Charles Dickens (12 page)

Dickens was not Marx or Engels. Though he was perhaps as outraged as they were at conditions around him, he was by nature a novelist, not a philosopher or a political economist or a revolutionary. Novels privilege the idiosyncrasies of individuals and can demonstrate larger ideas only by having characters work them out through action and contemplation. The narrator may attempt to extrapolate the ideas symbolically, or even to address the reader about them, as Dickens does rather more often in
Hard Times
(rather like Mrs. Stowe, who does the same thing in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
) than he had in previous novels, but the requirement of organizing the material by maintaining clear distinctions between characters means that groups never really come alive in novels—uniformity, crowds, and mass movements disintegrate in the linearity of prose. The novelist's eye can never work successfully as a wide-angle lens but must always move precisely from particular to particular. A novel such as
Hard Times,
where the characters are acting as examples of ideas, always has the air of a cautionary tale or a parable and relies upon a set of beliefs shared between author and readers. The very brevity of
Hard Times
was a challenge to its commercial success because rather than developing his ideas incrementally, by a kind of stealthy inertia or narrative weight, the author expresses them openly. As it happened, Dickens's ideas about education and the proper relations between Capital and Labor were not generally shared, the comic qualities of the novel were not widely appreciated, and
Hard Times
was a failure.

Nevertheless, the novel came to appeal far more to later critics and is perhaps better known as a representative example of Dickens's work in our day than it was in his. As with
Bleak House,
modern readers have accepted social criticism as one of the proper uses of novelistic art; in addition, the darkness of Dickens's vision of Coketown coincides more with our own opinions of the ecological and social destructiveness of the Industrial Revolution. Novels since
Hard Times
that have expanded upon and reiterated some of its ideas have helped modern readers share them enough so that they can fade into the background and the characters, who are actually quite entertaining, can emerge.

Dickens always showed an eagerness to contemplate his own situation by fictionalizing it and giving it to one of his characters, sometimes one who was like him (à la David Copperfield) and sometimes one who was quite unlike him (à la Mr. Dick, in the same novel, who is always writing assiduously, but is deeply frustrated that he can't prevent King Charles's head from intruding into his manuscript—perhaps the most perfect image in literature of how a writer comes back and back again to the same concerns in spite of, or because of, how hard he tries to avoid them). In
Hard Times,
Dickens endows the workman Stephen Blackpool, a man otherwise entirely unlike himself, with a burdensome marriage and a wish to divorce. Stephen consults Bounderby, whose answer indicates that Dickens has done some research on the subject: “Why, you'd have to go to Doctors' Commons with a suit, and you'd have to go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you'd have to get an Act of Parliament to enable you to marry again, and it would cost you . . . I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound . . . perhaps twice the money.” Stephen, of course, earns only a few shillings per week.
Hard Times,
composed in weekly installments like
The
Old Curiosity Shop,
is open and revealing of Dickens's state of mind in much the same way. His demons are no longer grotesque, and the fearsome world is no longer so mysterious and strange; rather, it is all too ugly and factual, peopled by those whose imaginations have been starved rather than perverted. But as with
The Old Curiosity Shop,
Dickens is unable to embody a redemption for any of his characters. Both novels seem to assert that the world, whatever it is made of, cannot be lived in. The longer, more carefully composed novels are never quite this hopeless.

Torment is not uncommon in the lives of novelists and in the lives of nineteenth-century novelists seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. Thackeray's wife was irredeemably insane; George Eliot lived out of wedlock with G. H. Lewes, whose wife continued to produce children with other men; Charlotte Brontë watched her sisters die of tuberculosis and her brother perish of alcoholism before herself dying in childbirth at forty-one; George Sand, Nikolai Gogol, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all lived lives that to us seem dramatic, strenuous, and even tragic, beset in some cases by debt, in others by illness, madness, loss, grief, political imprisonment. The onus was on them, nevertheless, to produce an art that was acceptable to the middle classes and, above all, respectable. With the passing of patronage and the broadening of an author's audience, his or her social function (and therefore his or her source of income) shifted. Every novel seeks to entertain—beginning with the rise of the novel as a literary form, the fact that novels entertain was invoked as an essential criticism: young persons read novels rather than, say, sermons and thereby failed to improve their morals
or their stock of knowledge—but the novel also has to enlighten, in order to attain and then maintain respectability. Novelists themselves, and Dickens was one of the first, understood at once the power of the form to reflect the world of the nineteenth century back to its citizens in a new and instructive way, but there were limits to what the middle classes were willing to ponder. Some novelists were more daring than others—Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, touches pretty firmly on marriage and sexuality, as well as upon slavery, in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. Dickens's attacks on the structure of English society were bolder than those of his contemporaries, who tended to focus on individuals. What novelists could not do, except by indirection, was reveal their personal torments in their art, especially if their personal torments were not quite respectable, and few torments are. For Dickens, whose purchase on his own middle-class life was always open to challenge, and whose expressed ideals of happiness and goodness were typical Victorian domestic ones, the contradiction between outward appearance and inner reality was especially dangerous.

