Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  The lives of novelists, and actors, too, are marked by bouts of emotion and changes of circumstances—love affairs, divorces, outbursts of all kinds—that supposedly contrast with the lives of citizens with more traditional employments. This flux is conventionally seen as evidence of instability on the part of artists and ascribed to wounds of childhood, or artistic temperament, or selfishness. But the true pattern, I think, is evident in Dickens’s relationship to his work and is most evident from the inception of David Copperfield, in 1849, to the end of his life. Every novelist brings some knowledge of dramatic states of mind to his writing. If he or she had no such knowledge, then he or she would have no business with, and no interest in, novels or drama, since both rely on the depiction of those states for narrative or dramatic interest. Audiences and readers want something to happen, and writers are ready to portray some of the things that can happen. Often this knowledge does have its root in the experience of the artist, though as frequently it has its origins in sensitive and eager observation (both of these were certainly true of Dickens). But the experience of writing about and depicting these dramatic incidents is at least as important as their origins, because the novelist bodies them forth, comments upon them, reacts to them; he learns from them and gives them both form and meaning, rather like, in a simpler way, expressing anger in words sometimes relieves feelings and sometimes exacerbates them. What might have remained inchoate becomes specific through making a narrative of it in a way that is analogous to psychotherapy. The novelist, unlike the patient, defines his story as fiction and therefore retains at least some distance from it, but he nevertheless learns to interpret it. Often it loses its power over him, as Dickens came to terms with his months in the blacking factory after giving them to David Copperfield. But he may also learn things about his true state of mind that might have remained shadowy had he not embodied them. In David Copperfield and every subsequent novel, Dickens created ideal heroines—Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, Sissy Jupe and Rachael (in Hard Times), and Amy Dorrit—who contrasted strongly with his perception of his wife. They were healthy, industrious, intelligent, companionable, slender, unselfish pre-mothers with the strength to withstand circumstances and enter into a kinship with flawed but loving men, several of whom were overt or covert stand-ins for Dickens himself. In every novel they were contrasted with other female characters—Dora, Flora, Lady Dedlock, Louisa—who were not rewarded with male companionship at the end of the novel. And with each novel, Dickens taught himself that he was missing what the characters he wrote about managed to achieve (and what several of the men around him also managed to achieve—his father, whose insolvency frequently aroused Dickens’s scorn, was evidently happily married to Dickens’s mother for more than forty years in a sort of “I will never leave Mr. Micawber”–type union). Art that has a revelatory effect upon the reader had its first revelatory effect upon the writer; the process of working out the plots and the relationships in an ambitious novel is always a learning process. In Dickens’s case, the fact that the novels were published as they were written and the fact that they were so long and multilayered meant that the challenge of maintaining the forward motion along with the integrity of the story and the characters was enormous. What the author knows at the end cannot possibly be the same as what he knew at the beginning, and what he knows has reference to every aspect of his emotional and symbolic life.

  Additionally, he has only himself as his guide and judge. The leavening presence of, say, a psychotherapist is not there to mediate the continuous sense of revelation the novelist feels as he gives meaning to his conceptions and feelings. For Dickens, who lived so public a life, there was some index of how far in or out of the mainstream of conventional thinking he was through reviews, sales, and opinions of friends, therefore some potential therapistlike check upon his wildest thoughts, but the feedback was mixed. High sales bolstered his sense of being right; he never read reviews; he had come to discount the opinions of Forster and other close friends. His primary ambition, which was to arouse strong feelings of sympathy and pathos in his audience, was almost invariably realized—at some remove through the novels, with great immediacy through the performances of The Frozen Deep. This sympathy he must certainly have interpreted as support or approval, moving him along bit by bit toward acting upon the feelings he had been portraying for so long.

  Authors live in a dialogue with their work, and their work is their inner life made concrete. Were they not susceptible to the reality of art, they wouldn’t have become authors in the first place. They would naturally be at least as susceptible to the power of their own art as to the power of the art of others, and from the beginning of his career, Dickens’s letters attest to his enthusiasm for and belief in every novel he wrote. When he came to the end of Little Dorrit, in June 1857, he was ripe for a change. Such a term, however, misstates and slights the state of mind he was in, which was very vulnerable, though his vulnerability was cloaked in his usual wit and activity.

  During the later spring of 1857, Hans Christian Andersen visited the Dickens family at Gad’s Hill Place. Expected to stay only briefly, Andersen made himself at home for five weeks (after he left, Dickens put a note in the room he had used that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES”) and noticed, it was said later, that Catherine was unhappy from time to time. The rest of the family did not make him feel especially welcome; the strain may have been caused by him, or he may have imposed himself upon a situation where strain was already being felt. On June 8, Dickens’s friend and fellow writer Douglas Jerrold died suddenly. They had known each other for many years; of the two of them, another writer wrote, “Jerrold flies at his enemy like a tiger, and never lets go while there is life in him; while Dickens contents himself by giving him a sound drubbing. Jerrold is most in earnest, but Dickens is more effective.” Jerrold left a wife and a daughter, and Dickens immediately began to arrange for some sort of performances or readings to benefit them. The goal was £2,000, a considerable sum that Dickens was confident he could raise. At the end of June, he read A Christmas Carol to a large crowd. On July 4, he and his fellow amateurs, who included Georgina Hogarth and his daughters Mamie and Katey in the women’s parts, gave a private performance of The Frozen Deep for Queen Victoria and her party that was also a great success. Other performances of Collins’s play followed, but when it appeared that the planned performances were not going to earn the expected sum (Dickens liked his productions to be both elaborate and perfect; often costs overran projections), Dickens agreed to put on a performance in a large hall in Manchester. When he went to have a look at it, he realized that Georgina and his daughters did not have the skills to project their lines in such a large space, and he asked a friend to recommend some professional actresses.

