Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  He was not really ashamed, though. And he had three balloons, the performances of The Lighthouse in June, the early stages of negotiations for purchasing Gad’s Hill Place, and the summer in Folkestone. Moving to 3 Albion Villas, on the cliff, near the church, with Collins as a companion, he expended “his superfluous vitality … in taking prodigious walks and climbing inaccessible places,” constantly smoking cigars and cigarettes. Thackeray, who came to dinner, seemed to Collins “pleasanter and quieter than … ever … before.” By late August, Dickens was hard at work, rising and falling “by turns into enthusiasm and depression.” The new story was “everywhere—heaving in the sea, flying with the clouds, blowing in the wind.” By the middle of October, when he arrived in Paris, eager to have as much head start as possible, he had finished the first three numbers. Early in November, he changed the title to “one which has a pleasanter sound in my ears, and is equally applicable to the same story, Little Dorrit.”10 Probably he did not want his readers to assume that the novel would be unrelievedly or even primarily satirical.

  He visited London unexpectedly for ten days, in “the vilest and most intolerable weather,” to help with the funeral of William Brown, Hannah’s husband, who had died in Montpellier while on holiday with his wife and Miss Coutts. With characteristic generosity, Dickens made all the arrangements. While there was a self-serving element, and he did not particularly like Hannah Brown, who “has many excellent qualities” but “would do anything conceivable or inconceivable, to make herself interesting to Miss Coutts,” he felt deeply and sincerely for the spinster philanthropist. In mid-December 1855, in freezing weather, he traveled from London to Manchester, Sheffield, and Peterborough to read for charity. It was “a grinding and snorting … perpetually on rail roads” week. On a brief, sad visit to Rockingham, where he felt “a chill and blank” at the reminder of the loss of Watson, he brought with him in his pocket the second number of his new novel, “the great start of my Little Dorrit herself.” Mary Boyle was there. He did not want to leave. The parting made him feel desolate. When he and Lavinia came in from looking at her husband’s grave, she asked him, he reported, “to go up in the gallery, which I had last seen in the days of our merry play.… She looked out of one window and I looked out of another, and for the life of me I could not decide in my own heart whether I should console or distress her by going and taking her hand, and saying something.… So I said nothing….” On the journey down to London, it began to snow. “At Peterboro’ … the lady in the refreshment-room was very hard upon me.… She gave me a cup of tea, as if I were a hyena and she my cruel keeper with a strong dislike to me. I mingled my tears with it, and had a petrified bun of enormous antiquity in miserable meekness.…”11

  The image of imprisonment appealed to him strongly these days. He felt trapped in a cell whose bars were made by personality and history. He struggled with his sense of being imprisoned in himself. The image resonated in his letters. While writing a brief autobiographical account, he felt “like a wild beast in a caravan describing himself in the keeper’s absence.” The image was inseparable from shifting and uncertain self-portraiture. He did not always know what kind of beast he was. He often did not recognize himself in the mirror that hung in the prison. In responding to another formal request to furnish biographical information, he was candidly evasive. The first reason why he would not is “that I do not desire to identify myself with such memoirs during my lifetime; the second is, that I may probably leave my own record of my life for the satisfaction of my children.”

  He had a difficult time, though, describing himself. He had “aged somewhat,” adding a moustache and scanty medium-length beard. The outer appearance was unmistakably solid, a slim well-anchored man of five feet nine, with a complexion to which weather had added deep wrinkles, with long thinning brown hair and a receding hairline, who gave the impression of being frequently in motion with sparks of energy and cheerfulness. Instinctively, he believed that a moving target was hard to hit. People noticed that he appeared always to be about to be someplace else. To many admirers, like Marcus Stone, even his physical appearance was inspirational, “his body light and spare, his hands somewhat large but fine in form.… His eyes, dark green grey hazel, were of unforgettable beauty. A splendid frankness and honesty shone out of them, such a keen perception and observation and such rare powers of unconscious expression…. His nose well formed with the nostrils … sensitive and mobile. A well cut mouth … his face … strongly lined” and weather-beaten. The external image also had the moral glow that the world sometimes invests in genius and success. “Take from his writings,” a reverential foreign visitor remarked, “the absolutely perfect, the warm feelings, indeed, everything that is good and noble; make from it a man, and you will have the true picture of Charles Dickens.”12

