Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  The ceremony meant many things to many people. To the bridegroom, it seemed “like a dream.” To the bride, the wedding was an escape from the tension of her relationship with her father. The man she had always relied on for stability and strength had become noticeably unstable. To Georgina, it had to be evident that she was the only member of the Hogarth family present. To Dickens, no amount of hopeful thinking could overcome his troubled thoughts. He had evicted his wife from his home. Soon afterward his daughter was leaving, voluntarily, to marry a man whom her father suspected she did not love. At the beginning of June, Dickens had been ill with “rheumatism … which remains hovering about my left side.”2 The day before the wedding he had learned that his brother Alfred was seriously ill.

  The wedding breakfast took only an hour. The host had promised everyone that there would be no speeches. The bride and groom “sat down at the table for a moment, then disappeared while the guests played games on the lawn.” When they reappeared for the going away, Katie was dressed in black. She “cried bitterly on her father’s shoulder, Mamie dissolved in tears, Charlie [Collins] as white as snow. No end of God bless yous.… King John Forster,” who had been a witness, added “in his d——d stentorian voice, ‘Take care of her, Charlie, you have got a most precious treasure.’” Mamie’s tears may have expressed something of a survivor’s relief, though her father expected, despite her not having “started any conveyance on the road to matrimony,” that it was likely enough that she would get married, “as she is very agreeable and intelligent.” He had little confidence that Charley Collins could take care of anyone, even himself, nervously confiding to a friend soon after the wedding that “the whole was a great success—SO FAR.” Though he disapproved of Collins giving up painting, in which he was “attaining considerable distinction,” and falling back “upon that worse of cushions, a small independence,” he had not opposed the marriage. But he had no doubt that Katie “might have done much better.” The ascetic groom, who had had periods of religious obsession some years before, probably had little to no sexual experience, and faced an unknown trial and its consequences. He had his doubts about Dickens. In late June, just before going to Gad’s Hill for a short visit, he confided to his close friend the painter William Holman Hunt that of all the remarkable men he had known, he never knew “one who was not injured by success.” Wilkie, though, put Dickens’ success in a different light when he proposed to Hunt that they consult with him on a reasonable price to ask for Hunt’s most recent painting, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. 3

  The thirty or so guests crowded onto the gravel pathway to shake hands, to throw old shoes, and to wave good-bye to the newlyweds, who were planning to live indefinitely on the Continent. In London, “we are paupers—abroad we are rich.” Katie’s sister and her brothers (except Charley, who had gone to Hong Kong on a business venture) tearfully relived the departure of their mother from the household. “They soon recovered. Mary in particular,” her father noted, “commanded herself extremely well.” The guests relaxed with an excursion to Rochester Castle and to Chatham to hear a military band. They played croquet on the Gad’s Hill lawn early in the evening. Then they had dinner and danced until they had to dash to the Higham station for the special 11 P.M. London train that their host had arranged. “After the last of the guests not staying in the house had departed, Mamie went up to her sister’s bedroom. Opening the door, she beheld her father upon his knees with his head buried in Katie’s wedding-gown, sobbing.… When at last he got up and saw her, he said in a broken voice: ‘But for me, Katey would not have left home.’” A year later, he declined an invitation to the wedding of a friend’s daughter by confessing that “I should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of a shadow on a young marriage.”4

  Ten days later the death of Dickens’ thirty-eight-year-old brother provided a ritual counterpoint to the wedding festivities. In his feelings, though, the events had a similarity. Dressed in black, Katie had embraced what was to be a childless, perhaps sexless, marriage. During the next five years, as Charles Collins’ weak health became more specifically life-threatening, Dickens increasingly saw in his son-in-law an emblem of death and a reminder of his daughter’s unhappy situation. Rather sour on marriages in general, he did have special reasons to be sour about this one. Alfred’s unexpected death soon after the wedding increased his guilt about Katie and also brought to mind the unhappy and threatening fact that two of his siblings had died in childhood. Fanny, like Alfred, had been thirty-eight at her death. Of his two remaining younger brothers, one was to die in his late forties, the other just past his fortieth birthday. The eldest son, he was to outlive all his brothers.

