The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  A generation ago, John Lucas wrote a book called The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens’s Novels. He took his title from Immanuel Kant, who defined a Melancholy Man as one who:

  is little concerned with the judgements of others, with their opinion of what is good or true; he relies purely on his own insight… He regards changes of fashion with indifference and their glitter with contempt… He has a lofty sense of the dignity of human nature. He esteems himself and regards man as a creature deserving of respect. He suffers no abject subservience and breathes the noble air of freedom. To him all chains are abhorrent, from the gilded fetters worn at court to the heavy irons of the galley slave.

  Lucas’s study of the novels was deserving of its status as one of the most perceptive of its time. The notion of Dickens, however, as a man who was not concerned with the judgements of others is not borne out by what we know. In particular in relation to his marriage and his sexual and romantic life, he was intensely occupied not merely with concealment, which is perfectly understandable, but with subterfuge and falsification.

  It is easy to mock the desire to be respectable, just as it is easy to label as hypocrites those who wish to keep up appearances. It would be less easy to have been born near the bottom of the heap in the cruel nineteenth century. Charles and Nelly had both gazed into the abyss. The fates of their two fathers could never be forgotten.

  Thomas Ternan, one of nineteen children, was the son of a Dublin grocer. Thomas became an actor in England. Even had he aspired, in his dreams, to enter one of the professions, that would have been impossible. He was a Catholic, and in those days the Inns of Court and the universities were reserved for members of the Established Church. A lot of actors, in those Penal Times, were Catholics, from the great Mrs Siddons and her Kemble brothers downwards. Thomas Ternan came to England, joined a troupe of actors in Kent on the Rochester circuit and married a fellow actor, Fanny Jarman, who also came from an Irish theatrical tradition. She was a cut above him, socially and in skill, having played Desdemona to Edmund Kean’s Othello, Ophelia to Charles Kemble’s Hamlet and having been in her way a minor star. But both Nelly’s parents had known the kind of rough-and-tumble life on the road, which we find in the life of Codlin and Short in The Old Curiosity Shop, in the Crummles troupe in Nickleby and in Jingle, the strolling player in Pickwick.

  Dickens responded to all this so strongly because, although his parents had not been actors, it was the profession he had always dreamed of following. Pretending to be someone else for a living, being constantly on the road, belonging nowhere – these were all activities he had pursued faute de mieux. Thomas Ternan had become an actor-manager in the North of England, with many periods of separation from his wife: that was what the profession demanded – demands – of those who follow it. The family united in Newcastle upon Tyne for the Christmas of 1844. That was the season Maria played Mamilius in The Winter’s Tale and Fanny performed a duet with her in a melodrama. Shortly thereafter, however, their father became severely ill. The next that was heard of him, he was in London and had been taken to the asylum at Bethnal Green, suffering from ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’. He would almost certainly have been kept in chains until, incontinent and skinny, he was too weak to require constraint. He would have been locked up and simply left to die.15 Which he did when Nelly was only six.

  John Dickens, the novelist’s father, likewise spent a crucial period locked up – during a (or, rather, the) crucial period of Charles Dickens’s childhood. We shall investigate all this in the next chapter. Suffice to say here that Charles, like Nelly, had a father who had fallen foul of the nineteenth century in all its monstrous pitilessness. He had been locked up in consequence. Of course, for the Victorians it was a crime to be a thief or a murderer; but also for the Victorians, who bought thousands of copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help and who believed that they were an Island Empire that had pulled itself up by its own boot-straps, the worst crime was to be a failure. It was the century that reversed the Sermon on the Mount. Cursed were the meek. Cursed were the poor in spirit. Cursed were the merciful.

