by A. N. Wilson
‘My father was like a madman when my mother left him,’ daughter Katey recalled. ‘This affair brought out all that was worst – all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us.’9
On another occasion, Katey said to Gladys Storey, ‘We were all very wicked not to take her part; Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time, and does not realize the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper. We like to think of our geniuses as great characters – but we can’t.’10 In her old age she would recall her first husband, Charles Collins, often begging her to go and see her mother, and that she had refused. She had the painful recollection of how, in their teens, she and her sister Mamie had taken music lessons in Gloucester Crescent in the house opposite their mother’s. ‘They would drive up and drive away, but never call to see their mother, who had either seen them arrive or depart, or had been told they had done so by one of her maidservants. Often had she waited in expectation of them coming – who could condemn the tears she shed in the desolation of her home – when after time they did not cross the road and ring her doorbell.’11
Kate Dickens, born Catherine Hogarth, could have read, and probably did read, a very severe danger-signal two years before her husband even met Nelly Ternan. In 1855, three days after his forty-third birthday, Dickens was making arrangements to take the family to France for a while, to give him space to start a new novel – the book that would become Little Dorrit. When the post was brought into his study, there was a letter from the woman he had first loved as a youth: Maria Beadnell.
He replied to it. ‘Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love.’12
He had first met Maria when he was nineteen. Her father, a City banker called George Beadnell, invited Dickens to dinner when he was working as a newspaper reporter for parliamentary debates. Maria was a year older than Dickens, tiny, ‘a pocket Venus’, and he first saw her sitting in a ‘sort of raspberry-coloured dress’ playing the harp. He was to fall deeply in love with her. Understandably enough, the Beadnells looked askance at an impoverished young journalist, who had no family and no apparent prospects. Dickens had made a success of the parliamentary reporting. The absurdities of the parliamentary system were never lost on him, but he did the work faithfully. So much so that the future prime minister Lord Derby, when still Mr Stanley, actually asked for the young reporter on the Morning Chronicle to come to his house in Carlton Terrace to take down the salient points of one of his speeches, because he had recognized Dickens (without knowing his name or what he would one day become) as the most accurate of the parliamentary reporters.
Dickens, from the first, had shown application, energy, all the qualities he would one day bring to his art. And when the work took him to report political meetings and elections in the furthest parts of the country, he had been capable of writing wherever and whenever necessity required: he later described himself as scribbling as they galloped ‘through a wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour’.13
This small, ambitious, hyper-energetic young man, however, had scarcely been the sort of son-in-law sought by a successful City banker. ‘I have never loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself,’ Dickens wrote to Maria.14 His infatuation with the Pocket Venus was, of necessity, without hope. Maria flirted with him, and was amused by his attentions, while clearly scorning him as a mere ‘boy’. When Dickens reconstructed the painful relationship between Pip and Estella in Great Expectations, it would seem as if he were drawing on the excruciating memory of these humiliations. In class-ridden Britain there are few things that remind someone so acutely of their place in the hierarchy of things as falling in love with someone out of your class. Eventually, after eighteen months of torture, he could tolerate Maria’s heartless displays of indifference no longer and broke off relations with her, in a tirade of hurt feelings – ‘to you a matter of very little moment still I have feelings in common with other people’). She was careful enough to take a copy of the letter before she returned it to him.
