The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  For the Dickens generation, the generation of Balzac and Tolstoy, things were otherwise. After the Napoleonic Wars, Europe passed through incomprehensible convulsions. Economists, social commentators and journalists tried to explain what had happened, and what was happening, which is why men and women turned the pages of Taine, de Tocqueville, Marx, Carlyle, Bentham, Mill. In a mysterious way, however, all these commentators, however astute, left something out. Balzac anatomized the convulsions in the class system, the money dramas, the sexual politics of his generation more accurately than any journalist or historian. Tolstoy told Russians the history of their patriotic war, the conditions in which they now lived, the spiritual crises of their Church and political classes more vividly than anyone.

  Dickens’s anatomy of British society was no less powerful. Whereas Balzac and Tolstoy, in their relentless realism, were really taking the art of fiction into the realm of history and political analysis, Dickens was doing something very different – much more radical and ‘modernist’. No doubt on some levels he would always have defended his art as completely realistic, but we can see that this is not really the case. On the one hand, he was translating the nineteenth-century experience into vaudeville and pantomime and fairy tale. On the other hand, he was going much deeper than any surface account of mere ‘events’. ‘No other ghost has haunted the boy’s room, my friends, since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief,’ he wrote in The Haunted House. [CS 1859] By prompting memory of the blacking factory, Forster had prised open the lid, and for a moment we look inside the treasure chest of the greatest imagination of the British nineteenth century. We see not merely his secret childhood, but the alchemy by which, in transforming it into fiction, he was able to hold up a mirror to the Victorians and explain them to themselves. If the Liberal Party or the Radicals, or the Charitable Institutions or the Workhouse Boards, or the Army Board or the Houses of Parliament or the Church of England or the Women’s Suffrage Movement had been able to sweep away all that was painful in that experience, then we should indeed be living in paradise and the novels of Dickens would be redundant. He always distrusted institutions, found them indeed to be ridiculous, and those who open his pages today find the stories of the damaged child and wonder whether all the reforms, changes and improvements to life attempted in institutional form in East and West have changed the pain of being born, the bewilderment of being a child, or the powerful compulsions of so many malformed grown-ups to torment and ruin the infancy of their children.

  Jonathan Warren claimed to have invented a particular recipe for blacking boots, but after a family row, the business ran into financial difficulty. It was sold to one George Lamert, who employed his cousin (and brother-in-law) James Lamert, the Dickenses’ lodger who was a relative by marriage of Elizabeth Dickens. Warren’s (Blacking Factory and Warehouse) was sold to Lamert: in an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought. Its chief manager, James Lamert, the relative who had lived with us in Bayham-street, seeing how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into the blacking warehouse to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six at first and seven afterwards. At any rate the offer was accepted very willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down to the blacking warehouse to begin my business life.

  It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age… No one had compassion enough on me – a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally – to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out [does he mean ‘tried’?]. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school and going to Cambridge.11

  At ten years old, his novelistic apprenticeship began. Warren’s Blacking warehouse saved Dickens the novelist, just as a grammar school and Cambridge would have destroyed him. It is difficult to imagine a richer gift to a novelist than this gift of Lamert’s: Dickens, the pert, talented child, one of a large, improvident, fanciful family, was singled out for the drudgery of the blacking warehouse. Had the family been prosperous, had they not teetered uncertainly between the hopes of prosperity and the abyss of bankruptcy, had there not hovered behind them the spectre of the class system, Dickens might have been as ‘successful’ as Dilke – first a clerk in Somerset House, and then the editor of a stodgy periodical.

  The enacting of the fiction on the podium in the public readings only increased the confusion, and the carefully carapaced self, the good humour, the witty speeches, the constant acting, the hiding away of Dickens’s sexual and romantic attachment, his complete rewriting of and concealment of his actual family background. These habits too took their toll. He was as much a creation as Pickwick or Mrs Gamp. He had made into ‘The Novel’ – his habit of fictionalizing – something that he thought he had been running away from, or running home to, all his life: a prison.