  The Ternan family, who were hired to play the parts, consisted of the mother, Frances, and three daughters, Fanny, Maria, and Ellen. Frances had acted with Charles Macready in various Shakespearean productions and was a serious and respected actress; the father, Thomas, had managed several theaters and was also a specialist in serious theater. He had died not long before, possibly, according to Ackroyd, of the late-stage effects of syphilis. The two older daughters were accomplished actresses, and the addition of the family gave the production the energy it needed, in more ways than one.

  Dickens wrote of the effect of the first night’s performance, “It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together in the palm of one’s hand . . . and to see the hardened Carpenters at the sides crying and trembling at it. . . .” Even Maria Ternan, experienced though she was, wept as she cradled the dying Richard Wardour (Dickens) in her arms, so that Dickens had to recall her to her professional obligations. Only two performances had been planned, but the play was such a sensation that a third was added. Of his own experiences at Manchester, Dickens later wrote to Collins, “I have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of ‘The Fro
zen Deep.’ ”

  In September, the Ternans were appearing, during Doncaster race week, at a theater in Doncaster. Dickens arranged a trip with Wilkie Collins for the composition of a piece for Household Words to be titled “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.” Collins was younger than Dickens, unmarried, and likely to overlook any risky doings, since he himself had considerable experience of the seamier side of Victorian life. They traveled first to Scotland, where Dickens got them into trouble mountain climbing and had to carry the injured Collins down the hillside. Collins’s injury, a sprained ankle, did not prevent Dickens from taking him on to Doncaster. There, he was with the Ternans, and Ellen, several times, but what they did can only be inferred from Dickens’s letters and writings. All that is known is that Ellen had small parts in plays, that Dickens went out several times, that Dickens was seen at the theater and cheered by the audience, and that he left suddenly, writing in a letter afterward, “The Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute.”

  In October, as a result of a dispute, Dickens told Catherine’s maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that he could sleep separately from her. The origin of the dispute remains unclear (though Catherine had frequently expressed jealousy of his feelings for other women, going all the way back to Madame de la Rue, and with good reason), but its result was irrevocable—they never lived as man and wife again, and thenceforth, Dickens seems to have allowed his dislike of her to emerge more and more openly.

  Dickens’s feelings about the women in his life were invariably strong. What he said of his love for Maria Beadnell, that it was a four-year obsession, applied in degree if not in kind to his feelings about every woman with whom he felt a connection. Sometimes the strong feelings were positive, as for Mary Hogarth, Georgina Hogarth, and his daughters; sometimes they were negative. Over the years he expressed contempt and dislike for his mother, for his wife, and for his wife’s mother. In some sense, it does not matter what these women were actually like or how others saw them. After Dickens had endowed them with a particular symbolic meaning, his feelings about them did not admit of contradiction. Everything they did or said just reconfirmed his opinions and intensified his feelings. His work showed that he had ideas about how a woman should be. The ideal women characters, like Esther Summerson and Agnes Wickfield, are balanced by portraits of many decidedly nonideal characters such as Mrs. Skewton and Mrs. Gradgrind. That he didn’t understand women is a modern truism that is no less applicable to other men of his time. That he didn’t admit the claims of particular women that he knew, once he had turned against them, to any sort of intelligence, justification, or respect is a greater sign of Dickens’s special idiosyncrasies of character. His relationships with men allowed gray areas and gradations of feeling. He had a falling-out with Douglas Jerrold but made friends again and exerted himself to benefit his wife and daughter; his friendship with Forster changed and he came to disapprove of several aspects of Forster’s personality, but he never turned away from him completely. He did not always get along with Thackeray, and was quite possibly aware of the intermittent animus and envy Thackeray expressed toward him, but he either accorded him respect or kept quiet (until Thackeray took Catherine’s part in Dickens’s divorce). While he was frequently angry with and contemptuous of his father, he was reconciled to him toward the end of his father’s life and treated him affectionately. But even Miss Coutts, his partner in charitable works, with whom he had what might be considered a more manly friendship, since it was based on common projects more than affectional feelings, never returned to a state of intimacy with him once he felt she betrayed him.

