Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  After the first reading in London, he continued to read systematically, in London for three months and then in the rest of England, Scotland, and Ireland for another three months. In the meantime, he and his friends were fashioning his divorce from Catherine. The catalyst for the open breach seems to have been Catherine’s discovery that Dickens had given a piece of jewelry to Ellen Ternan, followed by jealousy, followed by some sort of demand on Dickens’s part that Catherine visit or apologize to the Ternans. Possibly, having been found out enraged Dickens; he announced to Catherine that they would be separated (there is no record of the actual events, only several versions supplied by several sources). He proposed successive plans, ranging from the public appearance of harmony covering the actuality of separation through various forms of living apart, including the idea of Catherine moving, alone, to France, while Dickens and Georgina maintained the household and the children. Catherine, who had always been slow, compliant, and well-meaning, was no doubt appalled by what was happening to her and turned to her family, particularly her mother and younger sister. After that, the conflict became truly acrimonious, with accusations and rumors of an astounding nature, principally that Dickens had committed incest with Georgina and that Georgina was actually the mother of the Dickens children. Georgina was then examined by a doctor and discovered to be a virgin, at which point that particular accusation was dropped. From this, though, Dickens developed a sense of himself as the injured party that stuck with him for the rest of his life and fueled a strong hatred for the Hogarths and for almost everyone who took Catherine’s side in the dispute. Even Miss Coutts was not, in the end, forgiven.

  Dickens’s bad behavior in the divorce extended to an attempt to alienate the children from their mother, which he justified by declaring that she had always been a bad mother and that the children, especially his daughters, did not care for her (which they later contradicted). One of them considered this behavior on their father’s part “wicked,” and the other considered it “mad,” but no one could prevail on Dickens not to see it through, no matter what the implications or the consequences. Once he had identified himself as the Hogarths’ victim, he proceeded to repudiate all relationships with anyone who had relationships with them. While the children were allowed to visit their mother, they were instructed to leave at once if Mrs. Hogarth or Catherine’s sister happened to be there.

  Not only did Dickens act out of fury, he also expressed his fury in public, though he disguised it as self-justification. On May 25, he wrote a letter to his readings manager, with a cover note asking him to show it around. The letter, which came to be known as the “violated” letter, asserted that the separation had long been Catherine’s idea, because she was not suited to life with him; that she had never taken care of the children because of some “peculiarity of her character,” but instead had them brought up by Georgina. Of Georgina, he also says, “Nothing has, on many occasions, stood between us and a separation but Mrs. Dickens’ sister.” He goes on to state that he is acting only in the interests of others, and that he and his children are in full agreement on every aspect of the conflict. Needless to say, others’ accounts differed from Dickens’s own, and the actions of such principals as Dickens’s son Charley, now twenty-one, and Catherine herself did not fit in logically with Dickens’s version. But once he had written it down, it became the truth for him, and he adhered to the idea that everything he did, including making Catherine a generous allowance, “as if Mrs. Dickens were a lady of distinction and I a man of fortune,” had been misconstrued by enemies who unforgivably betrayed him.

  Much of the letter is about the innocent purity of Georgina. In the last paragraph, he alludes to “the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard.” The beginning of the paragraph, a reference to “two wicked persons,” who are probably Mrs. Hogarth and her youngest daughter, would indicate that he was referring to Georgina, but another incident shows that he was very sensitive to other rumors. Thackeray, going into a club where Dickens was also a member, was told that Dickens was sleeping with his sister-in-law, and he replied, “No, it’s an actress.” When his reply got back to Dickens, Dickens was enraged.

  The letter, going about, did not have the justifying effect that Dickens had counted on, but rather fanned the rumors and the general disapproval. Dickens had not reckoned with the impossibility of proving a negative, and he had no press agent to muzzle him. He then went on to an even larger public mistake.

  He decided that a public statement was necessary to counteract the rumors that were going about, so in early June he composed another letter, which he sent to various organs of the media and also published in Household Words. A hundred fifty years later, it is still an embarrassment to read, an aggressive floundering in the mire of public infamy that asserts that the situation is unimportant and not a problem for the participants, except for the “misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel . . . and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like unwholesome air.” This letter did not have the desired effect either, mostly because far fewer readers than Dickens thought were privy to his troubles, so it caused rumors to proliferate rather than otherwise, as, of course, new speculations were added to old ones. Dickens wished the letter to appear in several publications, and many declined, most notably Punch, which was published by Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of Household Words. The Punch group included Thackeray and several others, with whom Dickens was never intimate again after his divorce.

