by A. N. Wilson
On the surface of things, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that both John and Elizabeth Dickens behaved appallingly to the twelve-year-old Dickens whom they cast out of their home and forced to go to work in a factory, at a wage of six or seven shillings a week. This was at a time, even during his imprisonment for debt, when John continued to earn £350 per annum as a clerk, and had also inherited £450 as a legacy from his mother. They were able to help Fanny, their firstborn, apply for a scholarship and become a boarder at the Royal College of Music, and so begin a plausible and creative career.
We know that in that century when women usually lay up for days, sometimes for weeks, after childbirth, Elizabeth Dickens was dancing within a day of Charles’s birth in 1812, and it is clear that in grown-up life his relationship with her was one of cold contempt. We can conclude that, for whatever reason, she had been simply incapable of giving him love.
In addition to the many inadequate mothers in Dickens’s fiction, we must add the list of children who believe they should never have been born. Dickens was much impressed by Dr Johnson’s Life of his friend Richard Savage. He urged his wife to read it, and he longed to have her reaction to it. Many people now question whether Savage had told Johnson the truth about his life, but that is not of importance here. Dickens responded with intensity to a story of an illegitimate child of the Countess of Macclesfield, who cast off her son to be brought up by a poor woman, Mrs Brett, forced into an apprenticeship to a poor shoemaker in Holborn, but triumphing over these appalling odds by making a name for himself as a writer. For Dickens, it was a sort of parable: the unwanted child could be reborn as a published author.
Born so soon after his sister Fanny to a young pleasure-loving mother, Dickens felt unwanted long before she insisted upon him going out to work at the age of twelve. Long ago, the sage Hugh Kingsmill saw Dickens’s short story ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’, ‘drenched in self-pity and self-abasement’ as it is, as an allegory of the novelist’s entire life. This is probably an exaggeration – the differences between Dickens and ‘George Silverman’, an elderly clergyman who had risen from extreme poverty through education and patronage, and who disgraces himself by performing the wedding ceremony for the daughter of his patroness and an unsuitable partner, are more obvious than the parallels. The centrality of the story, though, is that George cannot escape his poverty-stricken origins; he cannot escape the troubling but obvious fact that no one wanted him to be born in the first place. When he had finished the story, in 1868, Dickens wrote that ‘I feel as if I had read something (by somebody else) which I shall never get out of my head.’16 The ‘somebody else’ was surely the unrecognized part of himself. Penned supposedly by the civilized self, Valentine, it is actually the story of Orson, ‘a mangy young dog or wolf-cub’ – ‘a young vampire’ is how he describes his working-class self before he rose through education and was sent to Cambridge. ‘I pen it for the relief of my own mind,’ ‘George Silverman’ wrote at the conclusion of the tale.
Dickens’s oeuvre is dotted with unwanted children, from Trotty Veck in The Chimes, to Florence Dombey, to Esther in Bleak House. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, pioneer in treating autism, discovered that many schizoid children had been born at a time of crisis in their parents’ relationship, the birth only making a bad relationship worse, adding to the poverty or tensions of the household. Such patients, frequently criminal delinquents or sociopaths, believed they had no right to have been born, just as Trotty, in The Chimes, thinks the poor are ‘born bad’. Trotty has to learn – hence the tears of all Dickens’s friends, captured by Maclise as the novelist read them the Christmas story – that ‘their Great Creator formed them to enjoy’ [TC 4] a rightful share in man’s inheritance. George Silverman accepts that he had no right to be born, he accepted his parents’ low view of himself and, because innocent, acted as if he were guilty. There was, naturally, another course, the one followed by Dickens himself – instinctively rather than consciously – a course that was much more fruitful, though aggressive. That is, to divide the self into two.
It is a wonderful recipe for a great creative dramatist or novelist – whether it is Shakespeare in love with two loves, comfort and despair, a bright and a dark angel, or Dickens, with his good and evil selves, carefully compartmentalized and fictionalized. However, woe betide the composed or integrated self who tries to form a relationship with such a person! That fate was handed out to Catherine Hogarth, the wife who was, as far as we can tell, the only person to whom Dickens ever told the truth about his childhood, before he wrote down the Autobiographical Fragment.
The words Dickens spoke about his mother to Forster are an indictment. ‘I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget.’17
The concept of the ‘False Self’ was introduced to psychoanalysis by Donald Winnicott in 1960, but versions of it had been around before that. He believed that the happy baby, confident in its parents’ love, learns the simple art of being – being itself – just by enjoying the dawning sensation of being alive, whereas the badly parented child has to develop a carapace, has to learn to be a False Self in order, usually unsuccessfully, to please its parents. Such False Selves often grow up to become manipulative, cruel and controlling people, incapable of making their own partners or children happy. Charles Dickens certainly would appear to be a textbook case of the False Self, and we can only be grateful that there was no Donald Winnicott in existence, as Dickens began to make sense of his experience in youth or young manhood, who would have been able to destroy his art by therapy.