  His awareness of his own lack of self-recognition was heightened when he agreed to have his portrait painted by a well-known Parisian artist, Ary Scheffer, who began to “peg away” at him in November 1855. He rushed every day from his desk to Scheffer’s studio “with the monotonous regularity of a pendulum swing,” fulfilling his promise with suppressed but increasing irritation. By the time each sitting was over, there was no daylight left. He missed his afternoon walks, and “to have to sit, sit, sit, with Little Dorrit on [his] mind,” and the new Christmas story also, was sheer torture. Worst of all, though, he did “not discern the slightest resemblance” to himself in the painting. By late January 1856, “the nightmare portrait” was almost finished. With “a good eye for pictures,” Collins thought it well done about the eyes particularly, “a wonderful portrait.” Dickens politely granted that it had great merit. But if the portrait were shown to him without his knowing who it intended to represent he doubted that he would recognize himself to be the original. Of course, it “is always possible that I may know other people’s faces pretty well, without knowing my own.” He was startled that others thought it an excellent likeness, “and yet I don’t see myself. So I come to the conclusion that I never do see myself.”13

  Later, when it was shown in London, he took belated satisfaction in the opinion of his artist friends “that it wants something … that it has something disappointing in it.” Apparently, he did not ask himself whether the blandness of Scheffer’s portrait reflected the artist’s unwillingness to see and to paint his subject’s inner turmoil or whether it effectively embodied his own unwillingness to let Scheffer see who and what he really was. Both artist and subject ostensibly believed such clear vision possible. Dickens was, of course, different things to different people. In the portraits and photographs of him that had begun to circulate widely by the late 1840s, he preferred, as did his public, a simplified version of the view of himself that a superficial reading of his novels suggested. By the mid-1850s, he was ready for something more, of the sort that his novels increasingly implied, both in his portraits and in his life. But that something more contained tensions and shifting perspectives of feeling and self-definition that traditional portraiture could rarely represent. He did not see himself in Scheffer’s portrait because the self that he was increasingly feeling was not there. Quoting his “friend the Boots” in his recent Christmas story, he commented sadly about himself to Mary Boyle, that “when you come to think what a game you’ve been up to ever since you was in your cradle, and what a poor sort of chap you are, and how it’s always yesterday with you or else to-morrow, and never today, that’s where it is.”14

  WHEN THE FIRST NUMBER OF LITTLE DORRIT WAS PUBLISHED ON December 1, 1855, Dickens had three or four in reserve, mostly written through the late summer and autumn. When the last was published on June 1,1857, he had been for some time writing to the moment. By late spring 1856, he was only one to two numbers ahead, though the pressure to keep ahead—he was busier than ever with Household Words and soon with new theatricals—did not obscure his enjoyment of the challenge or undermine his self-confidence. In Paris, in early January 1856, he read the second number to an appreciative au
dience of personal guests. Praise poured in from friends. The reviews, though, were mixed, with strong opposition from those who felt that he should stick to comedy and domestic drama. He felt no such thing, confident for the moment that his political satire would have some practical effect. “There is a dash in No: 3 that will flutter the doors in the House of Commons lobby, I flatter myself!” The public appreciation, though, tended to be less for the satire than for the sentiment. From the beginning, it was “an immense success” commercially, with thirty-five thousand copies of the second number sold on New Year’s Day, the first soon rising to forty thousand, and then every number hovering at that level thereafter. By May, with number six being snatched from the bookstands, Little Dorrit had so far “beaten all its predecessors, in circulation.”15

