Charles Dickens (8 page)

Dickens's characters in general have often been criticized for not being “realistic” or “rounded,” especially his women characters. Certainly they contrast with those of, say, George Eliot or Henry James. Whether this contrast arises from something lacking in Dickens or something present in Dickens that is not present in the others (comic exaggeration, for example), Dickens's characters often seem weirdly truer to life than those of more realistic novelists. While some readers consider the oft-repeated calling cards of some characters evidence of one-dimensionality, in fact, it is a standard literary device to give minor comic characters taglines or bits of repeated business so that they can distinguish themselves. Additionally, such calling cards are features of romance as well as
the literature of the spiritual journey, such as
Pilgrim's Progress,
in which a rather colorless hero meets personifications of tests, challenges, or qualities that he needs to assimilate in order to achieve his goal. Dickens, with his many innocent heroes and heroines from Pickwick to Esther Summerson, clearly writes in these traditions. Furthermore, the novel as a genre is particularly capacious in terms of the confluence of theme and form. That it is written in prose seems to make it more naturally “realistic,” but in fact it may use the devices of any type of narrative. Dickens repeatedly pushed the English novel away from standard realism at the same time that he pushed it away from depicting the English bourgeoisie. He expanded the social/economic scope of the novel while expanding its linguistic resources with no regard for class status or stylistic propriety—he gave his narrator and his array of characters many tongues to speak in, quite a few of which were visionary or poetical, and which themselves undermined the “realism” of the form. Ultimately, he required, or allowed, the reader to regard more of the life around him by allowing it to be important enough to get into a novel. He thereby expanded the audience of the novel itself.

We may add to this by pointing out Dickens's pivotal position in the shift in English literature from a countryside-based production to an urban-based production. Not only does Dickens's work look back to
Pilgrim's Progress,
it looks forward to Dostoevsky, Freud, and Kafka, three authors who were greatly influenced by Dickens. Many of Dickens's characters seem diagnosable, at least as harmless neurotics, but sometimes as murderous psychotics or tormented obsessive-compulsives or manic-depressives. How they present
themselves has the repetitive clarity of mental dysfunction translated into social dysfunction. In his comic mode, the characters manage to overcome the isolation attendant upon their individual dysfunctions and connect with one another. In his tragic mode, they do not, but instead suffer further isolation and death. The question is not whether Dickens's characters are “realistic,” like those of Jane Austen, but whether he makes a compelling case for the origins and resolutions of their dilemmas, which are, in many cases, extreme and melodramatic. These are exactly the terms in which most people experience their own dilemmas—life-or-death propositions that are tremendously challenging to resolve. Kafka, for example, often wrote of his conflict with his father as if one or the other of them had to die. Freud depicted the suffering of “the Wolfman” and of “Dora” (named after David Copperfield's first wife) in vivid terms, even though to the average reader their problems seem almost negligible. Dickens excelled at bodying forth the drama of the inner battle. Sometimes it is truly an inner battle, as in Scrooge or in Edith Dombey. Other times it seems to be a social or political battle, as in
Barnaby Rudge
or
Oliver Twist,
but the resolution always takes place within the character first and then in the social nexus. The difference between Dickens and Dostoevsky or Kafka has to do with the persistence of the social and political world. The very thing that Dickens worked against, and grew increasingly frustrated by in his social concerns—that is, the apparent resistance to change of English society—is what gives the world of his novels their reassuring comic stability. Conditions don't change, but people can; so Dickens, his characters, and his readers are afforded some measure of relief while still
protected from the sort of terrifying vertigo that is a feature of later European literature.

