Charles Dickens (14 page)

Dickens returns to some of the themes he explored in
Dombey and Son,
but now the sources of money are more various than they were in
Dombey
. The essential source is productive creativity. Property and rents and trade have a more problematic moral character; how they are managed dictates what good they are. Banking requires prudence, exactness, and benevolence but is not inherently corrupt. Investment or speculation is inherently corrupt. Dickens also explores the uses money is put to and finds them generally bad. In
Little Dorrit,
prosperity itself is almost a guarantee that wealth will be put to bad use. The primary example of this is that when poor and in debt, the members of the Dorrit family live generally in kindly intimacy with one another, but when raised to sudden wealth, kindness, service, and even expressions of love are considered humiliating. Who pays, who is supported, and whether these arrangements are legitimate is a constant concern of the novel.

Love circulates like money but is mostly powerless against the wholesale commodification of social and domestic relationships. In
Little Dorrit,
Dickens shows a world made up of debtors and cheats, among whom one or two decent,
hardworking, self-effacing figures move silently, often dishonored, rarely regarded, and only at the last minute, when almost all hope is gone, rewarded.

Dickens's vision in
Little Dorrit
is not only an exceptionally dark view of human nature, it is specifically a dark view of British society and of the effects of British social and economic structure upon British citizens. The Circumlocution Office and the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings who inhabit it are pervasive in both government and society, making sure that no business that might promote the common good is ever done, while all relationships are rendered false. The Circumlocution principle is shown to be more powerful and important even than the Chancery court, in
Bleak House,
because while Chancery court touches upon all aspects of British society, it does not define them, as the Circumlocution Office does in
Little Dorrit
. There are only two refuges from it, exile and prison.

The plot of
Little Dorrit
is overelaborate and creaky. The two halves, the first of which follows the Dorrits in their poverty and the second of which follows them in their wealth, have a profound simplicity that makes William and Fanny two of Dickens's most complex and ruthlessly drawn characters. But their effect is undermined by the convolutions of the Clennam plot, which involves Arthur's long-lost unknown mother, who died mad, a twin for Jeremiah Flintwinch, the melodramatic recuperation of Mrs. Clennam, and the literal collapse of her house. Rigaud/Blandois is simultaneously overdrawn and uninteresting—too ubiquitous and without even the most minimal complexity or fun. Even Bounderby,
the villain of
Hard Times,
is fun. Even Uriah Heep is a little fun. Rigaud/Blandois tempts the reader to skip his parts from the beginning to the end.

Dickens was frequently criticized in his own time for not portraying his characters with much complexity or depth. George Eliot, for example, wrote in 1856 that “he failed to give us their psychological character.” But many Dickens characters are beautifully layered. Almost invariably, though, these, like Dora or Flora Finching or William Dorrit, are his voluble ones, and they reveal themselves through their own dialogue or monologue. Flora Finching is a particularly appropriate example of several aspects of Dickens's working style. For one thing, she was based on Mrs. Winter, whose talkativeness Dickens had found so offputting in the spring of 1856. At first, the portrayal of her seems cruel, and must have seemed so to Mrs. Winter herself, who, Dickens was well aware, read all of his work attentively. She is not only fat, she is flirtatious and foolish. Arthur finds her repugnant and his former feeling unaccountable. She drinks. But Dickens gives free rein to her tongue, and many of her idea associations are funny and smart; she also shows considerable self-knowledge. She is kindhearted. By the end of the novel, she is one of the most endearing characters, perhaps the only truly endearing character, who clearly understands her failures, her father's faults, and the difficulties of Mr. F.'s aunt, but on the whole chooses to make the best of things in a world where most of the characters choose quite the opposite. Dickens understood intuitively that speech is a form of narrative, wherein the speaker narrates his or her own life to others as well as to him-or herself. He anticipates in this not only Freud, but also
Bakhtin and other theorists of the novel who maintain that the uniqueness of the novel as an art form derives from the clash and the complementarity of many voices. Dickens was also wonderful at the sort of indirect discourse where the author in the narrative voice appropriates various languages that occur in the general discourse, sometimes for whole paragraphs and sometimes for only a phrase. In chapter 24, when Amy takes dinner at Flora's, Mr. F.'s aunt is not at the table. She “was, for the time, laid up in ordinary in her chamber,” that is, like a noncommissioned ship that is still afloat. Often Dickens goes on at some length in this manner. When the Plornishes visit Arthur in prison, the narrator notes, “Mr. Plornish amiably growled, in his philosophical but not quite lucid manner, that there was ups, you see, and there was downs. It was in vain to ask why ups, why downs; there they was, you know.” This form of discourse often functions metaphorically, but its main effect is to widen the world of the novel, to refer to and incorporate a huge variety of colloquial forms of speech, and to reinforce the idea that the novel mimics life. That appropriating, mimicking, and delighting in the plentiful varieties of English speech was one of Dickens's signal traits, all of his acquaintances agreed upon, and he was perfectly alive to how speech and characteristic action revealed character.