And now, nearly a quarter of a century later, a novelist at the height of his powers, fame and success, Dickens received a letter from Maria out of the blue. He replied that he was about to go to Paris, but when he returned, his wife Kate would call on Maria to suggest a date for dinner. For, yes, Maria was married now – she was Mrs Winter, the mother of two young daughters. ‘In the unsettled state of my thoughts, the existence of these dear children appeared such a prodigious phenomenon, that I was inclined to suspect myself as being out of my mind, until it occurred to me that perhaps I had nine children of my own! Then the three or four and twenty years began to arrange themselves in a long procession between me and the changeless Past.’15
It was the middle-aged Maria Winter who had written to him, but in his fantasy, it was the youthful Pocket Venus with whom he was once again in love. Dickens was bored by his petulant, moody wife, and they were getting on badly. When he was in Paris, he was haunted by the thought of Maria. Was it really true, a friend asked him, that he had loved her so much? He replied, ‘there was no woman in the world, and there were very few men, who could ever imagine how much’.16
Both the forty-four-year-old Maria and the forty-three-year-old Dickens, before they actually met, were falling in love again on paper. She protested to him, in advance, that she was now old and fat and ugly, but he would not believe it. She must, from the tone of his letters (hers do not survive), have coquettishly suggested that, contrary to appearances, she had indeed loved him all those years ago and had been merely prevented from accepting his advances by the strictness of her family.
She suggested that they should meet à deux before the shared dinner with Dickens’s wife and her husband; he told her to come to Tavistock House, where the Dickenses were then residing, and to ask for his wife. It is not completely clear where the meeting took place, but on Sunday 25 February 1855 they met.
The glorious creation that came out of their meeting is known to all the world as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit.
Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly… ‘I am sure,’ giggled Flora, tossing her head with a caricature of her girlish manner, such as a mummer might have presented at her own funeral, if she had lived and died in classical antiquity. ‘I am ashamed to see Mr Clennam, I am a mere fright, I know he’ll think me fearfully changed, I am actually an old woman, it’s shocking to be so found out so really shocking.’ [LD I 13]
The meeting with his old love, like everything else in a novelist’s heartless life, was grist to Dickens’s mill. The pathos of it was retained, but coated in farce, like sea salt lending piquancy to vanilla ice cream. So many of the saddest things in Dickens’s experience were transubstantiated into farce. As he planned the novel that grew out of his father’s ruin and life in the Marshalsea, he would also draw on the humiliations visited upon him by the Beadnells, who had appeared to be somebody when he was a nobody, but were now seen as the banking nobodies who had cruelly rejected a genius. Maria’s harmless prattle, her nervous inability to finish sentences, her gross size, her exhausting and embarrassing coquettishness all became the ludicrous and unforgettable Flora Finching. For good measure, he gave her the companionship, not of a dull husband, but of a dead husband’s aunt, the furious old ‘Mr F’s aunt’, whose surreal and inconsequential outbursts are among the funniest things he ever devised: ‘“When we lived at Henley, Barnes’s gander was stole by tinkers.”’ [LD I 13]
The disillusionment he felt with Maria was strong, but the dinner went ahead as planned on 7 March. Mr Winter was a bore. Mrs Winter, fat, simpering, silly, had a bad cold which Dickens (always prone to colds) caught. Her fate was seale
d. What the real Maria could not know – because, unlike Dickens and the ‘characters’ whom he had been dreaming up ever since boyhood, she was not a ‘character’ in a novel – was that she, Maria Beadnell, had ceased to exist. Flora Finching had come into being. Her attempts to get in touch with Dickens after this disastrous dinner were met with brush-offs. Her usefulness was now at an end.
Kate Dickens, who knew her susceptible husband all too well, could read his disillusionment very easily. Like his first love Maria, Kate Hogarth, having reached her forties and borne Dickens ten children, one of whom had died, was also fat and unappealing, with bad teeth and a red face. She was in no doubt that, in his heart, if not yet in his bedroom or his day-to-day existence, she had been demoted, and she must on some level have feared complete banishment.
After the disappointment of being snubbed by the Beadnell family, Dickens at twenty-one had been transmogrified into ‘Boz’.17
Having made a success as a reporter of parliamentary debates, and of political meetings around Great Britain, as far afield as Edinburgh, Dickens found that his witty iconoclastic accounts (‘Lord Lincoln broke down and sat down’) led to his being taken on, first as a regular on the Monthly Magazine and then on the Morning Chronicle. In addition, the Monthly had begun to publish semi-fictionalized ‘sketches’ of London life. When he was on board a ship taking him up to Edinburgh, Dickens had seen a commercial traveller laughing over his copy of the Monthly – which contained his sketch of ‘The Bloomsbury Christening’. He wrote under the pen-name ‘Boz’. It had been the nickname Dickens himself gave his younger brother Augustus, ‘whom in honour of the Vicar of Wakefield, he had dubbed Moses’.18 The child’s nasal mispronunciation of ‘Boses’ led to the shortening to ‘Boz’.
