The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘Perfectly goblin-like’, the archetypical monster husband Quilp dominates The Old Curiosity Shop. Tiny, malign, he is a demonic projection of Dickens himself, and genuinely frightening. His mother-in-law, Mrs Jiniwin, did not exaggerate when she told her gaggle of female friends, ‘“He is the greatest tyrant that ever lived, she daren’t call her soul her own, he makes her tremble with a word and even with a look, he frightens her to death.”’ [OCS 4] ‘“He’s a Salamander you know, that’s what he is,”’ says Dick Swiveller of Quilp to Frederick Trent, who does not stop to enquire ‘“whether a fire-proof man was as a matter of course trustworthy”’. [OCS 23]

  One of the high points of the Dickenses’ visit to the Kingdom of Naples in 1845 was to climb the still-fuming Mount Vesuvius. It was February, and the six of them – Kate, Georgina, Dickens and three others – were accompanied by twenty-two guides and saw it in the severest weather conditions. One side of the mountain was ‘glazed from one smooth sheet of ice from the top of the cone to the bottom’.34

  The more the other travellers flagged, and the more frightened they were, the more Dickens revelled in the adventure. He insisted on them all slithering and staggering onwards and upwards towards the volcano’s crater.

  You may form some notion of what was going on inside it, when I tell you that it is a hundred feet higher than it was six weeks ago. The sensation of struggling up it, choked with the fire and smoke, and feeling at every step as if the crust of the ground between one’s feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in and swallow one up (which is a real danger), I shall remember for some little time, I think. But we did it. We looked down into the flaming bowels of the mountain and came back again, alight in half a dozen places, and burnt from head to foot. You never saw such devils. And I never saw anything so awful and terrible.35

  Quilp’s name is a shortening of Quill-pen, or the Writer. One remembers him pouring a glass of liquor and adding hot water as he smoked his noxious pipe, and proffering it to Dick Swiveller.

  ‘Is it good?... Is it strong and fiery? Does it make you wink, and choke, and your eyes water, and your breath come short – does it?’

  ‘Does it?’ cried Dick, throwing away part of the contents of his glass, and filling it up with water, ‘why, man, you don’t mean to tell me that you drink such fire as this?’ [OCS 21]

  In the last two years of the marriage, Dickens’s ex-publisher, Frederick Evans, and his near-worshipper (when in all-male company) W. H. Wills, who was managing editor of Household Words, declined to go to Gad’s Hill ‘because they “could not stand his cruelty to his wife”’. When asked by a friend what he meant, Evans explained, ‘“Swearing at her in the presence of guests, children and servants” – swearing often and fiercely. He is downright “ferocious” now, and has quarrelled with almost every friend he ever had. Next to him, Forster behaved worst – aggravating his discontent with his wife, who is “not the sort of woman they say”, Mr E declares. Dickens had terrified and depressed her into a dull condition, and she never was very clever.’36 Thus wrote Harriet Martineau.

  While Dickens himself became ever more energetic, and filled his life with more and more – journalism, theatricals, dinners, as well as writing fiction – Kate sank into ‘indescribable lassitude’. There was a sort of inevitability that one day he would meet a young woman and discard his wife. He denied Kate’s competence as a mother, but this had, nonetheless, been her function for the last twenty years and inevitably, as she became more and more of a mother, less and less of a lover, he should punish her as he needed to punish his own mother.

  Some months after he had met Nelly, he wrote to Kate’s maid, Anne Cornelius, at their London house, from Gad’s:

  My dear Anne,

  I want some little changes made in the arrangement of my dressing room and the Bathroom. And as I would rather not have them talked about by comparative strangers, I shall be much obliged to you, my old friend, if you will see them completed before you leave Tavistock House.

  I wish to make the Bath-room my washing room also. It will be therefore necessary to carry into the Bath room, to remain there, the two washing-stands from my Dressing-Room. Then to get rid altogether, of the chest of drawers in the Dressing-Room, I want the recess of the doorway between the Dressing-Room and Mrs Dickens’s room, fitted with plain white deal shelves, and closed in with a plain light deal door, painted white. Rudkin can do this – or Lillie [Benjamin Lillie, a plumber and painter] being in the house, can do it if he likes. The sooner it is done, the better.37

  Without consulting his wife, Dickens was literally building a barrier between them. It is especially chilling that he asserts his old friendship with the maid in his pincer-movement, within the household, to force everyone – servants as well as children – onto his side, in the warfare that, in October 1857, he was now planning.

