Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  Hard Times was published in August 1854, and Dickens once again took a short break from writing novels, though he continued to write for Household Words. Amateur theatricals were consuming more of his time, and in December, as a charity fund-raiser, he tried a new thing, reading A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth aloud to an audience in Birmingham for the cause of workingmen’s education. He had plenty of experience reading the Christmas books aloud; each of them had been introduced to his friends in this way, and all of them had gone over well—when he read The Chimes aloud, he reported William Macready “undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa,” and his painter friend, Daniel Maclise (who did a sketch of the occasion), said, “There was not a dry eye in the house.” Dickens read three nights in Birmingham, the third night to an audience of two thousand workingmen and -women who each paid sixpence for tickets. When he came home, thrilled with both the experience and his reception, he told his editor at Household Words, W. H. Wills, according to Wills, “If they will have him he will do it.” The idea was not to make money by it, as yet. There was still a sense of impropriety attached to the idea of an author performing in public, but with his love of and talent for the stage, Dickens certainly was drawn to the idea if only, for now, as a mode of raising money for good causes.

  When December 1855 came around, Dickens set up several more charitable readings, one in Reading, one in Sherborne, and one in Bradford that attracted 3,700 people, followed by another in London. He read A Christmas Carol each time and used the story and the time of year and the occasions to promote the sort of openhearted generosity that had always been important to him. But the moneymaking possibilities were obvious and the temptation to exploit them growing stronger. As important, though, was Dickens’s palpable sense of his own popularity and power. It was one thing to act in a play or a farce, in character and often speaking the words of another author. It was quite different to say his own words, passing through the personae of characters he himself had created, giving voice and action to his own inner life. His daughter Mamie once reported having an illness as a child and spending the day in his study while he was working: “He suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward but evidently not seeing me, he began talking in a low voice.”

  Dickens’s children were now eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, fourteen, eleven, nine, eight, six, and nearly three, seven boys and two girls. He was a strict and orderly father, who insisted upon neatness and quiet, especially while he was working, but who also had a knack for talking to young children and eliciting confidences in return. Music, dancing, and performing were a significant part of the Dickens family life. It seems clear that he did not want his children to repeat any of his early experiences of poverty, family instability, or street life; they were educated and prepared for a typical English middle-class adulthood. He did complain that they weren’t especially ambitious or hardworking, at least in comparison with the energy he had brought to making his way at their age. They were not raised on tales of their father’s youth; during a Christmas game toward the end of his life, when most of his children were in their twenties and thirties, Dickens said, “Warren’s Blacking, Thirty Strand,” and none of the children had any idea what he meant. Now, in 1855, it was getting to be the time when the older children would need to be provided with careers, and Charley, whom Miss Coutts had sent for a while to Eton, seemed particularly unsettled. He went to Germany for two years, to study banking, but Dickens wrote apologetically to Miss Coutts that Charley had “less fixed purpose and energy than [I] could have supposed in a child of mine.” Thackeray’s daughters were friends of Dickens’s daughters, and Thackeray commented on their elaborate style of dress. Catherine remarked to a friend that Dickens always liked the children best when they were babies and toddlers. At any rate, his restlessness seems to have been partly a result of his populous household. He often traveled alone or with male friends, both for work and for sightseeing, and 1855 was no exception. He spent two weeks in Paris with Wilkie Collins in February, then took the family to Folkestone in July. In November, he moved the family to Paris, where they stayed until May 1856, although Dickens himself returned to England from time to time. From June through August, Dickens summered with his family in Boulogne.