  The respectable professions from which circumstance excluded the parents of Charles and of Nelly were instruments of monstrous cruelty. Dickens’s novels dwell repeatedly on the grotesque blundering unkindness of the law. All Victorians knew about it. The other great profession, that of medicine, was something even more to be dreaded. In 1851, when, as usual, Charles Dickens was doing twenty different things at once – tending a sick wife in Malvern (she was suffering from giddiness, occasional loss of eyesight and serious depression, none of which was cured by the quack-water cure recommended by the doctors), preparing a play, Not So Bad As We Seem, which Queen Victoria had expressed the desire to see, and editing his weekly Household Words – he heard the news that his father was grievously ill. John Dickens was then in his mid-sixties. Ever since he was a young man he had suffered from a urinary complaint, which he had never sufficiently addressed, still less (spendthrift that he was) been in a position to cure. Charles Dickens had rushed back to London from Malvern to make the speech at the annual dinner of the General Theatrical Fund in Covent Garden, a charity devoted to indigent actors. At the same time, in his own house in Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park, he had a dying baby – little Dora. In one week he would lose his youngest child and the father who begat him.

  When Dickens arrived at Keppel Street in Bloomsbury (just behind the British Museum) it was to see his father, who was in delirious agony.

  The doctor was summoned, ‘who instantly performed (without chloroform) the most terrible operation known in surgery, as the only chance of saving him’. This involved cutting a vagina-like incision between the anus and the scrotum and unsexing the patient. ‘He bore it’, wrote Dickens, ‘with astonishing fortitude, and I saw him directly afterwards – in his room, a slaughterhouse of blood.’16 A few days later, when Dickens visited at eleven o’clock at night and sat beside the unconscious figure, ‘he died – O so quietly’.17

  His mother’s presence at this scene is scarcely mentioned. Nor is the fact that, present at the death, were Dickens’s two brothers Alfred and Augustus, his sister Letitia and her husband Henry Austin. When John Dickens died, Charles did take his mother in his arms and weep, but by the time he described the scene to his biographer, it was a duet, of him and his father alone.18 For Dickens, it was not the tragedy of a woman losing her husband, or of a family of siblings losing their father. It was the tragedy of severance from a ‘zealous, useful and cheerful spirit’, as his Micawber-father had become. Dickens had been deeply affected – and, in the middle of so much business, he had visited his father in his affliction. When his mother finally died in 1863, he had not visited her for months.

  Dickens’s complex relationships with his mother and father were the seedbed of all his art. As far as his relationship with John Dickens is concerned, we watch a huge shift in the artistic problems that Charles was addressing and solving as his imagination came to terms with life-experience.

  Dickens did not blame his father for the childhood traumas. It was the mother who bore all the weight of that cruel story. John Dickens remained, for the novelist, the jolly, jokey figure with whom, in early childhood, Charles had enjoyed ramblings in the marsh country along the Medway, and who, in the squalid London houses where they lodged, and from whose rent-collectors they flitted, kept him amused with recitations, imitations and jokes. The two great creations to emerge from the Charles–John Dickens dynamic were Micawber and Dorrit. In David Copperfield, the alternative-autobiography composed while John Dickens was still alive, Dickens made his father a figure of benign burlesque. Mr Micawber is the Clown of the old harlequinade. In the original pantomimes, Clown was the speaking part in what was often a mime show and, like all the Dickensian figures who correspond to Clown, Micawber is gifted with the exhilarating power of utterance – ‘“Now, welcome poverty!” cried Mr Micawber, shedding tears. “Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, ra
gs, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end!”’ [DC 52] Just as Micawber changes his character entirely and becomes a successful farmer and administrator in Australia, so John Dickens after his death – he who had been so conspicuously inept as a clerk and so undistinguished as a hack journalist – was saluted by his son as ‘one of the most efficient and respected members of the Press’.19

  Pantomime, more than serious drama, was the template for Dickens’s fiction in the earlier half of his writing life. How an audience responds to comedy and pantomime was central to Dickens’s life-view. Grimaldi the Clown, whom John Dickens took his children to see, and whose biography Charles Dickens reworked after writing Pickwick, was one of the greatest exponents of the commedia dell’arte.