  In the course of legal negotiations concerning the settlement, which took place during May, trustees had to be appointed for both parties; and Frederick Evans, Dickens’s publisher, was appointed as one trustee for Catherine, along with Dickens’s friend and the editor of Punch, Mark Lemon. They apparently took up her cause with some reluctance. Evans, in particular, became her protector (she later moved to a house not far from him). With absolutely no understanding that the situation required her trustees to negotiate for her in good faith, Dickens subsequently broke off relations with both of them, consigning them to the ranks of the unforgivable. Since one of them was his publisher, that meant that all of his publishing enterprises, including Household Words, had to be renegotiated. At first, Dickens tried to buy out the quarter interest in the magazine belonging to Bradbury and Evans, but they wouldn’t sell, so Dickens announced in November that he was folding the magazine. In February 1859, he began work on another magazine of the same type, which he named All the Year Round and which he and his subeditor, W. H. Wills, owned 75 percent/25 percent and published themselves. As for his novels, he returned to Chapman and Hall for book publication. Edward Chapman, his old publisher, with whom he had broken when Chapman suggested that he pay back part of the advance for Martin Chuzzlewit, had since been bought out by a cousin, Frederic Chapman, who had a larger and more commercial business plan.

  Dickens’s divorce put all of his friends and acquaintances to the test. Indeed, it puts his biographers to the test, too. His actions throughout were hasty, self-serving, frequently furious, and often cruel. He showed a consistent inability to understand or sympathize with anyone who opposed his wishes or his views. Of his own accord, he foolishly carried his private concerns into the public arena, gratuitously damaging his reputation without, it seems, even realizing he was doing so. His biographer, like his friends, is required to somehow account for his behavior, especially since kindness and compassion had been two of his hallmark qualities throughout his career. His daughter later stated, “It brought out what was weakest in him,” indicating that his behavior during the divorce was an extreme and prolonged variation of modes of behavior that were already part of his character. Peter Ackroyd makes a consistent case in his biography that Dickens was always prickly, always ready to see himself as a victim, and habitually tempted to blame others when things went wrong. The sources of these behaviors Ackroyd f
inds in Dickens’s characteristic hypersensitivity (to everything, not just to slights and injuries), combined with the various shames and embarrassments of his childhood. As always, he felt things with desperate intensity. Because he had suppressed his feelings for a long time, once he began to reveal them, he also revealed the profound resentment that accompanied their long suppression, which in turn compelled ever more open revelation of them.

  We also see a pattern in his behavior that is more familiar in our divorce culture than it was in Dickens’s time—a man filled with conflicting passions, resentments, and needs transfers his allegiance from one object to another. The situation with the new woman requires him to suppress his demands or resentments with her in order to court her, so he displaces his anger onto the former object, changing entirely from the protective, considerate husband he had once been into a thoughtless tyrant, completely unable to dissemble, as he had been doing when the probable continuation of the marriage required it. More and more anger requires more and more self-justification, until the man literally comes to seem either “mad” or “wicked,” which is what Dickens seemed to his daughters. At the same time, the man himself repeatedly talks about how forgetting the whole situation is the primary goal, as Dickens asserted in his public letter, in the lines “It [the situation] is amicably composed, and its details have now but to be forgotten by those concerned in it.” But, of course, it was unlikely that anyone would soon forget it, and no one did. Catherine, though, maintained her loyalty to her husband for the rest of her life, going to productions of his work and keeping up with his publications. Ackroyd records no instances of anger or recrimination, either in public or in writing, on her part, but only a reluctant acceptance of the terms he proposed to her and a diminishing disruption of her relationship with her children as time went on (especially after Dickens’s death). Charley, who was her designated protector, maintained good relations with Thackeray, Evans, and the others whom his father could not forgive, and he eventually married Evans’s daughter against his father’s wishes.

  It is also true that the evidence of Dickens’s vast canvas of characters, which includes Uriah Heep as well as David Copperfield, and Rigaud as well as Arthur Clennam, and Carker the manager and Joey Bagstock and the dwarf Quilp as well as John Jarndyce and Nicholas Nickleby and Sam Weller, indicates that Dickens was entirely at ease imagining anger, manipulation, and evil. Whatever the inspiration for any character, each receives life from the author’s empathetic imagination, which is quickened through its sense of kinship with the idiosyncrasies of the character. Dickens’s evil characters are often remarkable and riveting in their energy. They show that the powerful anger and longing Dickens expressed at the time of his divorce were not at all unknown or unfamiliar to him. Their eruption into his normally well-conducted life was possibly to be deplored, but also to be expected. Some of his contemporary authors were horrified at how he was behaving and did not themselves behave with a similar lack of control or degree of passion, but neither do their works explore the negative passions so deeply or so repeatedly. Once again, Dickens did not fit in and showed himself both freer and broader in his passions than those around him. But it is this very freedom and breadth that causes us to mention Dickens and not, say, Thackeray or Eliot, along with Shakespeare.