Inside, there was the burning anger and resentment: ‘I never shall forget, I never can forget.’ There was also, however, the never-so-aptly named False Self. Whereas the mother, frivolous, young, still little more than a teenager herself, and exhausted by the birth of Charles so soon after his elder sister, was simply not equipped to offer him love, the father urged him to perform, act and write. Dickens would be placed on the table, as on a stage, to entertain the guffawing aunts and cousins. He wrote a tragedy called Misnar, the Sultan of India, which his father urged him to put on for the entertainment of the larger family, and he wrote and performed sketches – in one he pretended to be a deaf old man, and in another he cruelly imitated the old woman who cooked their meals in Bayham Street, Camden Town. They could not give him the inward reassurance of knowing that he was loved, but they offered a knowledge that was much more seductive: the knowledge that he was entertaining.
THREE
THE MYSTERY OF THE CRUEL MARRIAGE
IT WAS 8 June 1870, his last day of consciousness.
With the help of the servants, Georgina Hogarth lifted Dickens from the floor and placed him on the sofa. One of the maids was sent to bring the local doctor, who recognized that Dickens had suffered a paralytic stroke. An effusion of blood on the brain made his imminent death inevitable. Georgina sent telegrams to his daughters Mary and Katey and to Dr Beard – Frank Beard, who had been Dickens’s medical adviser for a number of years and was the brother of one of his very oldest friends, Thomas Beard, who had known Dickens before he wrote his novels and was rising to fame as ‘Boz’. They arrived at Gad’s Hill that night. Early the next morning, Charley, the only one of the children who had insisted that he should live with their mother after the parents separated, arrived with the London doctor. Charley had explained to his father, when he went to live with Kate Dickens, that he still loved him: he merely considered it his duty to look after his forsaken mother. He worked with Dickens on All the Year Round, and he had been at Gad’s for the last Christmas, the one when his father had blurted out, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand!’ during the memory game.
While Charley came down to Gad’s Hill to see his dying father, his sister Katey Collins went in the opposite direction. She decided that she must return to London at once and tell the person whose absence from this scene was most conspicuous: Dickens’s wife. Did she remember that bitter sentence in Dombey and Son, referring to ‘
Mr Punch, that model of connubial bliss’? [DS 31]
‘Why did you get married?’ said Scrooge.
‘Because I fell in love.’
‘Because you fell in love!’ growled Scrooge, as if that were the only thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. [CC Stave 1]
I am writing these words overlooking the garden of my neighbour, 70 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town. For the last twenty-one years I have stared at this house, where Charles Dickens dumped his wife Kate after the fateful obsession with Nelly Ternan took over his existence. Before I became aware of this fact, I felt the place exuded an atmosphere of menace and melancholy. Since I discovered the Dickens connection, within a few weeks of moving in, I have often meditated upon the misery of it all. And now there has come to light the correspondence of one of Kate’s neighbours, which discloses that, not content to humiliate her by a very public separation, Dickens also wanted to cast doubt on her sanity and have her locked away. Even if you do not buy the Winnicott notion of the False Self in all its details, you can’t deny that no woman marrying Dickens could have avoided coming up against the consequences of the childhood demons. His controllingness (not trusting his wife to do the shopping, for example, and often accompanying her to butchers, fruiterers, fishmongers and the like), his obsession with mesmeric control – which will be explored later – his testiness, his obsessive neatness, later the violence of his language to her: all these would presumably have been directed against anyone who had the misfortune to marry him.
