Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

The vision was lifelong; the catalyst was recent. He had heard of Sir John Franklin and his expedition to discover a northwest passage through the Arctic before the publication, in October 1854, of Dr. John Rae’s report on the fate of Franklin’s latest effort. An experienced officer who had fought at Trafalgar, Franklin’s determination to find the passage had culminated in a major expedition that had left England in May 1845 and was last heard of in July. The searches that had begun in 1848 were unsuccessful. The reward of ten thousand pounds offered by the government remained unclaimed until Rae, an officer in the Hudson Bay Company, reported that he had sufficient testimony from Eskimo witnesses and from physical remains of the party to prove that Franklin and his men were not only dead but that they had prolonged their lives by cannibalism. The image of Thyestes’ feast shocked the Victorians. It had strong resonances for Dickens. Dismemberment and cannibalism had been powerful images in his life from childhood on and had been direct and indirect motifs in his fiction, the self feeding on itself, the world broken into animistic fragments, the society engorging the individual.

  Though fascinated by Rae’s report, Dickens’ immediate response was denial. The report was “hasty … in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions.” That seemed inconceivable. Those who had been the beneficiaries of European values could not do such a thing even under duress, and their cultural inhibitions were an expression of the positive virtues that derive not from external codes but from the very nature of human nature itself. Human beings were born with instinctive moral sentiments inseparable from their ability to feel. The notion that the Arctic wastes had been so cold as to freeze the capability of someone like Franklin to feel and express his moral sentiments was unacceptable. Attracted in his fiction to embodiments of evil, to destroyers and engorgers, Dickens often located the sources of such depravity in social pressures and deformation. Other times he admitted the insufficiency of such an explanation. He preferred, though, to explain human nature in the terms of eighteenth-century moral philosophy: Human beings are innately good; their goodness resides in their natural moral sentiments. We are at our best when we allow those sentiments spontaneous and full expression through intense feeling, through “sacred tears.”29

  Channeling his denial into semirational response, he examined “a wilderness of books” to show “that the probabilities are all against poor Franklin’s people having dreamed of eating the bodies of their companions.” The evidence, he claimed, did not support the charge. Eskimo witnesses were inherently unreliable, both because they were “savages” and because they shared the universal tendency among witnesses to tell investigators what they wanted to hear. If Franklin had endured trial by ice on previous expeditions, would it not be inconsistent with his demonstrated heroism for him to succumb in this instance? In two articles that Dickens wrote on “The Lost Arctic Voyagers” (published in Household Words in December 1854), he argued that no British gentleman could do what Franklin was now accused of doing. His arguments were “calculated to soothe the minds” of Franklin’s friends, particularly the mind of his wife, with whom he began an acquaintance, as well as his own. When he read a memoir written by one of Franklin’s intimates, he saw a mirror image of his own most highly valued relationships. The “manly friendship, and love of Franklin” that it expressed seemed to him “one of the noblest things I ever knew in my life. It makes one’s heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy.”30 When he conceived a “mighty original notion” for a new play in the spring of 1856 it was the Franklin expedition on which it was to be loosely based, an expression of his commitment to the values expressed in the articles he had written in 1854.

  There was also another level of interest for him in the new play. It would allow him to tackle directly some of the challenges of defining art and expressiveness that had been disturbing him in recent years. It could embody a response to the criticism that the main male characters of his novels were simplistically one-dimensional, that they were not “real” flesh-and-blood men with a complexity of moral and material life, especially in comparison to the protagonists of European novels by Balzac and George Sand. The tendency on the Continent to create realistic literary characterizations had been resisted in England with the tenacity of both a moderately Puritan culture and of a community of artists who still emphasized the idealistic element in art. Dickens was among the resisters, though he was sometimes ambivalent. When John Everett Millais depicted an ordinary boy in a commonplace carpenter’s shop as Jesus, he felt sufficiently offended to denounce the conception as indecent, even blasphemous.31 Some things, he felt, should not be subject to art’s increasing assimilation of the ideal into the ordinary. Despite his public denunciation, though, Dickens’ notion of the ideal was nontheological, and he shared with Millais, whom he personally liked, Carlyle’s notion of natural supernaturalism, of finding the sacred in everyday life. He needed to distinguish between a realism that enhanced the ideal and a realism that devalued hope, beauty, art, and human nature.

