Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  BUT THERE WERE PUBLIC DESTROYERS AT LARGE, ESPECIALLY THOSE who believed that parliamentary democracy was the glory of the nation. In January 1866, attending a banquet at the Mansion House, Dickens could hardly suppress his fury as he listened to “the imbecility of constitutional and corporational idiots.” Having begun his career as a parliamentary reporter covering the election campaigns preceding and following the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, he harbored no illusions about the venality and stupidity of that legislative body. The genial satire of his depiction of the Eatanswill election in Pickwick Papers had become the bitter despair of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. On many matters even his Whig-radical sympathies had become more conservative, though not on the fundamental issues of education and the franchise.

  However, the enfranchisement of the sanitized middle class had not, he believed, significantly improved either the intelligence or the liberalism of parliamentary legislation and governmental administration. “Every inventor of anything designed for the public good, and offered to the English Government, becomes ipso facto a criminal, to have his heart broken on the circumlocution wheel. It is as certain as that the whole Crimean story will be retold, whenever this country again goes to war.”21 With politics, his anger was likely to overcome his usual class identification. He had such “a very small opinion of what the great genteel have done for us, that I am very philosophical indeed concerning what the great vulgar may do.” Though fetishistic about personal cleanliness, he did not fear the contamination of the great unwashed. He saw no reason to fear the working-class enfranchisement that was inherent in the Reform Bill of 1867, partly because he did not believe any elected body in contemporary England could effectively govern the nation.

  Inherent within his distress at the condition of England was his implicit admission that his novels, his stories, and his journalism had contributed little to social and political reform. Taking his lead from Carlyle, whom he self-delusively claimed he had always striven to follow, he found himself, after the failure of the Administrative Reform Bill that Austen Henry Layard had championed and the publication of Little Dorrit, increasingly uncomfortable with political discourse. He declined emphatically a number of new opportunities to serve in Parliament. His tendency during the 1850s to emphasize social progress as a factor of individual regeneration rather than organized political activity found its counterpart in his increased need for privacy and a sharper distinction between his public and private life after 1859. He continued to express strong opinions in All the Year Round, and vociferously in private conversation. The Poor Law seemed “infamously administered.” Patronage was “one of the curses of the country,” the inference that high birth implied superiority inseparable from government by well-connected incompetents. Between 1859 and 1866 it appeared to him that “the general mind” was as weary of debates as was his own, that there was no “strong feeling” on the subject of reform, and that the society as a whole had “taken laissez-aller for its motto.”

  On the subject of capital punishment his idealism had diminished in the face of what seemed incontrovertible evidence of the recalcitrance of the habitual criminal. He had not changed his mind about the barbarity of the separate or solitary system. There had been, though, some wear and tear around the edges of his optimism about prison reform. On occasion he would even express himself about a particular criminal barbarity with a passionate exclamation that the only protection society had from such madness was to throw away the key. Though more likely to advocate capital punishment for non-English and particularly nonwhite malefactors, sometimes his anger overlooked even that distinction. In 1849 he had expressed his opposition to capital punishment. In 1863 he still believed “public execution to be a savage horror … affording an indecent and fearful gratification to the worst of people.” But he had come to believe “Capital Punishment to be necessary in extreme cases; simply because it appears impossible otherwise to rid society of certain members of whom it must be rid, or there is no living on this earth.”22

  Dickens’ increasing outrage with society had a comic side, particularly his hysterical fury at the noise of street musicians, many of them immigrants attempting to make a poor living with an organ and a monkey. Their persistence seemed blackmail. When they played beneath his window, he fumed, partly the resentment of the writer whose privacy is being violated, partly his characteristic fury at what he believed an infringement of his dignity and rights. Wilkie Collins complained that he had lost five working days recently “through nothing but pianos at the back of the house and organs, bagpipes, bands and Punches in front.” In May 1864, Dickens joined other writers, partly distinguished by their inability to sympathize with the inconvenient poor, in signing a petition, whose vivid wording has his flair and tone, urging legislative control of street musicians. At Somers Place in 1865, he was “a terror … to all the organs and brass bands in this quarter.”

  In regard to more serious crimes, his identification with what drives the criminal to criminal acts had decreased. When in 1868 two street thieves tried to rob him, he recklessly, and then with a relentless persistence, pursued them to capture and imprisonment; he pressured the police into arresting and a magistrate into convicting a young girl “‘for using bad language in the streets.’” In 1865, at Gad’s Hill, his gardener “came upon a man in the garden and fired.” The shot missed. “The man returned the compliment by kicking [the gardener] in the groin.” Dickens “set off, with a great mastiff-bloodhound … in pursuit. Couldn’t find the evil-doer, but had the greatest difficulty in preventing the dog from tearing two policemen down.” In an 1868 article, “The Ruffian,” he scathingly denounced street violence, advocating public or at least private flogging. In response to a notorious murder in 1865, he made clear that he had a graphic sense of sex and violence, and a preoccupation with both that had none of the softening disguises of his fiction. He theorized that “the father was in bed with the nurse. The child was discovered by them, sitting up in his little bed, staring, and evidently going to ‘tell Ma.’ The nurse leaped out of bed and instantly suffocated him in the father’s presence. The father cut the child about to distract suspicion … and took the body out to where it was found.”23 The threat of telling “Ma” had grim overtones of his childhood and marriage. The horror stories told by his nurse were the realities of adult life, and most of the formulas for reform that he had believed in as a young man now seemed untenable as social policy.

