The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  This was the Garden of Eden before Dickens had realised he hated his mother. Elizabeth Dickens was his first teacher. She taught him to read, and she even taught him a little Latin – probably the only Latin he knew. When he was old enough, she sent him to a dame’s school in Rome (pronounced Room) Lane, Rochester. The point of such schools was not especially to educate the children as to demonstrate the gentility of the parents. John Dickens, who was so far from being a gentleman, was always at pains to stress that this was what he was. He described himself on his marriage licence, at St Mary-le-Strand in London, as a ‘gentleman’, which he most certainly was not.

  Unlike his wife’s father, John Dickens was not an embezzler, but he found it just as difficult to keep afloat. By the time he was transferred from Chatham back to London, there were seven children – Fanny, Charles, Letitia (b. 1816), Harriet (b. 1818), Frederick (b. 1820), Alfred Lamert (b. 1822, the first Alfred having died in infancy) and Augustus (b. 1827). Plenty of siblings here to eat the parents out of house and home (literally), and for Charles to be ashamed of. They moved, not back to Marylebone, but to the cheaper district of Camden Town. Into the tiny terraced house they also crammed a lodger, James Lamert, who was hoping to be able to buy himself a commission in the army; and a maid, the Orfling, a girl fished out of the Chatham workhouse. Lamert was a connection by marriage. Mrs Dickens’s Aunt Fanny had married an army surgeon, Dr Matthew Lamert, quartered at the Ordnance Hospital at Chatham, and James was his son by a previous marriage.

  ‘I want to escape from myself – my blankness is inconceivable – indescribable, my misery – amazing,’ Dickens once confided in Wilkie Collins.7 A novelist’s way of ‘escaping’ differs, perhaps, from those of another person. One thinks of Evelyn Waugh, who could not escape the persona he had half invented for himself to hide behind. The mask had stuck. Just as Evelyn Waugh would die of being Waugh, Dickens was dying of being Dickens. Because Dickens was the most novelistic of all novelists, the condition was especially acute. Over and over again he had made experience into fiction, to the point where he was no longer able to distinguish what he had undergone and what he had invented.

  In his fictionalized boyhood, David Copperfield (his own initials reversed, CD/DC), he described how, made wretched by his mother’s remarriage to the sadist Mr Murdstone, he would retreat into novel-reading.

  My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in the house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time… It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them – as I did – and by putting Mr and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones – which I did too… This was my only and my constant comfort. [DC 4]

  Far from the reading of fiction being a purely passive act – allowing it, so to say, to wash over him, or distract him – Dickens here speaks of choosing to enact it; to inhabit the novels he enjoyed, and to make of them a reality more potent than the experiences he was actually undergoing. That this is true, to a greater or lesser degree, for everyone who enjoys novels – how much more so, drama and film, in the case of most people – explains the potency of the unreal. It is the ultimate reason why Plato, a purist contemplating an Absolute Good and an Absolute Reality of which this world is but a shadow, banished Homer and the Poets from his ideal Republic. Nineteenth-century industrialized Britain was a place so brutal, so ugly, so destructive of spiritual calm that Plato himself, had he been born in it, might have felt tempted to retreat into the cave and enjoy the illusive shadows cast by the fire, rather than venture out to the supposed reality of the sun, which had itself, more than 2,400 years after the Athenian philosopher, become scarcely visible through the polluted smogs and smokes of the smutty, coke-flecked cities.

  Dickens was an unashamed advocate of the illusory as a way of finding another reality, the reality that is contained within the covers of a novel. He found the exercise so easy, so beguiling, and ultimately so dangerous, because from an early age he had seen the act of reading as an escape from the lesser reality of being; the act of imagination as an escape from the world of work, earning, suffering and boredom. The most potent of maestros, Dickens could summon up an alternative world, recognizably that of the Victorians, and of all of us, yet comedic. Where our tears are of sorrow, the tears he drew forth were ones of pathos and sentiment. The grotesquerie and horror of unhappy workplaces, squalid living conditions and exploitative or cruel family life weigh upon those who suffer them, yet in the pages of Dickens they are transformed into pantomimic comedy and tear-jerking melodrama. Only by self-transformation, self-deception and the acting of parts could the fiction come into being, the carapaces he adopted as self-protection being a puppet show for all.

