The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Katey Collins said her father did not understand women – whatever that means. The fiction is full of women, many of whom are realistically observed, sometimes with sympathy, sometimes not. What we scarcely find in the novels is either the depiction of a successful, fulfilled relationship between the sexes or, with the possible exception of the empathy between the ‘china doll’ and Mr Crisparkle in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, an entirely satisfactory relationship between a mother and a son.

  This must be admitted, even by the most ardent Dickensian, as a fault in our hero. One of his finest, cruellest comic creations is Mrs Skewton in Dombey and Son, the seventy-year-old who dresses as if she is twenty-seven. ‘It was a tremendous sight to see this old woman in her finery leering and mincing at Death, and playing off her youthful tricks upon him.’ [DS 37] Dickens calls her Cleopatra, a good joke, but one that, by reminding us of the Cleopatra in Shakespeare, only recalls the absence in these novels of any woman of the depth, range and realism of the Shakespearean Egyptian queen. And where in Dickens is a Rosalind, or a Juliet, or a Hermione, or a Portia, or a Beatrice, or even, to choose a play in which Dickens himself acted, a Mistress Page and Mistress Ford? There are some memorable harridan mothers – such as Mrs Clennam – to set beside Volumnia, but they are drawn with infinitely less sympathy. And what animates them is the relationship of their male victims to the female caricature.

  One thinks of this when one contemplates the wonderful gallery of Dickensian ‘characters’. In the Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street – the novelist’s marital home in earlier days – one can see the famous unfinished watercolour by Robert William Buss – Dickens’s Dream. It depicts Dickens in his study at Gad’s Hill, his eyes closed, a cigar in his hand, slippers on his feet, and the characters of his fiction dancing about him, not unlike the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream gambolling around the head of Bottom. Buss – whose greatest distinction was fathering Frances, pioneer of female education and founding headmistress of Camden School for Girls – died before he could finish this charming, if saccharine, work. (He had, in his youth, been taken on by the publishers Chapman and Hall as a potential illustrator for The Pickwick Papers when the original illustrator committed suicide, but Buss’s work was, rightly, deemed to be unsatisfactory.) Presumably the picture was in part prompted by Dickens’s suggestive phrase, in his 1867 Preface to David Copperfield, in which he wrote of how ‘the Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of creatures of his brain are going from him for ever’.

  The Dickens’s Dream version of the novelist and his achievement is one that explains, for many, the nature of his appeal. Here they all are: Little Nell, and Mr Pickwick, and Peggotty and Oliver Twist and Fagin – Characters with a capital ‘C’, so many of them deriving, as we have acknowledged in this chapter, from the traditions of pantomime.

  No one would deny that an abundance of varied characters did indeed emanate from Dickens’s fertile imagination; and that this is one of the reasons for the abiding popularity of his fiction. This also explains why so many actors have enjoyed playing the ‘characters’ and why there are so many films, plays and TV adaptations of the novels.

  Dickens’s achievement, however, was so much deeper, so much more sophisticated and so much more complex than the simplistic Dickens’s Dream implies. One of the oblique tributes to him that has spoken most vividly occurred almost as a throwaway moment in a late novel by Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout. One of the characters, a highly intelligent retired schoolmistress, is translating a fresh French evaluation of Dickens, Le Grand Histrionique. She visits the house, now a museum, at Broadstairs, Kent, which was called Fort House, now named Bleak House. It was where much of David Copperfield was written and Bleak House gestated. Immersing herself in Dickens, his letters and his novels, Iseult asks herself, ‘What, now one came to think of it, had James, that Dickens really had not? Or if he had, what did it amount to?’

  It was a conversion moment, for me, reading that scene in the Bowen novel when it was published in 1969. Still in my teens, I had supposed that Henry James, the great psychological realist, was in every way a more ‘interesting’, more sophisticated, deeper artist than Charles Dickens, even though, since my childhood, I had read and reread Dickens with obsessive rapture, beginning in a childhood of abject misery when his books, more than anything in the Bible or anything said by a living person, offered me what felt like salvation.

  No writer, not even Shakespeare, can visit or inhabit every emotion, every human experience. Dickens’s novels do, however, contain so much more than a series of comic episodes and exaggerated caricatures. They are records of experience, and he would not have been able to write them had he not undergone the particular experiences that he underwent. This is an obvious thing to say, but it is worth underlining. It is not that biography, or tittle-tattle, can take the place of intelligent appreciation of the novels as they stand. But it is to say that his experience of life between 1812 and 1870 was something that, like pantomime in his essay, contributed to ‘the general enjoyment which an audience of vulnerable spectators, liable to pain and sorrow, find in this class of entertainment’.

  The vast, smoky, cruel, boundlessly energetic, steel-hearted nineteenth century was Dickens’s canvas, and his subject. It was the century in which economic liberalism, global capitalism, transformed the world, leading to the enrichment of Britain beyond any historical parallel, enrichment bought at great cost by the poor of the cities. It was the century in which religion was seen by many intellectuals to be disproved by science, in which materialism triumphed over faith; and Dickens reacted to this not by asserting the old doctrines, but by insisting that the essence of Christianity was in its injunction to be kind. Cruel and complicated as Dickens was, kindliness – and its necessity – was the one value that he held dearest of all others, and it was the value that explains his enduring popularity.

