Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  In retrospect, Kate believed that Ellen Ternan had been the cause of all the trouble. She, like much of London society, assumed there had to be Another Woman (it was not yet fashionable to conceive of the Other Woman as symptom rather than cause). But people who did not know the situation in the Dickens household as well as the Dickens daughters thought that the Other Woman was Georgina Hogarth, who had brought up the children and run the household for so many years. This was an unusually shocking suggestion, because in England at this time it was still illegal for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister; the relationship was considered incestuous. How much worse, then, to carry on illicitly with a living wife’s sister! Thackeray thought he was standing up loyally for Dickens when someone at the Garrick Club said he was having an affair with his sister-in-law. ‘No such thing,’ said Thackeray. ‘It’s with an actress.’ Hearing of this episode, Dickens was furious with Thackeray for spreading what he considered a great slander, although it was certainly the lesser of two slanders and closer to the truth. He could not accept any version of the story of his separation other than the one he himself chose to give out, the story of incompatibility bleeding into the tale of the monstrous Catherine. No blame. No blame. At least no blame on him. People whom he could not bring around to his way of seeing things, like Thackeray and Mark Lemon, he broke with.

  Other people in those days separated. George Lewes left Agnes, continuing to support her and her children, even the illegitimate ones. Anna Jameson, the author, lived apart from her husband for most of their life, supporting herself by her pen. Mrs Norton made her separation the basis of a campaign for women’s rights. Other male novelists who lived separate from their wives were Frederick Marryat and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The Bulwers’ separation and that of Mrs Norton were hardly discreet – Mrs Norton sought publicity in order to dramatise the injustices which married women suffered under English law. In the Dickenses’ separation, no issues were at stake, yet Dickens sought to tell his story as vigorously as Mrs Norton. Behind his desperate attempts to justify himself must have lain the sense that he was doing something wrong. But towards whom did he feel guilty? Towards Catherine, for abandoning his role as husband or towards his public for betraying his role as the bard of domesticity? Other people got separated, but few were in as peculiar a position as Dickens, who had so successfully appropriated for himself the role of exemplar and moral tutor. The London correspondent of The New York Times wrote that rumours of Dickens’s having eloped to France with an actress were a lying scandal which ought to be scotched lest readers’ faith in the wholesome lessons of Pickwick, Master Humphrey’s Clock and the Christmas stories be shaken by the author’s failure to achieve in his own life the ideals of peace and harmony he wrote about.

  Three days after the deed of separation was delivered to Catherine in June of 1858 after complicated and acrimonious negotiations, Dickens took a quite extraordinary step. It was a gigantic rebellion against the social structures in which his life was embedded, an absolute assertion of the uniqueness of his life and of the primacy of his imagination over all fact. He wrote a statement about his separation from his wife explaining himself and attempting to clear his name. Then he had the statement published first in the London Times and later in his own Household Words. ‘Three-and-twenty years have passed since I entered on my present relations with the Public,’ his statement began, and he continued, in describing his ties to the Public, to use imagery bizarrely connubial. He has tried to be as ‘faithful to the Public as they have been to me’. He has never trifled with the Public, or deceived it, or presumed upon its favours. He has always tried to do his duty by it. The document presents his relationship with the Public as the primary one in his life, and his marriage merely as an incident. His concern is all lest the Public think badly of him.

  Some domestic trouble of mine, of long-standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected, as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no anger or ill-will of any kind, and the whole origin, progress, and surrounding circumstances of which have been, throughout, within the knowledge of my children. It is amicably composed, and its details have now to be forgotten by those concerned in it.

  By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous and cruel – involving, not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge at all, if, indeed, they have any existence – and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an unwholesome air.47

  The monstrous and cruel misrepresentations he refers to were of course the suggestions that he was involved with another woman, whether Georgina Hogarth or Ellen Ternan, and the notion that not one reader in a thousand would not have heard these slanders suggests how badly Dickens was foundering in the fantasy that his private life was public, uniquely visible, centrally important to his readers. Of course, what the publication of his statement accomplished was precisely to spread the rumours about his private life far beyond the relatively small group of people in London who had heard them before. To spread them without convincing anyone that they were not true. How could the master manipulator of public response have conceived a step so misguided?

  In a way, everything in his adult life can be seen as preparing for this debacle, for his misjudgment of people’s response. He had had too much success in exerting his personal power. In his immediate lionisation with the publication of The Pickwick Papers when he was twenty-four, in his experiments with mesmerism, which put another person’s mind directly in his control, in his public readings and performances which established an almost hypnotic relationship with his audience, he was nurtured in a fantasy of omnipotence. He was convinced that there was a ‘particular relation (personally affectionate and like no other man’s)’48 subsisting between himself and the public, that vast feminine abstraction which wept and fainted and laughed on cue. He needed it to go on reacting as he wished. He needed its applause. He needed its love. He needed to retain his power over it. He had created another marriage, his successful marriage with the British public.

