Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  Torment is not uncommon in the lives of novelists and in the lives of nineteenth-century novelists seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. Thackeray’s wife was irredeemably insane; George Eliot lived out of wedlock with G. H. Lewes, whose wife continued to produce children with other men; Charlotte Brontë watched her sisters die of tuberculosis and her brother perish of alcoholism before herself dying in childbirth at forty-one; George Sand, Nikolai Gogol, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all lived lives that to us seem dramatic, strenuous, and even tragic, beset in some cases by debt, in others by illness, madness, loss, grief, political imprisonment. The onus was on them, nevertheless, to produce an art that was acceptable to the middle classes and, above all, respectable. With the passing of patronage and the broadening of an author’s audience, his or her social function (and therefore his or her source of income) shifted. Every novel seeks to entertain—beginning with the rise of the novel as a literary form, the fact that novels entertain was invoked as an essential criticism: young persons read novels rather than, say, sermons and thereby failed to improve their morals or their stock of knowledge—but the novel also has to enlighten, in order to attain and then maintain respectability. Novelists themselves, and Dickens was one of the first, understood at once the power of the form to reflect the world of the nineteenth century back to its citizens in a new and instructive way, but there were limits to what the middle classes were willing to ponder. Some novelists were more daring than others—Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, touches pretty firmly on marriage and sexuality, as well as upon slavery, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dickens’s attacks on the structure of English society were bolder than those of his contemporaries, who tended to focus on individuals. What novelists could not do, except by indirection, was reveal their personal torments in their art, especially if their personal torments were not quite respectable, and few torments are. For Dickens, whose purchase on his own middle-class life was always open to challenge, and whose expressed ideals of happiness and goodness were typical Victorian domestic ones, the contradiction between outward appearance and inner reality was especially dangerous.

  Dickens considered himself a reliable witness to, and an authority upon, social conditions of his time. Not only did he expend a great deal of energy informing himself, he also was in the habit of expressing his opinion and acting upon it. But as his critique broadened and darkened, he became less and less capable of putting it over. His style, or “genius,” as everyone called it, which was the essential and unchangeable feature of his vision, never failed to remind readers of his peculiarity. The lightheartedness and humor of earlier works had made a comprehensible bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and he had successfully embodied redemption through love, friendship, celebration, plenty, laughter, forgiveness, pleasure, character improvement, and the punishment of evil. In the 1850s, however, he no longer believed in improvement. One factor was the Crimean War of 1854–1855, the conduct of which exposed the incompetence of the government so that Dickens wrote his friend Mrs. Watson, “I feel as if the world had been pushed back 500 years.” He strongly felt that every official was shirking responsibility, as he wrote in an essay in August 1856: “The power of Nobody is becoming so enormous in England. . . . The hand which this surprising person had in the late war is amazing to consider. It was he who left the tents behind, who left the baggage behind, who chose the worst possible ground for encampments, who provided no means of transport, who killed the horses, who paralyzed the commissariat, who knew nothing of the business he professed to know and monopolized, who decimated the English army.” After developing this theme for several pages, he concludes, “Nobody has done more harm in this single generation than Everybody can mend in ten generations.”

  The war served only to confirm the contempt for Parliament he had felt first during his years reporting parliamentary speeches in the early 1830s. He always believed that the House of Commons was corrupted by self-interest, bribery, and collusion. He knew after twenty years of charitable endeavor that the alleviation of unsanitary public health conditions, for example, or the successful prosecution of a war was a public function, to be undertaken by the government in behalf of the citizens, but he saw no evidence that the British ruling class had any desire or will to do its duty.

  But the form of redemption Dickens represented in the public mind, and certainly in his own mind, redemption in domestic companionship and happiness, no longer seemed real to the man himself. Though he treated Catherine with consideration and courtesy at this point, in January 1855, he wrote Forster, “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?” He had given David Copperfield Agnes Wickfield, and he had given Allan Woodcourt Esther Summerson. He could imagine the sort of woman that a busy, benevolent, ambitious, energetic, and introspective man might love as a friend, companion, and wife, but he did not have that woman in his own life, and it is altogether possible that the authorial act of matching his alter ego, David, with Agnes exacerbated his sense of what he was missing. It was one thing for his fictional stand-in, John Jarndyce, to accept the role of kindly, detached guardian to his extended family; it was quite a different thing for the author himself, a man who fathered ten children in sixteen years. We may easily extrapolate Dickens’s ardor in every other area of his life to his sexual passions, although all the evidence is that however he felt, he had conducted himself up to this point with stern propriety. Nevertheless, within weeks of his confession to Forster, his longings were strangely answered through a letter from his first love, Maria Winter, née Beadnell.

