Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Only to Forster could Dickens show his unhappiness and yearnings, telling him things he seems to have discussed with no one else – not Macready, not his artist friends Maclise, Stanfield, Stone, Leech and Egg, not Collins, Wills or Miss Coutts, or Lavinia Watson, with all of whom he was in friendly contact. And even with Forster Dickens did not always find intimacy easy. He used circuitous ways of telling him about his problems, telling him that his situation resembled David Copperfield’s during his marriage to Dora, ‘the so happy and yet so unhappy existence which seeks its realities in unrealities, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual escape from the disappointment of heart around it’.8 In September, after finishing Hard Times, he wrote to Forster saying he thought of going away by himself for six months, to the Pyrenees perhaps: ‘Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year – though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.’9

  This was from Boulogne, where the family was installed from June to October. Dickens had sent Georgy in the spring to choose a house, showing his increasing reliance on her judgement and readiness to use her as a surrogate as he had never allowed Catherine to be. The villa she chose, the ‘Villa du camp de droite’, was named for an old military camp close by and now active again, with French troops putting up a city of tents and huts on the clifftops between Boulogne and Calais: paths were made impassable, trumpets sounded and soldiers swarmed, but Dickens took all this in his stride and kept working and taking his walks. The reason for the military activity was war: in March 1854 the British and French had declared war as allies against the Russians. Their object was to prevent Russia from seizing the European parts of the Ottoman Empire: Britain feared for her route to India, and France under Louis-Napoleon was eager to avenge the first Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow in 1812. There was enthusiasm for the fight in both countries after so many years of peace, and the allies were confident of an easy victory. Their plan was to take naval control of the Baltic and send a force to the Crimea to destroy the Russian shipyards at Sebastopol. Tens of thousands of men were to embark from Calais in British ships.

  Dickens put up flags on the villa, and in September wrote cheerful letters about the visit of the French Emperor and the Prince Consort, who came to review the troops. Walking alone on the clifftops, his path crossed with that of the two leaders, followed by seventy brilliantly uniformed staff, all on horseback. Dickens described to Forster how he doffed his broad-brimmed felt hat, and the Emperor, who had met him at D’Orsay’s and Miss Coutts’s in London, pulled off his cocked hat in return, Albert following suit.10 Dickens disapproved of both Albert, ‘a perfectly commonplace man’, and Napoleon III, ‘the French usurper’, but he appreciated the picturesque moment.11

  The allies had misjudged their capacities and the war was to last two years, bringing the deaths of many thousands and driving Dickens to the angriest political outbursts of his life. He admired the courage of the soldiers and decided to support the war in principle, but at the same time he was appalled at the seeming indifference of the authorities to the 10,000 deaths in London from cholera in 1854, ‘an infinitely larger number of English people than are likely to be slain in the whole Russian War’.12 ‘The absorption of the English mind in the War, is – to me – a melancholy thing. Every other subject of popular solicitude and sympathy goes down before it. I fear I clearly see that for years to come, domestic Reforms are shaken to the root; every miserable Red Tapist flourishes the war over every protester against his humbug.’13 He mocked the bungling of the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, in managing the conduct of the war, as Sebastopol remained in Russian hands, winter set in and the English troops died of disease, bitter cold and lack of medical care. This was when Florence Nightingale became a heroine, and William Howard Russell the first reporter from the front to supply immediate accounts of what was happening. The British political establishment and the military commanders both showed themselves to be incompetent. Dickens raged, and fed his anger into the novel he began to plan early in 1855, calling it ‘Nobody’s Fault’ in bitter mockery of the government.

  Throughout 1855 he wrote strongly expressed political letters to friends. He said that the rottenness of the political system made England like France before the Revolution, and that it might go the same way, given that an ‘enormous black cloud of poverty’ hung over every town, parliament was silent, and the aristocracy idle.14 When Austen Layard, now a Liberal MP, formed the Association for Administrative Reform in May 1855, Dickens joined and addressed it, taking up Layard’s complaint that merit and efficiency were passed over in public appointments in favour of ‘party and family influences’ and making this a running theme in his book. A series of articles in Household Words gave his views of the government, although he was careful to explain that he had no intention of entering politics himself: ‘literature is my profession – it is at once my business and my pleasure, and I shall never pass beyond it.’15 The Association for Administrative Reform fizzled out, but Dickens continued to fulminate in private, telling Forster in September that ‘representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that the whole thing has broken down’.16

  A few days later he wrote to Macready of ‘flunkeyism, toadyism, letting the most contemptible Lords come in for all manner of places’, and went on, ‘I have no present political faith or hope – not a grain.’ He added that he was now hammering away at ‘Nobody’s Fault’, ‘blowing off steam which would otherwise blow me up’, and found relief from his dark political thoughts only in strenuous exercise.17 The satirical parts of the book took on the great political families whose sons were given employment as by right, seats in parliament and well-paid positions as civil servants in government departments. Dickens calls them the Tite Barnacles and the Stiltstalkings, and has fun at their expense, showing the young ones idling in the great Circumlocution Office and Lord Decimus Barnacle himself dispensing patronage at a carefully arranged dinner, where he is encouraged by sycophantic fellow guests to tell his only joke. It involves lengthy reminiscences about a pear tree at Eton and pairs in parliament, and he takes much pleasure in boring everyone with it. In the glow of satisfaction this gives him he offers a senior position to his hostess’s son, a young man described by his own wife as ‘almost an idiot’, but made acceptable through his access to the fortune of his millionaire stepfather. It is a devastating piece of mockery, it angered the men Dickens was ridiculing, and some of the bad reviews the book received later were a closing of ranks with the class under attack.