  The strain of sitting tediously for Scheffer while still in the early stages, with crucial narrative decisions to be made, caused him to feel desperate. His pace through Little Dorrit revealed his usual writing rhythms, periods of uncertainty, depression, and intense restlessness, for which he applied his usual remedies: complaints, long walks, then a return to his desk, “prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out of window, tearing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up, going out, coming in, a Monster to my family, a dread Phaenomenon to myself.” Fortunately, he had companions with whom to find relief in Paris entertainments when he felt his head stinging “with the visions of the book.” He found an apartment for Collins on the same street. Macready, Lemon, and James White visited. The “strange places” of Paris nightlife attracted his voyeuristic compulsions. He needed to observe people of all classes, of all types, at play and at work. Late one night he paid three francs to go into a dance hall, where dance partners and prostitutes were for hire. “Some pretty faces, but all of two classes—wicked and coldly calculating, or haggard and wretched in their worn beauty.” He was attracted to “a woman of thirty or so, in an Indian shawl … handsome, regardless, brooding, and yet with some nobler qualities in her forehead. I mean to walk about tonight and look for her. I didn’t speak to her there, but I have a fancy that I should like to know more about her.” By day, the weather alternated between torrents of rain and snow, muddy thaw, and sharp, clear coldness, “as bright as Italy … these Elysian Fields crowded with carriages, riders, and foot passengers. All the fountains were playing, all the Heavens shining.” Paris “went at quick march down the avenue, in a sort of hilarious dance.”16

  During the short winter days, he looked ahead to the summer in Boulogne and “the long summer mornings” in which to write, though Paris social life had its attractions and diversions. They included meeting “the illustrious” George Sand, “chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed,” with “nothing of the bluestocking about her,” though assertively self-confident in all her opinions. When Collins came in February 1856, he found Dickens waiting for him at the flat that he had acquired for him, “like a cottage in a ballet.” Dickens was “all kindness and cordiality, with a supper for me at his house.” As always, Collins’ company was a tonic, energizing Dickens to think that they might do a series together for Household Words on the most interesting sites of Paris. Dickens spent hours encouraging him with suggestions when, at the beginning of April, Collins read to him an outline of the plot of his new novel, The Diary of Anne Rodway. Between them they conceived “a mighty original notion,” which was Dickens’”in the beginning,” for another play that they might write together and then put on at Tavistock House in January l857.

  Lemon came with two of his daughters, playmates for the Dickens children. The two girls stayed on for a short time after their father’s visit. Dickens wrung a promise from a reluctant acquaintance to accompany them later to London on the grounds that “they will cause … no trouble, as they are too young to require any gallantry.” When Macready came in April, he stayed with the Dickenses, who had added some additional rooms from a vacant apartment next door. With Macready, Dickens probably visited the Brownings, Macready’s friends rather than his. They were a prominent part of the English colony in Paris, some members of which he entertained at dinner parties.17 As a guest, he was in heavy demand. The demands, though, were not nearly as insistent or as undeniable as they would have been in London.

  As Little Dorrit progressed, Dickens felt that he was “writing [his] head off—or rather, round and round like a Harlequin’s.” He was “so busy … that my head simmers—occasionally approaches boiling point.” Sometimes, while writing letters late in the day, he joked seriously that he was not sure that he could see the paper in front of him. Some of this perceptual dislocation was the result of physical exhaustion. Probably it was also emotional fragmentation, different parts of himself at war with one another, the dizziness of both the outer and the inner whirl. When he discussed Little Dorrit with friends, he focused on its satirical dramatization of administrative incompetence embodied in the “Circumlocution Office,” the England of “how not to do it.” The energy of the novel, though, was intensely personal, the expandable dark emanations of his personal life, the “game you’ve been up to ever since you was in your cradle.…”

