Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Kate did not agree. She found the expressions of love in the letters perfunctory. She thought they showed that even before his marriage Dickens had been resigned to doing without the kind of companionship he craved. She did not see his heart and soul in these letters, and she feared that others might eventually turn up (letters to Ellen Ternan) in which his heart and soul did appear, making the letters to Catherine look all the more hypocritical. In the late 1890s, she was thinking of destroying the correspondence her mother had entrusted to her.

  It took George Bernard Shaw, whom she consulted on the matter, to convince Kate to save the letters and donate them to the British Museum. It took Shaw to get her to see that a case could be made for her mother. For Kate was an old-fashioned romantic, and she liked the story of a great man mismated and dragged down by an inferior woman. Shaw did not. He argued that ‘the sentimental sympathy of the nineteenth century with the man of genius tied to a commonplace wife had been rudely upset by a writer named Ibsen’. He predicted that posterity would sympathise more with the woman sacrificed to her husband’s uxoriousness to the extent of being made to bear ten children in sixteen years than with the man whose grievance only amounted to the fact ‘that she was not a female Charles Dickens’.55 Shaw seems to have convinced Kate thoroughly, for she later co-operated with Gladys Storey in the first attempt to tell the story of the Dickenses’ separation from Mrs Dickens’s point of view. Dickens and Daughter, published in 1939, based on conversations between Gladys Storey and Kate Dickens Collins Perugini in 1923, is dedicated to the memory of Mrs Perugini and of her mother, Mrs Charles Dickens.

  Although he thought he was unique, Charles Dickens, in his unrest and his impulse to blame it on the person with whom he had chosen to spend his life, was probably representative of many. Trying to be good, wanting to be loved, he made himself known in his own time as a model of (as they would have put it) ungentlemanly behaviour. For us he provides a fine example of how not to end a marriage.

  NOTES

  1.See the engrossing Dickens and Mesmerism by Fred Kaplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  2. My account of this episode follows closely that of Jane Carlyle in a letter to her uncle of December 13, 1847. See Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. James Anthony Froude, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 1:309–12.

  3. Leslie Staples, ‘New Letters of Mary Hogarth and Her Sister Catherine’, The Dickensian 63 (1967): 76.

  4. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. I (1820–1839), ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, The Pilgrim Edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), 689.

  5. House and Storey, 1:630.

  6. Staples, Dickensian, 77.

  7. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford University Press, 1948–58), 631–32.

  8. Staples, Dickensian, 80.

  9. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. II (1840–1841), ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, The Pilgrim Edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), 310n.

  10. House and Storey, 2:317.

  11. Ibid., 322.

  12. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. III (1842–1843), ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, The Pilgrim Edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), 9n.

  13. House, Storey and Tillotson, 3:629.

  14. Ibid. I quote this letter because it is one of few written by Catherine Dickens that survives and because I like its unassuming sweetness of tone. In trying to reconstruct such a shadowy figure, one grasps at straws.

  15. House, Storey and Tillotson, 3:204–5.

  16. Ibid, 206.

  17. Ibid., 302, 302n.

  18. Ibid., 613–14n. Jane noticed one of Dickens’s small children gazing in awe at the plum pudding his father had just pulled out of the hat and saw him approached by Mrs Reid, one of the ‘Friend-of-the-Species’ people for whom the Carlyles had such scorn. Seeing the opportunity for a moral lesson, Mrs Reid whispered loudly into young Master Dickens’s ear, ‘Wouldn’t you like there to be such a nice plum pudding as that in every house in London tonight? I am sure I would!’ Jane was delighted by the uncomprehending look which the little boy cast up at his questioner, ‘a whole page of protest against twaddle!’

  19. This terror of bankruptcy despite success was the reason he fought so hard for an international copyright law. He ended up making himself unpopular in America by taking this as the theme of many of his speeches there. 20.

  House, Storey and Tillotson, 3:444. 21

  Ibid., 575. 22. Ibid., 597. Birth rates were high at mid-century and came down towards the end of the century, probably in response to the inflation of the 1870s. Large families were simply no longer affordable, and people turned towards birth control, which had been resisted passionately for most of the century, although Francis Place began trying to spread information about it as early as the 1820s. The size of the Forsyte family, according to their historian, Mr Galsworthy, varied with the interest rates, ten being the usual number of children when the interest rates were 10 per cent and three being more usual later. The vulcanisation of rubber in 1844 allowed the development of the diaphragm as a method of birth control, but the condom had existed much earlier, as well as the vaginal sponge, a device brought to England from France and the one which Francis Place was trying to popularise. But technology was not the crucial factor. (The most widely used methods of birth control in the nineteenth century – coitus interruptus and prolonged breastfeeding – depended on no technology at all.) Ideology kept middle-class people from using birth control until economic necessity forced them to it. On these matters, see J. A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964) and Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1965).