  When Charles had seen Alfred early in the summer, he had been “greatly shocked and impressed by his shattered condition.” The illness had come suddenly, the same pleurisy or tuberculosis that had killed his sister, and that in 1849 he had worried he was showing signs of. “It is a dreadful thing,” Charles Collins wrote to his mother, “so strong and apparently healthy as he was.” After receiving a telegram on July 27, Dickens left immediately for Manchester. He arrived three hours too late. “The poor young widow,” Helen, and “five little witnesses,” the eldest thirteen, were in the first shock of mourning. An expert at funeral arrangements, Dickens took on the responsibility of seeing the body into its grave next to his father’s in Highgate cemetery and providing temporary help for the widow and children. All this was at his expense. Alfred had died in debt and financial confusion, though not of a substantial sort. A few hundred pounds easily cleared it all. He had left, though, absolutely nothing for his family. It helped that Dickens liked the widow, “a good, true, striving wife” whom he could “trust with all [his] heart.” The “black figures” were lodged temporarily at a farmhouse near Gad’s Hill. Then he found a house for them near Hampstead Heath. “Day after day I have been scheming and contriving for them … and I have schemed myself into broken rest and low spirits.”5

  Beginning in the late 1840s, there had been increasing estrangement among the brothers. Alfred had been his favorite, the only one whom he respected, primarily because he had honorably pursued a career and had been financially independent. Though he had had only moderate success as an engineer, it had not been for lack of effort. That only slightly mitigated Dickens’ fear that his father’s ghost lived in all his brothers. Unlike Hamlet’s father, this ghost always asked for money.

  By 1850, Frederick’s indebtedness had become chronic. Dickens tried to move him from the treasury department into a life insurance office, offering security for six hundred pounds of debts. Though “he has been heedless enough … there is not the least harm in him.” By the late 1850s, Frederick’s marriage to Anna Weller had collapsed, partly because of financial strain, in an atmosphere of adultery and recrimination. Occasionally Frederick made unexpected appearances, once when Charles was reading in Ireland, another time in Brighton, peremptorily demanding small favors, as if they were to be the price for his disappearing again. Charles’s youngest brother, Augustus, with less dramatic flair but also aggressively, played out the same ghostly debtor’s scenario and his own variant of marital turmoil. Having married Harriet Lovell, with whom he had a son, in the late 1850s he deserted them when she became blind, leaving his eldest brother to support both wife and child. From America, to which he fled in 1859, Augustus pressured him to advance money and favors. “He has always been, in a certain insupportable arrogance and presumption of character, so wrong, that, even when he had some prospects before him, I despaired of his ever being right.… I have no hope of him.”6

  Dickens also began to fear that the family ghost embodied in his father’s inability to stay out of debt might be rising again in the third generation, in his own sons. Their pattern of vocational indecisiveness made him anxious. Charley wanted a business career but didn’t seem to make much progress. Walter and Frank were mediocre students for whom, after some diversions, the army seemed a likely possibility. Frank unsuccessf
ully competed for a foreign-office position. Walter and Frank handled money badly. Sydney had his mind set on the navy, and soon went off, with his father’s assistance, as a teenage midshipman. Alfred went into business, without notable success, and was to go to Australia. Henry and Plorn were still at home, beginning the divergent paths that were to lead Henry to a successful legal career, Plorn to Australia and a withdrawn life as an unprosperous sheep farmer “whose besetting sin was his love of gambling.”7 At the time of their parents’ separation, Plorn was six, Henry nine. What terrified Dickens was the thought that some of them had inherited both their mother’s laziness and his own father’s tendency toward chronic indebtedness, as if the blood of the family had been poisoned. No one of them had genius. They also, though, had no extraordinary scars or special debilities, except for Frank’s stutter. The patterns of his children’s lives were hardly the cause for more than the ordinary parental disappointments. For Dickens, though, small signs seemed grave warnings. He felt himself potentially the indefinite financial guarantor of a family of unpromising sons, whose insufficiencies rose up before him with some of the pain of his anger at his wife’s incompetence and some of the fear that he would suffer again through them the anguish he had suffered because of his father.