The other side of this trait, though, is that he was often drawn to portray his positive characters as quiet, repressed, or self-effacing, in contrast with the parading egos of morally neutral or negative characters. Dickens's final image of Arthur and Amy swallowed up in the roar of the city not only portrays their unique fate, it also encapsulates the effect of their
portrayals throughout the novel. The clamor of the surrounding personalities has served as a continual distraction from the blanks where their personalities should be. If we give Dickens credit for intentionally delineating them as he does, then at this point in his career, his art is asserting that personality
is
a form of ego, and, as with
The Old Curiosity Shop,
there is no way to exist expressively in the world without partaking of its egomania. What Eliot often did well that Dickens did not do was anatomize her quiet characters, such as Rosamund Vincy in
Middlemarch
. Understanding layers of intention and desire beneath a quiet exterior was one of Eliot's interests and a strength of her writing—her characters are often portrayed in solitude, where they are free to reveal (or the author is free to reveal for them) their true natures. Dickens's characters reveal their true natures through social intercourse. He has not got much access to them if they hold themselves apart from others.

Little Dorrit
achieved excellent sales. The first numbers sold around forty thousand copies each, and though by the last numbers sales had declined to just over thirty thousand, still that was much higher than
David Copperfield
and nearly as high as
Bleak House
. Some critics liked it (George Bernard Shaw said “it was a more seditious book than
Das Kapital,
” a definite compliment), others were offended, others found it too drawn out. Forster did not like it, faulting its failures of invention and its labored quality. It ran from the end of 1855 through mid-1857 and was published in volume form in June.

In 1856, during the writing of
Little Dorrit,
John Forster, who was the same age as Dickens, forty-four, married a
wealthy widow, certainly to the surprise and somewhat to the dismay of his friends, including Dickens. Forster and his new wife immediately set up rather elaborate housekeeping in the heart of the very society that Dickens was busily excoriating in his novel; Dickens was a bit disapproving. Forster had grown more politically conservative since 1850, precisely during the time when Dickens was growing more radical. Dickens still wrote openly to Forster of his most important concerns, but Forster was not as supportive as he had been. As a result, Dickens's letters took on a note of defensive explanation that makes them especially informative. Forster had his own opinions about marriage, now that he was married, and his opinions grew out of just that sort of compatibility of abilities and views that Dickens missed in his own—he may have disapproved of what marriage into society had done to the old Forster, but he would certainly have noticed that Forster had achieved something, through luck or good judgment, that he himself missed very much.

Also during the writing of
Little Dorrit,
Dickens had realized yet another dream, which was to buy Gad's Hill Place, a large house near Chatham, in Kent, the very house that he and his father had often admired when Dickens was a boy. Dickens wrote of its purchase to a friend, “I happened to be walking past . . . with my sub-editor of
Household Words
when I said to him: ‘You see that house? It has always a curious interest for me, because when I was a small boy down in these parts I thought it the most beautiful house (I suppose because of its famous old cedar trees) ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to be a clever man perhaps I might own that
house or another such house . . .' We came back to town and my friend went out to dinner. Next morning he came in great excitement, and said, ‘It is written that you were to have that house at Gad's Hill Place. The lady I had allotted to me to take down to dinner yesterday began to speak of that neighborhood, ‘You know it?' I said, ‘I have been there today.' ‘Oh, yes,' she said. ‘I know it very well, I was a child there, in the house they call Gad's Hill Place. My father was the rector, and lived there many years. He has just died, has left it to me, and I want to sell it.' ” Dickens, of course, could not resist. The house had associations not only with his childhood, but also with Shakespeare—Falstaff has a famous scene in
Henry IV
that takes place at Gad's Hill.

