Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  No one in public life was aware of his work, and when he wrote an article about the Home for Household Words it was published anonymously. There may have been something lopsided about an enterprise that set out to save a few poor creatures out of the crowd, but that did not deter him, and he gave an extraordinary amount of time and energy to making a success of it, seeing it as a model for others to follow. His warmth and his concern for detail can be found in his letters to Mrs Morson. In July 1850 he asked her to ‘Tell the girls who go tomorrow [to the Cape] … as my last message, that I hope they will do well, marry honest men and be happy.’14 When Mrs Morson was to fetch a new inmate, he wrote to her, ‘Will you send underclothing to Eliza Wilkin now living with her father at 18 Market Row Oxford Market – with money for her to get a warm bath – or two would be better, and instructions to her to do so, that she may be perfectly clean and wholesome; and make an appointment to call for her, say on Wednesday or Thursday next. She has a gown that will do for her to come in. I suppose you have not one ready? Bonnet and so forth, I suppose you had better send her, I think. She is a rather a short girl.’15 He did what he did because he believed it was needed. If there was a providence in the fall of a sparrow, these girls were his sparrows, and he wanted to make them fly, not fall.

  15

  A Personal History

  1848–1849

  In 1848 Dickens allowed himself a nine-month break between books, and out of it came a new development in his friendship with Forster. A month after the final number of Dombey appeared, Forster published a book of his own, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, a biographical study of the eighteenth-century writer. It is a hefty volume, nearly 700 pages long, dedicated to Dickens with a sonnet in which Forster compared him to Goldsmith:

  O friend with heart as gentle for distress,

  As resolute with fine wise thoughts to bind

  The happiest to the unhappiest of our kind …

  Dickens wrote at once to say the book was ‘very great indeed’ – adding slyly that it was also ‘extremely large’ – and a week later he sent a glowing commentary, ‘having read it from the first page to the last with the greatest care and attention’. This was a considerable feat, because some of it is heavy-going, but he admired the vigorous picture of Goldsmith’s times, and the presentation not only of Goldsmith’s strength but also of his weakness, ‘which is better still’. The praise was sweet, since Goldsmith had been a favourite of Dickens since his boyhood, and he added enough comment and argument to show he had engaged closely with the book. He went on to say how proud he was to be ‘tenderly connected’ with what Forster had done, and added, ‘I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer – and such a Critic!’1

  In this way he appointed his own biographer, at the early age of thirty-six, and never afterwards wavered from his choice. They had their fallings out. Macready reports a quarrel in the autumn of 1847, and there were to be more, for Dickens could tease and impose on Forster, Forster could disapprove of Dickens’s behaviour, and their political views diverged somewhat, but their friendship and trust in one other always restored itself. For the present, he found comfort in confiding in him: ‘I am more at rest for having opened all my heart and mind to you,’ he told him in a letter written this May in which he dwelt on ‘the more than friendship which has grown between us’.2 A year before, in the spring of 1847, Forster had been told by Charles Dilke, manager of the Daily News after Dickens left it, of his recollection of seeing Dickens as a child, working in a warehouse near the Strand, and of how Dilke had given the boy half a crown, received with a polite bow, while his father looked on. When Forster mentioned Dilke’s story to Dickens, he was silent for several minutes. Realizing he had touched on something painful, Forster did not pursue the matter, but it led presently to Dickens telling him about the blacking factory and his father’s imprisonment for debt. He said he had spoken to no one else of these things, but never forgotten them and silently contained the distress they had caused him over the years. Now Forster’s sympathetic interest helped him to soften and look more objectively at the small boy he had been. Sometime later he decided to make a written account of those years, and gave it to Forster, who observed in his diary that there was ‘No blotting, as when writing fiction, but straight on, as when writing an ordinary letter’. He added that Dickens enclosed a note saying that ‘The description may make none of the impression on others that the reality made on him … Highly probable that it may never see the light. No wish. Left to J. F. or others.’3

  Unburdening himself of his hidden life led to further turning over of the past and the workings of memory in his mind. The Christmas story he wrote in 1848, The Haunted Man, took for its theme the importance of being able to remember even wrongs and sorrows suffered in the past, and suggests that it is only through our memories that we are able to feel for others, something already hinted at in A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge pities the self he remembers.4 And in 1849 he began on what became his own favourite among his novels, David Copperfield, a first-person narrative that draws on some experiences of his childhood and youth. But first he allowed himself a year off, between the finishing of Dombey and the first number of David Copperfield. He had learnt the value of a break from writing and he could now afford one.