  By his own admission, Dickens had been in love with, and obsessed by, Maria Beadnell for some four years, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, while he was working as a law clerk and shorthand parliamentary reporter. She was the daughter of a banker, and it has remained unknown how he first made her acquaintance or came to be accepted, at least provisionally, as an admirer, of which Maria had several. They met and also exchanged letters, some of them in secret after her father disapproved of the connection. In May 1833, Dickens declared his passionate love one last time, but her response was cool, and he parted from her. He met George Hogarth in 1834 and Catherine sometime between September and December of that year. There seemed always to be the sense that his regard for Catherine did not carry the passion of his attachment to Maria Beadnell. At any rate, when Mrs. Winter, now forty-four, wrote him, he responded warmly and at length, recalling his earlier feelings with great freshness. In their renewed correspondence, to quote the narrator of Hard Times, with reference to Louisa and James Harthouse, “He . . . established a confidence with her from which her husband was excluded.” Not to mention his wife.

  Dickens’s first letter to Mrs. Winter is worth quoting at length, if only to show how his mind worked:

  As I was reading by the fire last night, a handful of notes was laid down on my table. I looked them over, and, recognizing the writing of no private friend, let them lie there and went back to my book. But I found my mind curiously disturbed, and wandering away through so many years to early times of my life, that I was quite perplexed to account for it. There was nothing in what I had been reading, or immediately thinking about to awaken such a train of thought, and at last it came into my head that it must have been suggested by something in the look of one of those letters. So I turned them over again—and suddenly the remembrance of your hand came upon me with an influence that I cannot express to you. Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love.

  There was something so busy and so pleasant in your letter—so true and cheerful and frank and affectionate—that I read on with perfect delight until I came to your mention of your two little girls. In the unsettled state of my thoughts, the existence of these dear children appeared such
a prodigious phenomenon, that I was included to suspect myself of being out of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps I had nine children of my own!

  Dickens then goes on in a somewhat less personal vein, but six days later, he wrote her again from Paris:

  There are things that I have locked up in my own breast and that I never thought to bring out any more. But when I find myself writing “all to yourself,” how can I forbear to let as much light in upon them as will shew you that they are there still! If the most innocent, the most ardent, and the most disinterested days of my life had you for their sun—as indeed they had—and if I know that the Dream I lived in did me good, refined my heart, and made me patient and persevering, and if the Dream were all of you—as God knows it was—how can I receive a confidence of you, and return it, and make a feint of blotting all this out.

  Dickens’s remarkable grace as a correspondent combined with his eagerness clearly gave Mrs. Winter something to think about. We can guess what when we read in his next letter, dated from Tavistock House six days later, “When you say you are ‘toothless, fat, old and ugly’ (which I don’t believe), I fly away to the house in Lombard Street, which is pulled down . . . and see you in a sort of raspberry dress with a little black trimming at the top—black velvet it seems to be made of—cut in vandykes—an immense number of vandykes—with my boyish heart pinned like a captured butterfly on every one of them.” He goes on to discuss the arrangements for the meeting (which included Catherine and Mr. Winter) and to urge that he and Mrs. Winter might meet first alone because “I feel it, as it were, so necessary to our being at ease.”

  But the meeting was not a success. Mrs. Winter was as she described herself and, in addition, extremely talkative. Dickens quickly disembarrassed himself of further intimacy, but his April letter to her, making excuses for missing an engagement, is revealing. By this time, Dickens was in the throes of planning Little Dorrit:

  You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to care about it, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. “It is only half an hour”—“It is only an afternoon”—“It is only an evening”—people say to me over and over again—but they don’t know that it is impossible to command oneself to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes, or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a day away. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.

  Dickens embarrassed himself with Mrs. Winter and then compounded his embarrassment by writing her into Little Dorrit as the foolish and garrulous but kindhearted Flora. He exposed himself to his friends, but also to himself. Later in the year he wrote to Forster rather defensively, “I don’t quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling, and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is . . . that it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years . . . and that I went at it with a determination to overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men’s heads . . . nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood amazed at myself ever since!”