Dickens's restlessness infected every facet of his life. In the two years between June 1855 and June 1857, he had bought two new houses, lived at Folkestone, Paris, Boulogne, and London, and traveled besides for speeches and business. His level of activity, with writing, editing, reading in public, and managing the lives of his children, was higher than ever. His enthusiasm for amateur acting and play production was immense; he supervised the production of, and took roles in, six plays and farces, all of which were put on in the small theater at Tavistock House. The evidence of his writings, his frenzy of activities, and his letters about both personal and political subjects show that he was approaching a crisis and that he himself had identified the crisis as a domestic one. Dickens's life continued to look strangely modern, ruled by a need for freedom of all kinds and increasingly impatient with the typical patterns of his Victorian world.

W
ILKIE
C
OLLINS
, Dickens's friend and fellow writer, had written a play called
The Frozen Deep
. As always, Dickens was more than an adviser in its composition—almost a collaborator, though Collins's name was listed as author. When the play went into production, at the end of 1856, for Twelfth Night performances at Tavistock House, Dickens became the director, star, stage manager, theater owner, and moving force. The play took its theme from an Arctic expedition of 1845, the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, in which all were lost, with some allegations of cannibalism. Dickens played the leader of the expedition, Richard Wardour, whom Collins had envisioned as the villain, but whom Dickens rewrote and played as an angry, complex, and self-sacrificing man “perpetually seeking and never finding true affection.” Dickens rehearsed, sometimes in company and sometimes alone, all through November and December 1856. According to Ackroyd, he kept his monologues to himself, no doubt knowing that he was about to create a sensation, and then, in January, he allowed reviewers to come to the performances along with the invited guests; they testified to the sensation he succeeded in creating. The entire audience was deeply affected; Collins reportedly said, “This is an awful thing!” One reviewer noted the “irrational” depths of
Dickens's performance (which we may interpret in a Freudian way as seeming to come from the id or the unconscious, or in a Jungian way as seeming to come from the collective unconscious, or in a more traditional way as seeming to carry a force beyond that of a single individual, as being “inspired,” a state Dickens was entirely familiar with). The requirements of the evening's program meant that Dickens had to change almost at once for his part in the farce, “Uncle John,” but afterward, during the dancing, one of the ladies present reported that Dickens asked her to waltz and she “was whirled around almost to giddiness.” Dickens had found a way to express his feelings about his life in his own voice and with his own body, rather than through the medium of a character in a novel. The expression of his anger and his disappointment and his love for the woman Richard Wardour gives up to his rival in the play had the powerful effect of both arousing and relieving his generally repressed feelings about his marital situation.

The lives of novelists, and actors, too, are marked by bouts of emotion and changes of circumstances—love affairs, divorces, outbursts of all kinds—that supposedly contrast with the lives of citizens with more traditional employments. This flux is conventionally seen as evidence of instability on the part of artists and ascribed to wounds of childhood, or artistic temperament, or selfishness. But the true pattern, I think, is evident in Dickens's relationship to his work and is most evident from the inception of
David Copperfield,
in 1849, to the end of his life. Every novelist brings some knowledge of dramatic states of mind to his writing. If he or she had no such knowledge, then he or she would have no business with, and no interest in, novels or drama, since both rely on the
depiction of those states for narrative or dramatic interest. Audiences and readers want something to happen, and writers are ready to portray some of the things that can happen. Often this knowledge does have its root in the experience of the artist, though as frequently it has its origins in sensitive and eager observation (both of these were certainly true of Dickens). But the experience of writing about and depicting these dramatic incidents is at least as important as their origins, because the novelist bodies them forth, comments upon them, reacts to them; he learns from them and gives them both form and meaning, rather like, in a simpler way, expressing anger in words sometimes relieves feelings and sometimes exacerbates them. What might have remained inchoate becomes specific through making a narrative of it in a way that is analogous to psychotherapy. The novelist, unlike the patient, defines his story as fiction and therefore retains at least some distance from it, but he nevertheless learns to interpret it. Often it loses its power over him, as Dickens came to terms with his months in the blacking factory after giving them to David Copperfield. But he may also learn things about his true state of mind that might have remained shadowy had he not embodied them. In
David Copperfield
and every subsequent novel, Dickens created ideal heroines—Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, Sissy Jupe and Rachael (in
Hard Times
), and Amy Dorrit—who contrasted strongly with his perception of his wife. They were healthy, industrious, intelligent, companionable, slender, unselfish pre-mothers with the strength to withstand circumstances and enter into a kinship with flawed but loving men, several of whom were overt or covert stand-ins for Dickens himself. In every novel they were contrasted
with other female characters—Dora, Flora, Lady Dedlock, Louisa—who were not rewarded with male companionship at the end of the novel. And with each novel, Dickens taught himself that he was missing what the characters he wrote about managed to achieve (and what several of the men around him also managed to achieve—his father, whose insolvency frequently aroused Dickens's scorn, was evidently happily married to Dickens's mother for more than forty years in a sort of “I will never leave Mr. Micawber”–type union). Art that has a revelatory effect upon the reader had its first revelatory effect upon the writer; the process of working out the plots and the relationships in an ambitious novel is always a learning process. In Dickens's case, the fact that the novels were published as they were written and the fact that they were so long and multilayered meant that the challenge of maintaining the forward motion along with the integrity of the story and the characters was enormous. What the author knows at the end cannot possibly be the same as what he knew at the beginning, and what he knows has reference to every aspect of his emotional and symbolic life.