  Even the use of chloroform to ease the pains of childbirth was resisted, as being contrary to the Biblical injunction that women must bring forth children in pain and suffering. But Queen Victoria, who detested childbirth, as she detested what she called the whole ‘shadow side of marriage’ (anything having to do with sex), made chloroform respectable by using it for the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold, in 1853. Even before that, however, both Dickens and Charles Darwin had insisted that their wives be given chloroform for the birth of children, in 1850. Dickens insisted against doctors’ advice, and Darwin administered the chloroform himself. This was only three years after James Simpson, the Edinburgh physician, had discovered and published the usefulness of chloroform as an anaesthetic.

  23. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter, 3 vols., The Nonesuch Edition (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1938), 2:625–26.

  24. Ibid., 633.

  25. Ibid., 649.

  26. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, The Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 150.

  27. Dickens, Nonesuch Letters, 2:785.

  28. Daniel Levinson et al., The Seasons of a Man’s Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 199. See also Elliott Jaques, ‘Death and the Mid-Life Crisis’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 46 (1965): 502–14, reprinted in Elliott Jaques, Work, Creativity, and Social Justice (New York: International Universities Press, 1970).

  29. ‘The Stages of Life’ in The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Viking, 1971), 16–17.

  30. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter (New York: Haskell House, 1971; orig. publ. London, 1939). This book burst like a landmine into the placid fields of Dickensian biography, revealing for the first time details of Dickens’s secret life and particularly his affair with Ellen Ternan. Gladys Storey was a friend of Dickens’s daughter Kate, and got her information directly from Kate, in conversations held in 1923. See also David Parker and Michael Slater, ‘The Gladys Storey Papers’, The Dickensian 76 (Spring 1980): 3–16.

  31. Storey, Dickens and Daughter, 219.

  32. Dickens, Nonesuch Letters, 2:765.

  33. See Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Ralegh a
nd the Dramatic Sense of Life’ in Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 22–56.

  34. Dickens, Nonesuch Letters, 2:825; 859.

  35. Ibid., 2:805.

  36. See Ada Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), 11. Nisbet’s book, through Edmund Wilson, who made use of the Ellen Ternan material in his essay ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ in The Wound and the Bow (London: Methuen, n.d.), revolutionised contemporary attitudes towards Dickens.

  37. Edgar Johnson, ed., The Heart of Charles Dickens (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), 347–48.

  38. Quoted by John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1966; orig. publ. 1872–74), 2:198–99.

  39. Forster, 2:199.

  40. In the period 1876–80, there were about 460 petitions for divorce annually. See O. R. McGregor, Divorce in England (London: Heinemann, 1957), 36.

  41. Edgar Johnson, The Heart of Charles Dickens, 349.

  42. Quoted by Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Triumph and Tragedy, 2 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), 2:879.

  43. Forster revealed the blacking factory episode in his biography of Dickens, quoting heavily from an autobiographical document Dickens had prepared for him. Dickens was so deeply ashamed of this episode that he had not told even his wife about it and the remembrance of it made him a child again in thought: ‘My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.’ Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1:23. See 1:19–33 and Wilson’s ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’.

  44. Quoted Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, 46.

  45. Dickens, Nonesuch Letters, 2:20.

  46. Storey, Dickens and Daughter, 219.

  47. See Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, 64.

  48. Dickens, Nonesuch Letters, 3:15.

  49. He even broke with Bradbury and Evans, his publishers of many years, for not reprinting – although he had not requested them to do so – his Household Words statement in their magazine, Punch. They characterised this offence as the refusal to ‘take upon themselves, unsolicited, to satisfy an eccentric wish by a preposterous action’ (Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, 17).

  50. Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, 65–67.

  51. See New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle, 2 vols. (London and New York: John Lane, 1903), 2:118. The various expressions in which dickens is used as a substitute for devil (‘speaking of the dickens’, ‘playing the dickens’, etc.) are, however, very old. Some usages can be found in the sixteenth century.

  52. The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, ed. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 1:344, quoted Nisbet, Dickens and Ellen Ternan, 26.

  53. Ada Nisbet did the extraordinary detective work needed to understand this part of Dickens’s private life. Dickens destroyed most of his diaries, but one, kept on his second American tour, slipped away from him and ended up in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, where Nisbet found in it Dickens’s reminder to himself of his telegraphic code. See Dickens and Ellen Ternan, 54.

  54. Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud, trans. John Shepley, Krishna Winston and Arno Pomerans (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 177.

  55. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1 (1820–1839), ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), xxii.

