Charles Dickens: A Life (38 page)

Dickens expected failures, and there were girls who were bored by the ordered life at Shepherd’s Bush and could not bear living so quietly. One told him frankly as he was leaving after a committee meeting that she wished she were going out too, preferably to the races. Another took up secretly with the local policeman. Two broke into the cellar with knives and got drunk on the beer stored there. One he described, after expelling her, as capable of corrupting a nunnery in a fortnight. Some were so used to stealing that they could not give it up. There were dramas and rows, girls who stirred up trouble, girls who ran away and girls who had to be expelled. But the majority did well. What was expected of them was realistic, and they felt their health and strength improving, and saw that they were being offered something they thought worth having at the end of their time. Jenny Hartley, who has written an outstandingly good and gripping book about the Home, has traced a number of them to Australia and Canada, found the records of their marriages and even located descendants.
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She has also found a few records of the girls who were expelled, some of whom went back to prostitution, and some who died pathetic early deaths.

Dickens knew very well that he was only touching a huge social problem which had its roots in society’s neglect of the housing and education of the poor, its tolerance of the grim conditions in which workhouse children were raised, its acceptance of the double standards and the miserable pay and treatment of the lowest grades of female domestic servants – and also perhaps in something ineradicable in the natures of men and women. In 1855, answering an inquiry from Lord Lyttelton about the presence of prostitutes in theatres, he wrote, ‘It is always to be borne in mind that, in a great City, Prostitution
will be somewhere.
’
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He advised Miss Coutts in further large schemes such as the building of better housing for the poor in Bethnal Green, and the Home continued its work for over a decade. Only when the circumstances of his life changed and made it impossible for him to continue his association with it did Miss Coutts allow it to run down; the fact that she soon did so may suggest that she had never been so devoted to the cause, or so confident of its success, as he was.

Other writers have taken up good causes, but Dickens gave more time and thought to his Home and his rescue plans for young prostitutes working the London streets than could have been reasonably expected of anyone, least of all a writer with a large family who was also, from 1850, editor of a weekly magazine. None of the young women he helped knew enough to understand who he was or appreciate how extraordinary it was that he should devote himself to helping them. In his letters he reports a few of their remarks, heard on his visits to the Home. A girl called Goldsborough answered his question about what sort of work she might do in the colonies with ‘that she didn’t suppose, Mr Dickerson, as she were a goin to set with her ands erfore her’.
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Another complaining inmate volunteered ‘Which blessed will be the day when justice is a-done in this ouse.’
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A third, who had her marks for good behaviour taken away and was told she must earn them back, said to Dickens, ‘Ho! But if she didn’t have ’em giv’ up at once, she could wish fur to go.’ He grew fond of the cheeky ones and understood that the quiet routine of the Home was difficult for many of them, but he never hesitated to throw out those who made trouble. When they were expelled they were not allowed to keep their good clothes. Isabella Gordon was sent out crying, on a dark afternoon, with only an old shawl and half a crown. Outside, she leant against the house for a minute and then went out of the gate and slowly up the lane, wiping her wet face with her shawl. We know these details because Dickens was watching her and described what he saw. He was fascinated by them: yet he never wrote about them in his novels. Some returned to prostitution and stealing, like Mary Ann Church, turned out in 1852 for causing so much trouble, and Mary Ann Stonnell, who discharged herself and was soon in prison again. Another girl who was expelled died in a Shoreditch workhouse soon afterwards. Others did well, made the long voyages to the colonies and built decent lives for themselves, like Martha Goldsmith, who married a carpenter in Melbourne, and Rhena Pollard, who also married and had a large family in Canada. Louisa Cooper, after two years in the Home, went to the Cape and returned looking very respectable, engaged to be married to an English gardener, and bringing Dickens an ostrich egg as a present, ‘the most hideous Ostrich’s Egg ever laid – wrought all over with frightful devices, the most tasteful of which represents Queen Victoria (with her crown on) standing on the top of a Church, receiving professions of affection from a British Seaman’.
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No one in public life was aware of his work, and when he wrote an article about the Home for
Household Words
it was published anonymously. There may have been something lopsided about an enterprise that set out to save a few poor creatures out of the crowd, but that did not deter him, and he gave an extraordinary amount of time and energy to making a success of it, seeing it as a model for others to follow. His warmth and his concern for detail can be found in his letters to Mrs Morson. In July 1850 he asked her to ‘Tell the girls who go tomorrow [to the Cape] … as my last message, that I hope they will do well, marry honest men and be happy.’
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When Mrs Morson was to fetch a new inmate, he wrote to her, ‘Will you send underclothing to Eliza Wilkin now living with her father at 18 Market Row Oxford Market – with money for her to get a warm bath – or two would be better, and instructions to her to do so, that she may be perfectly clean and wholesome; and make an appointment to call for her, say on Wednesday or Thursday next. She has a gown that will do for her to come in. I suppose you have not one ready? Bonnet and so forth, I suppose you had better send her, I think. She is a rather a short girl.’
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He did what he did because he believed it was needed. If there was a providence in the fall of a sparrow, these girls were his sparrows, and he wanted to make them fly, not fall.