Additionally, he has only himself as his guide and judge. The leavening presence of, say, a psychotherapist is not there to mediate the continuous sense of revelation the novelist feels as he gives meaning to his conceptions and feelings. For Dickens, who lived so public a life, there was some index of how far in or out of the mainstream of conventional thinking he was through reviews, sales, and opinions of friends, therefore some potential therapistlike check upon his wildest thoughts, but the feedback was mixed. High sales bolstered his sense of being right; he never read reviews; he had come to
discount the opinions of Forster and other close friends. His primary ambition, which was to arouse strong feelings of sympathy and pathos in his audience, was almost invariably realized—at some remove through the novels, with great immediacy through the performances of
The Frozen Deep
. This sympathy he must certainly have interpreted as support or approval, moving him along bit by bit toward acting upon the feelings he had been portraying for so long.

Authors live in a dialogue with their work, and their work is their inner life made concrete. Were they not susceptible to the reality of art, they wouldn't have become authors in the first place. They would naturally be at least as susceptible to the power of their own art as to the power of the art of others, and from the beginning of his career, Dickens's letters attest to his enthusiasm for and belief in every novel he wrote. When he came to the end of
Little Dorrit,
in June 1857, he was ripe for a change. Such a term, however, misstates and slights the state of mind he was in, which was very vulnerable, though his vulnerability was cloaked in his usual wit and activity.

During the later spring of 1857, Hans Christian Andersen visited the Dickens family at Gad's Hill Place. Expected to stay only briefly, Andersen made himself at home for five weeks (after he left, Dickens put a note in the room he had used that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES”) and noticed, it was said later, that Catherine was unhappy from time to time. The rest of the family did not make him feel especially welcome; the strain may have been caused by him, or he may have imposed himself upon a situation where strain was
already being felt. On June 8, Dickens's friend and fellow writer Douglas Jerrold died suddenly. They had known each other for many years; of the two of them, another writer wrote, “Jerrold flies at his enemy like a tiger, and never lets go while there is life in him; while Dickens contents himself by giving him a sound drubbing. Jerrold is most in earnest, but Dickens is more effective.” Jerrold left a wife and a daughter, and Dickens immediately began to arrange for some sort of performances or readings to benefit them. The goal was £2,000, a considerable sum that Dickens was confident he could raise. At the end of June, he read
A Christmas Carol
to a large crowd. On July 4, he and his fellow amateurs, who included Georgina Hogarth and his daughters Mamie and Katey in the women's parts, gave a private performance of
The Frozen Deep
for Queen Victoria and her party that was also a great success. Other performances of Collins's play followed, but when it appeared that the planned performances were not going to earn the expected sum (Dickens liked his productions to be both elaborate and perfect; often costs overran projections), Dickens agreed to put on a performance in a large hall in Manchester. When he went to have a look at it, he realized that Georgina and his daughters did not have the skills to project their lines in such a large space, and he asked a friend to recommend some professional actresses.

