Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  As I have pointed out before, the form of the novel carries several inherent philosophical ideas—that the individual is worthy of investigation; that his or her relationship to the group is always more or less vexed, but that he or she exists only as part of a group; that reality is always subjectively experienced; that the world is so abundant and disorderly that it can be described only in prose; and that stories can be narrated sequentially and understood. A great novel may work against these inherent philosophical ideas, but a perfect novel must work with them—a perfect novel realizes the implications of the form and communicates the author’s idiosyncratic vision simultaneously, in an outpouring of language that seems brand-new and just right at the same time. For me, Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line.

  Even so, Our Mutual Friend was not a tremendous success. The first number sold very well—a new Dickens after two and a half years—but sales dwindled thereafter, and the last number sold only nineteen thousand copies. Dickens made about £7,000 overall (roughly equivalent to some $250,000), but Chapman and Hall lost money. Reviewers seemed to love it or hate it—one of the haters was Henry James, aged twenty-two, who panned it in The Nation. Modern critics have been divided also, no doubt owing to its differences from those novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—that they have most fervently admired. But the modern era has not, in general, been receptive to the comic novel, or the comic view of life, and has also tended to devalue Shakespeare’s comedies relative to his tragedies. It takes exceptional grace of style and a steady comic vision to make a comic novel work without allowing it to slip into sentimentality, while at the same time preventing its satirical tone from darkening into cynicism. Some critics have recognized the accomplishment of Our Mutual Friend, but others have looked for something that was no longer there—Dickens’s former global critique of English society.

  On June 9, 1865, when Dickens was returning from France with Ellen and Frances Ternan, the train in which they were riding went off the tracks as it was crossing a bridge near Staplehurst, Kent. Men working on the tracks had failed to post a warning guard far enough away for the train to have time to halt, and seven first-class carriages went over the bridge into the river below. Dickens’s carriage dangled over the bridge, held by its coupling to the baggage car behind it. Dickens and the Ternans were thrown into the downward corner of the carriage, but Dickens managed to climb out the window and then procure a key and get the two women out. At this point, he saw the chaos below. He took his brandy flask and his top hat and went down among the dead and injured; he filled his top hat with water from the river and went around, succoring where he could. Some people died as he was helping them; others he helped, only to return and discover that they had died. Dickens was not especially well at this time, but he wrote to a friend, “I have a—I don’t know what to call it—constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least flustered at the time.” He persuaded one young man to get himself out from under the wreckage; he helped another confront the death of his bride. As usual, he did not stint himself or shrink from the horror. When it was time to be taken away by an evacuation train, he climbed into the dangling carriage and found his manuscript.

  Although he acted in every way calmly and even heroically during the crash, he began within a day or two to suffer from what we would call post-traumatic stress—he wrote little about it in his letters, but to one friend, he said that thinking about it gave him “the shake,” and although he continued to travel by rail and of course hansom cab in order to visit Ellen and to do business and give readings, his children recalled later that any sort of unexpected jolt on the train panicked him, and he hated a cab or a carriage to go too fast. He did not advertise his presence on the train or his heroism. He used influence with the railway company to avoid appearing at the inquest, knowing the identity of his companions would be revealed. He did, however, maintain an interest in at least one of the people he rescued, with whom he corresponded for several years.

  It is possible that Ellen was injured in the crash, since Dickens referred to her in his letters as “the patient” for some time afterward, and in later life she was said to have an old injury in her upper left arm. Dickens, as always, went on with business—writing his novel, editing and publishing All the Year Round. In September, when the novel was complete, he went to France to do some business, returning over the same route as the accident, perhaps a conscious attempt to overcome anxieties that were growing rather than diminishing. His health was not improving, either. In France he had some sort of “sunstroke,” which was probably an actual stroke; his many long walks were taken in spite of the fact that one of his feet was painfully swollen.

