Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  But Dickens’s shame was not merely social embarrassment, and in the months after the completion of Dombey and Son he seems to have understood intuitively that his growth as an artist depended upon the excavation of his boyhood and the revelation of some of those experiences. The success of Dombey permitted this in several ways. One was that the novel was a rousing success, both critically and financially, and the terms of Dickens’s contract with Bradbury and Evans meant that he profited handsomely. He became financially secure and remained so thereafter (though he was at times beset by worries, especially late in life). Another was that he had approached one of the critical episodes of his childhood through the depiction of Mrs. Pipchin, and he had enjoyed writing about it. From the evidence of Dombey, he had, as it were, reduced her to her proper size—his adult mind had come to comprehend her and his power over his childish self, and he had experienced one of the special privileges of writing novels—putting powerful early experiences into a context. That Dickens felt a kinship with his former friend Madame de la Rue seems undeniable. That he helped her find a process for contextualizing and releasing herself from ideas and fears that oppressed her seems equally undeniable. Now he was ready to do something similar for himself, and he set about it with his usual energy. No doubt an additional motivation was the death from tuberculosis of his sister Fanny, only thirty-eight years old.

  Dickens had finished writing Dombey at the end of March 1848. The final number appeared in April, when the novel was also published in volume form. In April, Dickens and several friends also put on eight performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor as well as another farce, for the charitable benefit of the purchase of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford. Catherine was pregnant again, with the Dickenses’ eighth child, sixth son. (Sydney, son number five, was two.) As Frederick W. Dupee notes, “To his more and more open dismay, she continued to bear him children at brief intervals. . . .” The modern reader must wonder how he expected her to stop bearing these children, but nineteenth-century sources don’t engage substantively with the harder dilemmas of reproductive rights and choices. Ackroyd notes only that while Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins was reputed to have recourse to the seamier side of London life, and while Dickens showed no judgment of, and some interest in, Collins’s activities, there is no evidence that Dickens himself conducted his sexual life with anything but the greatest propriety. He was a firm believer in the Victorian domestic ideal of male-female familial companionship, except that the companion he had chosen was proving less and less satisfactory.

  During this time, it is not clear exactly when, Dickens began to write an autobiography. The fragment, amounting to some seven thousand words, was written, according to Forster, without any corrections, evidence of strong feeling and much previous thought. Its subject was a period he had not otherwise talked about, which has since become the most famous of his early life—at twelve, young Charles was removed from school and sent to work at a shoe polish factory, where he stood in a little window, pasting labels onto bottles, where passersby could watch him. Warren’s Blacking Factory was situated by the Thames in London, at Hungerford Stairs, near the Strand (next to Hungerford Market, which was torn down when Charing Cross Station was built upon the site). We now associate the area with tourism and shopping, but before the neighborhood was rebuilt and Trafalgar Square was created, it was ancient, damp. And frightening to young Charles, who later wrote, “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of [the experience] 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.” Not long after Charles went to work (living at the lodgings of Mrs. Roylance, who was the original of Mrs. Pipchin), John Dickens was taken into custody for nonpayment of debts, and the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, on the south side of the river, across London Bridge.

  Every biographer of Dickens has noted the profound impact these events had upon the boy and the man and speculated about the reasons. Certainly the change was fairly sudden and amounted to a class humiliation for the boy. Dickens had been born in Portsmouth, where his father worked in the Navy Pay Office, a respectable and promising appointment. His sister Fanny was about fifteen months older; two years later, his brother Alfred was born but died as an infant, and, two years after that, his sister Letitia. The Dickenses were, in fact, a large family, and by all accounts Charles came legitimately by his sociability, energy, and lively spirits, since the parents enjoyed singing, dancing, celebrating, and performing and encouraged the children’s talents. The family lived briefly in London, and then the Navy Pay Office sent John Dickens to Chatham, a naval town on the Thames estuary, when Charles was five. Three more children were born by the time Charles was ten, making seven in all.

  The five years in Chatham constituted Charles Dickens’s happy childhood. He was, by his own account, very attached to his sister Fanny, and Chatham was an interesting place to grow up in—a naval town still resonating from the Napoleonic Wars, where much of the population was attached to the military in some way. It was a rough town, but Dickens always spoke of it more fondly than he spoke of neighboring Rochester, a more respectable cathedral town that Dickens considered oppressive. He was taught to read by his mother and then sent off with his sister to a nearby school when he was about six. He reported over and over as an adult that the great resource and joy of his childhood had been books—eighteenth-century novels, like Peregrine Pickle and Tom Jones, but especially Tales from the Arabian Nights. Adults who knew him in childhood commented upon his devotion to reading, and it seems evident that his parents were eager to supply him with both education and books (his mother taught him some Latin). But John and Elizabeth Dickens’s good intentions were overwhelmed by their improvidence, and the fiscal life of the family got shakier and shakier.