The Ternan family, who were hired to play the parts, consisted of the mother, Frances, and three daughters, Fanny, Maria, and Ellen. Frances had acted with Charles Macready in various Shakespearean productions and was a serious and respected actress; the father, Thomas, had managed several theaters and was also a specialist in serious theater. He had
died not long before, possibly, according to Ackroyd, of the late-stage effects of syphilis. The two older daughters were accomplished actresses, and the addition of the family gave the production the energy it needed, in more ways than one.

Dickens wrote of the effect of the first night's performance, “It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together in the palm of one's hand . . . and to see the hardened Carpenters at the sides crying and trembling at it. . . .” Even Maria Ternan, experienced though she was, wept as she cradled the dying Richard Wardour (Dickens) in her arms, so that Dickens had to recall her to her professional obligations. Only two performances had been planned, but the play was such a sensation that a third was added. Of his own experiences at Manchester, Dickens later wrote to Collins, “I have never known a moment's peace or content since the last night of ‘The Frozen Deep.' ”

In September, the Ternans were appearing, during Doncaster race week, at a theater in Doncaster. Dickens arranged a trip with Wilkie Collins for the composition of a piece for
Household Words
to be titled “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.” Collins was younger than Dickens, unmarried, and likely to overlook any risky doings, since he himself had considerable experience of the seamier side of Victorian life. They traveled first to Scotland, where Dickens got them into trouble mountain climbing and had to carry the injured Collins down the hillside. Collins's injury, a sprained ankle, did not prevent Dickens from taking him on to Doncaster. There, he was with the Ternans, and Ellen, several times, but what they did can only be inferred from Dickens's letters and writings. All that is known is that Ellen had small parts in
plays, that Dickens went out several times, that Dickens was seen at the theater and cheered by the audience, and that he left suddenly, writing in a letter afterward, “The Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can't write, and (waking) can't rest, one minute.”

In October, as a result of a dispute, Dickens told Catherine's maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that he could sleep separately from her. The origin of the dispute remains unclear (though Catherine had frequently expressed jealousy of his feelings for other women, going all the way back to Madame de la Rue, and with good reason), but its result was irrevocable—they never lived as man and wife again, and thenceforth, Dickens seems to have allowed his dislike of her to emerge more and more openly.

Dickens's feelings about the women in his life were invariably strong. What he said of his love for Maria Beadnell, that it was a four-year obsession, applied in degree if not in kind to his feelings about every woman with whom he felt a connection. Sometimes the strong feelings were positive, as for Mary Hogarth, Georgina Hogarth, and his daughters; sometimes they were negative. Over the years he expressed contempt and dislike for his mother, for his wife, and for his wife's mother. In some sense, it does not matter what these women were actually like or how others saw them. After Dickens had endowed them with a particular symbolic meaning, his feelings about them did not admit of contradiction. Everything they did or said just reconfirmed his opinions and intensified his feelings. His work showed that he had ideas about how a woman should be. The ideal women characters, like Esther Summerson and Agnes Wickfield, are balanced by
portraits of many decidedly nonideal characters such as Mrs. Skewton and Mrs. Gradgrind. That he didn't understand women is a modern truism that is no less applicable to other men of his time. That he didn't admit the claims of particular women that he knew, once he had turned against them, to any sort of intelligence, justification, or respect is a greater sign of Dickens's special idiosyncrasies of character. His relationships with men allowed gray areas and gradations of feeling. He had a falling-out with Douglas Jerrold but made friends again and exerted himself to benefit his wife and daughter; his friendship with Forster changed and he came to disapprove of several aspects of Forster's personality, but he never turned away from him completely. He did not always get along with Thackeray, and was quite possibly aware of the intermittent animus and envy Thackeray expressed toward him, but he either accorded him respect or kept quiet (until Thackeray took Catherine's part in Dickens's divorce). While he was frequently angry with and contemptuous of his father, he was reconciled to him toward the end of his father's life and treated him affectionately. But even Miss Coutts, his partner in charitable works, with whom he had what might be considered a more manly friendship, since it was based on common projects more than affectional feelings, never returned to a state of intimacy with him once he felt she betrayed him.