  In the spring of 1860, Elizabeth Dickens asserted herself briefly. She had become senile, probably incontinent, and in need of constant attention. Charles continued to take responsibility for her care and support. How to do so sometimes exasperated him. He could count for help only on Letitia, though she was not in a position to contribute financially. In late March, the lady with whom Elizabeth lived became “terrified by the responsibility of her charge and utterly relinquishe[d] it.” Charles had “the difficult task of finding good hands” for her “and getting her into them without alarming her.” Within a few weeks, he had found another place for her to live, hopeful “that all will go well, and that [she] will become no worse, but will go on very gently.” Alfred’s death in August was beyond her comprehension. Her son humorously but bitterly dramatized his own grim Shakespearean scene. “My mother, who was also left to me when my father died (I never had anything left to me but relations), is in the strangest state of mind from senile decay; and the impossibility of getting her to understand what is the matter, combined with her desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it.” In her last years, she became increasingly like her son’s caricature of her as Nicholas Nickleby’s mother. The young boy who had so keenly felt the want of mothering was forced to become his mother’s keeper. It was costly, both financially and emotionally. In late November, she felt a little better than usual. “Helen and Letitia were poulticing her poor head, and, the instant she saw me, she plucked up a spirit and asked me for ‘a pound.’”8

  His own health had its unpleasant turns. In June 1859, he had contracted “a small malady,” which “my bachelor state has engendered,” and put himself under treatment to Dr. Frank Beard, Thomas Beard’s youngest brother. It probably was a stomach and bowel problem, with a persistent secondary skin infection. By late July, he was “very little better, really very little.” In early August, he hoped that he had “thrown the enemy.” By the end of the month he was still not well. He felt depressed. “I am a wretched sort of creature in my way, but it is a way that gets on somehow. And all ways have the same finger-post at the head of them, and at every turning in them.” A holiday at the seashore and then finishing A Tale of Two Cities helped. The next spring, the month before Katie’s wedding, he had a severe attack of what he called rheumatism. He could hardly stand. At the end of the year, working at his new autobiographical novel, Great Expectations, he was ill again, and “being doctored,” with the same “disagreeables,” accompanied by a painful, intractable “local irritation” that had possessed him the previous summer. By late January 1861 he seems to have recovered. In May, his facial neuralgia appeared. He associated it with the tension of writing. His faced ached “all the time.” There were no other symptoms.

  Though by September the distressing pain had subsided, it was to recur intermittently for many years, especially in stressful circumstances. “As my poor father (who was asthmatic too, and the jolliest of men) used philosophically to say, ‘one must have something wrong, I suppose, and I like to know what it is.’” In the early 1860s, the pain in his side associated with the renal cholic of his childhood returned, and frequent sleepless nights kept him emotionally and physically on edge, though he had great confidence in his powers of recuperation.9

  In August 1860, anxious to liberate himself from the expense of two homes, he sold for two thousand guineas the remaining thirty-six years on the lease of Tavistock House to J. P. Davis, whom he identified to Mitton as a “Jew Money-Lender.” Suspicious, expecting him to attempt to bargain and manipulate, he was relieved to have his anti-Semitic stereotypes disappointed. Without hesitation and without apparent sense of loss, he disposed of what had been the family home for ten years. “The bargain was made in five minutes … and the money paid within as many days.” With five small rooms over the office of All the Year Round, he had no need for any other permanent residence in London. Romantic domesticity was available whenever he desired it at Ampthill Square. Gad’s Hill would serve as the family home. If Mamie and Georgina wanted to be in town during the social season, he would take a house for a few months. Three or four days a week in London, three or four in the country, though for longer periods during the summer, seemed attractive and practical. With the success of the readings, he had no doubt that there would be long periods when he would be on the road. But it was a matter of temperament as well as practicality. He joked seriously to Miss Coutts that if he came to visit he would “want no bed,” for he had “an adventurous satisfaction in exploring hotels, and am quite as likely as not to leave in the middle of the night for the coast of Cornwall.”10 One of the advantages of change and travel was that other people could not readily perceive where his restlessness found rest at any particular moment.