  Though he felt the need for a strong hand at home, his international perspective condemned illiberalism abroad, particularly in his two favorite European countries, France and Italy. Louis Napoleon, whom he had met in England during the emperor’s exile, appalled him. A poor simulacrum of his talented uncle, he seemed an adventurer with “no chance but in the distraction of his people’s minds, and in the jingle and glitter of theatrical glory.” Scathing in his condemnation of British politicians who deferred to the emperor, Dickens predicted that the latter’s policies would end in blood, some of which might be English. “Louis Napoleon’s last great card for the temporary union and pacification of France is War with England.” In Italy, Austrian oppression had for some time been shedding the blood of Italian patriotism. When Prussia competed with Austria for influence, he felt that they were equally contemptible. “If each could smash the other,” he would be “perfectly satisfied.” Napoleon’s policy was “like his position in Europe at all times, simply disheartening and astounding,” partly because a “united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon’s way.” Dickens felt “for Italy almost as if [he] were an Italian born.”

  The country that was “an abiding dream with him” continued in the stupor that he had bewailed during his visits in 1844–45 and 1853. “Rome and I,” he complained, “are wide asunder … morally.” Detesting dogmatic Catholicism, “that abominable old priestly institution,” he distinguished Italian nationalism from Italian religion. He was sick of the
spectacle presented in England “by the indecent squabbles of priests of most denominations” and especially of the small-minded dogmatism of the Anglican Church, which had its “hand at its own throat.” Any increase in the power of the Roman Catholic Church, “that tottering monster,” would make a bad matter worse. He supported Giuseppe Mazzini, Camillo Cavour, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose humanity he admired, hoping that enlightened nationalism would destroy the Church’s power. To the extent that he wanted any church at all, he wanted one “with less arbitrary pretensions and stronger hold upon the mantle of our Saviour.” Because “man’s forms of religion tend to what is diabolically irreligion,” he “would not therefore abolish all forms of religion.”24 And he cautioned that criticism of the papacy in England and in any country in which Catholics were in the minority should be moderate.

  The outbreak of war in America provoked Dickens’ fascination and disgust. In early 1861, “the American business” was “the greatest English sensation.” He predicted “that the struggle of violence will be a very short one, and will be soon succeeded by some new compact between the Northern and Southern States.” He shared the British view that Northern attempts to force conformity of law and social custom on the South arose from the desire of the North to continue to exploit the South economically. Detesting slavery, he believed that opposition to slavery had nothing to do with Northern policy. In fact, “any reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the abolitionists.… For the rest there is not a pin to choose between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into the compromise or thrown out of it, just as it happens.” Sensitive to the likelihood that programs to enlighten, let alone liberate, distant peoples, particularly in Africa, would be bought at the expense of efforts to help the poor and oppressed in England, he had in Bleak House satirized the missionary mentality.

  In the Jamaica insurrection of 1865, he strongly supported the governor, Edward Eyre, who had been charged with using excessive violence in suppressing the rebellion. “That platform-sympathy with the black—or the Native, or the Devil—afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild.… But for the blacks in Jamaica being over-patient and before their time, the whites might have been exterminated, without a previous hint or suspicion that there was anything amiss.”25 He joined Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Alfred Tennyson on a committee of defense, though he did not take an active role in raising funds or in the public debate. The affair provoked a number of his characteristic attitudes: patriotism, chauvinism, a combination of paternalism, callousness, and moral condescension in regard to “primitive” people, distaste for the personality as well as the theology of “Exeter Hall,” or missionary evangelicism, and contempt for those concerned with the ill-treatment of distant people rather than with misery at home.

  Always ambivalent about America, he had developed a realism that bordered on cynicism, prompted by his visit in 1842, the aggressive pirating of his books, and the reaction to American Notes. Some friendly feelings notwithstanding, he shared the widespread British disparagement of the United States as an overcommercial country too slowly struggling out of the barbarism of its origins, the shortness of its history, and the mixed blood of its ethnic components, a “distracted land of troublesome vagabonds.” The American “people … are the most extensive and meanest of scoundrels.” Sharing the European notion of community based on biological identity, he had some sympathy with the view that Procter stated, “what can you expect from a people who are made up of the off-scourings of other countries?” When war erupted, he thought both sides venal. He was more provoked, though, by Northern materialistic self-righteousness than by what seemed to him Southern defense of its traditions. Uncomfortable with coercive Federalism, he argued that it was possible the Founding Fathers did not consider secession to be rebellion.