  This was true even in the sunny novels. The Pickwick Papers begins as a burlesque, picaresque novel; it ends as a novel about a man finding salvation – through prison. It is positively Dostoevskyan. Of his fifteen major works, ten involve prison. Oliver Twist starts in the semi-prison of the workhouse and ends in Newgate Gaol, with Fagin about to be hanged. Barnaby Rudge reverts to prison and the most vivid scenes are those in which the mob storms Newgate and the other prisons. A Tale of Two Cities has a man, Dr Manette, a jailbird from the Bastille, who, like Mr Dorrit in his delusional moments, and like Dickens himself, was not quite sure whether he was in prison or not. Great Expectations reveals Pip to be the heir not of the genteel Miss Havisham, the jilted bride who has made a prison for herself of her own house where the wedding breakfast has never been dismantled, but rather of Magwitch the convict – who has won his liberty from the prison-ships by being rescued by little Pip – who stole from his brother-in-law’s blacksmith’s forge a file to escape his leg-irons, and purloined from his tyrannical sister’s larder a slaveringly appetising meat pie. Prison doors clang in the majority of the novels, and we feel the cell doors clink behind us as we enter Dickens’s world. Fiction had been his escape route from the prison of childhood and had turned out to be another prison. Was Dickens a free man, with his frenzied public performances, or was he acting out lines not so much written by himself as mouthing words dictated by his inner psychological destiny?

  Likewise, when not in prison, his characters find themselves trapped in other ways – in nightmare marriages or non-marriages they had never intended. Again, even the merry Pickwick Papers carries this theme at its heart, with Pickwick sued for breach of promise, and threatened with prison in consequence of not wanting to marry Mrs Bardell. (Or, indeed, never having had any intention of doing so.) Of course it is comic, or supposedly comic, but what were all the music-hall jokes about shrewish wives, nagging mothers-in-law, timorous or philandering husbands – but the unhappiness of home translated into necessary humour? The Meagles, the doting parents of an only daughter who jokingly refer to themselves as jailbirds at the beginning of Little Dorrit, when they are temporarily in quarantine in Marseilles, create a domestic prison for the charity girl, Tattycoram, whom they adopt into their smotheringly sentimental domestic gaol. Of warmth, cosiness and control.

  Little Dorrit is one of the finest, and the most vividly realized, of the prison novels. George Bernard Shaw saw that ‘Little Dorrit is a more seditious book than Das Kapital. All over Europe men and women are in prison for pamphlets and speeches which are to Little Dorrit as red pepper to dynamite. Fortunately for social evolution, Governments never know where to strike. Barnacle and Stiltstalking were far too conceited to
recognize their own portraits.’12 Shaw was saying that Dickens’s novel is seditious because of the farcical representation of British government and administration in the Circumlocution Office. But the truly seditious thing about the novel is not its mockery of Tite Barnacle, it is its hideous determinism – we can none of us escape the prison of self. One of the truly disturbing things about the novel is that, when the Dorrits have left the Marshalsea, we feel bereft. We miss the prison. Like Little Dorrit herself, we have been born there and never knew anything else.

  It is the positioning of the first paragraph of the sixth chapter of Little Dorrit that is so shocking. If it had been at the very beginning of Chapter 1 we should have known where we were. But by now we have started in the prison in Marseilles; we have endured the would-be prison of quarantine in which the genial Mr Meagles refers to himself and his fellow quarantines as jailbirds; we have been to the House of Clennam, where Mrs Clennam speaks of herself as a prisoner and Little Dorrit flits through the shadows with her sewing and her trays… And then, of a sudden, after the sheer fancifulness of the writing, the searing sun of Marseilles, the night-terrors of Affery’s dreams, we have a straightforward pair of sentences which Dickens has been waiting nearly seventy pages to write – seventy pages and, we suspect, about forty years:

  Thirty years ago, there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint George, in the Borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way going southward, the Marshalsea Prison. It had stood there many years before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it. [LD I 6]

  Balzac’s biographer Graham Robb, commenting on that great masterpiece Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, says that for Balzac, prison had always been the ‘home of the creative mind’. Dickens took it further, however, which is why Shaw was right to think Little Dorrit more seditious than Das Kapital. In a passage that is actually highly reminiscent of the more descriptive passages of Das Kapital, Dickens sees the most horrible truth of all about the debtors’ gaol: that in the competitive, thrusting Samuel-Smilesey go-getting world of nineteenth-century capitalism, prison is about the most restful place you can be:

  Elsewhere people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We have done all that – we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom, we can’t fall, and what have we found? Peace. [LD I 66]

  So says the drunken old doctor whom Clennam meets in the Marshalsea. The Victorians had created for themselves such a hellish society that the place where you could most certainly be at peace was locked up in prison. The hundreds of prisoners and internees in Solzhenitsyn’s work never express this view: everyone in the Soviet Union, even those who most fervently believed in Marxism, could see there was something fundamentally wrong with the system by the time Stalin exercised power, whereas, in the more bewildered world of Victorian England, they wanted to believe they were creating an earthly heaven, when Britannia ruled the waves and it was merely the pace that exhausted some of them, the pace that was intolerable.

  Dickens’s mother always walked with a limp – the consequence, as a young woman, of falling through a trapdoor on the stage of the Soho Theatre. Though she never pursued a life in the theatre, this was clearly the direction she would have liked to have followed. Dickens disguised his feelings of bitter hatred for her by recognizing her essential comicality. He used to visit her when she suffered from premature senile decay.

  On one of these visits he noted that she was better, ‘for,’ said he, ‘the instant she saw me, she plucked up a spirit and asked me for a pound!’ Upon another occasion he observed: ‘My mother, who was left to me when my father died (I never had anything left to me but relations) is in the strangest state of mind from senile decay: and the impossibility of getting her to understand what is the matter, combined with her desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it.’13

  We know about the cause of Mrs Dickens’s limp from Mrs Davey, the wife of a Bloomsbury doctor who treated Dickens’s father in 1850. She wrote in reaction against John Forster’s account of Dickens’s relationship with his parents. Forster knew Dickens well, Mrs Davey scarcely at all. Forster knew that Dickens hated his mother. Mrs Davey, unwilling to recognize what a high proportion of the human race – angry, perhaps, to have been born – hate their mothers, wanted to put the record straight by suggesting that ‘a great deal of Dickens’s genius was inherited from his mother. He possessed from her a keen appreciation of the droll and of the pathetic, as also considerable dramatic talent. Mrs Dickens has often sent my sisters and myself into uncontrollable fits of laughter by her funny sayings and inimitable mimicry.’ That we can believe – that, and Mrs Davey’s memory that Charles ‘always treated her respectfully and kindly’.14 Less true is her assertion that he was decidedly fond of his mother.

  In his personal recollections and anecdotes, he made his mother into a figure of farce. She is the ludicrously vain Mrs Nickleby, who overlooks the manifest lunacy of her next-door neighbour (his affection takes the form of hurling vegetables at her head and imagining she is the ‘niece to the Commissioners of Paving and daughter-in-law to the Lord Mayor and Court of the Common Council’. When Kate Nickleby points out that her mother’s admirer is obviously a madman, the mother protests, ‘He may be a little odd and flighty, perhaps, many of us are that; but downright mad! and express himself as he does, respectfully, and in quite poetical language.’ [NN 41]

  The feckless father grew, in the fictions, into figures who could be seen as loveable – Micawber, even Dorrit sometimes, though Dorrit is a wretched creature. As for Mrs Dickens, her son’s imagination turned her into a figure of farce, before disposing of her altogether. Mr Dorrit is a widower. By the time Dickens’s greatest fiction came into being, his imagination had no need of the woman who had, in his recollection, been the cause of so much of the childhood trauma. He blamed her directly, personally, and without even the attempt to forgive or to understand, for the fact that, when his parents fell into debt, he was sent to work in Warren’s Blacking factory.