  When John was sent to London in the summer of 1822, now the father of seven, he simply could not live on his pay, and even though he enrolled Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music, Charles’s schooling apparently came to an end. He had thought he was going to be educated for some profession, and it appeared that those hopes were to be utterly given up. His sister Fanny was not, by contrast, required to leave her studies. Ackroyd suggests that the humiliation of doing his work in the window of the blacking factory and being observed by passing strangers was especially galling to a child of Dickens’s sensitivity—the nightmare counterpart to performing songs and speeches, which he always enjoyed. He had a horror of the factory and the district, and portrayed them later on as representations of evil and corruption. He was ejected from his family—while they lived rather comfortably together in the debtors’ prison, he was required to make his way through the streets alone, purchasing his own provisions and running the gauntlet of all the street people and eccentrics who might notice him. He was small and unprotected and suddenly required to grow up without sympathetic companionship. And yet, of course, as he well knew then and later pointed out to his readers over and over, there were thousands of children in London suffering under far greater danger and hardship. His servitude lasted five months, after which his father’s debts were relieved by a providential act of Parliament. His mother (no doubt attracted by the idea of a little extra money and one less mouth to feed) was reluctant to end his employment—something that Dickens never forgot or forgave; but he did go back to school for a few more years, before leaving finally at fifteen and embarking on his working life.

  Dickens had other memories of childhood, some of them cherished. It was not only the unpleasant ones that compelled him as he began to address his early life in his work. In her last weeks, his sister Fanny had recounted to him an odd experience, which he related to Forster: “In the night, the smell of the fallen leaves in the woods where we had habitually walked as very young children had come upon her with such strength of reality that she had moved her head to look for strewn leaves on the floor at her bedsi
de.” Dickens’s characteristic hypersensitivity to everything, but especially to sensory experiences, surely was a permanent feature of his makeup, and, of course, he had an extraordinary and well-developed memory. The impressions left by his childhood were a treasure; in order to revisit them, he had to rob the darker ones of their power, which he began to do through the autobiographical fragment. The fragment portrays the young Charles as the hapless victim of those around him, which Dickens the experienced author certainly sensed was not quite right, rhetorically, for a work that was to see publication. Confession and self-regard are the trickiest forms of rhetoric, the most likely to arouse ridicule or antagonism in the reader. Dickens the editor could distinguish between a document that had value for the author in organizing memories of experience and a document that had value for the reader in telling an entertaining or enlightening story. The autobiographical fragment didn’t succeed, and Dickens subsequently sent it to Forster, who waited until after Dickens’s death to publish it.

  In the autumn, Dickens wrote his last Christmas book, The Haunted Man. The haunted man in question, a chemist named Redlaw, is an isolated scholar beset by memories of the death of his sister and of his betrayal by a trusted friend, who many years before had seduced away Redlaw’s beloved. Like Scrooge, he is visited by a ghost, who offers to remove his faculty of memory and to give him the power to do likewise for everyone he meets. A kind and benevolent man, Redlaw suffers so much with his memories that he accepts this gift. In The Haunted Man, Dickens makes his most explicit argument for the primacy of mental attitude over external circumstances in the achievement of peace, happiness, and even prosperity. Redlaw’s associates and acquaintances live in more problematic circumstances than he does—Mrs. Williams, his housekeeper at the college, has never had children after the death of her firstborn. Her eighty-four-year-old father-in-law has seen his older son lead a life of increasing depravity. One of Redlaw’s students is recovering from a life-threatening illness and is impoverished. Neighbors of this student, the Tetterbys, have little money, little space, and too many children. But until Redlaw comes along, everyone is happy enough. In particular, the portrait of the Tetterbys is one of Dickens’s very best evocations of family life and absolutely sparkles with a sense of lived experience. There is even a touch of homely forgiveness, since Mr. Tetterby is a small man and Mrs. Tetterby is fat (something Dickens seems to have held against Catherine). But every time Redlaw interacts with another character, even incidentally, that character loses his or her memories and is transformed. The effect is illustrated comically with the Tetterbys: “The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny’s hand—the patient, enduring, and devoted Johnny—rose against the baby! Yes. Mrs. Tetterby, going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child.” The other characters are transformed as well, until Redlaw comes to realize the horrifying manner in which he is remaking the world and seeks reversal of his gift. Dickens’s explicit point is that memories of both pleasure and suffering are the source of forgiveness and, indeed, the source of our capacity to live with one another in toleration and happiness. Without memories, only the present inconveniences of life can assert themselves, breaking connections and driving people apart.