  There is intense deflected self-portraiture in Little Dorrit. For the first time since Pickwick Papers, he returned to a debtors’ prison for his setting. Though no longer functioning as a prison, it had retained its hold on his imagination. For years he had taken detours to avoid the site. In the depiction of William Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea, John Dickens is a living presence. The image of Dickens’ recently deceased father rose in the author’s imagination as if his memory were stronger than the reality of his death. The nightmare father, though, had been absorbed into the harmlessness of Mr. Micawber. Despite William Dorrit’s pride and blindness, his daughter’s love is unshakable. In her devotion to her father and her motherlessness, the main character embodies one of Dickens’ earliest fantasies. In Amy Dorrit, he combines his various favorite female archetypes, the daughter who loves her father beyond any possibility of betrayal, the “little” woman whose moral sentiments are intuitive, and the sister to some chosen man to whom she will also become a wife. Mary and Georgina are his touchstones. In Amy Dorrit, he provides the fictional model for the “one friend and companion I have never made.”18 Inverting the realities of his childhood, wealth becomes a prison, the Marshalsea becomes a place where freedom, gained only through self-discovery, is possible, and the world of experience provides the context in which honesty, moral rectitude, and hard work determine self-worth.

  In Arthur Clennam, Dickens presents an autobiographical hero who is badly mothered with a vengeance, for whom a childhood of motherlessness would have been a blessing. Exiled as a child to China with his businessman father, somber and joyless in his early middle age, Clennam returns to England to confront his mother, his vague sense of a family history of wrongs, even misdeeds, compounded by a dour Calvinism, and his displaced and damaged sense of self. For Clennam, England is a grim, gray place. London is a joyless city, where the natural moral sentiments have been distorted and repressed by social pressures. Except for Little Dorrit and Daniel Doyce, the engineer who becomes his friend and paternal model, England luxuriates in materialism, hypocrisy, and incompetence. False patriarchs abound. Like Dickens, he has had the misfortune of a mother who powerfully determines much of his unhappy emotional life. Sending him to China at an early age, part of her revenge on her adulterous husband, she provides him with not even the illusion of nurturing.

  In the portrait of Mrs. Clennam, Dickens created the most abysmal and frightening variation on the bad mothers of his fiction. By the mid-1850s, his own mother, Elizabeth Dickens, had been exiled almost beyond the pale. He continued to support her modestly. She remained in London apparently, perhaps at Keppel Street, throughout the decade, until her death in 1863. He did see her occasionally. There is some distant fluttering of the family wings that brings her to Letitia, that has her other children aware of her
. As far as his letters are concerned, though, she seems not to exist. She continues until her death to make grim fictional appearances, particularly in Great Expectations. In the brutal device of Mrs. Clennam’s vengeance and viciousness, “Do Not Forget,” there is an inverted representation of Dickens’ own inability to forget what he felt his mother had done to him. No doubt Elizabeth Dickens had long ago forgotten, or more likely had never known. In the end, Mrs. Clennam turns out not to be Arthur Clennam’s mother at all. That in the unraveling of the plot she eventually feels remorse for her crimes and dies in the collapse of a house that embodies her inner corrosion aptly represents the complicated anger toward his mother that Dickens never relinquished. Apparently it was a fertile wound that still sustained him.

  It was a wound that also intensified his marital problems, and in the depiction of the various women of Little Dorrit he wrote very close to the bone of his present situation with some anticipation of what was to come. With humorous harshness, he exaggerated Maria Beadnell into Flora Finching, the portrait “extraordinarily droll” to the writer but undoubtedly painful to the subject. Like some of his literary victims, she may have chosen not to see herself in her fictional counterpart. To Dickens, such exaggerations were imaginative reworkings essential to his creativity. He chose not to see them as damaging to the real-life models. If Maria had confronted him with the identification, he would have felt surprised, misunderstood, and defensively apologetic, as with Leigh Hunt. That the obese, incompetent, garrulous, persistently tedious Flora also suggests his view of his wife probably escaped his conscious attention. “We have all had our Floras (mine is living, and extremely fat),” he told a friend. But he was also unhappily, even bitterly, preoccupied with the realization that he was stuck with his Flora forevermore.19