The magpie adoption of a name that had belonged to another – his brother – and the transmogrification of experience into fiction: all this went hand-in-hand with the beginnings of Dickens’s success. The world of the Fourth Estate was a peculiarly classless one, much more so than the law – had he chosen to become a law clerk. Social climbing was not his sole end, but it was a useful skill for an aspiring writer and one that was made possible because he had started to woo the daughter of a fellow journalist.
Dickens was a small, dandified, smooth-faced young man, with thick chestnut-coloured hair. He developed the capacity to strike out on his own, took chambers at Furnival’s Inn (a legal Inn of Court), which he shared with his younger brother Frederick, while trying – out of his income as a journalist – to bail out his hopeless father from one financial scrape to another. John Dickens, having failed to make a living as a clerk, had himself drifted into journalism and had been given an opening, reporting on the arcane procedures of Doctors’ Commons – that ‘lazy old nook’ – and it was here, too, that Charles Dickens found work, doing legal reports at Doctors’ Commons: a branch of the ecclesiastical courts ‘where they granted,’ as he recalled, ‘marriage licences to love-sick couples and divorces to unfaithful ones, registered the wills of people who have any property to leave, and punish hasty gentlemen who called ladies by unpleasant names’.19
It was in Doctors’ Commons that Tony Weller, father of Mr Pickwick’s companion and servant Sam, went as a coachman and inadvertently found himself buying a marriage licence from two porters who were licence touts.
‘Pray take a seat, vile I makes out the affidavit, Sir,’ says the lawyer. – ‘Thankee, Sir,’ says my father, and down he sat, and stared vith all his eyes, and his mouth vide open, at the names on the boxes. ‘What’s your name, Sir?’ says the lawyer – ‘Tony Weller,’ says my father. – ‘Parish?’ says the lawyer – ‘Belle Savage,’ says my father; for he stopped there ven he drove up, and he know’d nothing about parishes, he didn’t. – ‘And what’s the lady’s name?’, says the lawyer. My father was struck all of a heap. ‘Blessed if I know,’ says he. – ‘Not know!’ says the lawyer. – ‘No more nor you do,’ says my father, ‘can’t I put that in arterwards?’ [PP 10]
Weller was a name that haunted Dickens. Mary Weller had been his nurse in childhood in Chatham, a sort of Peggotty, but with horror stories with which to regale her charge – she had told him the tale of Captain Murderer, as he recollected in ‘Nurse’s Stories’. Her younger sister Anna married Dickens’s brother Fred, a union no more successful than his own marriage to Kate. By contrast, long after he had written Pickwick, in Liverpool in 1844 he would meet a young pianist called Christiana Weller. He read ‘An angel’s message in her face… that smote me to the heart.’20
For eighteen months after his childhood ended Dickens had worked as a legal clerk. But taking rooms in an Inn of Court did not suggest any ambition to pursue a career in the law. Like Thackeray’s Pendennis:
the man of letters can’t but love the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, or peopled by their creations, as real to us at this day as the authors whose children they were – and Sir Roger de Coverley walking in the Temple Garden, and discoursing with Mr Spectator about the beauties in hoops and patches who are sauntering over the grass, is just as lively a figure to me as old Samuel Johnson rolling through the fog with the Scotch gentleman at his heels on his way to Dr Goldsmith’s chambers in Brick Court; or Harry Fielding, with inked ruffles and a wet towel round his head, dashing off articles at midnight for the Covent Garden Journal, while the printer’s boy is asleep in the passage.21
Dickens’s early forays into journalism brought him into contact with other writers, and he was befriended by William Harrison Ainsworth, seven years his senior, who was celebrated for his sub-Scott historical fiction. Rookwood was an exciting tale of Dick Turpin the Highwayman.
