Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Forster said that, while Dickens pretended to be indifferent to criticism, he was hurt by it, and ‘believed himself to be entitled to higher tribute than he was always in the habit of receiving’.13 With Bleak House the public took no notice of the critics, and the monthly sales surprised Dickens and his publishers, fluctuating between 34,000 and 43,000. The editor of the International Monthly Magazine in America offered $2,000 to Bradbury & Evans for advance sheets and was told that Dickens had no new book in mind, after which Harper’s sent their man straight to him and he agreed to let them have advance proofs for $1,728 (£360).14 Dombey and Copperfield had both sold very well in America and Dickens had made nothing from them, so although there was still no prospect even of an international copyright agrement, he was negotiating again.15 Sales in America rose to 118,000 copies monthly and became a valuable medium for advertising, leading to assertions in the press that Dickens was ‘a literary Croesus’. In fact he made about £11,000 in all from Bleak House. Robert Patten puts it memorably: ‘This return was not made from an expensive edition with elaborate binding and inflated price; it came from thousands upon thousands of individuals, putting down their shillings month after month in exchange for another thirty-two pages of tightly-packed letter-press – nearly 20,000 words – and two illustrations.’16 Dickens spoke to the people, and the people responded, and saw that Bleak House is among the greatest of his books.

  The writing took him from the winter of 1851/2 until the autumn of 1853, through his fortieth and forty-first birthdays. As the first episode appeared in March, Catherine gave birth to their seventh son, Edward, named for Bulwer but known in the family as Plorn. Shortly before his birth Dickens wrote to a friend that ‘I begin to count the children incorrectly, they are so many; and to find fresh ones coming down to dinner in a perfect procession, when I thought there were no more’ – a lovely joke, although he complained to Miss Coutts after the birth of Plorn that ‘on the whole I could have dispensed with him’ in a letter that was chiefly about plans to build model dwellings for the poor in the East End.17 But Plorn became the spoilt baby of the family, sometimes referred to as ‘the J. B. in W.’ by his father – the Jolliest Boy in the World.

  The other jolly boy, Charley, was enjoying Eton and was popular with his schoolfellows. Dickens had adored him from the start, believing that ‘he takes arter his father’ and that he was ‘a child of very uncommon capacity indeed’, although in need of encouragement.18 He visited him at Eton, taking the train to Slough or Windsor, with hampers from Fortnum & Mason for a summer water party one July, and a more modest picnic of sandwiches and beer the next. But after two years he became dissatisfied with his progress and told Miss Coutts that while ‘Eton would like to keep Charley making Latin verses for another five years’, it did not seem to him ‘rational in such a case’.19 He decided to remove him as soon as he could, although he was only sixteen, and asked him to decide on a career. When Charley said he would like to become an Army officer, which Miss Coutts would certainly have funded by buying him a commission, his father talked him out of the idea at once, with great firmness, and persuaded him that a career in business would be the thing. Charley had little option but to agree, and he was promptly removed from Eton and packed off to Leipzig to learn German and start acquiring commercial skills. After nine months there his German teacher told Dickens that the dear boy had learnt the language pretty well but advised against commercial school, because severe discipline would not suit him, and besides he showed little interest in becoming a merchant. The hapless Charley, keen to please his father but with no interest at all in commerce, went home to be lectured further. Dickens reported to Miss Coutts that he suffered from ‘lassitude of character, a very serious thing in a man’ and that he had ‘less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son’.20 He tried telling him about his own hard-working youth, and was dismayed by Charley’s response, which was to wonder at his father and show no inclination to emulate his habits.

  Dickens sent him back to Germany, where he produced some literary translations which pleased his teachers, and suggest he had aptitude in that direction. Once home again, his father tried to set up commercial training for him in Birmingham. The friend consulted there said Charley would do better to learn business in London, where the tone of commerce was higher, and he would have the advantage of living at home, which was not what Dickens had in mind. But for a while he allowed him to lend a hand in the office of Household Words and to join happily in family theatricals. Miss Coutts had a contact at Barings Bank, and after Charley had served a spell at a broker’s he was offered a position by Barings, at £50 a year. He was now eighteen, a cheerful boy with good manners, and without ambition or drive. Three years later, at twenty-one, he would have the moral strength to defy his father, but he never learnt how to make money.

  The girls were no problem, and in 1853 Katey, who showed a talent for drawing, began to attend art classes at Bedford College, recently established for women’s education in Regent’s Park. She seems to have been well taught and she became an accomplished painter, the only one of the Dickens children to follow their father into the arts. Walter was being prepared for the Indian Army, Dickens having no objection to the military as a career, except for Charley, and as long as it was abroad. He solved the problem of the younger boys’ education when he noticed a boarding school for English boys in Boulogne, run by two English clergymen, one of whom had been a master at Eton. The fees were only £40 a year. The boys had to speak French and studied the usual subjects, with fencing, dancing and German as extras. They were given two months vacation in summer, and none at Christmas unless the parents wished to see them then. It meant that they could be away from home for nearly ten months of the year. Frank and Alfred started together, aged nine and seven, in 1853. To be living an institutional life for such long stretches of time, away from mother, aunt and sisters, may have felt punitive to them, and possibly to their mother too. You wonder whether Dickens thought of them when he said in a public speech how much he disliked ‘cheap distant schools, where neglected children pine from year to year’.21 It was not how Charley and Walter had been treated.