  He had revealed his nightmare past again and again in his art, but the family, and presumably all his friends and acquaintances (except his wife Kate – was that another reason he felt compelled to get rid of her?), knew nothing of this. As far as they were concerned, Dickens was the sensationally successful author, the public figure who, in his velvet coats and with his well-brushed whiskers, was constantly asked to address banquets and dinners in London. They had no idea that the workhouse urchins, the imprisoned debtors, the vaudevillized bankrupts, the wretchedly unhappy little waifs picking their way, terrified, through the Victorian urban jungle and into his pages, were all projected from memories. ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!’ was nothing to them. Could anything demonstrate more vividly than that moment during the last Christmas games the extent to which Dickens kept his mystery hidden from those who believed themselves to know him best? And he had kept it hidden all those years in the most ingenious manner possible: by displaying it. With an ‘odd twinkle in his eye and a strange inflection in his voice’, he had told the story over and over again.

  Childhood, and the childhood self, the mysteriousness of being and consciousness, were as vividly explored by Dickens, in his fashion, as by Proust in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. And so much of the memory-tapestry was interwoven with Kent, and the country within a twenty-mile tramp of where he now, on 9 June 1870, lay dying on his dining-room floor, with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth holding his head, while the children – those of whom were still in England – were hurrying to railway stations and clambering into cabs, in the hope of reaching Gad’s Hill to see him alive. Meanwhile, the mind that had contained Charles Dickens’s past, and formed his fictions, was now in suspense.

  The layers of truth – as human beings unpeel the past – grow, unfold, change. Psychoanalysis is one method, since the beginning of the twentieth century, by which bruised individuals have recovered or changed their past. Writing and reading fiction is another. Dickens’s version of his childhood, and, by extension, his relationship with his mother and father, lay hidden. He had flashed it out during those last Christmas games, played with his sons and daughters, and they did not even know he had done it. Just a twinkle in the eye hinted at the past they would never see, and probably never understand. By not talking about it, and by fictionalizing it, Dickens had made the past his own possession. Only after he was dead, when his children read John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, did they realize the little game their father had played. They had thought it was a memory game, but it had actually been a forgetting game, or a concealing game. He had called out the scene of his childhood humiliation and trauma. No one in the room during the Christmas party, except Dickens himself, knew the significance of the address ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!’ Forster himself, who was privileged to know much more of his friend’s secret life than any of the novelist’s children, but who never came within a mi
le of understanding his old friend, only came to learn the story in a roundabout way.

  Forster had asked Dickens if he were acquainted with Charles Wentworth Dilke, a friend of Keats, who went on to be the editor of The Athenaeum. Dickens acknowledged that he knew Dilke, who had been a clerk in Somerset House at the same time as his father. He told Forster that he remembered Dilke visiting him as a child when he lodged in the house of an uncle in Gerrard Street. ‘Never at any other time.’8 The memory, of course, was a false one, and the notion that a gentleman such as Dilke was on visiting terms with one of Dickens’s uncles was simply a smokescreen. The Dilkes were upper middle class, the Dickenses were out-and-out nobodies. Dickens’s mother, father, uncles and cousins, with their unconvincing aspirations to gentility and their ludicrously implausible pretensions, were not Dilke’s friends, though it was possible that, as a senior clerk in Somerset House, Dilke had noticed John Dickens, a clerk in the humblest way, when, with a pay cut from his earlier work in the pay office at Portsmouth, he had been moved to do his pen-pushing, for a short and disastrous period, in London.

