Charles Dickens (19 page)

Of all the things that a novelist does, the first among them is to make repeated attempts to rationalize the world. Every time he or she writes a novel, he or she is systematizing what seems chaotic to others. In order for the product to satisfy the novelist, it has to have a certain rightness about it; order of some kind, comprehensibility of some kind, and truth of some kind are always present. As the novelist masters his or her materials and techniques, his or her novels approach more and more closely the novelist's natural cast of mind, or most essential vision, and the logical or systematic qualities of the novel speak back to the novelist, confirming his or her power to make something real. It is thus a tremendous temptation for a novelist, especially a successful one, to attempt to transform the world itself so that it fits the novelist's sense of the right sort of life. Dickens was always both active and energetic in his attempts to make the world fit his model; education, charitable works, social criticism and activism, aid to friends and their families, essays and articles and novels—all attest to his will to shape the world to a certain idea, as does his insistence on quiet, order, good dress, and excellent behavior on the part of his children. Certainly much of Dickens's discomfort in his domestic life in the 1850s was due to an abiding feeling of wrongness—the wife and the children and the houses simply did not mesh, however strenuous his efforts, with what felt right, and vast expenditures of energy in changing this or that part of the picture had no effect. That the life that did finally mesh with his sense of rightness was unusual, marked by less and less resistance or opposition on the part of his associates, with its terms dictated by him, shouldn't surprise us, but neither should it surprise us that it was a life he could not easily
live. A novelist's late, eccentric life is analogous to his late, eccentric novels. His ties to the mainstream have loosened. His primary job is no longer to be representative, as when he was a young writer looking for a publisher and an audience; it is to be still interesting. But it may be that those to whom he is still interesting are not his contemporaries, whose world he reflects, but his descendants, whose world he intuits and predicts. Long association has convinced his contemporaries that they know him; this will not necessarily be so for those who have a different historical perspective. As with the work, so with the life. In the last years of Dickens's life, he seems to have embraced a freer, more individualistic pattern, no longer striving to fit in, but actively seeking the sorts of relationships that are primary in our century—one-to-one intimacies on the one hand, joined with star-to-audience performances on the other. The intermediate circle of family, friends, clubs, and associations that had been a prominent feature of his thirties and forties had largely dropped away.

 

Dickens's reading tour in 1861 took him to twenty and more cities in two and a half months. He had earned £500 for six readings in the summer, so the work was profitable—the duration of the tour was short in comparison with the longer task of writing even one of his shorter novels (thirty to thirty-six weekly installments), not to mention a longer one (twenty installments over nineteen months). But Dickens was never one to stint on preparation. He rewrote, edited, and rehearsed each selection and came to feel that two hundred rehearsals was the minimum before the introduction of new material. His technique was not quite acting, but far more than reading
aloud. He was especially good at modulating the nuances of every sentence, narrative as well as dialogue, in order to bring out its proper effect. Not a word was wasted—words and phrases and sentences that did well enough on the page were changed if they were a little flat in performance. His stage set was simple—a desk, a lamp, a few decorations. He strove to give the feeling of intimacy in even the largest halls and was a master at developing a sense of individual communication between himself and members of the audience, in part by not maintaining an impassive distance from them, but by reacting to what he was reading as they did. The original inspirations of his public readings were private readings of the Christmas books to groups of friends, and he saw no reason to change a successful model. Ellen Ternan and other friends were often in the audience. As his health declined, they could judge whether the readings were too strenuous, but he didn't always follow their advice. The winter reading series concluded at the end of January 1862.

English literary life was now full and varied. George Eliot followed
Scenes of Clerical Life
and
Adam Bede
with
The Mill on the Floss
(1860) and
Silas Marner
(1861). Tennyson published
Idylls of the King
(1859); George Meredith,
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
(1859); Wilkie Collins,
The Woman in White
(1860). Samuel Smiles, J. S. Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Ruskin were all active, in these years publishing their most famous works. In Russia, Turgenev was publishing
Fathers and Sons,
Dostoevsky was publishing
Notes from Underground,
and Tolstoy was at work on
War and Peace,
to be published in 1865. In France, Victor Hugo was publishing
Les Misérables,
Flaubert was publishing
Salammbô
. Dickens was not much older than most of these writers (and younger than Mill and Darwin), but he was their ancestor as well as their contemporary. The thread of English fiction that led back to Scott came directly through Dickens. In his essay “Epic and Novel,” the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin points out that of all the literary genres, only the novel does not predate Aristotle, and only the novel is not defined by Aristotelian poetics: “The novel is not merely one genre among other genres. Among genres already completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore, it is deeply akin to that era.” A genre doesn't develop of itself, of course. It develops because its practitioners have ideas and talents that enlarge the form to encompass phenomena that are new or have not been portrayed successfully before. If we take Jane Austen, for example, it is often observed that the servant classes, the colonial plantations, and the naval establishment that supported the lives of her characters are never alluded to or depicted in her novels. The reasons for this are no doubt a combination of habits of mind, considerations of artistic form, and convention, but the basic fact is that Austen didn't consider it necessary to broaden her canvas or her language. Dickens, about a generation younger than Austen and a descendant on his mother's side of one of those serving families who do not appear in any of Austen's work, found a way to satisfy his own urgent need to depict almost everyone in his English world who did not appear in Austen's work, and a way to communicate with them as well. His natural predilections for exploration, investigation, mimicry, and drama,
combined with his natural flair for figurative language and his access to nonrational states of mind, meant that he could not help expanding the possibilities of the novel and almost by himself creating the literary world that surrounded him in the early 1860s. But he was, in some sense, now outmoded. Having read his works, his contemporaries saw their flaws—his native deficiencies in tightness of construction and complexity of characterization—and learned from them. Their works were more subtle and nuanced, more private and less convivial, you might say, more focused on the inner life as lived rather than as projected outward. Even so, they existed inside the gates of the very broad world that Dickens had shown over and over was the appropriate home of the novel.