 

Charles Dickens was a secretive man. Acquaintances, friends, relatives, and children always commented upon the fact that he could withdraw as readily as he could extend himself, that while he was so eagerly observing others he was also resisting observation himself. In our own time we see that great celebrity creates secretiveness, because the natural middle ground of private life is so difficult of attainment for those who live in the eye of the media. Certainly, secretiveness as an aspect of celebrity operated intermittently in Dickens's life—especially during his sojourn in America, where his fans were much more intrusive than his English ones. But the larger part of Dickens's secretiveness had deeper origins and longer-lasting effects. The fact is that modern readers know more of Dickens's early life than any of his contemporaries, including his wife and children, precisely because he made it his business to keep his family origins and his childhood to himself. There are several aspects to this. For one, Dickens did not come from a respectable family. His father, John Dickens, was persistently impecunious. Though he had many jobs and did well at them, he was not able to live within his income and had a habit of not only borrowing from his son, but also trying to make money by selling Dickens's manuscripts and autographs behind his back or approaching Charles's friends and asking for loans. Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Barrow Dickens, was the daughter of Charles Barrow, who worked as a clerk at the Navy Pay Office. In 1810, the year John and Elizabeth's first child, Fanny, was born, Charles Barrow was
discovered to have embezzled several thousand pounds and escaped the country before he could be prosecuted. Most of Dickens's antecedents came from the serving class rather than the professional or propertied classes. The routine and even required American process of leaving one's origins behind was much more difficult in England, even in the England of Dickens's time, which was undergoing a vast social shift. Dickens's friends—Maclise, Macready, Wilkie Collins, and Forster himself—were usually men who, like Dickens, had used talent and energy to make their own way. But as they rose in economic and social status, they encountered more conservative elements of society, men and women who gave them respect for their accomplishments, but a respect always circumscribed by reservations about dress, or education, or behavior, or modes of speaking. Dickens's colorful manner of dressing, for example, was always judged as a bit déclassé. The sheer weight of his talent and charm gained him passage pretty much wherever he wanted to go in English society, but it did not gain him the invisibility of perfect acceptance. One index of this was the difficulty his daughters had, later on, in making good marriages. For all these reasons, Dickens's secretiveness and shame at his origins was a realistic response to the closed, judgmental nature of English social life.

But Dickens's shame was not merely social embarrassment, and in the months after the completion of
Dombey and Son
he seems to have understood intuitively that his growth as an artist depended upon the excavation of his boyhood and the revelation of some of those experiences. The success of
Dombey
permitted this in several ways. One was that the novel was a rousing success, both critically and financially,
and the terms of Dickens's contract with Bradbury and Evans meant that he profited handsomely. He became financially secure and remained so thereafter (though he was at times beset by worries, especially late in life). Another was that he had approached one of the critical episodes of his childhood through the depiction of Mrs. Pipchin, and he had enjoyed writing about it. From the evidence of
Dombey,
he had, as it were, reduced her to her proper size—his adult mind had come to comprehend her and his power over his childish self, and he had experienced one of the special privileges of writing novels—putting powerful early experiences into a context. That Dickens felt a kinship with his former friend Madame de la Rue seems undeniable. That he helped her find a process for contextualizing and releasing herself from ideas and fears that oppressed her seems equally undeniable. Now he was ready to do something similar for himself, and he set about it with his usual energy. No doubt an additional motivation was the death from tuberculosis of his sister Fanny, only thirty-eight years old.

Dickens had finished writing
Dombey
at the end of March 1848. The final number appeared in April, when the novel was also published in volume form. In April, Dickens and several friends also put on eight performances of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
as well as another farce, for the charitable benefit of the purchase of Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford. Catherine was pregnant again, with the Dickenses' eighth child, sixth son. (Sydney, son number five, was two.) As Frederick W. Dupee notes, “To his more and more open dismay, she continued to bear him children at brief intervals. . . .” The modern reader must wonder how he
expected her to stop bearing these children, but nineteenth-century sources don't engage substantively with the harder dilemmas of reproductive rights and choices. Ackroyd notes only that while Dickens's friend Wilkie Collins was reputed to have recourse to the seamier side of London life, and while Dickens showed no judgment of, and some interest in, Collins's activities, there is no evidence that Dickens himself conducted his sexual life with anything but the greatest propriety. He was a firm believer in the Victorian domestic ideal of male-female familial companionship, except that the companion he had chosen was proving less and less satisfactory.

