Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  After three days of hospitality from his Genoese friends, they boarded a crowded steamer for Naples. From a flock of small boats, obstructing their effort to leave the harbor, came vigorous “shrill choruses from Verdi’s operas,” accompanied by shirtless fiddlers and “coffee-coloured women with guitars.” The officers of the Valetta, which was an English ship, shouted, “Hullo! you are in the way! I say, signora, sheer off—Oh, damn it: Mademoiselle will you sheer off!” With Genoa glittering behind them, they steamed into the bright Mediterranean on a smooth sea. As a distinguished Englishman, Dickens “became the brother of all the officers in half an hour.” His influence was soon an advantage. The ship was ludicrously overbooked, with twice as many passengers, all of whom had paid for first-class accommodations, as available beds. The agreeable passage of the first day gave way to confusion and irritation that night. “Berths in the saloon (on the seats) had been kept for [them], but the atmosphere … was so stifling that [they] … determined to rough it with wrappers and sofa pillows on deck.… Just as [they] were comfortably asleep,” it began to rain “like a waterfall.” The stairs and cabin were crowded with people and noxious smells. The triumvirate went on deck again, and tried to sleep in the rain. A “conversational miscreant,” who became known as the most prominent of the three ship bores, kept them up for hours. The next day, the captain, prompted by Dickens’ constant teasing about the misconduct of the steamship line in “allowing double the number of people to take passage,” took pity on the distinguished novelist and his friends. Dickens was soon superbly lodged in the steward’s cabin. Egg and Collins slept in the ship’s storeroom on stiff but at least private shelves, amidst flour, bread, apples, cheeses, bushes of grapes, and the clean smell of a grocery store. When they awoke, the boat was docked in Civitavecchia, “a wretched, dead place—infested by beggars and French soldiers.”7

  The next morning they steamed into the Bay of Naples, “wreaths of white smoke … curling up quietly … from the Crater of Vesuvius” in the distance. From his “charming apartment opposite the sea,” Dickens saw that Naples had hardly changed. It seemed as overwhelmingly poor and as degraded as ever. The weather was impossibly hot. Mosquitoes soon left their “highly ornamental marks” on his skin. “The same men, with the same instruments, were singing the same songs, to the same tunes” as nine years before. With a reversal in the usual relationship between geology and culture, Vesuvius, in contrast, had completely changed since his last visit. There had been a major eruption in 1850. Now there was a great deal of smoke, but no fire. Soon after landing, they went to a public bath, where an old man, who soaped him, “kept … ejaculating under his breath ‘O Heaven how clean this Englishman is!’” Before dinner, Collins suddenly heard the voice of the ship bore close at his ear, a man “created as a sort of moral hairshirt for unpenitential Protestants who won’t ‘mortify’ the flesh with any rougher discipline than a cold bath and a rub with a turkish towel.” On shipboard, they had enjoyed the company of an old acquaintance, Sir James Emerson Tennent, who, with his family, joined them on most of their excursions. Probably they had met through Forster, who had been Tennent’s classmate in legal studies. A writer, traveler, and Liberal politican who supported the Reform Bill in 1832, he had lived in Greece, which he had written about, and then in Ceylon, where he had been colonial secretary.

  Later, on their ascent of Vesuvius, they were also joined by the “very merry and agreeable” Austen Henry Layard, the thirty-six-year-old archaeologist, author, and diplomat, recently famous for his discovery of the ruins of Nineveh and whose parliamentary career was about to explode into a radical assault on governmental inefficiency. In the sunlight, they climbed to the cone on horseback. Making “a practice of increasing his speed when ascending a hill,” Dickens, accompanied by Layard, surged ahead. Whenever they felt fatigued, Egg and Collins “discreetly rested.… The mountain was very quiet,” Collins noticed, “no flame, no stones, no noise—nothing but thick clouds of sulphurous smoke.” From the mouth of the crater, looking out over Sorrento and Capri, there was “a blood-red setting sun gleaming through the vapour.” They descended by torchlight, “with a young Italian moon skimming above us.”8

  Before the middle of November 1853 they were in Rome, where Dickens paused, overcoming “the difficulties of so unsettled a life” to write a brief story for the Christmas number of Household Words. Soon he was looking forward to returning to domestic comforts, “though I feel I could not have done a better thing to clear my mind and freshen it up again, than make this expedition.” Business problems rumbled from the distance. Sales were not as strong as he and his co-publishers had expected. Forster and Wills had hardly written to him, and Wills complained of Forster’s interference and peremptoriness, which Dickens advised him to ignore. Forster complained of Wills’s “not consulting him enough.”