  The year was 1848, when revolutions broke out all over Europe, with uprisings in France, Prussia, all parts of Italy and the Austrian Empire. Only London remained quiet, although when the Chartists announced they were bringing their petition for the vote with six million signatures to London the government moved the Queen to the Isle of Wight and the Duke of Wellington was brought up to defend the capital against possible uprisings. But the Chartists were peaceful and there was no violence even when their petition was rejected by parliament. Dickens was not unsympathetic to their cause, but he made no public demonstration of support. However, he applauded the abdication of King Louis-Philippe in Paris, and the declaration of a republic, writing jubilantly to Forster, ‘Vive la République! Vive le peuple! Plus de Royauté! … Faisons couler le sang pour la liberté, la justice, la cause populaire!’, and signing himself CITOYEN CHARLES DICKENS.5 His faith in the good sense of the French people took a jolt when they elected Louis-Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, as President, and still more when he made himself Emperor, and imprisoned or drove into exile his republican opponents; but Dickens still found France irresistible.

  He told Miss Coutts he was tempted by an offer to be returned as MP for one of the largest London boroughs, but that prudence, and the thought that it would be hard to write and earn while sitting in parliament, made him refuse it. He added, ‘if I did come out in that way, what a frightful Radical you would think me!’6 At the end of 1848 he wrote an article attacking a judge who, in trying a group of Chartists accused of planning violence, stated that the French Revolution of 1789 had been unnecessary and harmful, a ‘mere struggle for political rights’. Dickens insisted that the judge was wrong, and that it had been a necessary struggle to overthrow a system of oppression.7 And his republicanism led him to celebrate the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I in January 1849, privately, with his fiery friend Landor.8

  Within his family circle one dark cloud overcast the year. Fanny, known to be ill with tuberculosis since 1846, had remained at home in Manchester working as a music teacher all through 1847 and into the early months of 1848. Dickens invited her husband, Burnett, to his Dombey dinner in March, asked him to sing and paid his train fare: he wanted to persuade him to bring his wife and two small boys to London, where Fanny would have the support of her family and the best doctors. Yet she struggled on through April until she became too weak to continue with her teaching. Dickens wrote urging her not to work – ‘do, do, do decide to stop’ – and sent money to help them, and they agreed to move at the end of the quarter, in late June.9 By the time they were settled in a house in Hornsey, Fanny was patheticall
y weak and thin, and the doctor Dickens sent to her told him there was no hope. He saw for himself that she was dying, ‘and not by very slow degrees’ he told Mitton.10 He described her calm resignation to the prospect of death, and said she did not regret working hard during her illness because it was in her nature to do so; and that she was distressed about her children, but not painfully so, because she believed she would see them again. In telling Forster this, Dickens confessed that he feared for his own children, in case they had the same dreaded disease in their blood.

  Fanny lived on through July, when Dickens was away in Scotland with his theatrical troupe, keeping in touch as best he could through their father, who devoted himself to watching over her. Dickens sent her claret as a comfort, and once back in London was able to make daily visits for a while. But his children were in Broadstairs, he took Catherine, who was pregnant, to join them, and after a few more days in London he followed her. Patience, so necessary in caring for the sick, was not one of his virtues, and, being unable to save her, he did not know what else to do. He told Macready he almost wished the end would come, ‘she lies so wasted and worn.’11 John Dickens continued his vigil at the bedside of his eldest daughter and kept his son informed. She was now suffering frightful paroxysms in which she could hardly draw breath. On 1 September, Dickens returned to London to find her in just such a paroxysm, half suffocated, an appalling noise in her throat and an agonized expression on her face. He saw her sink into a sort of lethargy, but not sleep, and she died the next morning. She was thirty-eight. He had loved her, envied her early education and success as a singer, seen how marriage and motherhood constrained her so that she performed less and had to rely on teaching; and pitied her first son, a bright child born with a physical handicap, who now pined and soon also died, Dombey-like.12

  Fanny and her husband were devout Dissenters and she had therefore asked to be buried in unconsecrated ground, and Dickens arranged the funeral according to her wishes, in the appropriate part of Highgate Cemetery, where Forster went with him on 8 September. Then he returned to Broadstairs for the rest of September, set to work on his Christmas story, and at the end of the month walked to London through his favourite Kentish territory, Maidstone, Paddock Wood, Rochester and Chatham. Another case of sickness greeted him in London with the news that Roche, his good courier during his travels in Italy, Switzerland and France, needed to be admitted to hospital, which Dickens arranged at once. He had heart disease, and not long to live.

  In December came two more family events: the weddings of his brothers Augustus and Fred, neither much approved by Dickens. Augustus, just twenty-one years old, asked to have his reception at Devonshire Terrace, and Dickens agreed, but escaped after the wedding breakfast, ‘as I think it probable that some of my very affectionate relations may hold on here, as long as there is anything to drink’.13 Fred was intent on marrying Anna Weller, the younger sister of Christiana Thompson, and Dickens strongly disapproved of the marriage on the grounds of her young age, uncertain health and unstable temperament. Having reluctantly paid off some of Fred’s debts, he kept away from the wedding, which took place in Malvern on 30 December, with John Dickens as the sole representative of Fred’s family. It was reported that Fred appeared in a white satin waistcoat with velvet flowers and silver ornaments: he evidently shared his elder brother’s taste for dressing up. Both marriages were disastrous, Fred’s ending in divorce in 1859 and Augustus abandoning his wife Harriet in 1858, after she had become blind, and leaving for America with another woman.14

