Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  During the first half of the 1860s, both daughters found ways to express their dissatisfaction. In the second half, both found ways to express outright unhappiness. Indirectly struggling with a possessive father who dominated their lives, they had an almost impossible time establishing separate identities. Katie, more energetic than “Mild Gloucester,” initially made the more dramatic attempt. Both, though, paid the heavy cost of accepting that the price of their father’s love was their rejection of their mother. They were not forbidden to visit her. But the message was clear. After the separation, they hardly saw her, and the Hogarth family was beyond the pale. During the second half of the decade, Mamie particularly showed the strain of her spinsterhood and the oddity of her domestic position. She was never to marry. And by the late 1860s, as her husband’s health declined, Katie’s marriage collapsed.

  For the next ten years, Georgina was the woman in Dickens’ life on whom he most relied. Unlike Ellen, she could live openly with him, and she had the self-protective good sense to accept her brother-in-law’s mistress as a friend. During the 1860s, in discreet ways and at convenient times, Ellen visited at Gad’s Hill, becoming companionable with Mamie and Georgina. When she and her husband returned from the Continent, Katie kept her distance. Georgina’s reverence for her brother-in-law, though, was sufficiently powerful to accept that he was to be spared the judgments of ordinary convention and morality. The practical situation was also clear. He could not divorce, he could not remarry. Having chosen sides at the time of the separation, she could not very well reconsider when one of its natural consequences became clear. She and both daughters, of course, were among the intimate circle of fifteen or so who knew about the relationship. Certainly numbers more knew that Dickens loved “deeply, passionately, madly,” without necessarily knowing Ellen or having any sense of what arrangements had been made. Georgina, who “think[s] of everything,” was necessary for his domestic comfort. She “would make the best wife in the world, but the children are so dependent upon her that I doubt if she will ever marry. (I don’t know whether to be glad of it or sorry for it).” He found the subject “perplexing—not being a judge of marriages.” But, on the whole, he was glad of it.13 Georgina served his domestic needs. Ellen served his romantic needs. Together, they made the perfect wife.

  THE PAST WAS MUCH ON HIS MIND. AS ALWAYS, THE CRUCIAL STORY of his life, the sustaining myth of his childhood, needed to be seen and reformulated in response to his vision of himself in the present. All crisis was a spur to creativity, all fiction a mirror of imaginative distortion in which the model of his own life became a portrait of his culture and his world. A half year after the separation, he had begun writing A Tale of Two Cities, whose hero redeems himself by his death. Dickens was in the process of demonstrating that his own creativity had not been diminished, that the separation had been the necessary prelude to its resurgence, that Sydney Carton had died so that Dickens might live.

  With the book’s completion in October 1859, he anticipated only a short rest from writing fiction. Tempted to pursue A Tale of Two Cities onto the stage, at least to the extent of supervising a Paris production, in his imagination he had cast himself for the role. In January 1860, unable to prevent Tom Taylor’s adaptation of the novel being staged at the Lyceum, he “devoted” two weeks to “trying to infuse into the conventionalities of the Theatre, something not usual there in the way of Life and Truth.” He even wrote a slightly altered ending to “make a better exit” where the actor playing Carton “justly felt the want of something.”14 In his next novel, Carton was to be transformed into a character who lives rather than dies, who survives various internal and external threats, rising to an act of self-sacrifice through which he achieves moral transformation and a meaningful life.

  In November 1859, he had it in mind that in two years or so he would write another serial novel of about the same length as A Tale of Two Cities. All the Year Round was too valuable a property for him not to strengthen its successful inception with another story of his own as soon as he could draw sufficient breath. Meanwhile, he had Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which would last about eight months. To fill the period between it and his own new story, he pursued George Eliot through his longtime acquaintance with George Henry Lewes, building on a brief congratulatory correspondence he had had with her in 1858. When Scenes of Clerical Life had appeared, he had immediately intuited that the pseudonymous author was a woman. When in July 1859 he had read Adam Bede, he was overwhelmed by its brilliance. Though he had in mind the possibility of her contributing to All the Year Round, his extensive praise was sincere. “Every high quality that was in the former book, is in [Adam Bede], with a World of Power added thereunto.”15 Reading it closely, he was deeply moved, particularly by the “extraordinarily subtle and true” depiction of Hetty Sorrel’s character. Encouraged by Lewes, he began to negotiate through him with the author, tactfully referring to her as Mrs. Lewes. Dickens was aware, of course, that she and Lewes were not actually married. Lewes’ marriage had collapsed in 1849; soon, by mutual arrangement, his wife began to live with Leigh Hunt’s son, with whom she had had numbers of children. In the process of becoming George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans went to Germany with Lewes in 1854. After returning, they lived together in Chelsea, in that shadow-land of social ambivalence created by Victorian private and public attitudes. They made no secret of their relationship. Unlike Dickens, though, neither was a great popular novelist whose livelihood depended on the goodwill of a vast middle-class audience.