Dickens considered himself a reliable witness to, and an authority upon, social conditions of his time. Not only did he expend a great deal of energy informing himself, he also was in the habit of expressing his opinion and acting upon it. But as his critique broadened and darkened, he became less and less capable of putting it over. His style, or “genius,” as everyone called it, which was the essential and unchangeable feature of his vision, never failed to remind readers of his peculiarity. The lightheartedness and humor of earlier works
had made a comprehensible bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and he had successfully embodied redemption through love, friendship, celebration, plenty, laughter, forgiveness, pleasure, character improvement, and the punishment of evil. In the 1850s, however, he no longer believed in improvement. One factor was the Crimean War of 1854–1855, the conduct of which exposed the incompetence of the government so that Dickens wrote his friend Mrs. Watson, “I feel as if the world had been pushed back 500 years.” He strongly felt that every official was shirking responsibility, as he wrote in an essay in August 1856: “The power of Nobody is becoming so enormous in England. . . . The hand which this surprising person had in the late war is amazing to consider. It was he who left the tents behind, who left the baggage behind, who chose the worst possible ground for encampments, who provided no means of transport, who killed the horses, who paralyzed the commissariat, who knew nothing of the business he professed to know and monopolized, who decimated the English army.” After developing this theme for several pages, he concludes, “Nobody has done more harm in this single generation than Everybody can mend in ten generations.”

The war served only to confirm the contempt for Parliament he had felt first during his years reporting parliamentary speeches in the early 1830s. He always believed that the House of Commons was corrupted by self-interest, bribery, and collusion. He knew after twenty years of charitable endeavor that the alleviation of unsanitary public health conditions, for example, or the successful prosecution of a war was
a public function, to be undertaken by the government in behalf of the citizens, but he saw no evidence that the British ruling class had any desire or will to do its duty.

But the form of redemption Dickens represented in the public mind, and certainly in his own mind, redemption in domestic companionship and happiness, no longer seemed real to the man himself. Though he treated Catherine with consideration and courtesy at this point, in January 1855, he wrote Forster, “Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life and one friend and companion I have never made?” He had given David Copperfield Agnes Wickfield, and he had given Allan Woodcourt Esther Summerson. He could imagine the sort of woman that a busy, benevolent, ambitious, energetic, and introspective man might love as a friend, companion, and wife, but he did not have that woman in his own life, and it is altogether possible that the authorial act of matching his alter ego, David, with Agnes exacerbated his sense of what he was missing. It was one thing for his fictional stand-in, John Jarndyce, to accept the role of kindly, detached guardian to his extended family; it was quite a different thing for the author himself, a man who fathered ten children in sixteen years. We may easily extrapolate Dickens's ardor in every other area of his life to his sexual passions, although all the evidence is that however he felt, he had conducted himself up to this point with stern propriety. Nevertheless, within weeks of his confession to Forster, his longings were strangely answered through a letter from his first love, Maria Winter, née Beadnell.

By his own admission, Dickens had been in love with, and obsessed by, Maria Beadnell for some four years, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, while he was working as a law clerk and shorthand parliamentary reporter. She was the daughter of a banker, and it has remained unknown how he first made her acquaintance or came to be accepted, at least provisionally, as an admirer, of which Maria had several. They met and also exchanged letters, some of them in secret after her father disapproved of the connection. In May 1833, Dickens declared his passionate love one last time, but her response was cool, and he parted from her. He met George Hogarth in 1834 and Catherine sometime between September and December of that year. There seemed always to be the sense that his regard for Catherine did not carry the passion of his attachment to Maria Beadnell. At any rate, when Mrs. Winter, now forty-four, wrote him, he responded warmly and at length, recalling his earlier feelings with great freshness. In their renewed correspondence, to quote the narrator of
Hard Times,
with reference to Louisa and James Harthouse, “He . . . established a confidence with her from which her husband was excluded.” Not to mention his wife.

Dickens's first letter to Mrs. Winter is worth quoting at length, if only to show how his mind worked:

Dickens then goes on in a somewhat less personal vein, but six days later, he wrote her again from Paris:

Dickens's remarkable grace as a correspondent combined with his eagerness clearly gave Mrs. Winter something to think about. We can guess what when we read in his next letter, dated from Tavistock House six days later, “When you say you are ‘toothless, fat, old and ugly' (which I don't believe), I fly away to the house in Lombard Street, which is pulled down . . . and see you in a sort of raspberry dress with a little black trimming at the top—black velvet it seems to be made of—cut in vandykes—an immense number of vandykes—with my boyish heart pinned like a captured butterfly on every one of them.” He goes on to discuss the arrangements for the meeting (which included Catherine and Mr. Winter) and to urge that he and Mrs. Winter might meet first alone because “I feel it, as it were, so necessary to our being at ease.”