  Laying out his dark vision of England absorbed Dickens for two and a half years, from early in 1855 until June 1857. He gives a striking account of the process of gestation in his letters, first of the scattered ideas and impressions that lead to ‘writing and planning and making notes over an immense number of little bits of paper, and they turn out to be illegible’. After this comes the sensation that the story was a physical force, ‘breaking out all round me’ and also controlling him, so that he had to go off ‘down the railroad to humour it’. Lavinia Watson was told in May of his ‘walking about the country by day – prowling about into the strangest places in London by night – sitting down to do an immensity – getting up after doing nothing … tearing my hair (which I can’t afford to do) – and on the whole astonished at my own condition, though I am used to it’. He told Miss Coutts that he had got himself into ‘a state of restlessness impossible to be described – impossible to be imagined – wearing and tearing to be experienced … I get up and go down a railroad – come back again, and register a vow to go out of town instantly, and begin at the feet of the Pyrenees … get up and walk about my room all day – wander about London till midnight – make engagements and am too distraught to keep them.’ Two weeks later his symptom
s were still bad, but ‘I am actually at work and in the middle of No. One’, meaning the first four chapters of what he still called ‘Nobody’s Fault’.18

  The quiet concentration found necessary by other writers was not a feature of Dickens’s working life.19 Throughout the months in which he laboured to take hold of his ideas and get started on the book, rival preoccupation of all kinds took his time and attention. There was Household Words to edit and write for, and his engagement with Layard’s Association for Administrative Reform: addressing it at a public meeting, he energetically attacked Lord Palmerston (who had followed Aberdeen as Prime Minister), together with the House of Commons, likening them to a run-down theatrical company. He was busy with the Home in Shepherd’s Bush, and engaged in trying to rescue another unfortunate young woman. When his early love, Maria Beadnell, wrote to him he was roused to intense emotion and made plans to meet her. He prepared, for his own amusement, a long reading-out of David Copperfield, which he did not then use until the 1860s. He embarked on the process of buying a house in Kent, after an all-male celebration of his birthday at a Gravesend inn, when he walked to Rochester through the snow and noticed as he went over Gad’s Hill a sign saying there was a freehold to be sold there. It was ‘the spot and the very house … literally “a dream of my childhood”’, he told Wills, and instructed him to pursue the possibility of buying it.20 Since he had already planned a trip to Paris with Collins, stopping at Boulogne to take Frank and Alfred out to dinner, he went ahead with that and left Wills to proceed. Collins fell ill, Dickens was so preoccupied and uncertain of his moves that he told Forster he might travel on from Paris to Bordeaux, and had further thoughts of moving to the Pyrenees in the summer. Once again he compared himself to David Copperfield, saying he was ‘altogether in a dishevelled state of mind … Why is it that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?’21

  There were more of these complaints to come, but instead of going to Bordeaux he took on the production of Collins’s melodrama The Lighthouse, to be performed in Tavistock House at midsummer, with himself in the leading part, and followed by a farce largely improvised by himself and Mark Lemon – all major distractions involving weeks of work. In May he decided he would spend six months in Paris the following winter and made the first move to find accommodation for himself and family. How could anyone do all this and at the same time be gearing himself up to write a long novel? Dickens kept going by taking on too much. He knew no other way to live, and no day went by in which he did not stretch himself, physically, socially and emotionally.

  When the school holidays came in July, he rented a house in Folkestone, took eight of the children there – Charley was working in London – and set up his writing routine, five hours’ work every morning from nine to two, after which he walked alone until five o’clock in the afternoon. He complained of the boys being noisy, but not for long, because Walter left on 1 August for his Indian Army training school and eight-year-old Sydney went with Alfred and Frank on 1 September to boarding school in Boulogne, leaving only Mamie, Katey and the two youngest boys.

  At this point, in September 1855, Dickens changed the title of the book from ‘Nobody’s Fault’, his political joke, to the simple, childish-sounding Little Dorrit, the name used by one of his characters, Amy Dorrit, the daughter of William Dorrit, a debtor held in the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark. The story is set even further back than Bleak House, in the 1820s, when he was a boy.22 William Dorrit has been in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison for many years, but 1824 was the year of John Dickens’s imprisonment there. Starting from this secret source of inspiration, Dickens’s imagination led him to create Dorrit’s youngest child, Little Dorrit, brought up in the Marshalsea, undernourished and thinly dressed, but with a persistent goodness that shines out over the shabby world through which she moves, and to which she contributes her practical skills, her hard work and her kindness to those more unfortunate than herself.

