by Fred Kaplan
Yet Magwitch’s mistake is a mistake of the caring heart, and Pip’s misplaced love for an unloving, badly damaged woman is as much an expression of his innate ability to love as is his eventual compassion for Magwitch. The ultimate model for the good heart is Joe (one of Dickens’ self-christenings in his correspondence with Mary Boyle), who unites with Magwitch in the New Testament patriarchy of the novel to become the ultimate good father, the combination of Jesus and Jehovah, of love and power, and of power redeemed by love. Though Pip betrays Joe, his betrayal can be redeemed through repentance. Though Pip, when his false class pride is shaken by the revelation of his true benefactor, initially detests Magwitch, he redeems himself by learning to love the man who has loved him so much. In the end, Magwitch dies so that Pip may be reborn into a truer, more realistic sense of human values and class structures, into self-reliance and self-respect.
In his portrait of Estella, Dickens dramatized the tension that he had felt throughout his life between the romanticized female as both an idealized star of love and a tormentor who has been conditioned by society to remain out of reach. Through much of the novel she is an extreme version of Maria Beadnell, the woman for whom he had longed desperately but of whom he had been deprived by social conditioning and external circumstances. Though this deprivation partly derived from his own self-deceit, it also expresses his failure to find an appropriate person to love. In Biddy, Dickens presents Pip with an attractive example of the good sister, like Georgina, who has all the feminine virtues except erotic attractiveness. Pip cannot love her romantically. He is irresistibly drawn to a woman whose rejection of him is part of his erotic attachment to her, whose romantic unattainability marks her as the effective fulfillment of his emotional needs. Pip’s pursuit of Estella, though, takes an extraordinary turn. In his devotion to Magwitch, realizing and rejecting the falseness of his earlier values, it becomes less erotic and considerably more domestic, realistic, and moral. When she is revealed to be the daughter of the man who has become a father to Pip, incest becomes sufficiently distanced to be legitimized and domesticated, the relationship a metaphor for the union of erotic and sibling love.
Conveniently, the main female characters ultimately contribute to and support Pip’s salvation, his moral and emotional triumph. His unnurturing, punishing sister, the only mother he initially feels he deserves, is reduced to harmless ineffectualness. Brutally beaten by Orlick, she becomes a mute cripple whose death soon liberates her husband and “son.” The powerfully grotesque Miss Havisham, who has manipulated him into maintaining the illusion that she is his benefactor, loses her power over him when he discovers that he owes nothing to her. Her portrait benefits from some touches of the senile Elizabeth Dickens, who was to outlive this last of her fictional variants by only a short time. In this final depiction of perverse, indifferent matriarchy, Dickens found the energy to transform even Miss Havisham into a repentant witch, regretting what she has done to Estella and Pip, rejecting, moments before her death, her years of bitterness, her self-destructive morbidity, and her efforts to pervert Estella’s innate moral sentiments. Estella’s ability, though, to learn from experience, to recover her capacity to love and to feel compassion, has not been irretrievably damaged. Her moral sentiments have not been destroyed. They cannot be. Years pass. Pip constructs a moral, self-reliant, realistic life for himself. After a marriage in which she is brutally mistreated, Estella remarries. Driving in a carriage in London, she sees and speaks to Pip, who “was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”
With that final sentence, the last section of the novel went to galley proofs. He sent a copy to Bulwer-Lytton about the middle of June 1861. Undoubtedly, Ellen read them or had them read to her, probably by the author. Having recently read to her the proofs of A Strange Story, Bulwer-Lytton’s new novel for All the Year Round, Dickens told him that he “implicitly trust[ed]” her judgment in which he “frequently observed (in the case of my own proofs) an intuitive sense and discretion that I set great store by.” Bulwer-Lytton immediately argued that the ending that sent the lovers on their separate ways again was false to the direction of the story overall, that the regeneration of Pip and Estella demanded some symbolic representation in the plot, at least the suggestion, at the minimum a shadowy expectation, that they would not part again, either in the spirit or in the flesh. Probably Ellen agreed. To the extent that she and Dickens may have seen some aspect of herself in the portrait of Estella, a hint of her occasional teasing imperiousness, a touch of her beauty, some distant suggestion of the challenges and obstacles they both had faced in making their love a reality, Bulwer-Lytton’s argument may have had a personal force. He “stated his reasons so well,” Dickens told Collins on the twenty-third, “that I have resumed the wheel and taken another turn at it.”