  With Collins as a working partner, Dickens had an additional reminder of the complications of literary realism. Even Collins, with his penchant for direct statements about daily life, took into account Victorian conventions about what could be said and depicted in literature and what could not. Both detested hypocrisy of the sort exemplified by Martin Chuzzlewit’s Pecksniff, who was based on the editor and journalist Samuel Carter Hall. When Dickens read, in July 1856, an account of a speech that Hall had given, he denounced “the snivelling insolence of it, the concentrated essence of snobbery in it, the dirty Pecksniffianity that pervaded it, and the Philoprogullododgetiveness wherein it was steeped.” Pecksniff soon was to be expanded into Podsnap, an embodiment of self-serving British hypocrisy on moral and sexual matters, the narrow-minded closing down of avenues of experience and life. But both writers had their eyes fixed firmly on just how far they could push the British public without damaging their sales.

  Generally the more artistically daring of the two, Dickens was radically conservative in his combination of realistic psychological portraiture and moral idealism. To the realists, though, even his sharp psychological portraiture lacked a fullness of dimension that would make the depiction true to life. Clennam was an instance at hand, as Little Dorrit progressed. Despite his complications of history and character, Clennam embodies conventional decency, and never struggles with the anger, violence, vengefulness, sexual fulfillment, even self-serving irrationality of the sort that such a man might naturally be expected to feel. Having gone as far as he thought it sound to go, Dickens felt the frustration of his situation as a Victorian writer. If “the hero of an English book is always uninteresting—too good—not natural, etc.… what a shining imposter you,” the English critic, “must think yourself and what an ass you must think me, when you suppose that by putting a brazen face upon it you can blot out of my knowledge the fact that this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be necessarily unnatural)… must be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and confusions inseparable from the making and unmaking of all men!”32 The hero of the new play was to be both the kind of character he had heretofore not been able to depict and a partial self-portrait.

  By mid-September 1856, they had a draft of The Frozen Deep. Loosely based on, though actually only alluding to, the Franklin expedition, it contained no references to cannibalism. The moral issues were to be dramatized without the unpleasantness of dealing with the charge directly. In April, after Janet Wills had agreed to play the part, they had decided that the first act, which would take place in Devonshire, would have as its major effect the clairvoyant “second sight” of an old Scotch nurse (Mrs. Wills) who would tell Clara Burnham, Frank Aldersley’s fiancée, that she saw in a vision disasters occurring to an Arctic expedition, one of whose members was Frank. Clara, played by Mamie, and her friend L
ucy Crayford, played by Georgina, accompanied by Nurse Esther, set out toward Newfoundland to learn what they can. The second act, set in the Arctic, and the third, set in Newfoundland, were refined in September and October, the dramatic excitement inhering in the conflict between Richard Wardour, Clara’s rejected suitor and also a member of the expedition, and Frank, who is ignorant of Wardour’s love for his fiancée.

  The “admirable idea” that became the crux of the drama was that Wardour, mad partly with jealousy, partly with despair, and partly with unextinguished hope, should struggle against his desire to murder Frank. For much of the third act his fellow crew members and the audience suspect that that is precisely what he has done. Wardour was Dickens’ role. Collins played Frank. Mark Lemon played his genial alter ego, Lieutenant Crayford, Lucy’s brother. At the climax, Wardour produces a completely safe and unharmed Frank Aldersley, whom he has valiantly rescued, carrying him across “the frozen deep” at the cost of his own life. In his final moments, he embraces Frank and has his last look at Clara. “My sister, Clara!—Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die!”33 Overcoming his initial ambivalence, Wardour demonstrates his inherent moral sentiments, his nobility of character, and his heroic virtue.