  Dickens’s mother died on 13 September 1863. Did she notice, over the years, when or if she was reading her son’s fiction, that it would be difficult to find a single happy child in all those thousands of pages? It is as difficult to find a happy child in his stories as it is to find an adequate mother. The good mothers are nearly always working class, or poverty-stricken lower middle class, like Mrs Cratchit, or Mrs Plornish, the plasterer’s wife in Little Dorrit, or Kit Nubbles’s mother in The Old Curiosity Shop. Did Elizabeth Dickens, as she read, notice the recurrent, obsessive theme of the mother who rejects her child? Edith Dombey, Louisa Gradgrind, Annie Strong – the ridiculous mothers who reject them. The entire plot of Bleak House revolves around the fact that Esther Summerson has been rejected by her mother, Lady Dedlock, as has Arthur Clennam who, it turns out, is not the son of the terrifying Mrs Clennam, but a child of sin whom she has elected to rear. The feckless mothers who are seen to neglect their children – Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pocket – give birth to children who ‘were not growing up or being brought up, but… tumbling up’. [GE 22]

  But actually in Dickens’s writing there is nothing so unsparing as the Autobiographical Fragment, when it comes to his exploring the extent to which his own mother rejected him. He softens the blow: was it because he could not bear to confront the truth, for most of the time, or was it out of consideration for, or fear of, the real mother? The bad mothers who are obviously more central to his exorcistic fictional processes, the mothers of the figures who in some way stand for himself, tend not to be the mothers but mother-substitutes. Pip’s real mother – ‘Also Georgiana, wife of the above’ – is conveniently dead. It is his elder sister who behaves towards him like a rejecting mother.

  ‘I have only been to the churchyard,’ said I, from
my stool, crying and rubbing myself.

  ‘Churchyard!’ repeated my sister. ‘If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?’

  ‘You did,’ said I.

  ‘And why did I do it, I should like to know?’ exclaimed my sister.

  I whimpered, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t!’ said my sister. ‘I’d never do it again! I know that. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother.’ [GE 2]

  So she does speak as if she were Pip’s mother. Likewise in the other alternative-autobiography, David Copperfield, the hero was able to absolve his foolish mother from neglect because she dies, and the cruelty perpetrated on him is inflicted by his stepfather and his sister – Miss Murdstone. It is they, the cruellest pair of human beings in Dickens’s entire oeuvre, who send David to work in the Thameside warehouse, Murdstone & Grinby, which bears so close a resemblance to Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand.

  We are now able to see what Dickens himself was probably unable to see: that his flawed relationship with his mother is the defining feature, of the man and of his art. We shall return to this in the next chapter when we enter the dark forest of his marriage and his relationship with Kate Hogarth. For the time being, we can be content to observe the appalling determinism of human psychology. Elizabeth Barrow had been born when her elder sister was twelve months old, and the next child appeared fourteen months later. She was just sixteen when she married John Dickens, and seventeen when her father’s fraudulent activity at the Navy Pay Office caused him to bunk off abroad. It was scarcely a stable upbringing, and, when she watched her new husband getting them into financial difficulty, she must have sensed history repeating itself. Her pathetic and inadequate attempt to start a school, to make ends meet, when they had moved to London was, of course, laughable. It got no further than her taking the lease on 4 Gower Street North, from Michaelmas 1823, at an annual rent of £30, and appending a large brass plate – MRS DICKENS’S ESTABLISHMENT – to the front door. Dickens himself contemptuously remembered, ‘Nobody ever came to the school, nor do I recollect that any ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was ever made to receive anybody.’15 He wrote about ‘recollecting’ the event, but the reality was that at the time of her starting the school, or at least buying the brass plate, he was only eleven years old, and his parents would have been unlikely to keep him abreast of their grown-up plans, still less of the details of their financial worries.