  Forster told Dickens that he had heard otherwise. No memories of calling cards or Gerrard Street. Heard that Dilke had visited a certain warehouse near the Strand, a short walk from Somerset House, having seen the child Dickens through the window, engaged in sticking labels on the jars of boot-blacking. Heard that Dilke had gone in to give the little boy half a crown. (Why would he do that, unless someone had tipped him off to do so?) Heard that the boy had given Dilke a deep bow. The boy was a very different Dickens from the celebrated adult Forster had known, and whose life he tried to recover in biography. Sickly, timid, thin-skinned, this was the Dickens who had been sent by his mother and father to work among workhouse children in a squalid little factory. Had John Dickens, sometime colleague of Dilke and everlasting scrounger, shamelessly admitted to Dilke that his boy was in the labels line at Warren’s Blacking, and suggested that half a crown would not go amiss? It is just the sort of embarrassing thing he would have done! Who will ever forget the squirm-making scene when Arthur Clennam follows Little Dorrit to the Marshalsea Prison, the debtors’ gaol, and is presented to her father – ‘The Father of the Marshalsea’ – who loses no time in ‘touching’ Clennam for a ‘testimonial’? (‘Sometimes,’ he went on in a low, soft voice, agitated, and clearing his throat every now and then, ‘sometimes – hem – it takes one shape and sometimes another; but it is generally – ha – Money.’ [LD I 8]) Who, in Somerset House where John Dickens and Charles Dilke briefly coincided, would be likely to forget that Charles Barrow, John Dickens’s future father-in-law, had held the responsible position of ‘Chief Conductor of Moneys in Town’, until it was discovered that he had conducted the moneys – £5,689, three shillings and threepence between 1803 and 1810 – into his own bank account? He had pleaded mitigating circumstances, ten children (one of them Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth) before skedaddling to France, leaving the Revenue to seize and sell his paltry household possessions? Just as the relentlessness of the system forced the poor, ‘deserving’ and the opposite, to struggle at all costs against the humiliation and pain of being incarcerated in the workhouse, so those who were a little higher than this in the category of things were forced by the dread of debt to excesses of work and worry. As Pancks the rent-collector says:

  Here am I… What else do you suppose I think I am made for? Nothing. Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, I’ll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country. [LD I 13]

  Part of the tragicomedy, the horror and the farce, of the position in which Dickens’s parents found themselves is that, compared with many of their contemporaries, they were in a good position to ‘better’ themselves. When he first married, John Dickens had been on a salary of £200 per annum. By 1822 in Chatham, when Charles was ten, his father was on an annual salary of £441, but he was living beyond his means even then, and when he got posted back to London, at a cruelly reduced pay of £350, the trouble started, and the Micawberish discrepancy between money earned and money owed threatened all their security. (They owed a staggering £40, one-tenth of their annual income at the best of times, to the baker in Camden Town.9)

  Dickens, by melodramatizing and mythologizing his own circumstances so blatantly in the novels, paradoxically drew attention away from himself, for the simple reason that almost everyone in that relentlessly commercial country could see themselves in his pages. He was writing down their great experience: the commercial success story that made Britain the richest imperial power in the world’s history, the commercial failures that created the Oliver Twists and the Amy Dorrits. The many paradoxes of Dickens’s mystery included the fact that his entire oeuvre is a cry of satirical rage, a whoop of contemptuous laughter, against the earnest, utilitarian Benthamite creed that Pancks enunciated: yet there was no one, probably, in the kingdom, after the success of The Pickwick Papers, who ‘kept at it’ more relentlessly than the workaholic Dickens. His Blakean Muse hymned the pleasure of laughter, the merriment of inns and theatres, the happiness of children at play. The machine of his capitalist conscience, of his dread of ever returning to the circumstances that had led him to Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand, kept him everlastingly, suicidally, ‘at it’. Fecklessness, idleness, the ability to put pleasure before work are often, in his novels, attractive qualities, as exemplified by Dick Swiveller or Mr Jingle or Mr Micawber. In the case of his parents, however, things were very different.