  When he went sight-seeing, Dickens managed to keep his anti-Catholicism muted in the background. Since he had last been in Italy, the clerical presence had receded. Italian nationalism had become stronger. In Naples, dining at the British Embassy, he enjoyed the story of a young Englishman who had “married … a bare-footed girl off the Beach, with whom he had previously fulfilled all matrimonial conditions except the ceremony. The better to do this, he had first turned Catholic.” Another Englishman “rowed away in the dead of night with another Capri virgin—who would have gone, with the greatest cheerfulness and without any opposition from her relations and friends, in the blaze of noon.” He visited St. Peter’s with Egg and Collins, to whom “the high altar sparkled with hundreds of fantastically disposed lights and the voices of the full choir, sounded faint and mystical far off.” But to the more pragmatic, anticlerical Dickens, the real music was in the contrast between the romance of classical ruins and the power of modernity. “The Colosseum in its magnificent old decay is as grand as ever—and, with the Electric Telegraph darting through one of its ruined arches like a sunbeam and piercing through its cruel old heart, is even grander.”9

  From Rome, they went to Siena and then Florence, happy to have had only three days of rain. On the road, they carried their own brandy, cloves, and tea. The triumvirate had no political differences, and they triumphed over small personal irritations, such as “Collins learnedly holding forth to Egg” about “the Fine arts” (when the subject came up, Dickens always pretended “to fall into a profound reverie” and he never went into a gallery with them), and Collins occasionally expounding “a code of morals, taken from modern French novels, which I instantly and with becoming gravity smash.” Dickens found tolerable the egotistical obsession of both friends with the moustaches they were growing in imitation of “the great Original.” In Venice, late in November, “in full dress and big sleeved great coat,” he was “rather considerably ashamed” by “Collins with incipient moustache, spectacles, slender legs, and extremely dirty dress gloves” and Egg “in a white hat, and a straggly mean little black beard.” They were conspicuously brought to their opera seats in the traditional ceremony in which those who have their own gondolas are escorted by their gondoliers, who lead the way “with an enormous lantern … through brilliantly lighted passages.” Dickens tried to sneak away, but could not. Though he even shaved his own small beard in the hope that they would follow his example, such contretemps did not really spoil their comradery. Nor did the intensely cold weather in Venice undermine their fun. “We live among pictures and palaces all day, and among operas, ballets, and cafes more than half the night.” To Collins, among the whirl of impressions, it seemed “seven months instead of seven weeks” that they had been away.10

  Their schedule had its pressures, though. Dickens had to be back in England by the tenth of December for family and Household Words business and to redeem a promise to read A Christmas Carol in Birmingham. From Venice, they went in freezing weather to Parma and then Turin, on their way to Paris, where he had arranged that Charley, his eldest son, coming from his business studies in Germany, would meet them. De la Rue, whom he r
elied on for travel and monetary arrangements, met them in Turin. His presence reminded him of how hard it was “to be so near to dear old Genoa without coming back; and, if the railroad had been finished, I think I certainly should have done so.” Something important to him still resided there. It was not only or so much Augusta de la Rue. It was a sense of himself that he needed both to expand and defend. He did so in an ostensibly loving but gratuitously aggressive letter to Catherine, his anger about an incident of nine years before sufficiently strong for it to stand as emblematic of other incidents and deeper currents. Invariably confident that he could see “the plain truth,” he reminded her, from Turin, that those aspects of his personality that made him different, “sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil,” were the same qualities that had “made you proud and honored in your married life, and given you station better than rank, and surrounded you with many enviable things.”

  More than anything else, “the intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me” distinguishes “me … from other men.” His earlier preoccupation with Augusta had been an exemplification of this monomaniacal intensity, the same intensity that had brought him from the blacking factory to Tavistock Place. Her jealousy, then, had been inappropriate, and, in fact, a slander against both de la Rues, who had behaved generously in not alluding to the slur that she had forced him to cast on their honor. In his recent visit, they had been graciously solicitous of her. “Now I am perfectly clear that your position beside these people is not a good one … not worthy of you at all. And … you have it in your power to set it right at once by writing her a note to say that you have heard from me, with interest, of her sufferings and her cheerfulness … and that if you should ever be thrown together again by any circumstances, you hope it will be for a friendly association without any sort of shadow upon it.… I do not ask you to do this, or want you to do this. I shall never ask whether you have done it or not, and shall never approach the subject from this hour,” for “it would be utterly valueless and contemptible if it were done through a grain of any other influence than that of your own heart.”11

  Beneath his anger was a view of himself as essentially an honorable human being, incapable of purposefully deceiving others. The possibility of self-deceit hardly crossed his mind. The energetic restlessness that was inseparable, he felt, from his creativity, was a desperate force for life, amidst all sorts of restrictions. Any attempt, whatever its motives, to regulate his expression of that energy in his relationships was an attempt to diminish his creativity. He resented being coerced into giving up friends because of Catherine’s banality and insecurity. That she had reason for the latter he utterly denied. That her awareness of her inferiority to her husband might have made her insecure and self-deprecatory, motivating her to dramatize her comparative incompetence while attacking him, apparently did not occur to him. Her jealousy of his intimacy with Augusta was an unacceptable limitation on his freedom to have friends and to fulfill his basic nature. And since 1845, “the skeleton in the closet” had come partly out of the closet. He had been accused of infidelities, so he later bitterly told Emile, with so many women that he deserved “respect” as an experienced man of the world. Increasingly unattractive to him, alternating between indolence and hysteria, Catherine seemed more and more like her mother in looks, in manner, and in speech. Dickens’ letter from Turin was interlined with anger about and rebellion against almost twenty years of a relationship that gave him fewer and fewer satisfactions, a marriage to an ordinary, frequently depressed, modestly intelligent woman whose limitations inevitably reminded him of the constraints that he had voluntarily assumed. In Italy, traveling with his bachelor friends, he saw the advantages of independence, and the misery of a union with an unsuitable partner, the absence of “the one friend and companion” he had “never made.”12

