Charles Dickens: A Life (39 page)

Fanny lived on through July, when Dickens was away in Scotland with his theatrical troupe, keeping in touch as best he could through their father, who devoted himself to watching over her. Dickens sent her claret as a comfort, and once back in London was able to make daily visits for a while. But his children were in Broadstairs, he took Catherine, who was pregnant, to join them, and after a few more days in London he followed her. Patience, so necessary in caring for the sick, was not one of his virtues, and, being unable to save her, he did not know what else to do. He told Macready he almost wished the end would come, ‘she lies so wasted and worn.’
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John Dickens continued his vigil at the bedside of his eldest daughter and kept his son informed. She was now suffering frightful paroxysms in which she could hardly draw breath. On 1 September, Dickens returned to London to find her in just such a paroxysm, half suffocated, an appalling noise in her throat and an agonized expression on her face. He saw her sink into a sort of lethargy, but not sleep, and she died the next morning. She was thirty-eight. He had loved her, envied her early education and success as a singer, seen how marriage and motherhood constrained her so that she performed less and had to rely on teaching; and pitied her first son, a bright child born with a physical handicap, who now pined and soon also died, Dombey-like.
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Fanny and her husband were devout Dissenters and she had therefore asked to be buried in unconsecrated ground, and Dickens arranged the funeral according to her wishes, in the appropriate part of Highgate Cemetery, where Forster went with him on 8 September. Then he returned to Broadstairs for the rest of September, set to work on his Christmas story, and at the end of the month walked to London through his favourite Kentish territory, Maidstone, Paddock Wood, Rochester and Chatham. Another case of sickness greeted him in London with the news that Roche, his good courier during his travels in Italy, Switzerland and France, needed to be admitted to hospital, which Dickens arranged at once. He had heart disease, and not long to live.

In December came two more family events: the weddings of his brothers Augustus and Fred, neither much approved by Dickens. Augustus, just twenty-one years old, asked to have his reception at Devonshire Terrace, and Dickens agreed, but escaped after the wedding breakfast, ‘as I think it probable that some of my very affectionate relations may hold on here, as long as there is anything to drink’.
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Fred was intent on marrying Anna Weller, the younger sister of Christiana Thompson, and Dickens strongly disapproved of the marriage on the grounds of her young age, uncertain health and unstable temperament. Having reluctantly paid off some of Fred’s debts, he kept away from the wedding, which took place in Malvern on 30 December, with John Dickens as the sole representative of Fred’s family. It was reported that Fred appeared in a white satin waistcoat with velvet flowers and silver ornaments: he evidently shared his elder brother’s taste for dressing up. Both marriages were disastrous, Fred’s ending in divorce in 1859 and Augustus abandoning his wife Harriet in 1858, after she had become blind, and leaving for America with another woman.
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The year ended with
The Haunted Man
selling 18,000 copies on publication (although not many afterwards) and Dickens planning a jaunt with his friends, ‘an outburst to some old cathedral city we don’t know, and what do you say to Norwich and Stanfield-hall?’ for the new year.
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Stanfield Hall was the scene of a recent sensational murder, and the jaunt was to be fitted in before Catherine’s confinement, expected in mid-January. Forster did not feel up to it, Dickens failed to enjoy himself much with Leech and Lemon, Stanfield Hall was a disappointment and Norwich dull, but Yarmouth caught his imagination, ‘the strangest place in the wide world … I shall certainly try my hand at it,’ he told Forster.
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He was back in time for Charley’s birthday party, performing conjuring tricks in a Chinese dress and a mask, and dancing the polka, which his daughters had been teaching him. The night before the party he had woken in the small hours, fearful that he had forgotten the polka step, and got up in the cold darkness to practise the dance by himself. At the party he told Forster about this nocturnal exercise and added gravely, ‘Remember that for my Biography!’
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On 15 January, Catherine went into labour. It was again an awkward delivery, with the baby badly positioned. But Dickens had read about chloroform as an anaesthetic, found out the facts when in Edinburgh, where it was in regular use, and, with Catherine’s agreement, arranged for a doctor from St Bartholomew’s, trained to administer it, to be present at the delivery. There was strong opposition to its use among most London doctors, who said it would produce idiot children, impede labour and possibly kill the mother, but Dickens was fully justified: the baby was quickly extracted without any damage, while Catherine was spared pain and made a rapid recovery. Four years later chloroform was so well accepted that it was given to the Queen for the delivery of her child.