  He was now writing Little Dorrit, though it was not going at all well, and his letters to Forster were full of frustration and anxiety. His initial ideas were thematic ones—building upon his success with Bleak House and his views of the conduct of the Crimean War, he wanted to explore the notion of “Nobody’s Fault,” which was the original title of the novel. But it was evidently not productive, because though he began thinking in January and expected by May to start publishing in November, in August and September he was still contemplating starting over. The novel begins with Rigaud and Cavaletto in jail in Marseilles, Dickens’s first depiction of non-English characters in a setting quite distant in both geography and ambience from London. It is distinctly not what Mrs. Gaskell would have called “Dickensy,” and when the English characters enter in chapter 2, they are not very Dickensy, either. In particular, Arthur Clennam is almost a blank—quiet, colorless, already resigned, and even beaten down by his upbringing and his life in the Far East (which is not evoked at all). A few other minor characters are introduced, but the novel doesn’t really gain any energy until chapter 6, when the scene moves to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, where the eponymous Little Dorrit lives with her father, brother, and sister. Dickens’s purpose from the beginning, one that he mentioned to Forster, was to depict ever-tightening connections and relationships among a large cast of characters who at first seem to bump up against each other randomly, like travelers passing together through the same scenes, only to part and bump into one another again later.

  Dickens returns to some of the themes he explored in Dombey and Son, but now the sources of money are more various than they were in Dombey. The essential source is productive creativity. Property and rents and trade have a more problematic moral character; how they are managed dictates what good they are. Banking requires prudence, exactness, and benevolence but is not inherently corrupt. Investment or speculation is inherently corrupt. Dickens also explores the uses money is put to and finds them generally bad. In Little Dorrit, prosperity itself is almost a guarantee that wealth will be put to bad use. The primary example of this is that when poor and in debt, the members of the Dorrit family live generally in kindly intimacy with one another, but when raised to sudden wealth, kindness, service, and even expressions of love are considered humiliating. Who pays, who is supported, and whether these arrangements are legitimate is a constant concern of the novel.

  Love circulates like money but is mostly powerless against the wholesale commodification of social and domestic relationships. In Little Dorrit, Dickens shows a world made up of debtors and cheats, among whom one or two decent, hardworking, self-effacing figures move silently, often dishonored, rarely regarded, and only at the last minute, when almost all hope is gone, rewarded.

  Dickens’s vision in Little Dorrit is not only an exceptionally dark view of human nature, it is specifically a dark view of British society and of the effects of British social and economic structure upon British citizens. The Circumlocution Office and the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings who inhabit it are pervasive in both government and society, making sure that no business that might promote the common good is ever done, while all relationships are rendered false. The Circumlocution principle is shown to be more powerful and important even than the Chancery court, in Bleak House, because while Chancery court touches upon all aspects of British society, it does not define them, as the Circumlocution Office does in Little Dorrit. There are only two refuges from it, exile and prison.

  The p
lot of Little Dorrit is overelaborate and creaky. The two halves, the first of which follows the Dorrits in their poverty and the second of which follows them in their wealth, have a profound simplicity that makes William and Fanny two of Dickens’s most complex and ruthlessly drawn characters. But their effect is undermined by the convolutions of the Clennam plot, which involves Arthur’s long-lost unknown mother, who died mad, a twin for Jeremiah Flintwinch, the melodramatic recuperation of Mrs. Clennam, and the literal collapse of her house. Rigaud/Blandois is simultaneously overdrawn and uninteresting—too ubiquitous and without even the most minimal complexity or fun. Even Bounderby, the villain of Hard Times, is fun. Even Uriah Heep is a little fun. Rigaud/Blandois tempts the reader to skip his parts from the beginning to the end.