  He and Nelly were not yet lovers. One inclines to agree with all the biographers and commentators who imagine that she took a long time to yield to his fervent wooing, and must, however flattering it was, have been frightened by it, its fervour, its Quilpian heat, its basic insanity. By May 1858 Dickens had decided that it was impossible for him and Kate to continue together in the same house. In his letter of 9 May he told a shocked Angela Burdett-Coutts, ‘I believe my marriage has been for years and years as miserable a one as ever was made. I believe that no two people were ever created, with such an impossibility of interest, sympathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind between them, as there is between my wife and me.’ He concluded his letter accusing Kate of ‘the most miserable weaknesses and jealousies… Her mind has, at times, been certainly confused besides.’38 We are in Gaslight territory.

  He was more than a little in awe of Miss Burdett-Coutts, who tried to urge a reconciliation. He only came clean to her about the separation when it was all about to come to light in the most public manner possible.

  We have reached the period during which, in his daughter Katey’s view, Dickens was ‘like a madman’. He was on the point of beginning the paid public readings that tightened the bond with his adoring public. While these began, lawyers were preparing a formal separation. Rumours flew about London’s drawing rooms and clubs. There was a story that Dickens had bought a bracelet for Nelly and it had been wrongly delivered to Mrs Dickens, with the inevitable ensuing row. One afternoon, Katey passed the open door of her mother’s bedroom in Tavistock House and heard sobs. Her mother was sitting at her dressing table in a bonnet, with the New York Tribune and tears cascading. Dickens had insisted that she visit Nelly to apologize for the appalling insinuation that her jealous rage implied.

  ‘Your father has asked me to go and see Ellen Ternan.’

  ‘You shall not go!’ Katey remonstrated, ‘angrily stamping her foot’.39

  Kate’s parents, the old Hogarths, were staying in Tavistock House, and both they and their daughter Helen made it clear that they thought Nelly was his mistress. Unable to ‘bear the contemplation of their imbecility any more’,40 Dickens stormed out and walked to Gad’s Hill through the night, a distance of thirty miles.

  Thackeray had heard the rumour – and repeated it in the Garrick Club – that Dickens was the lover of Georgina. Another friendship bit the dust. And then came Dickens’s decision to publish the so-called Violated Letter. He insisted that Helen Hogarth and her mother should sign it, and vowed that he would never forgive them, ‘living or dead’, if they persisted in accusing Ellen Ternan of adultery. He asked his good friend Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch, to publish the Violated Letter and he refused. Another friendship destroyed.

  Dickens himself, who was now appearing in public for the readings to audiences agog to see the central figure in this excruciatingly embarrassing drama, showed the Violated Letter to Arthur Smith, who was organizing the public readings, authorizing him to show it to any who believed the rumours put about by ‘two wicked persons’ – Mrs Hogarth and Kate’s sister Helen, presumably. On 29 May they signed the retraction that he had
demanded.

  The Violated Letter appeared in the New York Tribune and was subsequently reprinted in the English papers. Dickens, very naïvely, was surprised – or said he was surprised – that the journalists had got hold of it, but it was, by now, scarcely a secret. In June, he published it himself, in Household Words and in The Times; it was, as Edgar Johnson said in his biography, ‘the maddest step he had yet made in his unhappy and hysterical state’.41

  The Violated Letter is a repetition of what he had told Miss Burdett-Coutts: that he and his wife had been unhappy for years. The separation was entirely on the grounds of incompatibility. It was, moreover, a tribute to Georgina.

  Nothing has, on many occasions, stood between us and a separation but Mrs Dickens’s sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the age of fifteen, she has devoted herself to our home and our children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend, protectress, adviser and companion. In the manly consideration toward Mrs Dickens which I owe to my wife, I will merely remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on someone else. I do not know – I cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine – what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them.42

  In his Will, Dickens would describe Georgy as ‘the best and truest friend man ever had’, and this is probably simply factual. While he set out on the first of the big public reading tours, Georgy left her family behind in Tavistock House and settled in Gad’s Hill, where she would spend the last twelve years of Dickens’s life as his companion, housekeeper and helpmeet. She became Nelly’s friend, spent a week with her, after she had married, at Margate, and even went to the school run by Nelly’s husband, to give out the prizes.43