  The statement in Household Words was followed, in mid-August, by an even more explicit account by Dickens of the separation. He had written it in late May and given it to Arthur Smith, the manager of his public readings, to use as he saw fit in putting rumours to rest. What Smith saw fit to do was give the letter to the New York Tribune, from which the copy was reprinted in many other American and English newspapers, spreading the news of Dickens’s domestic misery even further throughout the world. Dickens claimed to be upset and referred to the document afterwards as ‘the violated letter’, but he did not end his friendship with Smith as he had with so many others who contradicted his wishes about the public presentation of his private life.49 So the violated letter constitutes another example of Dickens’s contradictory wishes to assert and control and yet to appear as victim.

  ‘Mrs Dickens and I have lived unhappily together for many years,’ this amazing statement began, like a parody of a fairy tale. ‘Hardly anyone who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, ever were joined together who had a greater difficulty understanding one another, or who had less in common.’ It is a smoothly worked-up version of his statement to Miss Coutts, emphasising Catherine’s dereliction in the household and glorifying Georgina Hogarth as the family’s saviour, the person to whom all the children are devoted and who has a greater claim on Dickens’s own affection, respect and gratitude than anyone else in the world. With a passing reference to a ‘mental disorder under which [Mrs Dickens] sometimes labours’ – no doubt, her jealousy – h
e goes on explicitly, but without mentioning her name, to deny the guilt of Ellen Ternan. Two ‘wicked persons’ (Catherine’s mother and sister) had linked Ellen with the separation. But ‘upon my soul and honour,’ he wrote, ‘there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than that young lady. I know her to be innocent and pure and as good as my own dear daughters.’50 The ‘violated letter’ expresses the myth of Dickens’s marriage as he chose to present it, as he probably believed it, in its final form, and it is worth noting what role he casts himself in. He has done nothing. He is torn between two women, one good, one bad. The issue is household and family management. There is no question of erotic needs or sexual satisfaction. Dickens’s marriage with the public was also, in its way, imprisoning; if Dickens was patriarchal in his relations with the public, the public was equally demanding, severely limiting him in the story he could tell. It would not permit the mention of anything which might bring a blush to the cheek of Miss Podsnap. In telling, even to himself, the story of his life, he had to make adjustments for the demands of family readers. In presenting the crises of adult life, he was forced back upon the structures and narratives of childhood crisis. He asked the public to respond to his domestic misery as they had to the trials of Oliver Twist, or Paul Dombey or the young David Copperfield.

  But the public was less a captive of its popular fictions than Dickens. It refused to believe that the most admired novelist of his country and age, the one with the fame, the money, the children, the magazine – and perhaps the mistress – was a victim. Jane Carlyle quipped that if one wanted a new way to describe a man who had ill-used his wife, one could say he had played the dickens with her.51 Many others saw the irony of the situation, as expressed in this contemporary comment, ‘Rumour says that this great novelist of the domestic hearth ran away with an actress; and his separation from his wife, although it does not prove this story, does show that he really was not happy at home, although he wrote so well about that kind of thing.’52 But the irony of his position was lost on Dickens. Other people had to tell him that it would not do to use the name Household Harmony for the re-constituted Household Words. (He used All the Year Round.) He believed too unshakeably in the fiction of his own innocence – that only the character of Catherine and not his own nature had kept him from the domestic ideal which he still endorsed – to see the joke.

  Catherine moved to Gloucester Crescent, accompanied, at least for a time, by Charles Junior, and Dickens’s torment was over. The intolerable itch was scratched. Soon after the separation, he was heavily supporting the Ternan family and looking after Ellen and Maria. On occasion he had his proofs sent to him at Ellen’s house. Kate Dickens believed that they had a child together, who died in infancy. He was, at any rate, deeply devoted to this woman who would always remain (she was twenty-seven years younger than he) the embodiment of eternal youth. The only unhappiness was leaving her as, for example, he was forced to do in 1867, when he went on a reading tour of America. He conceived the idea that she might join him there. He would look the place over and decide. If, shortly after his arrival in America, he telegraphed ‘All well’, then Ellen was to join him. If he telegraphed ‘Safe and well’, she was to stay put. The telegraph was to be sent to W. H. Wills, his assistant editor at All the Year Round, who would forward it both to Ellen in Italy and to Georgina at Gad’s Hill, but of course only Ellen would know what it really meant.53 The telegraph ‘Safe and Well’ went out, and Ellen remained in Florence with her sister, receiving letters from Dickens forwarded through Wills so there would be no direct communication between the lovers. In this Dickens was a model of discretion. Indeed the affair with Ellen Ternan forced Dickens to lead a secret and subterranean existence. He could not allow her to be seen with him publicly (although he travelled with her, and she and Mrs Ternan were with him when he was in a railway accident at Staplehurst), and she could not be received at Gad’s Hill Place to mix with his daughters.