  GEORGE ELIOT

  and

  GEORGE HENRY LEWES

  1854–1878

  prelude: the carlyles and the visiting australian

  One afternoon in their house on Cheyne Row, the Carlyles entertained a visitor from Australia. They had known Gavan Duffy for twenty years, from the days when he was a firebrand in Irish nationalist politics and an agitator for tenants’ rights. They had known him when he was jailed by the English for treason. Ten years before, despairing of Ireland, he had gone to Australia, Britain’s California, the land of opportunity, determined to prove that a man who had been called a traitor by the English in Ireland could rise to the top of the government of a free colony. By the time he came to visit London in 1865, he had already proved it. He was minister of lands for that vast continent. In the future he would rise even higher before retiring to devote himself to literary works, one of which, Conversations with Carlyle, would contain every word he could remember that the sage of Chelsea had uttered in their decades of friendship.

  This day, as the three sat chatting in the second-floor drawing room, shielded from draughts by the folding screen which Jane Carlyle had covered in découpage with scenes of antique heroism and pathos, Duffy was paying close attention in order to be Boswell to Carlyle’s Johnson. The latter-day Johnson was in a vile mood. He had been working on his biography of Frederick the Great for thirteen years, and now that he was nearing the end, far from feeling relieved, he feared that no one would read the book which, by taking so long to write, had blighted his life. When Duffy asked him if he would write another historical work after finishing Frederick, Carlyle answered grumpily. No one should be encouraged to write books at all these days, for nothing but junk was applauded – junk writers like Lamartine, with his windy platitudes, and George Sand, with her eroticism posing as morality.

  From George Sand, it was but a short step to talking of sex and London’s own female George.

  Was it consistent, asked Mrs Carlyle, to attack George Sand as a teacher of morals and to make so much of George Eliot in that respect? George Eliot, a moralist! Really, Mrs Carlyle had to laugh. ‘When we first heard that the strong woman of the Westminster Review had gone off with a man we all know, it was as startling as if we had heard that a woman we knew went off with the strong man in the circus. But that the partners in this enterprise set themselves up as moralists was even more of a surprise. A marvellous teacher of morals, surely, and still more marvellous in that other character, for which nature has not provided her with the outfit supposed to be essential.’

  Duffy was flattered by this allusion to the personal appearance of literary London’s most celebrated illicit couple. It included him among those who knew.

  ‘And the gallant,’ he said (referring to Lewes), ‘the gallant is just as badly equipped as an Adonis and conqueror of hearts.’

  ‘The ugliest little fellow you could meet anywhere,’ said the sage of Chelsea. ‘But lively and pleasant.’

  For his guest’s benefit, Carlyle explained that Lewes had been married to the pretty daughter of a disreputable member of Parliament from Wales. But she had openly produced all those dirty, sooty-skinned children whose father was Thornton Hunt. The household had broken bounds in all directions before he had met Miss Evans. So if he was now living sinfully with her, at least it could not be said he had broken up a healthy home in order to do so.

  ‘His proceeding with Miss Evans is not to be applauded, but it can scarcely be said that he has gone from bad to worse.’1

  a second birth

  It is so easy, looking backward, knowing the glorious fruits of a life, to assume that the glory was always evident, that the person destined for immortality looked confidently forward to his or her success, that people at the time acted deferentially and helpfully towards the one posterity would consider glorious. Nothing could be further from the truth of the life of George Eliot, who, at the time we begin her story was not George Eliot but Marian Evans, middle-aged, physically unattractive, lonely.

  In 1851, after spending the first thirty years of her life in the Midlands, in and around Coventry, she began working in London for the Westminster Review, a liberal periodical of some stature which had been particularly distinguished when it was owned by John Stuart Mill and which now belonged to John Chapman, the publi
sher and bookseller.2 Chapman and Marian Evans were the entire editorial staff of the Westminster, and since Chapman’s time was heavily committed to his other businesses, Miss Evans virtually ran the magazine herself. She conceived and commissioned articles, did copy-editing, read proofs and wrote some of the copy – particularly the connective copy in the long surveys of new work abroad and in England. Although the work was unpaid and she had to live on the interest from a legacy of £2,000 left by her father, it provided her with an excellent education in contemporary thought and literature.

  Superficially, her life was full. She boarded with the Chapmans, who had a large house in the Strand.3 She participated in their complicated family life: Chapman’s mistress was his children’s governess and lived with the family; both wife and mistress recognised Miss Evans’s presence as a further complication and watched constantly for signs of her attachment to Chapman evolving beyond the tolerable. The situation in the Chapman household must have been interesting but could hardly have been satisfying for the woman who was neither wife nor mistress. Still, there were pleasant social evenings. The Chapmans gave evening parties almost every week, and Miss Evans was always invited. Some of the people she met there – for example, Sir James Clark, the queen’s physician – liked her so much that they invited her to dine at their homes. Most people were impressed by her intelligence, by her grey eyes and by her voice, a deep, lovely instrument from which the provincial accent had been trained out when she was at boarding school in her teens. Ralph Waldo Emerson said of her, ‘That lady has a calm, serious soul.’