  Tentative rehearsals began in September. The casting was completed, with Charley, Katie, Alfred Dickens, Edward Pigott, Augustus Egg, Helen and Edward Hogarth (Georgina’s younger sister and brother), and Frederick Evans, Dickens’ publisher, in minor roles. At the beginning of October, both authors agreed to small changes, Dickens tactfully acknowledging Collins’ priority. Soon, in solemn council with Lemon, Dickens “abandoned the idea of doing a new farce.” As a companion piece, they would do one of their old standbys, Animal Magnetism, since The Frozen Deep “is so difficult and will give us all so much to do.” In mid-October, they “read the new play” to the full cast for the first time. In the schoolroom, “the clink of hammers [gave] awful note of preparation.” Acting as his own architect, he had redesigned it. The stage, now thirty feet long, was constructed opposite to where it had been previously, and the bay window at that end had become the entrance and exit to a small extension that would deepen the stage, allow for more sophisticated effects, and also permit room for a larger audience. “The sounds in the house are like Chatham Dockyard—or the building of Noah’s Ark.”34

  Under Stanfield’s supervision, the renovation proceeded. Soon “in ecstacies at its proportions,” he and William Telbin, also a well-known stage designer, were good-humoredly competing. Stanfield did the scenery and stage effects for acts two and three, Telbin for act one. Neither would allow the other to know his plans. Concerned about “Stanny’s” delicate health, fearing that this would be his last hurrah, Dickens encouraged him not to resist the most dramatic effects and settings possible. The work was rejuvenating. “If you were to see my young man perpetually painting here for the Christmas play, in the midst of 70 paint pots and a cauldron of boiling rise, you would never forget the spectacle.” As the rehearsals became intense, Dickens’ commitment to his role and to the experience of the play became passionate. The “Sparkler” was now “the manager” also. The cast was drilled intensely. “All the elder children are wildly punctual and businesslike to attract managerial commendation.” He boasted that they “go through fearful drill under their rugged parent,” justifying such discipline not only as necessary for the success of the play but as moral training, “a lesson in patience, order, punctuality, and perseverance … a bond of union among all concerned … the best training in Art and respect for Art, that my young people could receive.” In December, he had some moments of calm, capable even amidst the heavy workload of humorously telling Macready that “your aged friend glides away on the Dorrit stream, forgetting the uproar for a stretch of hours, refreshing himself with a ten or twelve miles’ walk, pitches headmost into foaming rehearsals, placidly emerges for editorial purposes,” and then “again calmly floats upon the Dorrit waters.”35

  For Dickens, the play was a unique event. Nothing like it would “ever be seen again.” For the actors, he had one sacred rule: “WHEN THEY APPLAUD, INVARIABLY STOP, UNTIL THE APPLAUSE IS OVER.” For the audience, he had one expectation—that they be sympathetic. For the performance itself, he had one standard—that it be as perfect as possible. Tickets were at a premium, to be obtained only through friendship and influence. Friends and acquaintances from literature, the arts, the bar, government, and wherever received letters of invitation, some of which Catherine wrote, accompanied by “a beautiful play bill in black and red ink,” and any ticket declined had to be returned for allocation to the name highest on the waiting list. To the final rehearsal, he invited the servants and local tradespeople. At the last moment, he wrote a prologue, to be recited by Forster, who was more in character as a declaimer than as an actor. On New Year’s Day, Dickens remembered that there were still “all those icicles to be made,” and urged Stanny to come over quickly. The rewards of ten weeks of hard work were about to be realized. It had been “like writing a book in company; a satisfaction of a most singular kind, which has no exact parallel in my life.” He had the opportunity to blow off his “superfluous fierceness” in the actual presence of his readers “instead of in my own solitary room, and to feel its effect coming freshly back upon me from the reader.”36 For the first time in his amateur career as a producer, director, and actor, he invited reviewers from the major newspapers, as if the restraints that he had felt previously no longer applied and probably also because of the importance he attached to the message of the play.

  At the premiere, the audience responded rapturously, the critics enthusiastically. The performance on January 6, 1857, touched a nerve of response. The setting and lighting effects seemed spectacular, including “a Sunset,” Dickens boasted, “far better than has ever been done at the Diorama or any such place.” The stage illusions were astoundingly realistic. Reviewers commented with almost awestruck praise on Dickens’ innovative naturalistic performance, in which he acted with an emotive restraint that made the character’s feelings especially expressive. Macready, in the audience, may have recognized that his own efforts at stage realism were being carried beyond anything he had done. And the audience sensed the identification between Dickens and his role, though only some were consciously aware of it. After each performance, he felt exhausted, brooding, unapproachable, as Richard Wardour’s “ghost sat by the kitchen fire in its rags.” After one performance, he fainted.37 For the immediate audience, the identification was between the novelist and the literary nature of his conception of Wardour, between the themes of his novels and the themes of the play. For the critics, Dickens was publicly dramatizing his ability both to conceive and to perform a complex character who inwardly struggles with the contradictions of his personality. For himself, he was acting out one of the personal myths that energized him, the restless hero whose wounds and afflictions provoke the creative energy for noble acts. For the larger audience of Victorian culture, he was affirming what the middle- and upper-class public had established as self-defining: that human nature was basically good, that the English gentleman could triumph over any adversity, that the morbid voices of degradation could be dismissed.

