by Fred Kaplan
CHAPTER TEN
Superfluous Fierceness
(1855–1857)
IN PARIS AGAIN IN THE WINTER OF 1856, DICKENS SAT AT HIS DESK on New Year’s Day in a large apartment of many small rooms, with a wonderful view of the “whole panorama” beneath his front windows on the Champs-Élysées. The snow fell heavily around him. The streets were clogged with slush and mud. On Christmas Day, he had had “seven sons in the banquet-hall of this apartment—which would not make a very large warm bath.” After dinner, everyone played a game of forfeits, and he brewed “a famous glass of Punch” for his family and friends. His sense of humor helped him both to dislocate and to relocate himself. Restless, he had moved to Paris in October 1855, to stay until the next summer. Housing was scarce, rentals expensive. He had “the wildest and most absurd adventures trying to get us established under a roof,” including a sleepless night in which the dirtiness of the apartment seemed almost threateningly alive. “Sallow, unbrushed, unshorn, awful, stalk[ed] the Inimitable through” 49 Champs-Élysées until it was “thoroughly purified.… The cleaning that was necessary to make” the rooms “habitable, will take its place in the mind of posterity, among the wildest fictions known to mankind.”1
In his New Year’s retrospective, he looked back on a difficult period. Having at the beginning of 1855 felt again the anguish of his youthful affair with Maria Beadnell, he found that dissatisfactions that had been repressed or partly exorcised suddenly became vividly revitalized. Forster tried to calm him, pointing out disproportions and exaggerations. But the power of the episode had not diminished. His friend’s cautionary deflations seemed not only irrelevant but incomprehensible. “I don’t quite apprehend,” he told him that December, “what you mean by my over-rating the strength of my feeling of five-and-twenty years ago.… Only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is.… You are wrong, because nothing can exaggerate that.” He could not help “going wandering away over the ashes of all that youth and hope in the wildest manner.” The ashes of the past, though, were being stoked by the fires of the present. He had little to no interest in Maria or the past except insofar as he was being driven by a “desperate intensity” now. Aspects of his life angered and depressed him, particularly what he felt was his lovelessly perfunctory relationship with Catherine. When the painter John Everett Millais married that year—Collins had just introduced Dickens to him—Wilkie could not resist jesting about the wedding night, remarking that “it is such a dreadfully serious thing afterwards that one wants to joke about it as long as one can.”2 Dickens, though, was beyond any kind of joke about his.
He was also disturbed throughout 1855 by the corrupt, inefficient administration of the Crimean War. The conflict seemed justifiable; its aims sensible. “Russia must be stopped.” The “future peace of the world” depended upon that.3 But if his past and his domestic life galled him into bitter complaint and frequent restlessness, the public world of British politics infuriated him. After fury came depression. Government and politics had none of the tidiness of his desk and mind. Accounts of mismanagement on the home front and abroad deeply offended him. Reports of insufficient clothing and supplies, of medical neglect and stupidity, of inflexible narrow-mindedness on the field and in the camp prompted unsuccessful, self-justifying efforts by the administration to ameliorate and to obfuscate. Routine and patronage had atrophied the vital organs of government. Though an increasingly reluctant, often pessimistic, reformer, Dickens’ lifelong instinct to be a strong voice for change asserted itself. He wrote editorials for Household Words, increasingly anathematizing administrative and policy failures in the conduct of the war, particularly on the home front. A new novel began to germinate, one of whose trumpet themes would be exposure of the bureaucracy, a satirical slash at the Britain that had become a country specializing in “how not to get it done.” For the half year or so of its useful life he vigorously supported his friend Austen Henry Layard’s Administrative Reform Association.