  They were kept there for five or six years, and in 1856 they even remained away from home over Christmas and until July 1857. Frank developed a stammer, bad enough for it to stand in his way later when he was considered for jobs. Neither Frank nor Alfred seems to have learnt much or been inspired with ambition to excel at anything. Dickens thought of putting them both in for Army cadetships, and settled for Alfred following Walter into the Indian Army. At fourteen Frank had the idea of becoming a doctor and was sent to school in Hamburg, perhaps because German medical training was good, but once there he changed his mind, did not want to stay in Germany, and was sent back to Boulogne for another year. Sydney started at the Boulogne school at eight and left at thirteen to go into the Navy at his own desire, and Henry also started at eight. He was the only one to record his opinion of the school, which he had found ‘rather sad and forlorn’ and did not look back on with any pleasure. The boys dined on tin plates and the food was unappetizing; and he thought poorly of the method of teaching French.

  Dickens had not wanted more than three children, and he preferred daughters to sons, but he became interested in each baby as it appeared and felt concern, if not exactly love, for the six younger sons. When he said he found it hard to show his feelings for them, perhaps he meant it was hard to have the feelings he was expected to have for so many unwanted offspring; and in the press of writing, and running a magazine, and putting on plays, and looking after the Home in Shepherd’s Bush, there was not much time or energy left over for them.

  Education was a central topic of the novel he wrote in 1854, Hard Times, which ran weekly in Household Words between April and August. It was intended to boost the circulation and succeeded in doubling it, although Dickens found it difficult to fit his ideas into the space available in the magazine and badly missed the elbow-room
given by monthly numbers. It had been agreed that it would be the length of just five numbers of Bleak House, and the texture of the narrative is noticeably cramped and prosaic after the expansiveness and poetry of Bleak House. Yet Ruskin thought it in several respects the greatest book Dickens had yet written and pronounced that ‘his view was finally the right one, grossly and sharply told’.22 The ‘grossly and sharply’ indicate his reservations about Dickens’s method, and Hard Times is close to parable or fable and underlines its points simplistically: the cramming schoolmaster is called M’Choakumchild, the Utilitarian MP for Coketown, Thomas Gradgrind, is a hardware merchant living in a house called Stone Lodge, and the name of the rich and grasping mill-owner is Bounderby. The chief message of the book concerns the bad effects of an education that confines itself to purely factual and practical matters learnt by rote, ignoring the importance of imagination, sensibility, humour, games, poetry, entertainment and fun. M’Choakumchild presides over a dismal class where the pupils who can memorize facts get all the rewards, and this fun-free educational path is imposed by Mr Gradgrind on his children, who are brought up to respect facts and ignore feelings. He names two of his sons after his idols, Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind – reminding us that Dickens’s sons were called after poets, essayists and novelists – Walter Landor, Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson, Sydney Smith, Henry Fielding and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens.

  Hard Times is set in a working community, in and around Coketown, an industrial town populated by mill-workers, and based on Preston in Lancashire, where Dickens went early in 1854 to observe a long-running strike. His picture of the workers is partly perfunctory and partly sentimentalized, centred on the good worker Stephen Blackpool, who is ostracized for refusing to join a union and, caught between bad employers and bad mates, comes to grief. Gradgrind’s favourite child, his daughter Louisa, marries the ludicrous Bounderby without love because she has been brought up not to acknowledge the existence of such a feeling. The marriage is made just plausible because the one person she does love helplessly is her brother, Tom, who will benefit, she hopes, from Bounderby’s patronage. Tom predictably turns into a thief and a liar, and among his other crimes gets Blackpool accused of stealing the money he himself has taken from Bounderby. As for Louisa, like Edith Dombey she leaves her detested husband and turns from a promising human being into the standard Dickens endangered beauty: she ‘strikes herself with both hands upon her bosom’ and asks her father, ‘What have you done, O father, what have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once in this great wilderness here?’ It is left to Sissy (Cecilia) Jupe, a circus girl taken in by the Gradgrinds, to cheer and comfort them with her generous warmth and to rise to a moral authority possessed by none of them. All things good and seemly come from Sissy and nothing but failure from the Gradgrind system; the moral is pressed home hard and the plot seems to have been worked out with a slide rule.