  Dickens was frequently criticized in his own time for not portraying his characters with much complexity or depth. George Eliot, for example, wrote in 1856 that “he failed to give us their psychological character.” But many Dickens characters are beautifully layered. Almost invariably, though, these, like Dora or Flora Finching or William Dorrit, are his voluble ones, and they reveal themselves through their own dialogue or monologue. Flora Finching is a particularly appropriate example of several aspects of Dickens’s working style. For one thing, she was based on Mrs. Winter, whose talkativeness Dickens had found so offputting in the spring of 1856. At first, the portrayal of her seems cruel, and must have seemed so to Mrs. Winter herself, who, Dickens was well aware, read all of his work attentively. She is not only fat, she is flirtatious and foolish. Arthur finds her repugnant and his former feeling unaccountable. She drinks. But Dickens gives free rein to her tongue, and many of her idea associations are funny and smart; she also shows considerable self-knowledge. She is kindhearted. By the end of the novel, she is one of the most endearing characters, perhaps the only truly endearing character, who clearly understands her failures, her father’s faults, and the difficulties of Mr. F.’s aunt, but on the whole chooses to make the best of things in a world where most of the characters choose quite the opposite. Dickens understood intuitively that speech is a form of narrative, wherein the speaker narrates his or her own life to others as well as to him-or herself. He anticipates in this not only Freud, but also Bakhtin and other theorists of the novel who maintain that the uniqueness of the novel as an art form derives from the clash and the complementarity of many voices. Dickens was also wonderful at the sort of indirect discourse where the author in the narrative voice appropriates various languages that occur in the general discourse, sometimes for whole paragraphs and sometimes for only a phrase. In chapter 24, when Amy takes dinner at Flora’s, Mr. F.’s aunt is not at the table. She “was, for the time, laid up in ordinary in her chamber,” that is, like a noncommissioned ship that is still afloat. Often Dickens goes on at some length in this manner. When the Plornishes visit Arthur in prison, the narrator notes, “Mr. Plornish amiably growled, in his philosophical but not quite lucid manner, that there was ups, you see, and there was downs. It was in vain to ask why ups, why downs; there they was, you know.” This form of discourse often functions metaphorically, but its main effect is to widen the world of the novel, to refer to and incorporate a huge variety of colloquial forms of speech, and to reinforce the idea that the novel mimics life. That appropriating, mimicking, and delighting in the plentiful varieties of English speech was one of Dickens’s signal traits, all of his acquaintances agreed upon, and he was perfectly alive to how speech and characteristic action revealed character.

  The other side of this trait, though, is that he was often drawn to portray his positive characters as quiet, repressed, or self-effacing, in contrast with the parading egos of morally neutral or negative characters. Dickens’s final image of Arthur and Amy swallowed up in the roar of the city not only portrays their unique fate, it also encapsulates the effect of their portrayals throughout the novel. The clamor of the surrounding personalities has served as a continual distraction from the blanks where their personalities should be. If we give Dickens credit for intentionally delineating them as he does, then at this point in his career, his art is asserting that personality is a form of ego, and, as with The Old Curiosity Shop, there is no way to exist expressively in the world without partaking of its egomania. What Eliot often did well that Dickens did not do was anatomize her quiet characters, such as Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch. Understanding layers of intention and desire beneath a quiet exterior was one of Eliot’s interests and a strength of her writing—her characters are often portrayed in solitude, where they are free to reveal (or the author is free to reveal for them) their true natures. Dickens’s characters reveal their true natures through social intercourse. He has not got much access to them if they hold themselves apart from others.

  Little Dorrit achieved excellent sales. The first numbers sold around forty thousand copies each, and though by the last numbers sales had declined to just over thirty thousand, still that was much higher than David Copperfield and nearly as high as Bleak House. Some critics liked it (George Bernard Shaw said “it was a more seditious book than Das Kapital,” a definite compliment), others were offended, others found it too drawn out. Forster did not like it, faulting its failures of invention and its labored quality. It ran from the end of 1855 through mid-1857 and was published in volume form in June.

  In 1856, during the writing of Little Dorrit, John Forster, who was the same age as Dickens, forty-four, married a wealthy widow, certainly to the surprise and somewhat to the dismay of his friends, including Dickens. Forster and his new wife immediately set up rather elaborate housekeeping in the heart of the very society that Dickens was busily excoriating in his novel; Dickens was a bit disapproving. Forster had grown more politically conservative since 1850, precisely during the time when Dickens was growing more radical. Dickens still wrote openly to Forster of his most important concerns, but Forster was not as supportive as he had been. As a result, Dickens’s letters took on a note of defensive explanation that makes them especially informative. Forster had his own opinions about marriage, now that he was married, and his opinions grew out of just that sort of compatibility of abilities and views that Dickens missed in his own—he may have disapproved of what marriage into society had done to the old Forster, but he would certainly have noticed that Forster had achieved something, through luck or good judgment, that he himself missed very much.