  Behind the traditional Christmas pantomime may be seen, even in the debased form in which it is performed in Britain today, a dramatic archetype which offers much the same katharsis that Aristotle sought in Tragedy. The inadequacy of the parents; the frustration of the young lovers; the poverty of the unsympathetic father, and his attempt to force the heroine to marry money against her will; the machinations of the Yellow Dwarf or the Demon King; while the transvestite Dame or Widow Twanky or Mother Goose projects, and redeems, the eternal dread of Mother. In these garish projections, the audience confronts comic versions of their own fears and griefs – the impossibility of finding domestic happiness in the place where we are programmed to seek it: in the family; the emotional frustrations and financial anxieties of life. It is a world, of course, where misfortune, rather than being something to weep over, is of necessity projected as comic.

  Dickens himself, both in his definitive and revealing essay ‘The Pantomime of Life’, and in a later article for Household Words called ‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’, made the point trenchantly – that pantomime was a world:

  where a man may tumble into the broken ice, or dive into the kitchen fire, and only be the droller for the accident; where babies may be knocked about and sat upon, or choked with gravy spoons, in the process of feeding, and yet no Coroner be wanted, nor anybody made uncomfortable; where workmen may fall from the top of a house to the bottom, or even from the bottom of a house to the top, and sustain no injury to the brain, need no hospital, leave no young children; where every one, in short, is so superior to all the accidents of life, though encountering them at every turn, that I suspect this to be the secret (though many persons may not present it to themselves) of the general enjoyment which an audience of vulnerable spectators, liable to pain and sorrow, find in this class of entertainment.20

  In the great English tragic tradition of the Elizabethan stage, the Clown had his finest manifestation in King Lear, the ultimate drama of fathers and children, in which the mad Lear, on the Heath, gathers around him the alternative family, consisting of Edgar disguised as a crazy beggar man, Poor Tom, the loyal Kent and Fool. Most of us, when we first read or see King Lear, realize that we have seen the story acted out before – at Christmas, with Cinderella and her Ugly Sisters foreshadowing Cordelia, Goneril and Regan. In the alternative fairy-tale universe of the panto, the inadequate parent – the Lear-like character – is usually a relatively minor figure, Baron Hard-up, as it were, in Cinderella, whereas the Clown could sometimes be the dominant figure. This was especially true, in the old harlequinade, if Clown were played by a great figure such as Joseph Grimaldi – later in the century by Dan Leno and in the twentieth century Charlie Chaplin, the conscious heir of this tradition, who carried it into motion pictures.

  In David Copperfield, Dickens’s own favourite among the novels, he recast his own autobiography as a harlequinade. When the Brothers Grimm, whose collection of German fairy stories was published in the year of Dickens’s birth, began their researches, they were appalled to discover how many of the folktales related to incest, or to parents in one way or another neglecting, brutalizing or mismanaging their children; so in the published version, the wicked mothers were converted into wicked stepmothers. When he came to write Copperfield, one of the central pantomime/fairy-tale themes – that of faulty parents betraying, through weakness or wickedness, their children – was neutralized by making David Copperfield pretty quickly into an orphan. His father is dead before the story starts, and once she has married Murdstone, David’s mother has no further role to play and can be allowed conveniently to die. The real John Dickens, whose misfortunes caused the infant Charles so much torment, was transmogrified kindly into a benign father-substitute, a Pantaloon Clown in the figure of Micawber.

  After the death of John Dickens in 1851, these burlesque examples no longer worked, for Dickens, as a template for experience. The Micawbers undergo the same horrors that the Dickenses underwent, but they are ‘only the droller for the accident’. After he had been ripped by the surgeon and his bedroom had become ‘a slaughterhouse of blood’, John Dickens could no longer be the clownish Micawber. His life could not be milked for comedy; but then again, nor need his feelings be spared. He could never again read his son’s novels and see burlesque versions of himself, pantomimic enactments of his own humiliating inability to cope with life. So a new layer of truth could be unpeeled. In the novel that Charles Dickens was writing in the year before he met Nelly Ternan – Little Dorrit – the gloves were off. The full ghastliness of his parents’ improvidence, and its consequences – the Marshalsea Prison and abject humiliation – were able to be examined with a cold eye.