  Dickens felt that he paid a price for the intensity of his imagination. In September, he wrote to Forster, “I am always deeply sensible of the wonderful exercise I have of life and its highest sensations, and I have said to myself for years, and have honestly and truly felt, this is a drawback to such a career [of writing novels] and is not to be complained of.” But things had changed. He continued, “But the years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that something might be done.” A few days later, he wrote to Forster again, reconfirming his resolve to act by countering Forster’s arguments, “She [Catherine] is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us . . . and if I were sick or disabled tomorrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, even since the days you remember when Mary was born. . . .” Mary was now nineteen years old.

  What was happening to Dickens is all too recognizable to those of us living in the divorce culture—as long as he was committed to the marriage, the situation seemed endurable, if not desirable, but the appearance of an alternative retrospectively transformed not only his entire experience of the marriage, but his view of his wife’s experience. There is actually no evidence at this point, or later, except what Dickens himself reported, that Catherine ceased to love Dickens or that she would not have chosen to remain in the marriage. Even Dickens admits that she continued “amiable and complying,” but he steadily recasts their life together in order to justify its coming end. In October, he wrote to Forster, “Too late to say, put the curb on, and don’t rush at hills—the wrong man to say it to.”

  Also in October, the Ternan family returned from Doncaster and took rooms in London. Ellen got an acting job at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and worked there for most of the next two years. Dickens seems to have been instrumental in getting her the job and wrote a note thanking the theater manager for the favor in mid-October. But if he expected immediate gratification in his new relationship, he seems to have been disappointed. He remained in a restless and anxious state of flux, unable to begin a new novel or to bring his family situation to closure. In fact, as his marriage moved toward open rupture and divorce, he encountered the most disagreeable side to his life as a public man; he was brewing up a scandal in which he was required to play the villain’s role, and for at least the next year he played it, willy-nilly, to the hilt.

  At the same time, he was moving toward giving public readings for money. Before Christmas, he gave two benefit readings of A Christmas Carol. In the late winter, he gave a fund-raising speech for the Hospital for Sick Children, which was still struggling to establish itself. The speech was so eloquent that it raised £3,000 (roughly comparable to $100,000 today) in one night. And Ackroyd reports an incident in which Dickens went with Forster to a playwright’s reading of his own play and demonstrated afterward how the playwright should have read his own work. A bystander reported that, by contrast to the playwright’s rendition, “the characters seemed to stand out and almost walk about the room.” Queen Victoria let it be known that she wanted to hear A Christmas Carol at a private reading, but Dickens was reluctant, feeling that he needed an audience to create the best effect. Then he did another benefit reading in a large hall in Edinburgh, now consciously preparing himself and his material for his new moneymaking project. The reading was a tremendous success, confirming Dickens in his decision to go on with the idea, and in April he gave his first paid public reading. Many tickets were sold, the audience was receptive from the beginning, and Dickens asserted from the platform that his primary justification for what was considered by some to be an unorthodox and even undignified activity was that “whatever brings a public man and his public face to face, on terms of mutual confidence and respect, is a good thing.” To his friends he confided two other motives—his unsettled personal l
ife made him especially restless, and he wanted to make a lot of money in a short time.

  Knowing as we do the great success of Dickens’s new endeavor, and the great passion and talent that he brought to it, giving public performances of his work seems in retrospect to have been a natural flowering and integration of several of his signal talents. It is hard to understand quite what had been holding him back without remembering the social taint that surrounded both public performance and the appearance of working for money. Forster disapproved in part because he had gotten a little stuffy in the 1850s, but also because Dickens himself had worked over the years to make novel writing a respectable endeavor. Forster worried that the public readings would endanger Dickens’s respectability and the respectability of the novel. But, in fact, Dickens was not respectable; he had just finished attacking “respectability” in Little Dorrit, and he still did not fit into English middle-class life. He still acted on his deep-seated urge for freedom, although the consequences of doing so were often painful. He began to have new associates, younger and more like Wilkie Collins than Forster; some of his former associates, for example the middle-class Hogarths, whom he had once been pleased to join, he now detested. Thus it is instructive to look upon this juncture in Dickens’s life in terms of its expression of his relationship to English class structure. He had realized his parents’ ambition to be taken as stable members of the middle class and raised his own children to live in the middle class without any real alternative. But for himself he had reserved, with increasing difficulty and inner turmoil, the freedom to witness, criticize, and eventually break out of the middle class, at first through his art and then through his actions. The public readings were a gamble that could have more than a monetary payoff. When they worked as quality performances that were also popular and remunerative, they confirmed that Dickens was beyond class, that he was, as he called himself, “the Inimitable,” a unique, entirely national treasure. Thus, again, he prefigures the modern period, where celebrities are required to throw off their allegiances to specific places or backgrounds and to exercise the freedom to be claimed by every paying customer. The professional Dickens, like the professional Rita Hayworth or the professional Paul Newman, inherently asserts the human kinship that goes beyond class. It is assumed that nuances of style or characterization or performance or insight can be comprehended by all members of the audience, whatever their class and educational background. Dickens had asserted this before, in writing to be read aloud, in writing for monthly and weekly serials, in writing of the triumphs and tribulations of working-class characters, in criticizing English society and culture. But now, in taking up public readings and being exquisitely responsive to his audience (he always wanted them to laugh and cry openly, preferably in quick succession), he asserted it again and more strongly.