  The year ended with The Haunted Man selling 18,000 copies on publication (although not many afterwards) and Dickens planning a jaunt with his friends, ‘an outburst to some old cathedral city we don’t know, and what do you say to Norwich and Stanfield-hall?’ for the new year.15 Stanfield Hall was the scene of a recent sensational murder, and the jaunt was to be fitted in before Catherine’s confinement, expected in mid-January. Forster did not feel up to it, Dickens failed to enjoy himself much with Leech and Lemon, Stanfield Hall was a disappointment and Norwich dull, but Yarmouth caught his imagination, ‘the strangest place in the wide world … I shall certainly try my hand at it,’ he told Forster.16 He was back in time for Charley’s birthday party, performing conjuring tricks in a Chinese dress and a mask, and dancing the polka, which his daughters had been teaching him. The night before the party he had woken in the small hours, fearful that he had forgotten the polka step, and got up in the cold darkness to practise the dance by himself. At the party he told Forster about this nocturnal exercise and added gravely, ‘Remember that for my Biography!’17

  On 15 January, Catherine went into labour. It was again an awkward delivery, with the baby badly positioned. But Dickens had read about chloroform as an anaesthetic, found out the facts when in Edinburgh, where it was in regular use, and, with Catherine’s agreement, arranged for a doctor from St Bartholomew’s, trained to administer it, to be present at the delivery. There was strong opposition to its use among most London doctors, who said it would produce idiot children, impede labour and possibly kill the mother, but Dickens was fully justified: the baby was quickly extracted without any damage, while Catherine was spared pain and made a rapid recovery. Four years later chloroform was so well accepted that it was given to the Queen for the delivery of her child.

  He had planned to call his boy Oliver Goldsmith, then changed his mind and made him Henry Fielding Dickens, as ‘a kind of homage to the style of the novel he was about to write’, he explained to Forster.18 But in truth David Copperfield is great in a way that is peculiar to Dickens. It is not a robust comedy of social and sexual hypocrisy like Tom Jones, but odder, more precise and more painful. Attachment and loss, and the shaping of adult behaviour by early experience, are its central themes. The first fourteen chapters, covering David’s early childhood, stand on their own as a work of genius. They show with a delicate intensity the pain of a child being separated from his mother, unkindly used by his stepfather, humiliated and punished without knowing why, sent to a boarding school run on a harsh and unjust system, helpless in the hands of people who don’t like him. Many parts of this experience being common, many readers have responded to it. Dickens understands how slowly time passes for unhappy children. He shows how someone who offers love to a neglected child becomes all important, as Peggotty, his mother’s servant, does for David: ‘She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt for her something I have never felt for any other human being.’19

  He tells us that even very young children observe adults critically, and judge them, not only the ones they dislike but also ones they love, in David’s case his mother, whose faults of vanity and pettishness he notices even before she betrays him by marrying a stepfather against whom she will fail to protect him. And in a justly famous scene he shows David grieving for his dead mother and also preening a little before his schoolfellows at having this important event in his life. Before Freud or any of the child experts arrived on the scene the voice of childhood was truly rendered by Dickens out of his own experience – and out of his imagination, since the earliest chapters of the book are purely imaginary. Suffolk was hardly known to him, and Blunderstone, the village where David was born, was plucked from ‘Blundeston’, seen on a signpost and not even visited.

  This was his first book to be narrated in the first person. It was also only the second novel to give a voice to a child who is taken seriously as a narrator. Two years before he started to write David Copperfield, a great stir was caused by Jane Eyre, which opens with a child’s narrative of cruel usage by her guardians and at school. Published under a male pseudonym, it was soon revealed as the work of an unknown Yorkshire woman, Charlotte Brontë. As far as is known, Dickens never read Jane Eyre – he makes no reference to it in any surviving letters – but Forster would certainly have done so, and it was he who suggested the use of a first-person narrative to Dickens: ‘A suggestion that he should wr
ite it in the first person, by way of change, had been thrown out by me, which he took at once very gravely; and this, with other things, though as yet not dreaming of any public use of his own personal and private recollections, conspired to bring about that resolve.’20 That two writers should have within a few years made the voice of an ill-used child central to a novel is a remarkable coincidence. To Charlotte Brontë the idea had come spontaneously, and if Dickens was influenced by her, either directly or indirectly through Forster, it was a happy cross-fertilization between two great writers. There is little resemblance beyond this, the tone of her early chapters being passionate and angry, of Dickens’s sorrowful, almost elegiac, culminating in the child David being shown his mother dead, with his baby brother in her arms, and seeing her in his mind as the mother of his own infancy, and the little creature as himself, ‘hushed for ever on her bosom’. For Dickens the change to a first-person narrative was liberating and enriching: where Oliver, Nell and even Paul Dombey were the brilliant products of high artifice, David is a fully imagined, living child.21