  What had James that Dickens, really, had not? Iseult, who asked the question in the Elizabeth Bowen novel, is a former school teacher, as I am, and it is probably the sort of question that teachers, more than other readers, like to ask. What it implies, however, is that Dickens’s ‘take’ on experience is one of the deepest and widest, which can help us, as great art always can, to make sense of our own experiences of childhood, loss, fear, love. It is the reason that when the exhausted, tiny, over-sexed, whiskery body at Gad’s Hill exhaled its last breath, the world itself felt bereft. Few deaths in the entire nineteenth century were so mourned.

  They were mourning a great, a unique, artist. It is not sentimental, it is merely accurate, to say that of all the great artists, however, Dickens was most mourned by the unsophisticated and the poor, as well as by the book-buying, literate classes. He had begun the journey just before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in the year that Moscow was besieged. He ended it in the year that Prussia conquered France and set the seal for all the subsequent horror story of European history. Personalized, pantomimic and unpretentious as Dickens’s version of the century was, he had palpably – much more obviously than any of his contemporaries – been on the same journey as the mass of Victorian men, women and children, the ones who lived on the precipice of risk: the ones who feared the workhouse and the debtors’ gaol, the ones who never owned property and whose lives were nastier, more brutal and shorter than the contemporaries of Thomas Hobbes who had first coined that phrase. The death of Dickens in 1870 took them back to the infancy of their complicated, soot-grimy, violent century. And as he lay there on the carpet at Gad’s Hill, with his sister-in-law holding his hand, the consciousness or soul of Dickens – the imaginative self whose immortality had found its place in the books, more than in a specifically religious hope for a future disembodied life – drifted back in memory and time, through the thirteen years with Nelly, back through the good and bad times of his marriage to Kate Hogarth, to his burgeoning manhood and his effervescent apprenticeship as a writer, to the core of it all, the buried c
hildhood.

  Anyone who dies with a secret on their conscience must wonder at what juncture, if any, it will come to light. Dickens had hidden his secrets in the most cunning of places – in the novels, where anyone with an eye could read about them, while supposing they were all inventions. But death has a way of bringing to light hidden things, which the dying one wished never to be disclosed. Could it be, as his eyelids flickered and he prepared for the ultimate mystery, that the curtain was not going to come down, but up; that the garish lights of the theatre were to be turned up, and the actors found unprepared upon the stage?

  ‘Clear the stage,’ cries the manager, hastily packing every member of the company into the little space there is between the wings and the wall, and one wing and another. ‘Places, places. Now then, Witches – Duncan – Malcolm – bleeding officer – where’s the bleeding officer?’ – ‘Here!’ replies the officer, who has been rose-pinking for the character. ‘Get ready, then; now, White, ring the second music-bell.’ The actors who are to be discovered, are hastily arranged, and the actors who are not to be discovered, place themselves, in their anxiety to peep at the house, just where the audience can see them. The bell rings, and the orchestra, in acknowledgement of the call, play three distinct chords. The bell rings – the tragedy (!) opens… [SB 13]

  TWO

  THE MYSTERY OF HIS CHILDHOOD

  But who’s this hairy youth? She said;

  He much resembles thee:

  The bear devour’d my youngest son,

  Or sure that son were he.

  Percy’s Reliques

  CHRISTMAS GAMES played a large part in the annual celebrations of the Dickens family at Gad’s Hill. His enjoyment of charades and memory games owed much to the fact that he was good at them, and could always win. In the game where one player went out of the room and the others chose an object, he always managed to work out what the object was, by a ruthless series of Socratic questions, however obscure the answer might be. He especially liked the memory game, in which each player had to remember a list of phrases, objects, stray words or objects, before adding an item of their own. Henry Fielding Dickens remembered the last Gad’s Hill Christmas – 1869 – when his father had been suffering from pain in his left arm and left leg and was too unwell to come downstairs until the evening. When he had done so, Dickens wanted them to play the memory game.

  ‘My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, “Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!” He gave this’, Henry remembered, ‘with an odd twinkle in his eye and a strange inflection in his voice, which at once forcibly arrested my attention and left a vivid impression on my mind for some time afterwards’.1

  Dickens’s past, which had been fictionalized and rearranged so often in the course of his life, was safely hidden, never shown or shared. Gad’s Hill and, indeed, all the houses in which Dickens raised and housed his children were the houses of gentlefolk. The Dickens family who assembled to play the Christmas games at Gad’s belonged to the safe class, of carriage-folk and professional people, for whom workhouses and prisons and burglars and prostitutes on the run from the police were things you read about or, in the case of their father, wrote about, in books. We emphasized in the last chapter that Dickens, alone of all the great figures of the Victorian public scene, alone of all their great imaginative or intellectual giants, had known what it was to have fallen into the abyss. Whereas Henry Dickens, who remembered this Christmas game, was a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, growing up to become the well-clad clubman, the lawyer who rose to be a judge, the sort of man who, when he wanted a glass of brandy and water, would ring for a servant to fetch it for him, Charles Dickens was the grandson of domestic servants. He could remember his grandmother, a former housekeeper, and her various relations, dotted about them when they lived in Marylebone, working in undistinguished jobs. Above all, he could remember his parents, and all they had and had not done for him during the grotesquely sad galanty show of his childhood, the constant nightmare of money worries, the darting from lodging to lodging to avoid the debt-collector and the rent-collector, such as Pancks in Little Dorrit:

  Throughout the remainder of the day, Bleeding Heart Yard was in consternation, as the grim Pancks cruised in it; haranguing the inhabitants on their backslidings in respect of payment, demanding his bond, breathing notices to quit and executions, running down defaulters, sending a swell of terror on before him, and leaving it in his wake. [LD I 23]

  Dickens’s children had never known this. But for Dickens and his siblings, it was the atmosphere that had coloured every month of their youth.

  ‘Jesus turned this water into wine,’ Dickens told his own children in his Life of Our Lord, ‘by only lifting up his hand; and all who were there, drank of it. For God had given Jesus Christ the power to do such wonders; and he did them, that people might know he was not a common man.’ [LOL 2]

  The blacking factory was not only his apprenticeship as a novelist. It cut loose the childhood into two sections as neat as the chapters of a book. Before the Dickens family came to London, they had lived in Kent, and this was the idyllic world of Chatham and Rochester. The Medway ran through this glorious world like the four rivers flowing around the Garden of Eden in the Bible. The innocent, pure Medway sparkled in sunlight and sang songs of innocence. The murky, corpse-floating, ordure-stinking, corrupt Thames flowed through unhappy London and sang songs of experience.

  Bright and pleasant was the sky, balmy the air, and beautiful the appearance of every object around, as Mr Pickwick leaned over the balustrades of Rochester Bridge, contemplating nature, and waiting for breakfast. The scene was indeed one which might well have charmed a far less reflective mind… On either side, the banks of the Medway, covered in cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill, or a distant church, stretched away as far as the eye could see. [PP 5]

  Dickens’s first full-length fiction began in the prelapsarian world of his childhood. In Pickwick, Rochester and its environs were bathed in light. By the time Dickens had reworked his version of his own history many times, and confronted the imperfections of his own nature in Great Expectations, the marshes were places of menace, and Rochester – home to Estella and Miss Havisham – was a place where he was compelled to confront his snobbery, his vanity, his failure in love, his shame and resentment of his family. The novelist, in making this confrontation with the brutally ambitious, callous figure he had been and was, creates a version of autobiography in which he is entirely alone, being brought up by his elder sister, Mrs Joe Gargery, and her amiable blacksmith husband. The deplorable family are all safely buried. ‘It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.’ [GE 14] And when he wrote that sentence, Charles Dickens might have been summoning up the corrupt, complicated muses who inspired him. He carried shame of home to gloriously comedic, poignantly tragic, imaginative heights. And in the capitalist world that makes ‘social mobility’ one of its central creeds – a desirable end, rather than a shaming, cruel aspiration; cruel because it encourages shame of home – he spoke for millions. Whether you label it the American Dream, or Social Mobility, or Providing Opportunities, the thought that we should all, from infancy, be trained to have a ‘higher’ or ‘better’ level of income or education than our mother and father is an open invitation to be ashamed of them. ‘There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.’ [GE 14] The class system is designed to make most of the people miserable most of the time, either because they are ashamed of their origins or wish they could overcome them. Those born above the Plimsoll line, the upper class, and those who cheerfully remain in the working class are alone immune from this particular form of inbuilt and systematic insecurity, which persists in Britain to this day but in the nineteenth century was so much stronger; was, indeed, the raison d’être of the entire Victorian social system.

 
In the unfinished novel upon which he was engaged, as a dying man, Dickens once more returned to Kent, to the Rochester of Miss Havisham and the marshes of Magwitch and the escaped criminals; only now, the sunlit cathedral town on the banks of the pure Medway had become an autumnal, brooding place, and the bright waters threatened menace and death.

  The very house in which he lay dying, Gad’s Hill Place, was part of the prelapsarian childhood story. As a small boy in the company of his father, Dickens would cross that very Rochester Bridge where Mr Pickwick had leaned on the balustrade, and would walk up the two-mile slope towards Gad’s Hill. There stood the Georgian house, red-brick with a small white bell turret surmounting its gambrel roof: a gentleman’s house. Oh, to be a gentleman! John Dickens would tell the little boy that, if he worked hard, he might one day live there or ‘in some such house’.2 Only, it was not some such house, it was that house; it was the very house his father had pointed out to him. Dickens lived in many houses, but it was in this house that he had aspired to live – in his own version of his life at least – since those early days beside the banks of the unpolluted, innocent Medway. It was in this house that he would die, and where he could, at least, estimate how far he had come and whether the journey, and all its pain and scramble, had been worth the agony.