morley and Richard Henry Home. The former, a schoolteacher, on Dickens’ urging became a journalist. Born in 1822, the only university-trained person on the staff, Morley specialized initially in issues of public health, in which Dickens was keenly interested. He soon became one of the quiet, unassuming, invaluable, Dickens-worshiping members of Household Words, contributing a long list of articles on a wide variety of subjects during the next fourteen years. In contrast, Horne was an ambitious, moderately talented writer who had h
ad only small success in his efforts at writing drama, poetry, criticism, and journalism. He had written glowingly about Dickens in a book of literary criticism and gossip, A New Spirit of the Age (1844), whose silent co-author was Elizabeth Barrett. Their co-authorship was carried on only by letter. The previous year he had had his only popular success, the pseudoepic Orion, whose callow derivativeness and hollow Shelleyanism were momentarily outweighed by his advertising himself as “the farthing poet.” For the first two years of the existence of Household Words, he was its leading investigative reporter, sometimes working out suggestions that Dickens gave him. By himself or with Dickens, beginning with the second issue, he published almost ninety items in the journal before he left for Australia in 1852. Years later, Dickens drew on one of them, “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” for some aspects of his last completed novel.

  Dickens’ journalism, of course, mainly served the causes he believed in. He never, though, took his eye off the balance sheet. There was a family to support, including, to his bedazzled moroseness, another child. Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens was born in March 1852. Despite Catherine’s poor health, he had been conceived in early summer 1851. His father could not “afford to receive [this] seventh son” and ninth living child “with perfect cordiality, as on the whole I could have dispensed with him.” Six months later, he provided the first of his many variations on the “strange kings in the fairy times, who, with three thousand wives and four thousand seven hundred and fifty concubines, found it necessary to put up prayers in all the temples for a prince as beautiful as the day! I have some idea—with only one wife and nothing particular in any other direction—of interceding with the Bishop of London to have a little service in St. Pauls beseeching that I may be considered to have done enough towards my country’s population.”22 Nicknamed Plorn, this latest infant became his father’s delight, an amusingly wonderful prodigy of entertaining willfulness and cuteness about whose childhood achievements Dickens constantly boasted, despite his preference never to have had him at all.