Once he began unraveling, he had to exert himself not to unravel too much. Having canceled the previous final passage, he wrote an ending in which Estella and Pip, reborn to love and compassion, join hands, leave the ruined garden of Satis House, and begin the difficult, fragile possibility of a life together. “And in all the broad expanse of tranquil light” the subdued but optimistic Pip “saw no shadow of another parting from her.” Dickens soon made up his mind definitively. Yes, “upon the whole, I think it is for the better.”19 Like Pip, he had come through one of the most painful, destructive periods of his life with subdued optimism. Personal anguish had been transformed into artistic triumph.
EACH CHRISTMAS GAVE NEW LIFE TO DICKENS’ OLD CHRISTMAS works, partly because of their enduring popularity, partly because each Christmas issue of All the Year Round contained a new Christmas story, some or all of which he wrote. That was a sacred financial obligation. The fatuous “A Message from the Sea” of 1860, done with Collins, was followed in 1861 by “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” of which he wrote two of the seven chapters. Mainly a moral fable preaching against “unnatural solitude” embodied in a perverse hermit, the final sermon has a personal resonance. “You cannot do better,” the hermit is told, “than imitate the child, and come out too—from that very demoralizing hutch of yours.” Busy with an intensive reading tour, he could not devote as much time to “Tom Tiddler’s Ground” as he could to his next three Christmas stories. “Somebody’s Luggage” (1862) was a potpourri of self-satire, partly narrated by a waiter, with All the Year Round as one of the genial targets. By Christmas Eve, it had “sold the rather extraordinary number of one hundred and ninety one thousand and odd hundred copies.” By late summer 1863, he had in mind a new novel in twenty monthly parts.
Despite his need to “clear the Christmas stone out of the road” and to rid himself of a short paper under the rubric of the “Uncommercial Traveller,” a persona he had created in 1860 to unify his disparate articles for All the Year Round, he found himself entranced with his new Christmas story, “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings.” Its success prompted him to write a sequel, “Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy” (1864). “I had a very strong belief in her when I wrote about her, finding that she made a great effect upon me; but she certainly has gone beyond my hopes.” Early in 1864, he boasted that “the Christmas number has been the greatest success of all; has shot ahead of last year; has sold about two hundred and twenty thousand; and has made the name of Mrs. Lirriper so swiftly and domestically famous as never was.”20 With some of the features that had made a success of Mrs. Gamp, the widowed Mrs. Lirriper seemed to him “indeed a most brilliant old lady,” a rough-spoken, sentimental, good-hearted lodging-house keeper, who narrates a redemptive tale of betrayal, suffering, rebirth, and new life, of a deserted orphan adopted by a fairy godmother and godfather who proves himself to be a wise, talented son.