  He absolutely declined to travel backward toward reconciliation with Catherine or to mitigate his anger at her parents. To Miss Coutts, who in April 1860, probably having consulted with Catherine, again suggested that he reconsider the separation, he granted that he did “not suppose himself blameless, but in this thing as in all others know … how much I stand in need of the highest of all charity and mercy.” The exculpating fact, though, was clear. “When I was very young, I made a miserable mistake.… The wretched consequences which might naturally have been expected from it, have resulted from it. That is all.” As to simply meeting with her in some neutral place, “in the last two years, I have been stabbed too often and too deep.… It is simply impossible.… That figure is out of my life forevermore (except to darken it) and my desire is, Never to see it again.” He assured his friend that he was the same “hopeful, cheerful, and active” man he had always been, that he had not changed, that he had not soured, and that he still desired through his art “to sweeten the lives and fancies” of others. He could not, of course, hold Miss Coutts’s efforts against her. “Many reasons, old and new, unnerve me,” but “I think you know how I love you.” In September he and Miss Coutts saw one another, and he felt that “we renewed our old friendship and affection—or rather, perceived when we saw one another that no renewal was needed.”

  To Albert Smith, who tried to persuade him to attend a social event at his home, he was more peremptory. He could “not be a guest at any house where Mrs. Hogarth’s youngest daughter is received in the same capacity. There are some considerations in life that are superior to one’s ease and pleasure. The lowest self respect on my own behalf, and on that of the girls, and Georgina’s, imposes this rule upon me.” He found Smith’s response objectionable, but had the satisfaction of repaying an account. At the time of the separation from Catherine, Smith had written him “a very manly letter indeed, the remembrance of which has
never since been disturbed. It is my turn now. I set that against this, and am always Faithfully Yours.”11

  What the many “old and new” reasons were for being unnerved can only be guessed at. Probably one of them was his mother’s condition. Perhaps another was his relationship with Ellen. Approaching fifty years of age, a grizzled-looking veteran of family and profession, he had the challenge of finding common ground and practical accommodation with a young woman barely twenty years old. If they were lovers, the range of challenges must have been delicate and unnerving. If they were not, his expectations must have kept him on edge. In addition to the delicacy of his relationship with her, he had to make the adjustment to being a bachelor and a single parent. He attributed his malady in 1860–61 to his “bachelor state.” Whether that meant sexual activity as well as irregular meals and frequent travel is not clear, though probably only the latter. Despite his voyeuristic restlessness, his interest in night life and prostitutes, and his occasional excursions with the casually libertine Wilkie Collins, Dickens would have found it difficult to have casual sex. Morally self-righteous, physically fastidious, he was also widely known and would have feared recognition, even in Paris. Strongly selfcensoring, his powerful imagination created fantasies that frequently ran up against the boundaries of expression in ways that must have been unnerving.

  As a single parent, he worried about his children, particularly his sons. Concern was inseparable from exasperation. Like his father, he boasted on those few occasions when they gave him the opportunity, though his candid evaluations of their abilities usually had an edge of disparagement. Having been born to neither wealth nor title, his sons, Dickens assumed, should go out, as he had, into the world, and make their fortunes.12 Since opportunities at home were limited, there were seas to sail and continents to conquer. Frustration at home could be overcome by imperial challenges abroad. Whatever the mixture of motives, after 1858 he promoted their early departure, even when it pained him to see them leave. His need, though, to force on them the model of his own success, to distance himself from their likely failures, and to decrease his daily responsibilities as a parent probably contributed to the pattern. As soon as the ghostly specter of what they would do with their lives rose, he felt sufficiently ill at ease with them to want to see them gone. His daughters, though, were a different matter. In his eyes and in society’s, their natural position was dependency, and they were emotionally congenial to him in a way that his sons were not. By embracing them, he could distance himself even further from his mother and his wife. Katie’s departure pained him. For Mamie, one or two echoes of matrimonial possibility surfaced. Hardly heard, they soon faded away. She began to settle into her role as the ostensible matron of her father’s house. Compared to Georgina, though, she was neither particularly competent nor reliable.