Charles Dickens (13 page)

But the meeting was not a success. Mrs. Winter was as she described herself and, in addition, extremely talkative. Dickens quickly disembarrassed himself of further intimacy, but his April letter to her, making excuses for missing an engagement, is revealing. By this time, Dickens was in the throes of planning
Little Dorrit:

Dickens embarrassed himself with Mrs. Winter and then compounded his embarrassment by writing her into
Little Dorrit
as the foolish and garrulous but kindhearted Flora. He exposed himself to his friends, but also to himself. Later in the year he wrote to Forster rather defensively, “I don't quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling, and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is . . . that it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years . . . and that I went at it with a determination to overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men's heads . . . nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood amazed at myself ever since!”

 

Bleak House
sold well, and
Hard Times
raised the circulation and profits of
Household Words,
but after a visit to England in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked, “Dickens is evidently not liked nor thought well of by his literary brethren—at least, the most eminent of them, whose reputation might interfere with his. Thackeray is much more to their tastes.” Bad reviews abounded of both books, though Dickens said that he never read reviews. In this, Dickens's life and work continued to be of a piece and continued to express his unique place in
English society. He simply did not fit in. In the first place, he was too imposing and had been around too long—predating almost every other serious author of his own age by years or decades. His worldview formed part of the raw material from which they made their own and which they were required to differ from in order to establish their authorial identities. His well-known generosity and helpfulness had two sides—he encouraged and promoted the work of others, in so doing promoting the respectability of authorship itself, which was important to him, but he also had very particular views about what was good and entertaining and what the role of authors in society should be. Unsurprisingly, he was his own best example of the right sort of thing: socially engaged, entertaining, lively, and fanciful. He often called himself “the Inimitable,” and indeed he was exactly that. But for that very reason, he didn't fit in.

Additionally, as Dickens grew more radical in his political views (and more idiosyncratic—we should not interpret him as the sort of left liberal we know today—he was racist, imperialist, sometimes anti-Semitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions), he divided himself more and more from his fellow novelists. How do we make sense of this? It is important to note, to begin with, that the literary world of Victorian England was small and personal. Writers and editors knew each other, often socialized and worked together, and published each other's works to a degree that simply no longer obtains even in England, where the literary world is significantly more interconnected than that of the United States. Obviously, however, no one had any power to restrict the publication of Dickens's work. He was his own
editor, and virtually his own publisher, and his relationship to his audience continued unimpeded.

All they could really do was complain. Charlotte Brontë complained that she disliked Dickens's “extravagance” (but neither was
Jane Eyre
to his taste). George Eliot, whose first two books Dickens praised in very kind letters, considered his work shallow and melodramatic. Thackeray, Dickens's sometime friend, admired several of Dickens's works, especially
Dombey and Son
and
A Christmas Carol,
but felt a strong rivalry toward Dickens, which, it must have been irritating for Thackeray to sense, Dickens hardly noticed. (Dickens judged Thackeray on how he conducted himself as an author, not, it appears, on what he wrote.) Trollope called Dickens “Mr. Popular Sentiment.” In fact, it appears that Dickens considered his own literary tastes to be private ones. He may have liked or disliked certain books, but he always supported the social role of authorship and the success of authors in general. They had to denigrate him, but he did not have to denigrate them and, indeed, seems to have understood that his power to promote or denigrate the work of any individual was enormous and should be used with caution. He did not, for example, review books. As an editor, he made work available. As a famous author, he did not make his judgments, especially negative ones, well known.

These most famous authors were not the only ones. There were many working writers and critics whose work has no modern currency, and they, too, all had their opinions of Dickens and his set. Generally that opinion was negative, based partly on the sorts of things published in
Household Words
and partly on the class origins and personal habits of
the writers. Dickens had always preferred to surround himself with self-made men from backgrounds similar to his, to dress loudly, to go out to all sorts of theatrical entertainments. He didn't fit in.

He made fun. He made fun of the Civil Service, he made fun of the courts of Chancery, he made fun of the aristocracy and the factory owners and the bankers and the managerial class. He made fun of educators and moneylenders and women who married for money. He made fun of Parliament. He made fun of selfishness and self-interest of all kinds. He made fun of all sorts of religious types, but especially Evangelicals. He made fun of feckless young men and libidinous old men and government officials like beadles. But more important, his mind did not work by means of analytical sifting of premises and data, or through a refined analysis of motive and moral reckoning, as, say, George Eliot's mind worked. Dickens's mind worked symbolically. He apprehended the world through figures that were endowed with meaning. Objects come alive, and people become mechanical. His style invariably expresses a worldview that seems almost unmediated by normal reasonable discourse, as if there is no objective reality, only a subjective reality in which meanings present themselves in terms of vivid figures, come into conflict with one another, and shift. Eliot, whose art depends on the notion of characters living in an objective world that they must come to understand through experience and reasoning, whose mysteries are hidden in gradations of motive and action, would of course not appreciate the terror and joy of Dickens's highly distinct subjectivity. But Dickens appeals to that part of the reader that recognizes that much is left undiscussed by
reasonable discourse, that people and institutions often do populate our inner lives not as who they are but as what they mean to us, and that we often do not see them whole and complex, but simple and strange. This view, of course, has an affinity with childhood, as Dickens had an affinity with childhood, but it also has an affinity with many states of consciousness throughout life, including madness or obsession and exalted states of love or spiritual transcendence. That Dickens submerged into his style many good, useful, and humane ideas is a testament to the fact that his vision did not prevent him from living and working in the world, but simply intensified his experience of it. As he said to Forster, “Only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is.”