  In the fall, Dickens leased several houses. One, near Hyde Park, was for himself and his daughter Mamie. Two others, in the village of Slough, he took under the name of “Tringham,” one for himself and one for Ellen and Frances Ternan. Letters written by contemporaries to other contemporaries about the Dickenses’ social lives that fall indicate that they were the subject of at least some disparaging gossip—Dickens’s daughters, after all, were allied not only to him, about whom there were stories, but also to Wilkie Collins, Katey’s brother-in-law, who lived openly with his mistress. Dickens’s apparently successful secrecy about where Ellen Ternan was and what precisely their relations were did not inhibit society, his old enemy, from inferring and disapproving.

  In 1866, Dickens embarked upon another reading tour, this time giving thirty readings for £50 each, and he hired a new manager, George Dolby, who became a good friend and ally as well as a trusted business associate. When Dickens had rehearsed with his usual industry and given a few test readings to friends, they were once again amazed—he was even better than he had been, in spite of ill health, post-traumatic stress, and living a double life. He began his tour in March 1866 and ended it in June. The reading series earned £5,000, though Dickens took only his £1,500—he had proved his point about how profitable such a series could be, and the company that had put on the series was eager to do it again. But the success of the series could not make up for the fact that Dickens spent the summer in worse health than before, bothered by pains and anxieties. Kate became ill later on in the year too. In January 1867, he began again, this time a longer tour, taking him also to Ireland. The traveling exhausted him very quickly, but the reading itself and the audience enthusiasm seem to have energized him enough to go on. The great paradox of the readings was that they gave him something that they also took away. Forster claimed that the net cost was more than he could bear, but without any detailed knowledge of what was going on with Ellen Ternan, it is impossible locate the real cause of Dickens’s complaints. We may infer that the ups and downs of his relationship with her affected him from the fact that he had been so sensitive to the unhappiness of his marriage and to Catherine’s illnesses and depressions. There is no evidence that he was ever able to reserve his emotions or assume a cool attitude toward his loved ones. If, as Claire Tomalin asserts, Ellen Ternan bore a child or even two who died, and if, as Ellen later told her clergyman, Canon Benham, she came to regret and dislike her intimacy with Dickens during his lifetime, then there must have been some emotional turmoil between them; but no letters to her or from her survive. The readings Dickens gave were more than a success, they were a success without the ambiguities of personal intercourse. The admiration of his audiences, the money he made, and his own sense of accomplishment in doing a consistently professional job in spite of obstacles carried him through exhaustion and the gathering symptoms of mortality.

  The temptation was to go on to America, and Dickens began to explore it as soon as his 1867 tour ended in May. He decided to send George Dolby to America to canvas the possibilities, and Dolby left in August, accompanied to the boat by Dickens, who was using a cane. Another temptation of the American trip was that Ellen might go with him (though it’s hard to believe that he actually considered t
his realistic after his former experience of the United States, where he had been forced to give up almost every vestige of privacy). No doubt the strength of his desire dictated the fantasy. When Dolby returned at the end of September, he assured Dickens that there was plenty of money to be made, and although Dickens consulted several friends (Forster was strongly opposed to the trip), he had already decided to go. The households he had to support and the fact that his sons were not making their way in the world meant that earning a fortune seemed a better alternative than not earning a fortune.

  Dickens began to plan his trip and persistently held on to the idea that Ellen might accompany him, all through the fall and even until he arrived in the United States in mid-November. Their plan together is somewhat confusing, as if a fair amount of subterfuge was involved. Ellen left England for a visit to her sister in Florence at the end of October. Dickens’s plan was to get to America and reconnoiter (he had two weeks before the first reading). If Ellen’s companionship looked possible, she was to travel back to England and take the boat from Liverpool on December 11. A coded message, passed to her from W. H. Wills, was to tell her what to do. But it did not look possible—once again, Dickens was beset with appearances and engagements. Ellen, who was staying with her sister, the wife of Anthony Trollope’s older brother, made no apparent effort to leave. Possibly she did not agree with his plan to begin with. At any rate, Ellen Ternan stayed in Italy, and Dickens made his American tour alone; his notes to W. H. Wills from America (many of them cover notes for letters to Ellen that have since been lost or destroyed) reveal his yearning for her. Her responses are not on record.