An impressive, charismatic man, Layard invested much of his energy in a bold effort to rally public opinion at a time of national crisis to pressure Parliament into substantial governmental reform, particularly of the army. Despite early training in the law and a diplomatic career, he had essentially the temperament of an adventurer, an explorer, a traveler. In his desert years in the Middle East, as anthropologist and archaeologist, he had relied on instinct, courage, force of personality, and dramatic self-presentation. His strong point was dominance, not persuasion. After his triumph at Nineveh, he turned to politics, attacking the encrustations of governmental atrophy with the same willfulness with which he had uncovered Babylonian antiquities. His political career was brief, stormy, and unsuccessful. From 1855 to 1857 he served as the Liberal member for Aylesbury, then from 1860 to 1869 for Southwark, during five years of which he was undersecretary for foreign affairs. Dickens supported him throughout, and valued his friendship. He liked and admired Layard. They had climbed Mount Vesuvius together in 1853.
In April 1855, after seeing him at Miss Coutts’s, Dickens volunteered to put all his and his friends’ resources behind the Administrative Reform Association. It seemed a duty, a national crusade in which the media resources at his command could be invaluable. The people needed to be roused. Without reform, revolution was inevitable. To the accusation that he and Layard were creating class conflict, Dickens responded that the classes were already in opposition. The aristocratic class was responsible for the division. He assured the frightened Miss Coutts, who thought him impetuous, that he was a reformer because he wanted “to interpose something between … the people … and their wrath. For this reason solely, I am a Reformer heart and soul. I have nothing to gain—everything to lose (for public quiet is my bread)—but I am in desperate earnest, because I know it is a desperate case.” For all that, though, he was a cautious national reformer, eager to persuade rather than coerce. He did not want to alienate the middle class, without whose support he thought reform impossible. And he had learned to temper his private anger with due attention to public decorum and the realities that determined success in public matters. His profession and his personal history had made him more communal, more socialized, and more pragmatic than Layard. He had had long training in the advantages of strategy and flattery. When, in May 1855, the brusque Layard, speaking with his heart, made a serious tactical mistake in an important speech, he defended him. “For Heaven’s sake, be careful.… The most useful man in the house” might undermine his own usefulness.4
In late June, Dickens spoke to a large meeting of the Administrative Reform Association at Drury Lane Theatre in support of Layard’s motion in Parliament that “this House views with deep and increasing concern the state of the nation, and … that … merit and efficiency have been sacrificed in public appointments, to party and family influences, and to a blind adherence to routine.” He did not think, he assured Miss Coutts, he would “do anybody any harm—but I feel a little vicious against Lord Palmerston.” The association did not set “class against class.… No, it finds class set against class, and seeks to reconcile them.” The speech was a stirring, witty, bravura performance. At a dinner party at Lord John Russell’s, Dickens “gave them a little bit of truth” about the oppressive government-supported Sunday legislation, restricting public entertainment and closing public places on Sunday, “that was like bringing a Sebastopol battery among the polite company.”5
Heavy cannon, though, could be ineffective. Layard’s thundering speeches had little practical result. His parliamentary resolution was overwhelmingly defeated. For Dickens, with a novelist’s concern for origins and realities, frustrated in his political efforts and in the early stages of conceiving a new novel, the question of who was at fault took on increased importance. It occurred to him that perhaps because it was everybody’s fault it was also ironically nobody’s fault.
Dickens took on another reform challenge in the spring of 1855. Unable to resist, his anger stirred by inefficiency and stu
pidity, he urged the Royal Literary Fund to reject its own constitution and obtain a new charter that would allow it more flexibility. The constitution invested all authority in a general committee dominated by nonliterary dignitaries primarily interested in social privilege. Badly constructed, “utterly defective and rotten,” the constitution permitted neither the committee nor the membership to amend it. To Dickens the fund seemed a perverse bureaucratic nightmare expensively administered by conservative incompetents (none of whom were his personal friends) whose Tory deference to rank and privilege he detested. Their disinclination to adapt its charitable activities to contemporary conditions seemed emblematic of what was wrong with Britain as a whole. For years he had been advocating the “dignity of literature.” That the most prominent organization in his profession was unprofessional and unwittingly self-demeaning infuriated him. In 1854, in protest, he resigned from the general committee. Entering into an alliance with Forster and Charles Dilke, the elderly editor of the Athenaeum who had been his father’s colleague in the navy pay office and who had probably seen him at the blacking factory, he planned to speak, to lobby, and to pressure the committee to make changes.