  Bleak House sold well, and Hard Times raised the circulation and profits of Household Words, but after a visit to England in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked, “Dickens is evidently not liked nor thought well of by his literary brethren—at least, the most eminent of them, whose reputation might interfere with his. Thackeray is much more to their tastes.” Bad reviews abounded of both books, though Dickens said that he never read reviews. In this, Dickens’s life and work continued to be of a piece and continued to express his unique place in English society. He simply did not fit in. In the first place, he was too imposing and had been around too long—predating almost every other serious author of his own age by years or decades. His worldview formed part of the raw material from which they made their own and which they were required to differ from in order to establish their authorial identities. His well-known generosity and helpfulness had two sides—he encouraged and promoted the work of others, in so doing promoting the respectability of authorship itself, which was important to him, but he also had very particular views about what was good and entertaining and what the role of authors in society should be. Unsurprisingly, he was his own best example of the right sort of thing: socially engaged, entertaining, lively, and fanciful. He often called himself “the Inimitable,” and indeed he was exactly that. But for that very reason, he didn’t fit in.

  Additionally, as Dickens grew more radical in his political views (and more idiosyncratic—we should not interpret him as the sort of left liberal we know today—he was racist, imperialist, sometimes anti-Semitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions), he divided himself more and more from his fellow novelists. How do we make sense of this? It is important to note, to begin with, that the literary world of Victorian England was small and personal. Writers and editors knew each other, often socialized and worked together, and published each other’s works to a degree that simply no longer obtains even in England, where the literary world is significantly more interconnected than that of the United States. Obviously, however, no one had any power to restrict the publication of Dickens’s work. He was his own editor, and virtually his own publisher, and his relationship to his audience continued unimpeded.

  All they could really do was complain. Charlotte Brontë complained that she disliked Dickens’s “extravagance” (but neither was Jane Eyre to his taste). George Eliot, whose first two books Dickens praised in very kind letters, considered his work shallow and melodramatic. Thackeray, Dickens’s sometime friend, admired several of Dickens’s works, especially Dombey and Son and A Christmas Carol, but felt a strong rivalry toward Dickens, which, it must have been irritating for Thackeray to sense, Dickens hardly noticed. (Dickens judged Thackeray on how he conducted himself as an author, not, it appears, on what he wrote.) Trollope called Dickens “Mr. Popular Sentiment.” In fact, it appears that Dickens considered his own literary tastes to be private ones. He may have liked or disliked certain books, but he always supported the social role of authorship and the success of authors in general. They had to denigrate him, but he did not have to denigrate them and, indeed, seems to have understood that his power to promote or denigrate the work of any individual was enormous and should be used with caution. He did not, for example, review books. As an editor, he made work available. As a famous author, he did not make his judgments, especially negative ones, well known.

  These most famous authors were not the only ones. There were many working writers and critics whose work has no modern currency, and they, too, all had their opinions of Dickens and his set. Generally that opinion was negative, based partly on the sorts of things published in Household Words and partly on the class origins and personal habits of the writers. Dickens had always preferred to surround himself with self-made men from backgrounds similar to his, to dress loudly, to go out to all sorts of theatrical entertainments. He didn’t fit in.

  He made fun. He made fun of the Civil Service, he made fun of the courts of Chancery, he made fun of the aristocracy and the factory owners and the bankers and the managerial class. He made fun of educators and moneylenders and women who married for money. He made fun of Parliament. He made fun of selfishness and self-interest of all kinds. He made fun of all sorts of religious types, but especially Evangelicals. He made fun of feckless young men and libidinous old men and government officials like beadles. But more important, his mind did not work by means of analytical sifting of premises and data, or through a refined analysis of motive and moral reckoning, as, say, George Eliot’s mind worked. Dickens’s mind worked symbolically. He apprehended the world through figures that were endowed with meaning. Objects come alive, and people become mechanical. His style invariably expresses a worldview that seems almost unme
diated by normal reasonable discourse, as if there is no objective reality, only a subjective reality in which meanings present themselves in terms of vivid figures, come into conflict with one another, and shift. Eliot, whose art depends on the notion of characters living in an objective world that they must come to understand through experience and reasoning, whose mysteries are hidden in gradations of motive and action, would of course not appreciate the terror and joy of Dickens’s highly distinct subjectivity. But Dickens appeals to that part of the reader that recognizes that much is left undiscussed by reasonable discourse, that people and institutions often do populate our inner lives not as who they are but as what they mean to us, and that we often do not see them whole and complex, but simple and strange. This view, of course, has an affinity with childhood, as Dickens had an affinity with childhood, but it also has an affinity with many states of consciousness throughout life, including madness or obsession and exalted states of love or spiritual transcendence. That Dickens submerged into his style many good, useful, and humane ideas is a testament to the fact that his vision did not prevent him from living and working in the world, but simply intensified his experience of it. As he said to Forster, “Only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is.”