  Dickens met with Lewes, and perhaps George Eliot, early in November 1859. “The question is, whether it would be consistent with her perfect peace of mind and comfort… to enter into terms for such a story.” Money was no barrier. She would be paid at the highest possible rate. Aware of hesitation, he urged her, through Lewes, to take it on. “An immense new public would probably be opened to her, and I am quite sure that our association would be full of interest and pleasure to me.” He would say little about “the extent to which I have it at heart as an artist, to have such an artist working with me.” George Eliot’s ambivalent response puzzled him. He still thought, though, that the answer was essentially yes, that her hesitancy had to do with the schedule. To give her more time, he proposed another novel, probably by Mrs. Gaskell, between Collins’ and hers. When, after further procrastination, Lewes wrote to him in February 1860 that she had decided on an indefinite postponement, he was disappointed and even angry. He went immediately to visit them to see if the matter was still open. But it did no good. She “is terrified by the novel difficulties of serial writing; cannot turn in the space; evidently will not be up to [it].”

  When Mrs. Gaskell, not wanting to chop her novels into weekly segments, turned him down, Dickens still needed someone to follow Collins. And then someone to follow whoever followed Collins. For the latter position, he queried Bulwer-Lytton. Charles Reade was another possibility. For the immediate need, he turned to Charles Lever, a prolific minor novelist living on the Continent. Lever was thrilled at the opportunity to publish in All the Year Round, partly because the payment was so high, partly because he hoped that what he felt was Chapman and Hall’s neglect would be remedied by this additional association with them. The terms were generous. Lever’s name would be published with his story. Dickens would push Lever’s novels with Frederic Chapman, that “Monstrous Humbug,” who seems “to be making holiday one half of his life, and making mistakes the other half, and making money … in spite of himself, always.” When it became clear in February that George Eliot would not be a contributor, Dickens asked Lever to begin in July, and not to be “afraid to trust the audience with anything that is good.” Despite his praise, though, of the “life, vivacity, originality, and humour” of the opening of A Day’s Ride, the readers of All the Year Round soon expressed their opinion in a striking falloff in sales. Lever’s story was “a dead-weight.”16

  At first concerned, then alarmed, then desperate enough to take action, he determined
in early October 1860, after “a council of war at the office,” that the “new big book” that he had been meditating since August, and which by the middle of September he was “on the restless eve of beginning,” would be transformed from the projected twenty monthly pamphlet numbers into a weekly serial. It would begin on December 1, 1860, and run concurrently with the remainder of Lever’s novel. “If the publication were to go steadily down, too long, it would be very, very, very difficult to raise again.” There were Lever’s feelings to be assuaged. There was no way of disguising that A Day’s Ride had failed to hold its readers, but “some of the best books ever written would not bear the mode of publication…. This might have happened with any writer.… I hate to write—dread to write—can’t write—this letter.” All he could do was assure the deeply disappointed author that “my original opinion of your serial remains quite unchanged.” Though he tried to help publish it in book form and to get Chapman and Hall to back Lever with more publicity, it was clear to both men that he would not have a second chance with All the Year Round.

  Preoccupied with his own new novel, Dickens had little thought to spare for Lever. The title, he told Forster at the beginning of October 1860, is “GREAT EXPECTATIONS.” In the previous month, while working on a short piece, he had suddenly conceived “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea” that so excited him that he decided to cancel the short paper and “reserve the notion for a new book.… It so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.” The novel idea was the dramatic encounter on the Thames marshes between a young orphan and a convict escaped from the prison hulks on the river. “The grotesque tragic-comic conception that first encouraged” him was that the boy would assume, for some superficial, self-serving reasons, that the benefactor to whom he owes his “great expectations” is a bitterly disappointed, domineering, well-to-do local woman when it is actually the convict whom he has befriended. What opened out so immediately and fully before him was the ultimate reworking of the story of his own life into a fiction that would capture the emotional truths by which he had lived. Initially, the “hero [was] to be a boy-child, like David. Then he will be an apprentice.” From the start, he had no doubt that it would be autobiographical, and he soon reread David Copperfield in order to avoid unintentional repetition, “affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.”17

  Beginning sustained writing at the end of September, he soon had the equivalent of three weekly installments to show Forster. Through the first two weeks of October he wrote obsessively. As usual, he gave up writing all but the most essential letters, explaining to Macready that “when I have done my day’s work, I rush into the air and take fierce exercise: the pen once laid down, is leaden—and not feathery—to take up again that day.” By late October, he had “four weekly numbers ground off the wheel.” In early November, he made a five-day visit to Cornwall with Collins, for a setting for the Christmas story, “A Message from the Sea,” on which they had agreed to collaborate. Preoccupied with that obligation, he did not resume work on Great Expectations until early December, soon after the first installment appeared. Also, he had been feeling ill. The “disagreeables” returned. He prepared for a month’s hard work at Gad’s Hill, “in actual bondage.” He was soon cheered by the great success of the new novel. The sales of All the Year Round had immediately recovered.