In March 1855, he began the first of four annual efforts at the general meetings of the fund to defeat the reactionaries. Appointed chair of a special committee to make recommendations to the membership, he proposed that the fund expand its activities. It should be no longer only a charitable fund for indigent authors but also a literary society with a library, lectures, and distinguished writers from all countries as associate members. Fighting on his own turf, with resources of influence and prestige, he thought that he would succeed. Once the stupidity and absurdity of the whole arrangement were exposed the rotten structure would fall like a flimsy house of cards. Rather than admit that they had been wrong, he imagined that the conservative members of the committee would resign. They could not survive, he thought, his withering satire and their public exposure. “I wish you could have seen [me],” he boasted to Collins, “beleaguer the Literary Fund. They got so bothered and bewildered that I expected to see them fade away under the table; and the outsiders laughed so irreverently whenever I poked up the chairman that it was quite a facetious business. Virtually, I consider the thing done.… I am not about to let go, and the effect has far and far exceeded my expectations already.”6
His optimism was more than premature. It was unwarranted, a combination of naïveté and arrogance. Dilke, who was thoroughly disliked, had made some of the same proposals years before. That there were so many recommendations from the special committee offended the conservative majority, who were averse on principle to any change at all. At a special general meeting in June, the recommendations, even those to provide loans and pensions, were defeated soundly. The widespread opinion was that Dickens and his friends were “the mouthpiece of a sort of conspiracy … and the arguments of the malcontents, though possessing some truth … have proved nevertheless injurious to the cause, from the captious spirit in which they have been brought forward.” By the next general meeting it was clear that the thing would never be done. Dickens’ forceful, witty speech did not help. Conservative gentlemen found his and Forster’s styles distasteful. Class values were more important than substantive issues in determining the outcome. Not even a resolution to examine the administration of disbursements, which all agreed could be improved, succeeded, primarily because its advocacy had become contaminated by general hostility to the reformers, who were insufficiently deferential to God, queen (in this case, Prince Albert), and country. Their next effort, in March 1857, was rewarded with charges of “bad taste.” With unwarranted bravado, Dickens boasted that he was “resolved to reform it or ruin it—one or the other.”
In March 1858, with a final flourish of opposition, the reformers attempted to rally public opinion by publishing The Case of the Reformers in the Literary Club, a pamphlet most of which he wrote. It did no good. The fund rejected even the motion that a subcommittee be created to inquire into the administration of the budget. His old enemy Richard Bentley, the “Burlington Street Brigand” of the early 1840s, with whom he had recently become cordial again, took great pleasure in supporting conservative principle. “Ah! You should see the virtuous grey hairs of Bentley … voting on their conservative side, and going direct to Heaven in their company. It’s like the apotheosis of an Evangelical (and drunken) butler.” The next year, the fund rejected Forster’s offer of his manuscripts, books, and an endowment of ten thousand pounds if it would agree to some minor changes in the constitution. It seemed too much like a bribe. Despite his vow of ceaseless dissent from within, Dickens never publicly addressed a Literary Fund meeting again.7
THE MOVE TO PARIS IN OCTOBER 1855 TOOK SOME OF ITS IMPETUS from the good time that he had had there with Collins the previous February. Unlike London, and despite the freezingcold weather, Paris amused “itself as gaily as ever, and only talks occasionally on the miserable subject of the war in the East.” With “motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older growth threatening to close in upon [him],” Dickens felt in February 1855 that Paris was the perfect holiday city, Collins the perfect companion. Maria Beadnell had been much on his mind, and the cluster of feelings associated with domestic dissatisfaction, starting a new novel, reactionary forces in London, and the grimness of the war created a combination of tiredness and restlessness, a desire for amusement and escape. In a “gorgeously-furnished” apartment in the elegant Hotel Meurice, miraculously warm despite the “snow and ice,” he and Collins had lived comfortably like a compatible odd couple. Dickens felt “like an elderly gentleman … in a negative state of virtue and respectability.” Temporarily invalided, Collins remained “perfectly cheerful under the stoppage of his wine and other afflictions.” Each day Dickens wrote until two, then walked all over Paris. Every evening they dined in a different restaurant and went “sometimes to two theatres, sometimes to three.” At midnight, he drank lemonade with rum before a bright fire.8