  After the premiere, Dickens hosted a champagne supper. There were to be three more performances. “How they fly!” he told Collins. With the closing performance approaching, “by an absurd coincidence” attended by “three fourths of the Judges I know,” Dickens exalted in the “delightfully strong … impression that the play has made.… I actually have never seen audiences so affected.” He felt overwhelmingly affected himself. Two days later he was “in the depressed agonies of smashing the Theatre.” The realism of the production, including the costumes that might have allowed the cast to “have gone straight to the North Pole itself, completely furnished for the winter,” did not disguise for long that the stage was an illusion, the schoolroom now “a mere chaos of scaffoldings, ladders, beams, canvases, paint-pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas-pipes, and gha
stliness.” As always, when a project was finished, the imaginative excitement over, he felt “shipwrecked—as if I had never been without a play on my hands before.”

  Having seen the snakes being fed at the zoo, he now kept imagining that the legs of all the tables and chairs at Tavistock House were serpents that were eating “all possible and impossible small creatures.” The image would not go away. Recognizing that he was “generally in a collision state,” he absorbed himself in Little Dorrit, “transcendentally busy, drawing up the arteries.” He also had some of the usual family anguish to torment him, particularly Frederick’s request for a small loan. He resolutely declined, accusing his brother of “bad faith” in an agreement he had entered into with Wills and Austin as guarantors. Apparently, like John Dickens at his worst, Frederick had defaulted. Charles reminded his brother that a loan would be throwing good money after bad since it would not free him from his creditors. Having suffered through a decade of debts, adulteries, and now a collapsing marriage, Frederick responded bitterly. “The World fancy that you are the most tolerant of men. Let them come under your lash.” If he were to be judged by how he treated his “own flesh and blood, God help them.” And he provided Charles with the opportunity to focus again on his own restless imperfections with the accusation that the danger of having “had the world at your feet … for a quarter of a century” is that “of placing yourself upon a Pinnacle, upon the assumption that your nature is perfection.” Charles dismissed the accusation, though, ironically distancing himself with the response that “a touch of simple manly gratitude, fresh from the honest and overcharged heart, is so delightful in this world.”38

  Fortunately, he also had Gad’s Hill to preoccupy him. Anticipating spending the summer there, he began the improvements that gave him so much pleasure. First he attended to the furnishings, sending his servant to the London markets to bargain for pieces he had already picked out in order to get them at a lower price. “If you should see such a thing as a mahogany dining table or two marble washing-stands, in a donkey cart anywhere, or in a cat’s meat cart or any conveyance of that kind, you may be sure the property is mine.” He hired a contractor to paint and wallpaper. The two most pressing renovations were raising the roof six feet so that the garret floor would have full-size rooms and redoing the garden early enough in the spring so that he might have neat flower beds with bright geraniums that summer. He urged Frank Stone to consider using it as “a light place to paint in during the winter months … for what you can afford to pay.” The late winter was made bearable by Little Dorrit and by his anticipation of his “extensive freehold, where cigars and lemons grow on all the trees.” In early March, he took a long weekend with Collins in Brighton “for a breezy walk on the downs.” It improved his spirits to be away from Tavistock House, and Lavinia Watson was there. He had strongly regretted that she had not been able to attend a performance of The Frozen Deep. His admiration for her had increased. She seemed younger and more beautiful than ever. He briefly delayed calling on her when, on a walk on the Downs in which he was “rained upon, hailed upon, snowed upon, and blown,” his hat became an unwearable “solid cake of ice, half an inch thick.” He could not borrow Collins’, since his “head being triangular with a knob in the middle, and small besides, his hat is of no use to anybody but himself.”