During this time, it is not clear exactly when, Dickens began to write an autobiography. The fragment, amounting to some seven thousand words, was written, according to Forster, without any corrections, evidence of strong feeling and much previous thought. Its subject was a period he had not otherwise talked about, which has since become the most famous of his early life—at twelve, young Charles was removed from school and sent to work at a shoe polish factory, where he stood in a little window, pasting labels onto bottles, where passersby could watch him. Warren's Blacking Factory was situated by the Thames in London, at Hungerford Stairs, near the Strand (next to Hungerford Market, which was torn down when Charing Cross Station was built upon the site). We now associate the area with tourism and shopping, but before the neighborhood was rebuilt and Trafalgar Square was created, it was ancient, damp. And frightening to young Charles, who later wrote, “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of [the experience] that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in
my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.” Not long after Charles went to work (living at the lodgings of Mrs. Roylance, who was the original of Mrs. Pipchin), John Dickens was taken into custody for nonpayment of debts, and the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, on the south side of the river, across London Bridge.

Every biographer of Dickens has noted the profound impact these events had upon the boy and the man and speculated about the reasons. Certainly the change was fairly sudden and amounted to a class humiliation for the boy. Dickens had been born in Portsmouth, where his father worked in the Navy Pay Office, a respectable and promising appointment. His sister Fanny was about fifteen months older; two years later, his brother Alfred was born but died as an infant, and, two years after that, his sister Letitia. The Dickenses were, in fact, a large family, and by all accounts Charles came legitimately by his sociability, energy, and lively spirits, since the parents enjoyed singing, dancing, celebrating, and performing and encouraged the children's talents. The family lived briefly in London, and then the Navy Pay Office sent John Dickens to Chatham, a naval town on the Thames estuary, when Charles was five. Three more children were born by the time Charles was ten, making seven in all.

The five years in Chatham constituted Charles Dickens's happy childhood. He was, by his own account, very attached to his sister Fanny, and Chatham was an interesting place to grow up in—a naval town still resonating from the Napoleonic Wars, where much of the population was attached to
the military in some way. It was a rough town, but Dickens always spoke of it more fondly than he spoke of neighboring Rochester, a more respectable cathedral town that Dickens considered oppressive. He was taught to read by his mother and then sent off with his sister to a nearby school when he was about six. He reported over and over as an adult that the great resource and joy of his childhood had been books—eighteenth-century novels, like
Peregrine Pickle
and
Tom Jones,
but especially
Tales from the Arabian Nights
. Adults who knew him in childhood commented upon his devotion to reading, and it seems evident that his parents were eager to supply him with both education and books (his mother taught him some Latin). But John and Elizabeth Dickens's good intentions were overwhelmed by their improvidence, and the fiscal life of the family got shakier and shakier.

When John was sent to London in the summer of 1822, now the father of seven, he simply could not live on his pay, and even though he enrolled Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music, Charles's schooling apparently came to an end. He had thought he was going to be educated for some profession, and it appeared that those hopes were to be utterly given up. His sister Fanny was not, by contrast, required to leave her studies. Ackroyd suggests that the humiliation of doing his work in the window of the blacking factory and being observed by passing strangers was especially galling to a child of Dickens's sensitivity—the nightmare counterpart to performing songs and speeches, which he always enjoyed. He had a horror of the factory and the district, and portrayed them later on as representations of evil and corruption. He was ejected from his family—while they lived rather comfortably
together in the debtors' prison, he was required to make his way through the streets alone, purchasing his own provisions and running the gauntlet of all the street people and eccentrics who might notice him. He was small and unprotected and suddenly required to grow up without sympathetic companionship. And yet, of course, as he well knew then and later pointed out to his readers over and over, there were thousands of children in London suffering under far greater danger and hardship. His servitude lasted five months, after which his father's debts were relieved by a providential act of Parliament. His mother (no doubt attracted by the idea of a little extra money and one less mouth to feed) was reluctant to end his employment—something that Dickens never forgot or forgave; but he did go back to school for a few more years, before leaving finally at fifteen and embarking on his working life.