  If, in his depiction of Mr Dorrit in the Marshalsea, Dickens penetrated a much deeper place than when he had created Mr Micawber, how much more does that novel reveal about the depth of his mother-hatred. In that dark, joyless room of Mrs Clennam – mother of the hero – something extraordinary is going on. It is like the drug-like fantasy world entered by sadomasochists who implore women to enchain them, whip and torture them. It is not, of course, a rational request. It comes from the deepest needs of mother-hate. From this stems the legend of Medusa who turns men to stone, of Circe turning them to pigs. Flintwinch, the horrible old family retainer, is not Mrs Clennam’s son, so he can say to her, ‘I have been faithful to you, and useful to you, and I am attached to you. But I can’t consent, and I won’t consent, and I never did consent, and I never will consent to be lost in you. Swallow up everything else, and welcome. The peculiarity of my temper is, ma’am, that I won’t be swallowed up alive.’ [LD I 15] We are close here to thoughts of mother spiders that devour their young and bite off the genitalia of their male offspring; to Picasso’s innumerable representations of women with serrated mouths and genitalia-like lobster claws, who could not kiss or copulate with a man without mutilating him. These come to mind in Mrs Clennam’s dark room as we watch her toying with her morning tray of oysters and reading aloud from the more blood-curdling passages of the Scriptures.

  In the expression of his own mother-hate, Dickens began with the fluttery, silly figure of Mrs Nickleby. In Little Dorrit, however, he reached the depths of the truth. And in 1857, when he had reached that truth, he realized that Arthur Clennam – that is, himself – needed a companion to rescue him from his mother. Kate Dickens was actually his wife, but having borne ten children, lost her looks and become a fat wretch of misery worn down by his bullying; she had taken the place, in his imaginative life, of the mother he could not forgive for her treatment of him in childhood. She had become a hate object. The only way of escape was to find a nymph-dream, a little girl-woman who could never turn out to be his mutilantabusive mother in disguise. A Little Dorrit. He needed Nelly, had invented her, even before he met her in Manchester during The Frozen Deep.

  ‘Do you happen to know, Mrs Clennam, where she lives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you, now, would you like to know?’

  ‘If I cared to know, I should know already.’ [LD I 15]

  Mrs Clennam here deflects the questioners of the nineteenth century of whom she knew nothing, but whom her intelligence can intuitively sense lurking in the shadows, waiting, like Jeremiah
Flintwinch, to pounce. Herr Marx is waiting to tell her that her accumulation of wealth is ill-gotten gains, and Herr Doktor Freud is trying to tell her what she has done to Arthur. The point is only further emphasized when we realize that she is not, actually, Arthur’s mother at all. The two ‘truths’ that these powerful, intellectual German-speaking sages would so earnestly and so destructively profess to unearth – namely, that the whole capitalist dream was based on exploitation, and that at the heart of supposedly blissful family life there lay a core not of love, but of hate and power-games – these were things which, if Mrs Clennam cared to know, she should know already. How is life tolerable in such a society? By pursuing the art of ‘How Not to Do It’, and by taking the view that the misery of things is ‘Nobody’s Fault’. If these demons were unearthed and confronted, they would devour us, and so, like Flintwinch, we do not let them. Yet, as in Affery’s dreams, the novel tells us that one of these days the whole edifice – of respectability, and family structure, and capitalism – is going to come tumbling down. Dickens achieved few more brilliant things than Little Dorrit.

  And the fact that he was writing Little Dorrit in the period immediately before the coup de foudre that was his encounter with Nelly says much. Panto or burlesque could no longer provide the consolations they had been offering since childhood. Dickens was never again going to be able to produce sunlit figures like Pickwick or Micawber. Even dramatics themselves were not going to be effective in holding reality at bay, or transforming it. When she became deeply involved with Dickens, Nelly herself would give up the stage. He, for his part, would continue to perform, but, more and more, in the solo role of himself, enacting scenes from the novels in his public readings. Yet, as we shall see, the more he involved himself in these enactments, and the more his later fiction darkened and enveloped him, the less clear it became whether they were his creation or whether he had become the prisoner of his own inventions.