Dickens's public readings, in addition to being a scheme for making money and for performing and for getting a feeling of connection to his audience and fans, were also the next step in the idea of the novel, a step into a territory where other novelists were not able to follow (except in a pale sense that novelists today go on book tours and read more or less skillfully from their own work). If the novel by nature seeks to communicate more and more about a world that contains more and more material worthy of communication, then Dickens, with his rehearsals and his rewritings and his careful projection of his words, was attempting to make every single word count. The ideal would be that every word would be both clear and evocative of many overlapping meanings—that is, the natural complexity of the novel, both overall and sentence by sentence, would be taken to its limit. For Dickens, “meaning” included both large quantities of ideas and large quantities of emotion, so the proper audience reaction
would be both emotional and intellectual (a reaction he found in France and in Scotland most frequently). In addition, the mutually subjective writer/reader experience, wherein the reader feels his or her mind is in direct communication with a single other mind, the author's, would also be fulfilled by the staged intimacy of the setting. Nor could the novels be acted out—the author/narrator was essential to the public reading as a novel-like enterprise rather than a more impersonal drama-like enterprise. So even when his contemporary novelists were in some sense disdaining Dickens for déclassé self-promotion, he was testing the boundaries of the novelistic enterprise—that is, the boundaries of how a narrative can be communicated. It is thus no coincidence that his work has some affinity with film, a narrative form that portrays some aspects of modern life more effectively than the novel does.

 

Between January 1862 and April 1866, Dickens did no reading tours; he did not begin his next novel,
Our Mutual Friend,
until November 1863 (though he thought of several ideas and names that later appeared in it). There is no record of where Ellen Ternan lived at this time, only that she and her mother did not attend Maria Ternan's wedding in the summer of 1863 (though there is no evidence of a breach between them). Dickens worked on
All the Year Round
and traveled back and forth to France, sometimes for only a few days at a time. He even went during the summer of 1862, when Georgina Hogarth was seriously ill. Most commentators believe that Ellen and her mother were in France, supported by Dickens, though no scholarly investigations have uncovered where they were living. Some believe that Ellen had a baby in
these years; Dickens's daughter Kate told a friend of hers many years later that there had been a son who died (a story corroborated by Dickens's most successful son, Henry). At any rate, Dickens was depressed, he reported to Forster, and the evidence of Pip and the later character of Jasper, in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
show that Dickens was exploring the idea of guilt in his novels. There is no reason to believe that Dickens's feelings toward Ellen, about his situation, and about himself didn't fluctuate over the years. It is not uncommon for a man or a woman to act in accordance with his or her desires, only to find that the accomplished goal doesn't have the imagined results but must be accommodated anyway. Dickens didn't have much experience with being satisfied or at peace. Even if he was able to arrange things as he liked, that may not have worked to settle him.

In the absence of all evidence as to the terms of Dickens's relationship with the Ternans, there is only speculation about the probable effect upon Ellen's life and reputation were she to become Dickens's acknowledged mistress and bear his child, even in France. Those who think she did become his mistress and those who don't all agree that her prospects would be clouded—her career would court scandal (and she had not shown much talent for the stage anyway), and her ability to make a respectable and prosperous marriage would be compromised. Her most marriageable years were passing—she turned twenty in 1860, thirty in 1870. Rationally, she was wasting her prospects, and according to their biographers, both she and Dickens would understand this. Was Dickens thoughtful and foresighted enough to restrain his ardor and remain a loving but avuncular figure in her life, as
Ackroyd maintains? Or was he willing to risk her well-being for love, his or theirs, as Tomalin maintains? And what was her mother, famously respectable and very much in the picture, willing to risk, and for what?

At the end of 1863, Dickens began to write
Our Mutual Friend
. The gestation of the novel was prolonged and difficult, and Dickens was especially concerned that he would get behind the publication schedule—his sense of his powers had diminished since he sat down three years before to begin
Great Expectations
because his magazine needed a serial. He hadn't filled one of his large canvases since
Little Dorrit,
begun in 1855, and for the first time in his life, he was daunted by the prospect. During the writing of
David Copperfield,
he had told Forster rather gaily of entering a stationery store to buy paper, and overhearing a woman ask for the next number of the novel, knowing that he hadn't even written it yet—that was the only time, apparently, he was ever intimidated by his chosen publishing format. While he was working up
Our Mutual Friend,
he complained several times to Forster that he didn't quite know what he was getting at. The ideas he had pivoted upon character (for example, the idea of a man and a woman both scheming to marry for money, only to discover after the wedding that neither had any) rather than theme (by contrast, his first thoughts about
Little Dorrit
concerned the social problems implicit in the phrase “Nobody's Fault,” the first title of the novel). One aspect of English life that still annoyed him was narrow-minded John Bullishness—portrayed in
Our Mutual Friend
in the person of Podsnap. Tradition has it that Podsnap was based on none other than John Forster, as
Harold Skimpole had been based on Leigh Hunt, and once again Dickens managed to betray a friend and portray a characteristic at the same time, though tradition also has it that he got away with it and that Forster never revealed whether or not he realized what Dickens had done.