The previous month Dickens had begun to jot down ideas for stories and character sketches and lists of titles and names for characters in a small notebook, titled “Memoranda.” It became a constant companion, with spare but pregnant entries, the twenty-five pages of notes, about half of which were made between January and May 1855, providing the basis for most of the novels and stories he was to write thereafter. He had never before kept a working notebook. He had never been so imaginatively fertile in such a brief time. Despite, or perhaps helped by, the inner turmoil, the disappointments, and his sense of impending change, his orderly pattern of anticipating one novel at a time gave way to explosive fragments of alternate possibility, which might or might not be connected, which might or might not become literary realities. Under pressure, the departure manifested his recognition both of the necessity, on the one hand, to conserve his creative energy and plan for the future, and, on the other, to allow himself the spontaneity of comparatively unstructured creativity, the free flow of an imaginative idea whose initial nondevelopment made the next idea possible. With him in Paris, or on his desk at home, or in his pocket while walking and reading outdoors, the notebook unified his restlessness and his creativity.
After returning from his February 1855 holiday, he had begun “writing and planning and making notes [for his new novel] over an immense number of little bits of paper.” Household Words continued to prosper, with the help of Wills and Morley, though not without his constant attention. Mrs. Gaskell finally stipulated that her proofs were not to be altered “even by Mr. Dickens,” after he had gone over them “with great pains” and “taken out the stiflings—hard-plungings, and other convulsions … her weakenings and damagings of her own effects.” As an editor, he had a sure hand, and he always felt that he knew better. But he could be tactful. “I do not like to use my pen upon a paper,” he told Morley, encouraging him to revise his essay, “that is so feelingly done from the heart.” Through the spring and summer he continued his activities at Urania Cottage
. And he helped Miss Coutts, who had supported Charley in Germany and assisted him to employment at Baring Brothers, with her private charities. One case particularly interested him, that of Frederick Maynard and his sister Caroline Thompson, who had become a prostitute in order to support her child. Fascinated by the loving closeness between the respectable brother and his prostitute sister, he interviewed both of them numbers of times. “Rather small, and young-looking … pretty, and gentle,” she elicited from him the feeling that “there can never have been much evil in her, apart from the early circumstances that directed her steps the wrong way.… I cannot get the picture of her out of my head.” To his novelistic imagination, Maynard’s “undiminished admiration” and love for his sister “is a romance at once so astonishing and yet so intelligible as I never had the boldness to think of.”9 In late March, he read A Christmas Carol in Ashford.
Soon he was in a “wandering-unsettled-restless uncontrollable state of being about to begin a new book.… I sit down to work, do nothing, get up and walk a dozen miles, come back and sit down again next day, again do nothing and get up, go down a Railroad, find a place where I resolve to stay for a month, come home next morning, go strolling about for hours and hours, reject all engagements to have my time to myself, get tired of myself and yet can’t come out of myself to be pleasant to anybody else, and go on turning upon the same wheel round and round and over and over again until it may begin to roll me towards my end.” In early May 1855, he felt “restlessness worse and worse. Don’t at all know what to do with myself. Wish I had a Balloon.” He did have, though, what he thought a good title for his novel. It would be called, with an ironic ring, “Nobody’s Fault.” By late May he had begun writing “the first chapter of a new long twenty number Green book” to begin publication in November. That did not prevent him from “walking about the country by day—prowling about in the strangest places in London by night,” and tearing out his hair, which, he joked seriously, he could not “afford to do.” Beginning was always the most difficult part. “I say to myself sometimes when I am a little impatient, ‘how can you be such an erratic, wayward, unsettled, capricious, incomprehensible Beast? I am ashamed of you!”