Dickens would not follow Ainsworth’s manner when he turned to fiction, but he aped his dress sense, with velvet coats and embroidered waistcoats he could scarcely afford. The Victorian Age had not yet begun and, as far as clothes were in question, fashion still followed the tail end of the Regency. Mr Turveydrop, the dancing master and teacher of deportment in Bleak House, would have approved of them. It was looking velvety and colourful and heavily pomaded that Dickens first met his future father-in-law George Hogarth, who had been a Writer to the Signet (a lawyer) in Edinburgh, had known Sir Walter, and had come south to work as a music critic on the Morning Chronicle. Dickens would boast of ‘My marriage with Miss Hogarth – the daughter of a gentleman who has recently distinguished himself by a celebrated work on Music, who was the most intimate friend and companion of Sir Walter Scott, and one of the most eminent among the Literati of Edinburgh.’22 Scott, by far the most famous writer in the English language before Dickens, and with a huge following in Europe as well as at home, had only died four years previously, in 1832.
At the age of fifty, Hogarth was made editor of the newly founded Evening Chronicle and Dickens became a regular visitor to his house in Chelsea, in those days still separated from the rest of London by green fields. Dickens gave shorthand lessons to Hogarth’s son Robert, and flirted with the daughters, Mary, Georgina and Catherine.
Catherine Hogarth (Kate), inclined to plumpness even then, was a voluptuous, blue-eyed brunette – small, like Nelly, like Maria – with whom Dickens formed a quick bond; though, stung as he had been by the Maria Beadnell experience, he held back a little more of himself than he had done aged nineteen.
Anyhow, circumstances had now changed. The nineteen-year-old who had tried to woo Maria had been a penniless boy. It is not known how much the Beadnells knew about the penurious Dickens family, but they could have guessed that here was not a man of substance, even if the full truth – his grandparents in domestic service, his father an habitué of the Marshalsea – might have been tactfully hidden. The crimson-velveted ‘Boz’ had cut loose from reality altogether, and there was no need for him to spell out in too much detail to the Hogarths who he was or where he came from. They were all citizens together in the republic of London journalism. It was the world of Thackeray’s Pendennis, and it was one that Dickens inhabited cheerfully all hi
s life. He was, like Pendennis and his friend Warrington, ‘of the Corporation of the Goosequill – of the Press, my boy… of the fourth estate’. Passing a newspaper building in the Strand at night, ‘“Look at that, Pen,” Warrington said, “there she is – the great engine – she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world – her couriers upon every road. Her officers march with armies, and her envoys walk into statesman’s cabinets. They are ubiquitous…”’23 To this great republic, which burgeoned so fully in the nineteenth century, Dickens belonged. He was indeed its creature: he always chose to publish in periodical, rather than in volume, form.
Prodigious as was his output as a novelist, and successful on every level as these novels were, Dickens never abandoned journalism. Scarcely a month of his life passed without his writing for one periodical or another, and he was the founder editor of two periodicals – Daily News, which he inaugurated in 1845, and Household Words, which started life in 1850 just as he was finishing David Copperfield. Even the fiction appeared periodically, as if it were journalism. Dickens loved and needed the tension of journalistic demands, the deadlines and the instant gratification of seeing work appear speedily in print. He described how, in December 1835, he had dropped the first of his sketches – ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’ – through the door of the Monthly Magazine ‘up a dark court in Fleet Street’. When the magazine appeared, he bought a copy in Hall’s bookshop in the Strand and saw himself in print for the first time. He walked to Parliament to begin his evening stint of reporting, ‘my eyes so dimmed with pride and joy that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen’.24 He never lost this ‘buzz’, and for those who feel it, there are few stronger emotions, which is a poor lookout for those they marry.