  Dickens’s second American journey was not the disaster the first had been—Dickens was neither so offended by the Americans nor so offensive in return. For one thing, his public readings were a great success, starting with the first one, in Boston. He read every day or so, traveling from one city to another, mostly between Boston and Baltimore, as far west as Syracuse, but not any farther (the loop to Chicago, Canada, and the West was canceled). But the weather was northern winter weather, with snow and sleet and frigid cold; Dickens suffered from colds, flu, and general respiratory malaise the whole time. From time to time, he lost his voice. His left leg and foot gave him trouble, so that he had to use a cane and sometimes prop his foot up during appearances. The sheer immensity of his appeal was wearing—thousands of tickets were sold, he was continually stared at and greeted in the street, prominent Americans, including President Andrew Johnson, wanted to meet and talk with him.

  He had many experiences that entertained and amused him, especially encounters with children and friendly strangers. He made friends and renewed old friendships. His postscript to his earlier volume, American Notes, shows a sense of forgiveness. He comments that the United States is a decidedly more settled and refined place than it had been in the 1840s, and that he, perhaps, had also learned something. He writes, “I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here, and the state of my health.”

  The state of his health seemed to revive temporarily with his return to England at the end of April. He went first to Peckham, to see Ellen and Frances Ternan, who had returned from Florence only a day or so before. He stayed there for a few days, then went to Gad’s Hill, where, he said, his doctor greeted him with, “Good Lord! Seven years younger!” But there was no real rest—W. H. Wills suffered a concussion from a fall from his horse, and Dickens had to assume his partner’s share of the work on All the Year Round. Family troubles continued. Katey’s husband, Wilkie Collins’s brother, was ill with stomach cancer; Dickens’s unsympathetic attitude estranged him from his longtime friend. Dickens’s son Charley went through bankruptcy proceedings, ended up owing £1,000, and went to work at the magazine (he was married to the daughter of Dickens’s enemy Richard Evans, and they had five children). Ellen and her mother moved away from the house in Peckham, possibly evidence that Frances Ternan no longer countenanced the relationship or that the relationship had changed to something less compromising and intimate (this according to Ackroyd). Unable to start another novel, Dickens decided to do another tour, his final tour. This time, he thought, he would do a hundred readings for £8,000, and this time, he also thought, he would do something that all his friends and relations subsequently agreed contributed directly to his death, which was to introduce into his performance the murder scene from Oliver Twist.

  He practiced during the summer of 1868. One day, according to Ackroyd, his son Charley was working in the house when he heard the sounds of two people fighting. He ran out and discovered his father “striding up and down, gesticulating wildly, and, in the character of Mr. Sikes, murdering Nancy, with every circumstance of the most aggravated brutality.” The result, on stage, was by every account electrifying and even terrifying (which, according to extant scripts, was Dickens’s goal). One male friend testified to a tremendous desire to scream out, and another, a doctor, warned Dickens that one screaming woman would lead to mass female hysteria. It was a sensation unprecedented on the stage, according to one celebrated actress Dickens consulted, in at least fifty years. But how well we recognize it, and the impulse to do it—surely Dickens’s acting out of Sikes’s murder of Nancy is the direct ancestor of every horrible mass murder, dismemberment, explosion, and gratuitously violent act that we see in the movies and on stage. Audiences couldn’t resist it; the author/reader/actor/impresario couldn’t resist it. Once again, Dickens was the first, or nearly the first, to try something that, over 130 years later, is almost routine and yet still discussed in much the same terms that people discussed it at the time—is it necessary, is it healthy, is it too much, is it enough, is it true, and if it is true, isn’t it still unsafe for public consumption?