  Although she is twenty-two years old in the main part of the story, she looks like a child, pale faced, small and thin, and she is a natural successor to the working children who appeared in Bleak House. But she is more than this: she threads a strand of poetry through the book, able to walk through the night-time streets unmolested, comforting, helping and allowing dignity to the brain-damaged and hairless Maggy and to Old Nandy from the workhouse, good to her ungrateful elder brother and sister, and making unannounced midnight appearances. Early in the story, when the forty-year-old Arthur Clennam is reviewing his wasted life and hopeless future by a dying fire, late at night in his lodging, asking himself what his situation is now but a descent to the grave, the door is softly opened ‘and these spoken words startled him and came as if they were an answer: “Little Dorrit”’. It is a magical moment, and it is neither theatrical nor sentimental.23 She acts as parent to her father, never complaining of his bad behaviour, let alone raging, as Dickens had so often done at his father. She has something of Cordelia, who comforted her father in prison. Dickens knew his Shakespeare, and was no more tied to realism than Shakespeare. Little Dorrit is the wise child who redeems a sorry world.

  Little Dorrit is the third in Dickens’s condition-of-England novels, and returns to the broad sweep of Bleak House. The centre of the story is again London, an almost unredeemedly gloomy London, with its ‘deadly sewer’, once a fine, fresh river, running through it, its overworked people denied natural beauty, its melancholy streets ‘gloomy, close, and stale’, its broken old houses on whose steps sit ‘light children nursing heavy children’, and smart, cheap new houses with absurdly got-up footmen and grooms lounging outside. The ‘crooked and descending streets’ below St Paul’s, between Cheapside and the river, lead down among warehouses and wharves through narrow alleys to the foul river and ‘Found Drowned’ bills. Everything offends the senses. The houses of the rich smell dismally of ‘yesterday’s soup and coach-horses’. The clothes of the poor are greasy. Old Nandy in his pauper’s uniform smells of all the other workhouse men. Mrs Flora Finching, once pretty and lovable, now middle aged, eats too much, weighs too much, talks too much and smells of lavender water and brandy. On Sunday evening the church bells sound ‘as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round’. Dickens dislikes so much of what he sees, hears and smells – partly the London of his childhood, partly London in the 1850s – that his jokes are almost all uncomfortable or bitter.

  He maps out a great London patchwork around the river, St Paul’s and Cheapside, Barbican, Holborn and the Gray’s Inn Road; the Borough, Southwark Bridge with its three narrow cast-iron arches, built in 1819, where Little Dorrit goes to be quiet and sit looking at the water beneath; Covent Garden and Pentonville; Richmond and Hampton Court; Cavendish Square and Park Lane; and Westminster, where the government offices are. And he takes his cast from all these places – the workhouse, the prison, the theatre, the government offices, the crammed dwellings of the poor in Bleeding Heart Yard, Mayfair mansions, grace-and-favour residences and suburban villas. They are woven together in an elaborately constructed plot, some of it over-elaborate and strained at the seams. The pantomime villain Rigaud who hails from a Marseilles prison fails to convince at any point, and is more memorable for being given the first cigarette to appear in Dickens’s fiction than anything else.24 Many of the characters are sent on travels through France, to the Alps, Venice and Rome, but London and especially the Marshalsea and its surroundings are the heart of the book.25

  The question of money also runs through it: how to make it, how to lose it, how to manage without it; when is it real, and when notional? Perennial questions. The Dorrit family is raised from prison and debt to great wealth, investments are made and lost, the financier Merdle maintains the lifestyle appropriate to his vast fortune through his beautiful cold wife and his terrifyingly superior butler, without ever enjoying himself. Mrs Merdle has perfecte
d a conversational style in which she expresses her preference for a simple life – ‘A more primitive state of society would be delicious to me’ and ‘I am pastoral to a degree, by nature’ – but is bound by Society, she explains, to respect its values, which are neither primitive nor pastoral. Politicians, bankers, bishops and lawyers are all eager to attend the dinners given by the Merdles. Mr Casby, a landlord with the look of a benevolent patriarch, squeezes his poor tenants mercilessly through his rent collector. The amateur artist Henry Gowan, cousin to the Barnacles, condescends to marry the daughter of the middle-class Meagles and to overspend the generous allowance they give her while despising them as social inferiors. Arthur Clennam, the unheroic hero, has been brought up by a ferociously pious mother whose creed is ‘Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them.’ He discovers that his real mother, who died young, had been a poor singer training for the stage, and so dedicated to the world of art and imagination despised by his foster mother. Clennam is no businessman, and has to learn through adversity and loss where he may put his trust: not in business, not in government departments, not in religion, but only in the faithful human heart.