  At the beginning of the new year, he feared for a brief moment that his health would force him to miss an installment. He managed, though, to keep working, and soon felt better. The challenge of brevity and condensation was matched in its pain with the pleasure of success. He gave a short series of readings in London in March and April 1861. But he was happy to be out of them quickly and to be able to concentrate on his story. Hoping to be finished by mid-June, he went to Dover in late May to have the benefit of the sea air. The neuralgia in his face ached painfully. There, he worked “like a steam engine.” He was feeling “the worse for wear, and the work has been pretty close. But I hope that the book is a good book, and I have no doubt of very soon throwing off the little damage it has done me.”18 He thought he had finished on June 11, 1861. Later in the month, though, he was persuaded by Bulwer-Lytton to cancel and then rewrite the ending.

  The story gripped him with the passion of self-exploration, self-reconstruction. The landscape of the novel, Rochester, Kent, and London, was to be that of his childhood and young manhood. It was also the landscape of the present of his life. It contained the weather and the places to which he had returned in these recent years, both literally and emotionally: the Cooling churchyard, the flat marshes between Gravesend and the Medway, the streets of Rochester, the London law offices and courts in which he had served his apprenticeship, the essential mediation between his memory of the voice of his childhood and the voice of his adult experience. Like David Copperfield, it was to be narrated in the first person. Writing in the house that he had purchased as an affirmation that he was both his father’s son and more, Dickens created transmutations of the important people and relationships in his life, some of it in fantasy terms, much of it, for the first time, both realistic and personally liberating, an adult fairy tale close enough to the reality to allow him to align his inner needs with his personal myths. His emotionally powerful adult misrepresentations of his childhood became the source of a subtle, resonant work of fiction about birth, class, guilt, self-deceit, betrayal, moral values, and personal redemption. Like all his orphans, the main character, Pip, is a projection of his childhood feelings of isolation and parental betrayal. He is a survivor, though, whose punishment for outliving his infant siblings and parents is a strong sense of guilt and confusion. The penalty for such independence is complete dependence on his one living sibling, his older sister, who provides him with harsh nurture, bringing “him up by hand,” constantly reminding him that he is unworthy to have survived and that he has been born to failure and a bad end. Not even an orphan, then, can escape having a bad mother.

  In the form of his sister’s husband, Joe, this orphan is provided with an amiable, loving, but ineffectual father who cannot protect him from his wife. Like John Dickens, Joe has a good heart. Apprenticed to him at the blacksmith’s forge, Pip has ahead of him the prospect of a working-class life, with a hearth potentially as glowing, fulfilling, and stable as that found in middle-class or upper-class households. Without any special talents, he possesses neither intellectual ambition nor artistic ability. Unlike his previous orphan-heros, from Nicholas Nickleby to David Copperfield, Pip is utterly unheroic, unromanticized, his sensibility and moral core free of the complications of talent and of authorial self-glorification. He is as close to the self stripped bare as Dickens could ever get.

  Brought to Satis House in “Rochester” for the entertainment of Miss Havisham, an eccentric, semimad spinster who stopped her clocks and her life when jilted on her wedding day, Pip falls in love with her ward, Estella. Years later he is to discover that Estella is the daughter of Magwitch, the convict whom he had fed in the churchyard cemetery, and that her mother has been saved from the gallows by Mr. Jaggers, Miss Havisham’s lawyer. Worst of all, he discovers that his wishful hope, which he had elevated into a stubborn belief, that Miss Havisham is his benefactor and intends Estella to be his wife is completely false. Miss Havisham has raised her to be his and all men’s tormentor. The games the young Pip plays with her at Satis House are sadomasochistic enactments of the mutual pleasure of victim and victimizer, of the interaction of guilt, self-deprecation, and romantic hope, and a seemingly hopeless confusion of hostility, shame, vengeance, casual brutality, and class torment.

  Unexpectedly told in his early adolescence by Mr. Jaggers that he now has “great expectations,” that prospect becomes inseparable from his hope of fulfilling his love for Estella. He believes Miss Havisham has intended them for one another. With extraordinary acuity, Dickens reduces romantic emotion to its class basis, dramatizing the shabby contortions through which Pip
feels himself compelled to wriggle up to respectability. Arrogant, snobbish, and insecure, he values becoming a gentleman more than he values Joe’s good heart and his love. Memories of the blacking factory and dirty fingernails rise to the surface of the text. “‘Have you seen anything of London, yet?’” Pip asks Joe. “‘Why, yes, sir … me and Wopsle went off straight to look at the Blacking Ware’us. But we didn’t find that it come up to the likeness in the red bills at the shop doors.’” Estella has ridiculed Pip’s coarse hands, his working-class world. The daughter of a criminal and a prostitute wears the clothes of a lady. The orphan of the working class aspires to rise to her level. Actually, his expectations are being paid for by Estella’s ex-convict father’s labor as a sheep farmer in Australia. Magwitch mistakenly believes that he is fulfilling an honorable role by helping the little boy who fed him in the cemetery to become a gentleman.