He had planned to call his boy Oliver Goldsmith, then changed his mind and made him Henry Fielding Dickens, as ‘a kind of homage to the style of the novel he was about to write’, he explained to Forster.
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But in truth
David Copperfield
is great in a way that is peculiar to Dickens. It is not a robust comedy of social and sexual hypocrisy like
Tom Jones
, but odder, more precise and more painful. Attachment and loss, and the shaping of adult behaviour by early experience, are its central themes. The first fourteen chapters, covering David’s early childhood, stand on their own as a work of genius. They show with a delicate intensity the pain of a child being separated from his mother, unkindly used by his stepfather, humiliated and punished without knowing why, sent to a boarding school run on a harsh and unjust system, helpless in the hands of people who don’t like him. Many parts of this experience being common, many readers have responded to it. Dickens understands how slowly time passes for unhappy children. He shows how someone who offers love to a neglected child becomes all important, as Peggotty, his mother’s servant, does for David: ‘She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt for her something I have never felt for any other human being.’
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He tells us that even very young children observe adults critically, and judge them, not only the ones they dislike but also ones they love, in David’s case his mother, whose faults of vanity and pettishness he notices even before she betrays him by marrying a stepfather against whom she will fail to protect him. And in a justly famous scene he shows David grieving for his dead mother and also preening a little before his schoolfellows at having this important event in his life. Before Freud or any of the child experts arrived on the scene the voice of childhood was truly rendered by Dickens out of his own experience – and out of his imagination, since the earliest chapters of the book are purely imaginary. Suffolk was hardly known to him, and Blunderstone, the village where David was born, was plucked from ‘Blundeston’, seen on a signpost and not even visited.

This was his first book to be narrated in the first person. It was also only the second novel to give a voice to a child who is taken seriously as a narrator. Two years before he started to write
David Copperfield
, a great stir was caused by
Jane Eyre
, which opens with a child’s narrative of cruel usage by her guardians and at school. Published under a male pseudonym, it was soon revealed as the work of an unknown Yorkshire woman, Charlotte Brontë. As far as is known, Dickens never read
Jane Eyre –
he makes no reference to it in any surviving letters – but Forster would certainly have done so, and it was he who suggested the use of a first-person narrative to Dickens: ‘A suggestion that he should write it in the first person, by way of change, had been thrown out by me, which he took at once very gravely; and this, with other things, though as yet not dreaming of any public use of his own personal and private recollections, conspired to bring about that resolve.’
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That two writers should have within a few years made the voice of an ill-used child central to a novel is a remarkable coincidence. To Charlotte Brontë the idea had come spontaneously, and if Dickens was influenced by her, either directly or indirectly through Forster, it was a happy cross-fertilization between two great writers. There is little resemblance beyond this, the tone of her early chapters being passionate and angry, of Dickens’s sorrowful, almost elegiac, culminating in the child David being shown his mother dead, with his baby brother in her arms, and seeing her in his mind as the mother of his own infancy, and the little creature as himself, ‘hushed for ever on her bosom’. For Dickens the change to a first-person narrative was liberating and enriching: where Oliver, Nell and even Paul Dombey were the brilliant products of high artifice, David is a fully imagined, living child.
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Dickens’s techniques are all his own. In the early chapters, and in moments of high intensity, David moves between past and present tense in telling his own story, carrying the reader with a ‘Let me see …’, a ‘Now I am …’ or a ‘We are …’ In this way, talking of his childhood home, he writes, ‘Here is a long passage – what an enormous perspective I make of it!’ ‘Now I am in the garden at the back …’ ‘We are playing in the winter twilight, dancing about the parlour … I watch [my mother] winding her bright curls round her fingers …’ And as he describes his mother taking him through a lesson, with his stepfather and his sister in the same room, ‘I trip over a word. Mr Murdstone looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over half-a-dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly: “Oh, Davy, Davy!” “Now, Clara,” says Mr Murdstone, “be firm with the boy.”’ And here he is leaving home: ‘See, how our house and church are lessening in the distance; how the grave beneath the tree is blotted out by intervening objects …’
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His descriptions are so finely accurate that he seems to be watching something taking place before his eyes as he writes (and he may have been, as Thomas Hardy saw pictures in his mind when writing his poems). For example, when Peggotty is describing his mother’s last days and death to him: ‘Here Peggotty stopped, and softly beat upon my hand a little while,’ and later again, ‘Another silence followed … and another gentle beating on my hand.’
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This is wonderfully observed of someone who finds it hard to express herself and needs to search for the right words, unconsciously beating with her fingers as she does so. Another instance: when he makes David, worn out from his walk from London to Dover, and facing his formidable aunt Betsey at last as she stands in the front garden armed with her gardening knife, simply put out one finger and touch her. Anyone who has lived with a timid child recognizes that gesture, and doubtless Dickens had observed his younger brothers and sisters, and his own children, doing just that; and here he plucks it from his memory and makes perfect use of it.