  BLEAK HOUSE, COMPLETED IMMEDIATELY BEFORE DICKENS’ DEPAR-ture for Italy, is visibly dark with overtones of both his personal dissatisfaction and his increasing pessimism about the condition of England. The reconciling dynamic of the novel is the interaction between the narrator’s passionate anger at poverty, corruption, and exploitation and the temperate, harmonizing goodness of the voice of the main character. For the first time, using a female first-person narrator, he created a dual narrative in which the voice of the author alternates with the voice of a character. These personae compliment and play off against one another. Drawing on the stereotypical realities of British Victorian culture, one voice is masculine, aggressively satirical, and prophetically explosive. The other is feminine, passive, innocent, loving, and infinitely gentle. The voices maintain their independence in a marriage of harmonizing opposites. They are Dickens’ version of the perfect couple. Esther Summerson even eventually marries a medical doctor, whose powers of gentle healing have that touch of the feminine that he saw in himself as mesmerist, “physician,” and novelist. “Most writers of fiction,” he told a contributor to Household Words, “write partly from their experience, and partly from their imagination.… I have had recourse to both sources.”13

  His absorption of personal experience into fiction had its conscious and unconscious dimensions. The former ranged from his modeling Inspector Bucket after the Scotland Yard detective who had provided him with the opportunity to write articles based on observation of police work to his projection of Georgina Hogarth onto the depiction of the idealized Esther Summerson. In creating the first detective hero, Dickens originated the genre of detective fiction. In his impressionistic depictions of London, which had become increasingly insidious, “one of the dragons” with which he was “perpetually fighting,” he expanded his preoccupation with the city in an age of dehumanization into the novel of the modern urban experience. Bringing together sound and sense, he transformed the Romantic use of landscape as an equivalent for inner states of consciousness into the psychological and the symbolic novel, and to the Romantic emphasis on weather and place he pointedly added institutions, like the Chancery Court, as symbolic representations of the inner lives of individuals 2nd the society. The biographical structure of Bleak House, though, rests on the emotional substructure of his preoccupation with living and dead parents, with abandonment and poverty, with the conflict between innate goodness and social degradation, and with the triumph of prophetic artistry over a chaotic world. Through fictional correlatives, he dramatizes many of the emotional conditions of his life. Like his own father, Esther’s fails to make his way out of poverty. Like his mother, Esther’s sacrifices her child to her own self-interest. As in his childhood he felt himself deserted, Esther is abandoned to the woeful ministrations of an evangelically demeaning false mother. Her motherlessness reflects his sense of his own, just as Lady Dedlock’s feelings of loss, guilt, and unnaturalness, which compel her to endanger her status and security, reflect his desire to bring mother and child together again after a lifetime of separation. By 1852, he had found some effective strategies for distancing himself from his parents, partly through the numerous rewritings of the story of his childhood. After his father’s death in 1851, he had inherited complete financial responsibility for his sixty-four-year-old mother, who had “a strong objection to being considered in the least old,” and regularly appeared at Tavistock House “on Christmas Day in a juvenile cap which takes an immense time in the putting on.”14 Ever in his eyes the irresponsible parent, the bad fairy of indifference and rejection had not changed.

  Within fiction, though, reconciliations were possible. With his deep attachment to his own two daughters, Dickens had little difficulty in creating for Esther in John Jarndyce a surrogate father, a man of rectitude, benevolence, and wisdom. Some of the warmth of the relationship between this “father” and his “ward” expresses his love for Mamie and Katie, but also his feelings about Georgina, who had come into his household a child and grown to womanhood there. For Dickens, emotionally and unconsciously, the line between daughter-sister and daughter-sister-wife was sufficiently blurred for there to be
significant overlap. John Jarndyce proposes marriage to Esther. A surrogate father can become a real husband. Esther is everything that Catherine Dickens was not, the guiding good spirit and genius of whatever household she invests with her presence. She is an angel of competence, the good fairy of self-sacrifice, the combined figure of daughter-sister-wife into which, partly to distance himself from Catherine, he had transformed Georgina. In a notebook that he soon began to keep as a source and reminder for ideas, he sketched a partly fictionalized version of his sister-in-law in her role as surrogate: “she sacrificed to children, and [was] sufficiently rewarded. From a child herself, always ‘the children’ (of somebody else) to engross her. And so it comes to pass that she never has a child herself—is never married—is always devoted ‘to the children’ … and dies quite happily.”15