A Personal History

In 1848 Dickens allowed himself a nine-month break between books, and out of it came a new development in his friendship with Forster. A month after the final number of
Dombey
appeared, Forster published a book of his own,
The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith
, a biographical study of the eighteenth-century writer. It is a hefty volume, nearly 700 pages long, dedicated to Dickens with a sonnet in which Forster compared him to Goldsmith:

O friend with heart as gentle for distress,

 

As resolute with fine wise thoughts to bind

 

The happiest to the unhappiest of our kind …

 

Dickens wrote at once to say the book was ‘very great indeed’ – adding slyly that it was also ‘extremely large’ – and a week later he sent a glowing commentary, ‘having read it from the first page to the last with the greatest care and attention’. This was a considerable feat, because some of it is heavy-going, but he admired the vigorous picture of Goldsmith’s times, and the presentation not only of Goldsmith’s strength but also of his weakness, ‘which is better still’. The praise was sweet, since Goldsmith had been a favourite of Dickens since his boyhood, and he added enough comment and argument to show he had engaged closely with the book. He went on to say how proud he was to be ‘tenderly connected’ with what Forster had done, and added, ‘I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer – and such a Critic!’
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In this way he appointed his own biographer, at the early age of thirty-six, and never afterwards wavered from his choice. They had their fallings out. Macready reports a quarrel in the autumn of 1847, and there were to be more, for Dickens could tease and impose on Forster, Forster could disapprove of Dickens’s behaviour, and their political views diverged somewhat, but their friendship and trust in one other always restored itself. For the present, he found comfort in confiding in him: ‘I am more at rest for having opened all my heart and mind to you,’ he told him in a letter written this May in which he dwelt on ‘the more than friendship which has grown between us’.
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A year before, in the spring of 1847, Forster had been told by Charles Dilke, manager of the
Daily News
after Dickens left it, of his recollection of seeing Dickens as a child, working in a warehouse near the Strand, and of how Dilke had given the boy half a crown, received with a polite bow, while his father looked on. When Forster mentioned Dilke’s story to Dickens, he was silent for several minutes. Realizing he had touched on something painful, Forster did not pursue the matter, but it led presently to Dickens telling him about the blacking factory and his father’s imprisonment for debt. He said he had spoken to no one else of these things, but never forgotten them and silently contained the distress they had caused him over the years. Now Forster’s sympathetic interest helped him to soften and look more objectively at the small boy he had been. Sometime later he decided to make a written account of those years, and gave it to Forster, who observed in his diary that there was ‘No blotting, as when writing fiction, but straight on, as when writing an ordinary letter’. He added that Dickens enclosed a note saying that ‘The description may make none of the impression on others that the reality made on him … Highly probable that it may never see the light. No wish. Left to J. F. or others.’
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Unburdening himself of his hidden life led to further turning over of the past and the workings of memory in his mind. The Christmas story he wrote in 1848,
The Haunted Man
, took for its theme the importance of being able to remember even wrongs and sorrows suffered in the past, and suggests that it is only through our memories that we are able to feel for others, something already hinted at in
A Christmas Carol
, in which Scrooge pities the self he remembers.
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And in 1849 he began on what became his own favourite among his novels,
David Copperfield
, a first-person narrative that draws on some experiences of his childhood and youth. But first he allowed himself a year off, between the finishing of
Dombey
and the first number of
David Copperfield.
He had learnt the value of a break from writing and he could now afford one.

The year was 1848, when revolutions broke out all over Europe, with uprisings in France, Prussia, all parts of Italy and the Austrian Empire. Only London remained quiet, although when the Chartists announced they were bringing their petition for the vote with six million signatures to London the government moved the Queen to the Isle of Wight and the Duke of Wellington was brought up to defend the capital against possible uprisings. But the Chartists were peaceful and there was no violence even when their petition was rejected by parliament. Dickens was not unsympathetic to their cause, but he made no public demonstration of support. However, he applauded the abdication of King Louis-Philippe in Paris, and the declaration of a republic, writing jubilantly to Forster, ‘Vive la République! Vive le peuple! Plus de Royauté! … Faisons couler le sang pour la liberté, la justice, la cause populaire!’, and signing himself CITOYEN CHARLES DICKENS.
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His faith in the good sense of the French people took a jolt when they elected Louis-Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, as President, and still more when he made himself Emperor, and imprisoned or drove into exile his republican opponents; but Dickens still found France irresistible.

He told Miss Coutts he was tempted by an offer to be returned as MP for one of the largest London boroughs, but that prudence, and the thought that it would be hard to write and earn while sitting in parliament, made him refuse it. He added, ‘if I
did
come out in that way, what a frightful Radical you would think me!’
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At the end of 1848 he wrote an article attacking a judge who, in trying a group of Chartists accused of planning violence, stated that the French Revolution of 1789 had been unnecessary and harmful, a ‘mere struggle for political rights’. Dickens insisted that the judge was wrong, and that it had been a necessary struggle to overthrow a system of oppression.
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And his republicanism led him to celebrate the bicentenary of the execution of Charles I in January 1849, privately, with his fiery friend Landor.
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Within his family circle one dark cloud overcast the year. Fanny, known to be ill with tuberculosis since 1846, had remained at home in Manchester working as a music teacher all through 1847 and into the early months of 1848. Dickens invited her husband, Burnett, to his
Dombey
dinner in March, asked him to sing and paid his train fare: he wanted to persuade him to bring his wife and two small boys to London, where Fanny would have the support of her family and the best doctors. Yet she struggled on through April until she became too weak to continue with her teaching. Dickens wrote urging her not to work – ‘do, do, do decide to stop’ – and sent money to help them, and they agreed to move at the end of the quarter, in late June.
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By the time they were settled in a house in Hornsey, Fanny was pathetically weak and thin, and the doctor Dickens sent to her told him there was no hope. He saw for himself that she was dying, ‘and not by very slow degrees’ he told Mitton.
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He described her calm resignation to the prospect of death, and said she did not regret working hard during her illness because it was in her nature to do so; and that she was distressed about her children, but not painfully so, because she believed she would see them again. In telling Forster this, Dickens confessed that he feared for his own children, in case they had the same dreaded disease in their blood.