  Whether or not this philosophical assertion is true, Dickens worked it out in detail in The Haunted Man and then built upon it when he began perhaps his greatest, and certainly his favorite, novel, David Copperfield, in February 1849. It was just around the time of his thirty-seventh birthday, and exactly twenty-five years after the commencement of his employment at Warren’s Blacking Factory.

  It was Forster who suggested that Dickens use the first-person point of view to tell the story. He was possibly influenced by the popularity of Jane Eyre, published in 1847, though Dickens himself never read it. Dickens was no longer alone in the field of the Victorian novel—the publication of Vanity Fair coincided with that of Dombey and Son. Thackeray’s feelings of rivalry (which Dickens does not appear to have shared) could not have been soothed by the comparative sales of the two novels—five thousand for each number of Vanity Fair, thirty thousand for Dombey. Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 as well, and Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton in 1848. Dickens was still the most popular serious novelist of the age, but other voices were emerging from his shadow, expressing distinct visions of their own. That they fed his inspiration, at least secondhand, is another manifestation of Dickens’s natural inclusiveness. He seems to have been far less aware of them as rivals than they were of him—throughout his writing life, he was the primus inter pares. Writers who lived during his lifetime (and just after) felt they had to define themselves in relationship to him, but he did not reciprocate the feeling—he was generous with praise and invitations to write for the periodicals he edited, and honest, though tactful, with criticism. His own work filled up his thoughts while he was creating it; he paid no attention to what other writers might be doing.

  David Copperfield did not go as smoothly or easily at first as Dombey. His letters to Forster were filled with complaints, and certain details, such as the title of the novel, the names of some characters, and the nature of David’s profession, remained undecided or were changed well into the composition of first numbers, evidence of indecisiveness that was unusual for Dickens and in contrast with the high degree of planning that had worked so well for Dombey. Nevertheless, and even though David Copperfield sold fewer copies than Dombey, Dickens grew increasingly pleased with it and wrote steadily, without interruption.

  He loved it as if it were his autobiography, but in fact the incidents of the novel and the incidents of Dickens’s early life were quite different. David Copperfield, of course, is the scion of a much different family from the populous and convivial Dickenses. His father, twenty years older than his mother, is already dead by the time David is born. He lives happily with his mother and the servant, Peggotty, near Yarmouth. His father’s sister, Betsey Trotwood, is a woman of property, though eccentric and embittered by her failed marriage. The first chapters of David Copperfield detail a sort of early childhood idyll, with David the treasured male child, that is brutally ended by David’s mother’s remarriage to Mr. Murdstone. Murdstone and his sister, Jane, are classic portraits of just the sort of Victorian parents that Dickens detested. They are harsh, serious, authoritarian, and unimaginative. Their cruelty arises from their own joylessness and lovelessness. Their most evil effect comes not from how they treat David and his mother (which is bad enough), but from how they cast a pall of heavy sobriety and restraint over everything. What Murdstone says is just close enough to what a typical stepfather might say to or about his stepson as to be especially chilling. When David bites Murdstone in the midst of being punished, he is sent away to boarding school.

  The characters of Peggotty and her brother, Ham, Little Em’ly, and Barkis the carrier have no known analogues in Dickens’s family, nor had Dickens ever been to Yarmouth until just before he began the novel. Nevertheless, David Copperfield seemed to Dickens to evoke the feelings he had had as a child, and therefore to be true to his life as he had experienced it. The events themselves were less important than the feelings they gave rise to in the author, and the first-person point of view allowed Dickens to evoke how it feels to be a child. This was certainly one of his special talents, and in David Copperfield, he did better than he had in Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop in mediating between a growing child’s sense of his own power and his sense of being in the power of others. David is not a hapless victim; in fact, once he gets to school, his immaturity and ignorance hurt others, most notably Mr. Mell, whose family circumstances David knows he should not reveal but does anyway, leading to Steerforth’s ridiculing Mr. Mell and Creakle’s firing him. While we never lose sympathy for David, we also never forget that he has a task, which is to learn how to be a good man—his innocence is no guarantee of good judgment or right acti
on. In this sense, the portrayal of David is far more sophisticated than earlier portrayals of children; even Paul Dombey is characterized at one point as sometimes imperious but never shown to be other than unusually wise and loving. The depiction of David’s infancy and childhood is the sine qua non of such later depictions of childhood as the first chapters of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dickens’s experience and his natural sympathies with children in general led him to understand that the tone and style of childhood are different from that of adulthood and worthy of artistic representation. This is surely in part the reason Freud was so fond of David Copperfield—Dickens apprehended that the symbolic world of the small child was rich and had lifelong power, and in the course of relatively few pages of text, the life is lived and the symbolic links are forged. The narrative also reinforces the idea that a consciousness can understand how it came to be through memory and reconstruction of early experiences. David has no “analyst,” but the narrator himself serves as the analyst, mediating through language and selection of incident between the reader and the protagonist.