  He tried it out among friends in November. Most were horrified. He tried it out onstage in January 1869. It was a great success and became his favorite part of the performance. He did it several times a week, in spite of the reservations of everyone around him, just as he had always done outrageous things in spite of the reservations of everyone around him. He would assert his freedom to the end. In Edinburgh, as the tour progressed, George Dolby expressed reservations. Dickens responded angrily, “Have you finished?” Dolby then replied, “I have said what I feel on that matter.” Dickens leapt from his chair and “smashed” his plate with his knife and fork. At the end of their disagreement, Dickens burst into tears. But he did not stop reading Sikes and Nancy. As the reading series went on, things went more and more badly—he was giddy, he fell and cut himself, he was dazed and tired, his left leg and foot plagued him, he was confused from time to time. His doctor and another both advised him to stop the readings, and, finally, some weeks before scheduled to do so, he did, returning to Gad’s Hill Place and attempting to rest.

  If Ackroyd is correct in suggesting that there had been a shift in Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan, this shift would now be about a year old. In the summer of 1869, Dickens began to think about a new novel; it was far darker in theme than Our Mutual Friend and concerned not only a man, John Jasper, who was living a double life (respectable cathedral organist and secret opium addict), but also an affianced couple, Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud, who agreed to end their engagement. It is possible to infer some shadowy outlines of Dickens’s thirteen years with Ellen Ternan from hints that both of them dropped, as well as from some of the themes Dickens explored in his last four works. In A Tale of Two Cities, Lucie Manette seems physically like Ellen Ternan, but she is still one of Dickens’s idealized young woman figures, who functions in the novel mostly to support, comfort, and inspire the men around her—her father, her husband, and Sydney Carton. She has no distinct personality of her own, even less, in fact, than Esther Summerson or Amy Dorrit. This is the sort of young woman all of Dickens’s letters during his divorce show that he was eager for Ellen to be seen as, and his
ideal relationship toward her, as shown by his role in The Frozen Deep as well as the portrayal of Sydney Carton, was a noble, self-sacrificing one. It seems as though, at least at first, Frances Ternan and Ellen’s sisters went along with this idea—Dickens as mentor, helper, and protector of the whole family, whose interest in Ellen was marked but avuncular.

  When Pip and Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, discuss love in terms of “unquestioning self-humiliation” and irresistible attraction, where the loved one is projected into every scene and facet of the lover’s perception and existence (very new terms for Dickens in his depiction of love, which he had always previously shown as a form of devoted, active companionship), we don’t have to make Estella precisely into Ellen Ternan in order to infer that Dickens’s ardor was seeking a new form of expression with Ellen, which resulted in her removal to France and possibly the birth of a child. That this was followed by a period of domestic contentment, reflected in the congeniality and generous spirit of Our Mutual Friend, does not require much of a leap, and toward the end of the composition of this novel, the group decided to return to England. But in the meantime, Ellen’s sister Fanny had married into the Trollope family. There is evidence of bad relations between Dickens and Fanny Ternan Trollope in several letters written in 1867, before Dickens embarked for America, and also of self-consciousness on Ellen’s part about her status. Bad relations might easily have grown out of Fanny’s desire for untainted respectability in her new situation. While Dickens was in America, Ellen lived among the Trollopes in Florence. Though Dickens hoped Ellen would join him, there is no evidence that she ever planned to. When he came back in April, she preceded him by only a day or two, which meant that she had been with her sister for six months, plenty of time for her family and Fanny’s in-laws to convince her that, at twenty-eight, her own secret life was harming her rather than helping her. She and her mother moved out of the Peckham house not long after her return from Florence. Although she then saw Dickens frequently, his sadness, her later remarks to her clergyman, and the theme of parted lovers in The Mystery of Edwin Drood would indicate that they were attempting friendship. Possibly, too, her compassion for his failing health as well as gratitude for his love prevented a total breach between them.