  Yet the message of the book is delivered with an originality that goes some way towards redeeming these weaknesses. It is spoken by the circus master Sleary, a fat, seedy man who travels around entertaining the poor with tightrope walkers, clowns, performing dogs and horses. Sleary tells Gradgrind that it is not good to be always working and learning, and that something else is needed in life: ‘people must be amused.’ The boldness of setting up Sleary and the circus people as exemplary figures who keep the best human values alive is a stroke that no one but Dickens could carry off, and it startles the reader, the more so because Sleary speaks with a lisp, and his dictum comes out as ‘people mutht be amuthed.’ What on earth? you ask yourself for a moment. Then you understand that even a man with a lisp can speak a truth. Dickens was ahead of his time in showing that people with handicaps could be likeable, intelligent and perceptive, and Sleary is there to remind everyone, the virtuous and the zealous, the comfortable, conventional middle classes and the parents ambitious for their children, that the world is various, and that the imagination is as important as the multiplication table, and more important than business or banking. You can’t help wondering whether Charley read Hard Times, and, if so, what he thought of it. Dickens dedicated it to Carlyle, yet it was the only one of his novels he did not provide with a preface for the reprint, which suggests he was not quite satisfied with it. It was parodied, though not dramatized, translated into French and Russian, and has found some passionate critical defenders; but it is among the least popular of his books, perhaps because it cuts too narrow and formal a path, and fails to take note of its own message that people must be amused.

  As the 1850s went by Dickens gave himself as fully as ever to editing and writing for Household Words, and to good works and theatricals, which were a branch of good works. What was changing was his domestic life and his relations with the Hogarths, his in-laws, and the two Hogarth daughters who shared his home, Catherine and Georgina. His energy and inventive powers did not flag, but there was a shift in his inner life, as though he were preparing himself, only half consciously, for a metamorphosis into a different creature.

  18

  Little Dorrit and Friends

  1853–1857

  Dickens’s dissatisfaction with his marriage grumbled and sputtered below the surface. Catherine must have felt it and Georgy can’t have missed it. Although he boasted of the size and beauty of the new baby born in 1852 – Edward, known as Plorn – he was oppressed by having so many sons needing care, education and guidance, and suspicious that they might have inherited the passivity of their mother or even the ‘imbecility’ of his in-laws.1 Catherine was still in her thirties – she would not be forty until 1855 – so there was no guarantee that Plorn was the last. When they were apart he still wrote affectionately to her, ‘I shall be very happy to be at home again myself and to embrace you – for of course I miss you very much.’2 Yet he felt the need to get away, and in the autumn of 1853 he set off with two bachelor friends, Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg, to revisit Switzerland and Italy. Chamonix, the Mer de Glace and a cloudless ascent of the Simplon pleased him, but from Naples he wrote home, to Georgy and Catherine separately, complaining of having received no letters at all for five days, and from Rome he lamented the lack of any from Forster or Wills, which suggests he was finding the trip rather dull.

  The oddest letter to come out of it was one he wrote to Catherine in December, after he had seen the De La Rues in Genoa and recalled how jealous she had been of his intimacy with Madame in 1845. It begins with a striking piece of self-analysis as he told her that ‘the intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me, is one of the qualities that makes me different – sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil – from other men. Whatever made you unhappy in the Genoa time had no other root, beginning, middle or end, than whatever has made you proud and honoured in your married life, and given you station better than rank, and surrounded you with many enviable things.’3 The graceless reminder at the end of the benefits he has conferred on her leads on to a reproach that her attitude towards the De La Rues ‘is not a good one, is not an amiable one, a generous one – is not worthy of you at all’, and a suggestion that she should write them a cordial letter. He says he will never ask her whether she has done so, and it would be ‘valueless and contemptible’ if she did it only because he asked, but it would place her ‘on a far better station’ in her own eyes if she did. This piece of moral blackmail gives a chill glimpse into his conduct of their marriage at this stage. Catherine, cowed, wrote the required letter. Four years later Dickens had so far forgotten what a husband should be, and what the amiable and generous behaviour he had urged on Catherine was, that he wrote mockingly of her to De La Rue, telling him she had been ‘excruciatingly jealous of, and has obtained positive proofs of my being on the most confidential terms with, at least Fifteen Thousand Women … since we left Genoa’.4 It is not a pretty letter, but by then what mattered most to him was that he should be seen to be in the right.

  His friendship with Forster was also going through a cooler pat
ch. Dickens sometimes allowed himself the licence to be brutally frank, as when, after hearing Forster give a lecture of two and a half hours on the seventeenth-century statesman Strafford, he sent him a critical letter, telling him he had talked down to his audience, ‘like a schoolmaster teaching very young children, which I think a London audience would undoubtedly be resentful of’; and that, like most biographers, he was too ready to invest his subject with all the virtues. He advised him to cut half an hour out of the lecture. Apart from that, he said, it was excellent. Forster was wounded; Dickens apologized and was forgiven.5 Forster, as editor of the Examiner, was moving the paper away from radicalism and towards solid middle-class values, which were not so congenial to Dickens, and which he would later satirize in Our Mutual Friend. Yet Dickens was also capable of sweetness and sensitivity, as when Forster was bedridden with rheumatic gout, and he went and sat beside his bed for a long evening, reading aloud the whole of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Both men enjoyed the reading intensely.6 Forster was often ill: he had bronchial trouble, he had rheumatic pains, he drank too much, ate heartily and failed to walk off the effects as Dickens did. Dickens also exercised on the water, rowing himself from Oxford to Reading in June 1855, ‘through miles upon miles of water lilies, lying on the water close together, like a fairy pavement’, a solitary day he described to Miss Coutts later.7