The detail is astonishing, and the establishment of the theme of the whole book – the education and development of a man from childhood, through suffering to happy maturity – is done with tenderness and humour. David is not the young Charles Dickens, although he is lent some of his experiences at the blacking factory. He transfers the callousness of his real parents to David’s sadistic stepfather, Mr Murdstone, and makes John and Elizabeth Dickens into the charming Micawbers, with whom he lodges while working at the factory. They, to a degree, counter the poverty and loneliness he has been consigned to, with the denial of education, comfort or hope, and offer him affection and respect. Micawber speaks with the voice of John Dickens, in torrents of elaborate speech, always hoping something will turn up, mood-swinging from elation to despair as financial disaster looms; and he offers David the dictum Charles was actually given by his father, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’
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A large and unforgettable character, he is glorious in his incompetence and absurdity, and always well intentioned; and Mrs Micawber is as absurd in her way, and also without a shred of blame for David’s unhappiness. Having divided his father in two, and cleared both parents of blame, he adds another interesting touch by making both Mr and Mrs Micawber appear oblivious of the fact that David is a child. They talk to him and treat him as a fellow adult and an equal – something that might suggest an explanation for the way in which the Dickens parents had treated their son, expecting him to deal with pawnbrokers, work in a factory and manage entirely on his own. His quick intelligence and clear capacity to carry out whatever was demanded of him had allowed them to forget that he was a child; but he did not forget how they had behaved, and used it.

The transposition of Mr and Mrs Dickens to the Micawbers is exceptional, however, and almost all the characters David encounters as he grows up are supplied by Dickens’s imagination. Peggotty’s family of Yarmouth fishermen, living in an inverted boat on the sands, with Ham and Little Em’ly, a blue-eyed orphan brought up by her uncle Peggotty, have no known models. Nor has Steerforth, David’s older schoolfriend, a Byronic figure irresistible to him. Even as David sees him behaving badly, he worships him for his charm; this is the nearest approach Dickens made to showing romantic homosexual love, and it is frankly done. When they meet again as young adults Steerforth takes David home to meet his mother and her companion, Rosa Dartle, and she appears as the most interesting woman in the book, with her scarred lip and biting intelligence. David is too innocent to understand her or her exchanges with Steerforth, whom she finds as attractive as David does, but for whom she refuses to be ‘a doll’, whereas David is happy to be called ‘Daisy’ by him. When Steerforth, who has met the Peggotty family through David, speaks of them as ‘that sort of people’, meaning they are less sensitive than those of higher social class, Rosa responds with ‘Really! … I don’t know, now, when I have been better pleased than to hear that. It’s so consoling! It’s such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don’t feel …’
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While David in his innocence misreads the exchange and thinks Steerforth is joking and teasing her to get a rise, Rosa’s sarcasm is her way of rebuking his callous view. David is wrong, and his friend is about to lay waste to the lives of the Peggotty family, carelessly, to amuse himself. But David will always find excuses for Steerforth, and always remember how he would think of him after going to bed at school: ‘[I] raised myself, I recollect, to look at him where he lay in the moonlight, with his handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm …’
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