Through myth and storytelling, the young hero celebrates love, self-worth, and well-deserved worldly success.21 The emotional power of his
goodness rewrites the story of his parents’ lives, affirming that “unchanging Love and Truth will carry us through all!” Frederick Dickens makes a cameo appearance as Joshua Lirriper, the irresponsible younger brother of Mrs. Lirriper’s deceased husband. The dismal forty pounds for which John Dickens was imprisoned in the Marshalsea echoes in the dispossession that Miss Wozenham’s indebtedness produces—“after all it was just forty pound, and—There!” Like Aunt Betsey in David Copperfield, Mrs. Lirriper glows with a maternal warmth, love, and commitment that makes the timing of her creation particularly ironic. On August 5, 1863, Mrs. George Hogarth died. Dickens gave Catherine a letter of authorization to the manager of Kensal Green cemetery to open the grave in which Mary had been buried and to which he had given his mother-in-law “the right in perpetuity.” On September 12, 1863, Elizabeth Dickens died. The previous September her rapid recovery had seemed “quite amazing.” She had been, though, “in a terrible state of decay.” With another funeral to look after, he postponed a visit from the de la Rues, but only until the day after the burial. There was to be no period of mourning. For her gravestone, he wrote the cold words HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF ELIZABETH DICKENS WHO DIED SEPTEMBER I2TH 1863 AGED 73 YEARS. Two days after her death, he wrote to Wills, highlighting that Mrs. Lirriper had just been born. He added, as an afterthought, that “my poor mother died quite suddenly at last. Her condition was frightful.”22
With a genius for transforming personal loss into aesthetic wealth, he was hardly surprised by, though he exalted in, the success of the two Mrs. Lirriper stories. Ironically, the perverse maternal legacy was commercially golden. Beginning with the resuscitative success of Great Expectations, All the Year Round never seriously faltered again, though his contributions thereafter were to be confined to articles and Christmas stories. When Great Expectations appeared in book form in July 1861, the bookstores could not stock enough copies. He excoriated the inefficiency of the publisher and the printer, who “caused it to be out of print for a fortnight! Imagine that, with a second edition all sold to the trade, a third edition already being ordered away, and not a copy of either producible until next Saturday!”23 By the end of August, the fourth edition was going to the press.
Having in mind the importance of not allowing readers to drift away from All the Year Round, he arranged to have the first installment of Collins’ The Woman in White appear in the same week as the last of A Tale of Two Cities, with “a few words … between the end of mine and the beginning of his—to the effect that” he would always reserve “that first place for a continuous story” and that he hoped “this series will take its place in English literature.” The hardworking, ambitious Collins, “shut up at [his] desk” in Broadstairs, had been cooperating through the summer and autumn of 1859, “every day … slowly and painfully launching [his] new serial novel. The story is the longest and the most complicated I have ever tried yet—and the difficulties at the beginning of it are all but insuperable.” By July 1860, he had “wound [it] up in a very new and pretty manner,” and felt the relief of having “written at the bottom of the four hundred and ninetieth page of my manuscript the two noblest words in the English language—The End. “ He went out to “walk off the work and the excitement of winning the battle against the infernal periodical system, at last. “ Throughout its serial publication, despite a mixed reception from the critics, it sustained and increased the already high weekly sales of All the Year Round. Dickens congratulated him on having “triumphantly finished your best book.” Within a week of its volume publication in August, it had sold 1,350 copies. By September, Collins crowed, “Cock-a doodle-doo! The critics may go to the devil!” With 1,400 pounds in his pocket, “with the copyright in [his] possession … all sorts of good news” kept coming. From Paris, Katie soon wrote to Harriet Collins, “How is my illustrious brother-in-law? (Private and satirical.) We have heard of his riches and his growing magnificence and plumpness.…”24
With a genius for subtle but symmetrical complications of plot in a mystery structure that exceeded his mentor’s, Collins had created the first of his two extraordinary detective narratives. He had learned a great deal from the older writer, and certain aspects of Dickens’ skills continued to be sharpened by his appreciation of Collins’ major strength. Lacking, though, a whole arsenal of talents that Dickens possessed, Collins’ spare, effective prose had none of his poetic resonances. Without the social compassion, psychological insight, or linguistic resources at the master’s command, he excelled as an entertaining writer of one-dimensional fictions whose brilliance with suspenseful plot brought him great popular success throughout the 1860s. Amidst his unstinting praise, Dickens occasionally, but tactfully, offered advice. Collins objected in general to “the nonsense talked in certain quarters about [his] incapability of character-painting,” which he discussed in his preface to The Woman in White. Dickens affirmed that the novel was “a great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in respect of tenderness … in character it is excellent.… No one else could have done it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing.” He did, though, “always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention.”