  So the Dickens that Forster was for the first time resurrecting, when he remembered the half-crown and the handshake, and the excruciating bow in the blacking warehouse back in the reign of George IV, was a very different figure from the ‘Boz’ who had burst on the world ready-made as the brilliant writer, wit and diner-out a year before the reign of Queen Victoria, a little woman with whom, to amuse the company, the young Dickens pretended to be in love. The Dickens They All Knew, and who had – to use a brilliant phrase of Kitty Muggeridge applied to a twentieth-century celebrity – ‘risen without trace’, was a very different figure from that waif in the warehouse, so inconveniently recalled by Charles Dilke. This was the Dickens, born into a family that had invented its own claims to gentility, but which in reality belonged to the servant class, being hurled back, through his parents’ heedlessness, to the bottom of the heap. Moreover, it was especially painful because the little Charles, of all the Dickens children, had been singled out for this uncongenial role. The other members of his family were not put out to work in this way. Dickens was one of eight children: there was his elder sister Fanny, who won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, and who was a professional musician; there was little Alfred, who died in infancy in 1814; and there were Letitia, Harriet, Frederick, Alfred Lamert and Augustus. We notice that in the fictionalized version of his autobiography, David Copperfield, Dickens/David was an orphan and an only child. The imagination that created The Rookery, and Peggotty, and the doll-like, pretty widowed mother of Copperfield, had cut out Dickens’s appalling family altogether, allowing only the father a quasi-farcical supporting role as the Clown of the story, the loveable spendthrift Mr Micawber.

  In Great Expectations, where the autobiography was rewritten in a much less sparing and more merciless mode, Dickens, as it were, killed off all his siblings, imagining them to be the babies in the graves on the edge of the marshes at Cooling, on the Hoo Peninsula near Rochester: ‘I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana, wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried.’ [GE 1]

  Now, through the chance of his mentioning Dilke and the half-crown, Forster had ripped off the outer carapace, released the infant Dickens – the re
al, as opposed to the fictionalized infant – to confront his adult self.

  Whereas Dickens had transmogrified his experience into art, so that it was probably no longer entirely feasible to separate what he had imagined and what he had experienced, Forster’s revelation to him threatened the unravelling of the tapestry, by opening up the philistine game of matching ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ life. With deeper energy, more tearful and hilarious passion than any other writer I know of, Dickens had put himself, and his experience, into the novels. Great artist as he was, however, the process made it not so much difficult, as unnecessary, to distinguish between experiences he had actually undergone and ones that he had refashioned as story. Now, however, the conscious self was compelled to release the unconscious; the successful mid-Victorian gentleman was forced to look at a sickly little waif, the ‘strange little apparition’ from the reign of George IV.

  I was such a strange little fellow, with my poor white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trowsers, that frequently, when I went into the bar of a strange public house for a glass of ale or porter to wash down the saveloy and the loaf I had eaten in the street, they didn’t like to give it me.10

  Forster’s hearsay released Dickens’s reticence. Once unmasked, it was inevitable that Dickens should have felt compelled to set down the non-fictional account. In a sense, however, there was a danger that, having transformed experience into art, he was going to tempt readers of his biography to perform the superfluous philistine exercise of translating the art back into an account of what ‘really’ happened.

  In another sense, the encounter between the adult Dickens and that funny little Georgian waif, making his terrified way through the alleys and streets of the Artful Dodger’s London, reminds us of the centrality of the art of fiction to that particular generation. Those of us who have lived through the twentieth or twenty-first centuries have enjoyed the fiction of our contemporaries, but for an account of what has happened to us since the Second World War we have tended to go to historians, journalists, social commentators. Only, perhaps, the Russians discovered, through reading the supposed fiction of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an account of what they had been through that was more realistic and more accurate than the official histories and propaganda journalism fed to them by authority.