  A powerful and new type of character appears in Dickens’s later work, a man divided and tormented. Bradley Headstone, the schoolmaster in Our Mutual Friend, whose frustrated passion for Lizzie Hexam leads him to plan the murder of the man Lizzie loves, is one of these striking figures in later Dickens who seems to live two separate lives – an underground, volcanic emotional life and a placid, repressed life of service. In Edwin Drood’s John Jasper – a choirmaster in a quiet cathedral town who takes opium, has possibly murdered his own nephew and is probably a devotee of the Indian goddess of destruction, Kali – the contrast between the underground life and the surface life of respectability verges on schizophrenia. In both cases, the man occupies a conspicuously respectable position in his community. His passionate emotional life is secret. He can find no way to integrate the two. The emotional impulses – the drive to emotional and sexual satisfaction – are imagined as destructive and murderous. In portraying these men who carry their respectability around with them like a burden, Dickens showed that he had come to understand imaginatively in his later years the truth that Freud was to articulate in Civilization and Its Discontents, that the achievements of civilisation require a suppression of instinctual drives, that lust and aggression had to be ridden over and trodden down in order for books to be written, laws to be passed, families to survive. And he also understood that this got harder, rather than easier, to do as one aged.

  I suspect that The Frozen Deep served as the template for the divided path of Dickens’s later life, providing a structure for emotions and impulses obscurely felt. Two men, united by their love for one woman, deadly rivals, one of whom sacrifices himself for the other: Dickens would repeat the triangular pattern in A Tale of Two Cities. In Our Mutual Friend, the other possibility is played out when Bradley Headstone actually plans to kill his rival. But the triangularity becomes most interesting when the two rivals exist within the same man, as in John Jasper, whose waking rational side vows to destroy the other side, the drugged, murderous worshipper of Kali. By amalgamating the two instincts – towards self-sacrifice and towards self-indulgence – in one person, by merging into one figure the two men who are rivals in love, Dickens worked his way towards a psychological formulation way beyond in subtlety anything in his early fiction. It is a formulation of psychic economy especially congenial to the late nineteenth century and to our own post-Freudian age, and recent biographers of Dickens, picking up on it, invariably emphasise Dickens’s enjoyment of his public readings of the murder of Nancy by Sikes – how his pulse would shoot up dangerously when he read that passage. They stress the writer’s criminal sympathies and the way he sublimated his erotic and murderous energies into fiction and performance. I would add that the woman for whom the darker part of himself had to be sacrificed so that the other part of him could live was certainly not Catherine and not Ellen Ternan, either. It was the British public, his feminine abstraction, that ultimately demanding woman he had created for himself and could never ultimately satisfy.

  Dickens may have felt he was bottling himself up, sacrificing his happiness for respectability, but in fact he neither stifled himself nor erupted self-destructively. He continued to write. For all the secrecy – perhaps because of it – he had a more satisfying life with Ellen Ternan than he had had with his wife. In however inept and muddled a fashion, he remade his life to suit himself for such ‘afternoon’ as he had left to him. (He lived twelve years after his separation from Catherine, dying at fifty-eight.) In later life, he tended to have sympathy for any man he met who was unsuitably married. And he showed, in his writings, an understanding of repression in men and of complex erotic appeal in women. Moreover, there is something compelling in the gigantic, unself-conscious theatricality of Dickens’s flailing against middle age and domesticity. There is something grand about living as though no one had ever lived before. He acted his plight out on the grand scale, in expectation of a matching grand-scale sympathy which never came.

  But it must be said that Dickens seems to have learned little about himself from
his sufferings – and less about the suffering of others. As he transferred all the blame to his wife in the matter of his marriage, he blamed most of his woes in later life on his male children, accusing them of shiftlessness and lack of energy, which they had inherited – as he thought – from their mother. Dickens’s emotional development is not inspirational. It is a story of survival merely and proves only, as Jung said about his own reprehensible behaviour to a young woman, that sometimes it is necessary to be unworthy in order to continue living.54

  If, for Dickens, the upheaval in 1858 was to the good, allowing life to continue, the price for his wife was a kind of living death. His behaviour towards her, accentuated by his self-righteous posturing, seems little short of murderous. Deprived of her children, deprived of any role, Catherine lived for twenty years after the separation. She lived quietly, like a lady, in the modest house in Gloucester Crescent. She remained very fat. When their son Walter died suddenly in 1864, Dickens did not even send her a note. When Dickens himself died, no one troubled to invite her to the funeral, although the scrupulous Miss Burdett-Coutts paid a formal condolence call on Catherine at Gloucester Crescent and not, as others did, on Georgina Hogarth at Gad’s Hill. Catherine felt she had been wronged and hoped that posterity would vindicate her. Near the end of her life, she gave the letters which Charles Dickens had written to her in the course of their life together to her daughter Kate, with the request that they be published. She thought the letters, filled with expressions of devotion and affection, proved that at least there had been a time when Dickens loved her.