Collins’ major objection to Dickens’ fiction, explicit in his suggestions about A Tale of Two Cities, was that he did not tell his audience enough. For Collins, the art of fiction demanded a series of self-conscious signposts directing the reader toward an unraveling of a well-constructed plot. For Dickens, plot revelation needed to rise organically from the interaction of characters in a narrative pattern in which suggestion and symbol appealed to the reader’s intuition. The differences were oddly complementary, and Dickens even believed that Collins’ procedure was one he could effect, if he chose to. “One of these days” they might “do a story together” that would combine their strengths. When, in October 1862, Collins feared that a bad episode of a recurrent illness might prevent him from continuing a serial novel, his friend offered to take up the artistic challenge and the fraternal obligation. “Say you are unequal to your work, and want me, and I will come to London straight and do your work. I am quite confident that, with your notes and a few words of explanation, I could take it up at any time and do it. Absurdly unnecessary to say that it would be a makeshift! But I could do it at a pinch, so like you that no one should find out the difference.… The trouble would be nothing to me, and the triumph of overcoming a difficulty great.”25 Collins recovered in time to do the installment himself.
By April 1861, the commercial success of The Woman in White had made it clear that his moment had come to be rewarded financially far beyond what it was sensible for All the Year Round to provide. Lever had proved a failure. Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story had successfully followed Great Expectations. In March 1862, Collins fulfilled the last of his obligations to the journal with the beginning of the serial publication of No Name. Having been “slowly—very slowly—building up the scaffolding of the new book,” in July 1861 he had “tried the outline” on Dickens, who “was immensely struck by it, and … gave such an account of it to Wills … that the said Wills’s eyes rolled in his head with astonishment when he and I next met at the office. If I can only write up to my design.…” Manuscript in hand, Dickens thought it “extremely clever and careful … quite up to the mark of the Woman in White—but the creaking of the wheels is so very loud, that” he sent Collins “a little advice on that head.” From the sale of the copyright and the serial rights, he earned £4,600. “Not so bad, for story-telling,” Collins boasted to his mother. Dickens wrote glowingly to Collins that from the time of his first novel he “was certain … that you were the Writer who would come ahead of all the Field—being the only one who combined invention and power, both humourous and pathetic, with that invincible determination to work, and that profound conviction that nothing of worth is to be done without work.”26 He felt pride
and pleasure in his friend’s accomplishment, and concern about his deteriorating health, a combination of gout and rheumatism so debilitating that he soon began to go regularly to spas on the Continent.
With the completion of the publication of No Name, Dickens was sorry “that we part company (though only in a literary sense).…” Even if Collins’ health had allowed him to remain on the staff of All the Year Round, money and ambition would have prevented it. With “Dickens’s full approval,” he signed a contract in April 1861 with Smith and Elder for their exclusive rights to his next novel, “to be published either as a separate serial, or in the Cornhill Magazine, as they please,” for five thousand pounds. “No living author (except Dickens) has had such an offer as this for one book. If I only live to earn the money, I have a chance at last of putting something by against a rainy day.” That it was likely to be published in Cornhill, a rival of All the Year Round that Thackeray edited and in which a satirical depiction he did of Forster had appeared, did not give Dickens a moment’s hesitation in encouraging him to accept. In effect, “Smith & Elder have bought me away from All the Year Round and in circumstances which in Dickens’s opinion amply justify me in leaving.” Such an offer reflected well on Dickens’ longtime confidence in Collins. His own pioneering success as a professional author and All the Year Round’s generous treatment of its contributors had helped make the offer possible. He hardly had to extend himself to sympathize with Collins’ exalting that “if I live and keep my brains in good working order, I shall have got to the top of the tree, after all, before forty.”27