  Also during the writing of Little Dorrit, Dickens had realized yet another dream, which was to buy Gad’s Hill Place, a large house near Chatham, in Kent, the very house that he and his father had often admired when Dickens was a boy. Dickens wrote of its purchase to a friend, “I happened to be walking past . . . with my sub-editor of Household Words when I said to him: ‘You see that house? It has always a curious interest for me, because when I was a small boy down in these parts I thought it the most beautiful house (I suppose because of its famous old cedar trees) ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to be a clever man perhaps I might own that house or another such house . . .’ We came back to town and my friend went out to dinner. Next morning he came in great excitement, and said, ‘It is written that you were to have that house at Gad’s Hill Place. The lady I had allotted to me to take down to dinner yesterday began to speak of that neighborhood, ‘You know it?’ I said, ‘I have been there today.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I know it very well, I was a child there, in the house they call Gad’s Hill Place. My father was the rector, and lived there many years. He has just died, has left it to me, and I want to sell it.’ ” Dickens, of course, could not resist. The house had associations not only with his childhood, but also with Shakespeare—Falstaff has a famous scene in Henry IV that takes place at Gad’s Hill.

  Dickens’s restlessness infected every facet of his life. In the two years between June 1855 and June 1857, he had bought two new houses, lived at Folkestone, Paris, Boulogne, and London, and traveled besides for speeches and business. His level of activity, wit
h writing, editing, reading in public, and managing the lives of his children, was higher than ever. His enthusiasm for amateur acting and play production was immense; he supervised the production of, and took roles in, six plays and farces, all of which were put on in the small theater at Tavistock House. The evidence of his writings, his frenzy of activities, and his letters about both personal and political subjects show that he was approaching a crisis and that he himself had identified the crisis as a domestic one. Dickens’s life continued to look strangely modern, ruled by a need for freedom of all kinds and increasingly impatient with the typical patterns of his Victorian world.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WILKIE COLLINS, Dickens’s friend and fellow writer, had written a play called The Frozen Deep. As always, Dickens was more than an adviser in its composition—almost a collaborator, though Collins’s name was listed as author. When the play went into production, at the end of 1856, for Twelfth Night performances at Tavistock House, Dickens became the director, star, stage manager, theater owner, and moving force. The play took its theme from an Arctic expedition of 1845, the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, in which all were lost, with some allegations of cannibalism. Dickens played the leader of the expedition, Richard Wardour, whom Collins had envisioned as the villain, but whom Dickens rewrote and played as an angry, complex, and self-sacrificing man “perpetually seeking and never finding true affection.” Dickens rehearsed, sometimes in company and sometimes alone, all through November and December 1856. According to Ackroyd, he kept his monologues to himself, no doubt knowing that he was about to create a sensation, and then, in January, he allowed reviewers to come to the performances along with the invited guests; they testified to the sensation he succeeded in creating. The entire audience was deeply affected; Collins reportedly said, “This is an awful thing!” One reviewer noted the “irrational” depths of Dickens’s performance (which we may interpret in a Freudian way as seeming to come from the id or the unconscious, or in a Jungian way as seeming to come from the collective unconscious, or in a more traditional way as seeming to carry a force beyond that of a single individual, as being “inspired,” a state Dickens was entirely familiar with). The requirements of the evening’s program meant that Dickens had to change almost at once for his part in the farce, “Uncle John,” but afterward, during the dancing, one of the ladies present reported that Dickens asked her to waltz and she “was whirled around almost to giddiness.” Dickens had found a way to express his feelings about his life in his own voice and with his own body, rather than through the medium of a character in a novel. The expression of his anger and his disappointment and his love for the woman Richard Wardour gives up to his rival in the play had the powerful effect of both arousing and relieving his generally repressed feelings about his marital situation.