 

Hard Times
was published in August 1854, and Dickens once again took a short break from writing novels, though he continued to write for
Household Words
. Amateur theatricals were consuming more of his time, and in December, as a charity fund-raiser, he tried a new thing, reading
A Christmas Carol
and
The Cricket on the Hearth
aloud to an audience in Birmingham for the cause of workingmen's education. He had plenty of experience reading the Christmas books aloud; each of them had been introduced to his friends in this way, and all of them had gone over well—when he read
The Chimes
aloud, he reported William Macready “undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa,” and his painter friend, Daniel Maclise (who did a sketch of the occasion), said, “There was not a dry eye in the house.” Dickens read three nights in Birmingham, the third night to an audience of two thousand
workingmen and -women who each paid sixpence for tickets. When he came home, thrilled with both the experience and his reception, he told his editor at
Household Words,
W. H. Wills, according to Wills, “If they
will
have him he will do it.” The idea was not to make money by it, as yet. There was still a sense of impropriety attached to the idea of an author performing in public, but with his love of and talent for the stage, Dickens certainly was drawn to the idea if only, for now, as a mode of raising money for good causes.

When December 1855 came around, Dickens set up several more charitable readings, one in Reading, one in Sherborne, and one in Bradford that attracted 3,700 people, followed by another in London. He read
A Christmas Carol
each time and used the story and the time of year and the occasions to promote the sort of openhearted generosity that had always been important to him. But the moneymaking possibilities were obvious and the temptation to exploit them growing stronger. As important, though, was Dickens's palpable sense of his own popularity and power. It was one thing to act in a play or a farce, in character and often speaking the words of another author. It was quite different to say his own words, passing through the personae of characters he himself had created, giving voice and action to his own inner life. His daughter Mamie once reported having an illness as a child and spending the day in his study while he was working: “He suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments,
and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward but evidently not seeing me, he began talking in a low voice.”

Dickens's children were now eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, fourteen, eleven, nine, eight, six, and nearly three, seven boys and two girls. He was a strict and orderly father, who insisted upon neatness and quiet, especially while he was working, but who also had a knack for talking to young children and eliciting confidences in return. Music, dancing, and performing were a significant part of the Dickens family life. It seems clear that he did not want his children to repeat any of his early experiences of poverty, family instability, or street life; they were educated and prepared for a typical English middle-class adulthood. He did complain that they weren't especially ambitious or hardworking, at least in comparison with the energy he had brought to making his way at their age. They were not raised on tales of their father's youth; during a Christmas game toward the end of his life, when most of his children were in their twenties and thirties, Dickens said, “Warren's Blacking, Thirty Strand,” and none of the children had any idea what he meant. Now, in 1855, it was getting to be the time when the older children would need to be provided with careers, and Charley, whom Miss Coutts had sent for a while to Eton, seemed particularly unsettled. He went to Germany for two years, to study banking, but Dickens wrote apologetically to Miss Coutts that Charley had “less fixed purpose and energy than [I] could have supposed in a child of mine.” Thackeray's daughters were friends of Dickens's daughters, and Thackeray commented on their elaborate style of dress. Catherine remarked to a friend that
Dickens always liked the children best when they were babies and toddlers. At any rate, his restlessness seems to have been partly a result of his populous household. He often traveled alone or with male friends, both for work and for sightseeing, and 1855 was no exception. He spent two weeks in Paris with Wilkie Collins in February, then took the family to Folkestone in July. In November, he moved the family to Paris, where they stayed until May 1856, although Dickens himself returned to England from time to time. From June through August, Dickens summered with his family in Boulogne.

He was now writing
Little Dorrit,
though it was not going at all well, and his letters to Forster were full of frustration and anxiety. His initial ideas were thematic ones—building upon his success with
Bleak House
and his views of the conduct of the Crimean War, he wanted to explore the notion of “Nobody's Fault,” which was the original title of the novel. But it was evidently not productive, because though he began thinking in January and expected by May to start publishing in November, in August and September he was still contemplating starting over. The novel begins with Rigaud and Cavaletto in jail in Marseilles, Dickens's first depiction of non-English characters in a setting quite distant in both geography and ambience from London. It is distinctly not what Mrs. Gaskell would have called “Dickensy,” and when the English characters enter in chapter 2, they are not very Dickensy, either. In particular, Arthur Clennam is almost a blank—quiet, colorless, already resigned, and even beaten down by his upbringing and his life in the Far East (which is not evoked at all). A few other minor characters are introduced, but the novel doesn't really gain any energy until chapter 6,
when the scene moves to the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, where the eponymous Little Dorrit lives with her father, brother, and sister. Dickens's purpose from the beginning, one that he mentioned to Forster, was to depict ever-tightening connections and relationships among a large cast of characters who at first seem to bump up against each other randomly, like travelers passing together through the same scenes, only to part and bump into one another again later.