When it was all over, and the years had passed, and she was looking back on the ruins of their family past, Dickens’s artist daughter Katey said she believed that whoever her father had married, it would have been a disaster. ‘He did not understand women.’1
The week before he died, Katey had come up to Gad’s Hill from London. She had been worried about her father’s health. He had been grey in the face, and looked far older than his years. During dinner, however, the greyness evaporated and ‘it was a lively meal accompanied by merry laughter’. Father and daughter sat up talking until three in the morning. She talked about her painting – she was an artist, married to the painter Charles Collins (Wilkie’s gay brother, painter of Convent Thoughts, one of the campest of all camp Pre-Raphaelite canvases) – and she discussed her ambition to go on the stage. It had probably been the ambition of Dickens’s mother. His sister Fanny had been a professional musician. Dickens himself, as a youth and young man, had been to the theatre every night for three years and yearned to achieve fame on the boards. He and Fanny had even auditioned with his favourite actor, Charles Mathews, and the equally famous Charles Kemble, but nothing had come of the hope.2 Dickens understood the wish to act, but he told his daughter, ‘You are pretty and no doubt would do well, but you are too sensitive a nature to bear the brunt of what you would encounter. Although there are nice people on the stage, there are some who would make your hair stand on end. You are clever enough to do something else.’3
The conversation turned to other subjects, and it is obvious from what Katey later told her friend Gladys Storey that Dickens was led, by the lateness of the hour, and the warmth of a good dinner followed by brandy and cigars, to confide in his daughter. The seriousness with which he wanted to spare her the pains and humiliations of an actress’s life inevitably led to the thought of the actress who had obsessed him for the last thirteen years, Nelly Ternan. He said he wished he had been ‘a better father, a better man’. ‘He talked and talked, how he talked, until three o’clock in the morning, when we parted for bed. I know things about my father’s character… that no one else ever knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man, he was wonderful! He fell in love with this girl, I did not blame her – it is never one person’s fault.’4
The next day she went to him in the Swiss chalet in the garden, where he wrote. Normally, when parting from his daughters, he would merely offer his cheek. On this occasion it was he who kissed Katey, very affectionately. There were two words he never liked to say – ‘good bye’. It was the last time she saw him conscious.5
And now, as he lay dying on the sofa, Katey, having made her last farewell to a father, returned to the railway station. She took the train to Charing Cross, and a cab conveyed her across London. In reverse, it followed the route that he would have taken every day during the dread years, as a boy, of his employment at Warren’s Blacking, from Covent Garden northwards through Bloomsbury to Camden Town, to 70 Gloucester Crescent. These houses, which had been erected by speculative builders during and just after the coming of the railways, were grander than anything his parents had known, but they were scarcely mansions. They were for the middling sort. Number 70 was, however, the pleasantest in the crescent because it had almost an acre of garden surrounding it on three sides – albeit overlooked by the taller houses to the north-west in Regent’s Park Terrace, in one of which I am sitting to write this page. I am looking into the drawing room where Katey broke the news.
After her parents separated, Katey’s mother only spoke twice to her of Charles Dickens. Once, looking at his photograph in a gilt frame, which she kept in her drawing room, she asked, ‘Do you think he is sorry for me?’
Years afterwards, nine years after Dickens had died, when Mrs Dickens was suffering from cancer, she asked Katey to go to her drawer and fetch her a bundle of letters, and a locket that contained a likeness of the novelist and a lock of his hair. ‘With great earnestness’, she said to her daughter, ‘Give these to the British Museum – that the world may know that he loved me once.’6
To her neighbours in Gloucester Crescent, Mrs Dickens had been less reticent. Edward Dutton Cook, a novelist and man of letters, and his young pianist wife Lynda befriended Mrs Dickens and her son Charley, who were living next door. She told Cook that, contrary to what Dickens put about, ‘a great affection subsisted during a long course of years between’7 her and Dickens, but that when he decided to bring the marriage to an end, he pretended they had never been able to get along. She also told the Cooks that he had tried to persuade the doctor who attended her to sanction an accusation of mental illness, which would permit him to have her confined to an asylum. Dickens had close friends in the medical profession. John Sutherland wrote, ‘To be accused of “mental disorder” with Dr John Connolly and John Forster… hovering in the background was highly ominous. For a physician like Connolly, Mrs Dickens’ alleged “languor” and her excitability about her husband’s infidelity would have been quite sufficient for a certificate of “moral insanity” to be drawn up. He did it for [Dickens’s friend] Lord Lytton, would he not do the same for his friend Mr Dickens?’8
As she made her way to Gloucester Crescent to tell her mother that Dickens was dying, Katey was confronted with the essential mystery of the thing. This was not that two people had tried to get along together and failed: there is nothing mysterious about that. The mystery was: how could the apostle of kindliness, the novelist who, more than any other, extols the virtues of charity, who waged war on Scrooge, and Bumble and Bounderby, how could he, of all the people in the world, have been so furiously unkind, so vindictively, pointedly and quite unnecessarily cruel, to the woman who had borne his children, and whose faults, in so far as anyone has noted them, were trivial? Even if Dickens could not contain his marital hatred, how could he not have seen that by ending his marriage in the way he did, he was causing incalculable pain to the children? Such is the madness of marriage separation, of course, as all those who have been through it will most bitterly know. But even by the selfish standards of the divorcee, Dickens’s behaviour was beyond easy explanation. Maybe the simple answer, when puzzling over this problem, is the same we should give when trying to explain his mother’s neglect of him, and her insistence that he should return to Warren’s Blacking, even after John Dickens was released from gaol: that in family relationships, sometimes bad behaviour is the only option. It is not to be excused, but it is a fact.
By many accounts, Kate could be petulan
t and moody. Compared with her favoured sister Georgina, she was a bad household manager. She was impractical. But were these reasons not merely for putting her away, but for doing so very publicly; for advertising her faults in his own periodical, Household Words, and also in The Times; for plotting with the doctors – though there is not the smallest evidence of Kate being insane – to have his wife incarcerated in a lunatic asylum? And, perhaps most extraordinary of all, for forbidding her children to see her? Further to this mystery is the mystery of Dickens’s power: how and why he exercised his mesmeric power over those often strong-willed children.