  His conviction that it was to be a short war terminated by a “contemptible” compromise only gradually gave way to obvious facts. Though he accepted the claim that the North could put down the South speedily because “the South has no money and no credit,” he believed that it “will neither raise the money nor the men required.” In fact, “the one chance for the miserable country … is, that those two blatant impostors Lincoln and McClellan will fail to get the 300,000 new men they ask for.” In a country, though, in which the devil is “the ruling power,” anything could happen. In May 1863, Dickens still responded to the opinion “that the conscription will succeed … and that the war will be indefinitely prolonged,” with a firm “‘No’ … however mad and villainous the North is, the war will be finished by reason of its not supplying soldiers.” No analysis of the conflict and its likely perpetuation other than his own, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, seemed worth consideration. “I can not believe … that the conscription will do otherwise than fail, and wreck the War.… Of course the more they brag, the more I don’t believe them.”26

  Compromise was not forthcoming. A Southern victory soon appeared impossible. Southern social values and class stratification seemed preferable to Englishmen who valued traditional notions of gentlemanliness. The South, of course, did not threaten British commercial and manufacturing interests. Its agrarian economy supported British imperialistic industrialization. The North seemed vulgar, arrogant, and ambitious. It also had the power to interfere with British trade. British cotton manufacturing interests flexed their self-defensive muscles in favor of a steady supply of Southern cotton, raising fears of economic depression if factories closed. “The Americans northward are perfectly furious on the subject.” Fearing that irresponsible British responses to American embargoes, and then a series of confrontations between American sea power and British trade, would increase tension, from the beginning Dickens felt “the North to be utterly mad, and war to be unavoidable.”

  Though he had no American investments, he had flirted with invitations to do a reading tour there. The war made it impossible even to consider that for the time being. When a friend sailed for the North on a business trip, Dickens suggested that they “drink confusion together to your customers for light steel and my customers for light reading.” There was serious concern that Britain would intervene in the war on behalf of the South. A British-American conflict would eliminate the possibility of his giving readings in America, perhaps for the rest of his lifetime. When the danger of such a war diminished temporarily, he responded to a query from an American friend, “Think of reading in America? Lord bless you, I think of reading in the deepest depth of the lowest crater in the Moon, on my way there!” In 1865, he again feared that American “swagger and bombast” and “claims for idemnification” would “embroil us in a war.”27 Two years later he was to be storm-tossed on a Cunard steamer, once more on his way to a tumultuous and this time profitable welcome in America.

  WHILE ON A READING TOUR IN MARCH 1867, DICKENS TOOK AN AFTERnoon holiday by the sea at Tynemouth. “There was a high north wind blowing, and a magnificent sea running.” Huge waves suddenly broke over the bar, knocking him down, drenching him, filling his pockets with water. For a moment, he felt “wonderfully well, and quite fresh and strong.” The sky turned golden. Beyond the waves, he saw “a quiet rainbow of transcendent beauty” arching over “one large ship, as if she were sailing direct for heaven.” Stanfield, whom the scene brought to mind, died two months later. Alerted by Stanfield’s son, he went up to Highgate for a last visit. When he “saw what had happened,” he did not have “the courage to ring.… No one of your father’s friends can ever have loved him more dearly than I.” He had a keen sense of ships sailing directly to heaven, of the changing of the tide that age and time determined. He clung to old friendships as best he could. With the death of his parents, his sister Fanny, and his brother Alfred
, his links to his childhood had diminished. His brother Augustus died in Chicago in 1866. In October 1868, Frederick died, “a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong.” His memory conveniently lapsing, he could “not recollect … that a hard word … passed between us.” He “was my favourite when I was a child, and … I was his tutor when he was a boy.” With one of his oldest friends Dickens now had almost no contact; Thomas Mitton had withdrawn into eccentricity and seclusion.28 But with Thomas Beard he sustained an easy, intimate affection.

  Of the friends of his early manhood, Macready was the oldest in years, Maclise in intimacy. The latter’s obsession with his work and his frequent depressions prevented “the old associations,” though it had “not a jot abated the old regard.” Always hoping to come out of his isolation, Maclise became by 1867 a little more accessible. The old relationship, though, was mostly a memory. Dickens watched Macready live almost the length of a second postprofessional life in his Cheltenham retirement. Having left the stage early in the 1850s, he remarried, fathering a second family while the tubercular remains of his first continued to fade away. “Poor Macready,” Procter moaned, expressing the heartache of his friends, “are all his children to die, or to desert him?” He had remarkable flashes of liveliness, though, his “old fire” reviving whenever Dickens encouraged his “dearest old friend” to talk about drama, art, and the artist. Unquestionably, Macready “was wrong in excluding himself from … the world of occupation and Art.” On occasional trips to London, he also traveled the additional thirty miles to Gad’s Hill. At Cheltenham soon after the birth in 1862 of Macready’s youngest child, Dickens found the second Mrs. Macready an excellent wife, and seized an umbrella when Macready “had the audacity to tell me he was growing old, and made at him with Macduff’s defiance.” The retired actor “fell into the old fierce guard, with the desperation of thirty years ago.… Repentantly possessed” of one of the Macreadys’ bath towels, Dickens soon sent him a claret jug with their names inscribed upon it, “in token of our many years of mutual reliance and trustfulness.”