  When she met Charles Dickens, Ellen Ternan was eighteen years old, neither as self-confident in her career nor as accomplished as her older sisters. Those biographers who have acknowledged Ellen Ternan’s presence in Dickens’s life (Forster did not, though Dickens wrote to him about his feelings almost from the beginning, and Forster reproduced Dickens’s will, in which he left Ellen Ternan £1,000, as an appendix to the biography) have consistently wondered what qualities she had that he found so attractive that he was willing to throw his life into public turmoil for her sake. In addition to the treatment she has received in biographies of Dickens, she has been the subject of many rumors and at least one full-length biography of her own. She was important in his life from this point to its end, in 1870, but no one can say for sure whether she was his mistress, whether she bore any children by him, even whether she returned his affections. The most any biographer has been able to do is extrapolate from the female characters in his late novels and from his evident fondness for his sister Fanny, Mary Hogarth, and Georgina Hogarth (virginal figures) and his disenchantment with his wife and his mother (maternal figures). While the events are interesting, and would be even more so if we knew what they were, what is really interesting is how they brought out Dickens’s secretiveness, something that was in part imposed upon him by both celebrity and the nature of Victorian society, where any taint upon a woman’s reputation impaired her social position, but was also evident as a feature of his personality from the beginning, in the remoteness that alternated with his conviviality, in his love of disguise, in his solitary ramblings, in his attempts to send his parents out of the way to secluded spots, in the way in which he kept his early life to himself.

  August 1857 marked a turning point in Dickens’s life. Previously, he lived a professional life and a domestic life that were more or less open to scrutiny; his private reservations and ambivalences were displaced through activity, novel writing, and performance. After he met Ellen Ternan, he lived two lives, dividing his time and activities between what could be, and had to be, public, his working life, and what could not in any way be public, his affectional life. The man who had as large a role as anyone in creating “Victorian Englishness,” that domestic ideal of comfort, coziness, business, and celebration, henceforth lived his life in direct contradiction to that very ideal. He was good at it. He made it so that his colleagues, his friends, his family, and his public were unaware of where and how he was spending at least some of his time. It was clear to everyone that his health and vitality were deteriorating almost from this point on, but everyone attributed the deterioration to the public readings he undertook and the energy he poured into them. He kept his secret life so well hidden that no biographer can gauge with any authority what he gained or lost by it, how he viewed it or justified it to himself, how his feelings for Ellen Ternan evolved, whether she satisfied those yearnings for true intimacy that he had expressed to Forster and found unsatisfied in his wife, whether he found at least intermittent peace with Ellen or only continuing frustration. There is no telling what she was like. An acquaintance wrote some years later that as an older woman, she was “witty, warm, sympathetic, charming, cultured, and charitable,” that she “victimized” her husband and “made scenes,” and she was teasing, self-willed, and a “spitfire.” But there is no way of knowing which of these qualities, if any, were original, and attracted Dickens to her, and which were, perhaps, reactions to her relationship with a man almost thirty years her senior whose behavior toward her remains unknown.

  The modern era of divorce has shown that individuals’ modes of behavior in relationships sometimes change in interesting ways, depending upon what the person learns about himself or herself from previous relationships. Usually the man or woman is helped to these lessons by therapists or sympathetic friends or even books. The bête noire of modern life is “making the same mistakes over again” or, indeed, over and over again. If we speculate that, once again prefiguring modern life, Dickens entered into a remarriage of a sort without the benefit of the divorce culture that guides such things today, and that he “made the same mistakes over again,” then most likely his behavior continued to be of a piece, and he was with Ellen as he had been with the other women in his life—domineering, exacting, prickly, and sensitive to slights, but also kind, affectionate, generous, and lively, as well as sexually passionate, though the mystery of whether Ellen Ternan ever bore his child reflects the mystery of whether the two ever became lovers. After ten children, many of whom were becoming troublesome as they neared adulthood, it is possible that Dickens decided that abstinence was the wiser course. Dickens succeeded in his secretiveness as he did in almost all of his endeavors, but the deterioration
of his health showed that the price of the contradictions he had to live with was a high one. At the very least, he now had one more reason to travel constantly, to have several homes and sometimes even rooms that he rented, none of which could hold him for very long.