  It is obvious that she and Dickens were not lovers. All the evidence points to her having been a decent, level-headed person. Most of those who contemplate the Dickens marriage have rushed to judgement, and even the most ardent Dickensians find little to defend in his conduct during 1857–8. Georgy’s loyalty to him should be weighed in the balance against his cruelty to her sister. That he was cruel can’t be denied. Georgina is a witness, too, however, to something mysteriously missing about Catherine, some incurable personal defect. Hans Christian Andersen, when he grossly outstayed his welcome in the Dickens household in 1857, saw Georgina as ‘piquante, lively and gifted, but not kind’.44 Nevertheless, might Georgy herself not have been right when she told Maria Winter that, ‘by some constitutional misfortune, my sister always, from their infancy, threw her children upon other people, consequently as they grew up, there was not the usual strong tie between them and her – in short, for many years, although we have put a good face on it, we have been very miserable at home’.45

  Georgina saw it as her duty to protect Dickens, first of all from his wife’s unhappy hostility, and next from the drain on his energy and resources by the grown-up children. She was all that a wife should be, apart from sharing his bed, and when he was dead, she was the fiercest guardian of the shrine. There will always be those who feel it is a duty, when miserable at home, simply to endure, for fear of cruelly inflicting more misery. The truth was, however, that in the practical, ever-changing and not especially religious Victorian world, there was no need to make an ideal of an everlasting marriage. Indeed, their very cult of marriage made it inevitable that the Victorians would introduce divorce. In the days of Chaucer, not only was life-expectancy lower – so that a life-vow was unlikely to be endured for more than a couple of decades – but the marriage bond and the love code were quite separate. In the days of Dickens, things were different. Their novels and poems all told them that a man and a woman should be lovers, companions, best friends, all in one. The ‘Angel in the House’ was not, as is sometimes supposed, the woman. The Angel was the spirit of love that fills the marital home. No wonder, when the Angel had fled, or was found never to have been there in the first instance, it seemed like time to call the marriage to an end.

  English divorce is an essentially Victorian invention. The Victorians liked to think of themselves as domestic beings, defenders of the home and of marital respectability. Three years after Coventry Patmore’s verse-novel The Angel in the House – the most saccharine, though brilliantly versified expression of the happy marriage – was published, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made divorce a possibility for most married people for the first time in English history.

  Henry VIII, often spoken of as having divorced Katherine of Aragon, was actually never divorced in his life. His Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, declared that marriage to be annulled. The second, with Anne Boleyn, ended, as did the fifth, with the axe on Tower Hill. Jane Seymour, the third wife, died a natural death. The ‘marriage’ with Anne of Cleves was contracted but never consummated. After Henry’s death, no person, royal or otherwise, obtained a divorce in England for 130 years. The first person to do so, in 1670, was John Manners, Lord Roos, future Earl (later Duke) of Rutland. The divorce was granted on the grounds of his wife’s adultery.46

  For the next 180 years divorce was still highly unusual, and could only be obtained, in each case, by a special Act of Parliament. Even after the 1857 Act, it remained extremely difficult for a woman to obtain a divorce, since she had to prove not merely adultery, but adultery aggravated by incest, bigamy, rape, sodomy, bestiality, cruelty or desertion for more than two years.47

  The story of the ‘road to divorce’ (the title of a groundbreaking study of the subject by Lawrence Stone in 1990) coincides with the rise of the novel – a fact of clear relevance to Dickens’s own marital history, and to the way in which he wrote about marital failure in his books. The two facts – the growth of the novel, and the exposition of particular types of marital misery and failure – are directly connected. Kelly Hager, a scholar who has written well on this subject, was correct when she wrote, ‘the law is a set of social conventions, and it thus makes different sorts of plots available’.48

  Some of the novel-plots most familiar to us from these drew directly from public divorce cases. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, about a young woman forced into an illegal wedding against her will, drew on the real-life case of Maurice Méjan and Mme de Douhault, for his story of the perfidious Sir Percival Glyde forging legal documents to make it appear that his parents had married more than twenty years before they actually did. Legislation since the Marriage Act of 1753 aimed to prevent clandestine marriages and enforced marriages by nullifying all marriages that had not been recorded in parish registries, and which did not have the parental consent of the bride’s family. Wife-sales, such as those that take place at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, were real.

  Dickens, when he was a reporter for the Morning Chronicle, wrote up the notorious case of 1836, when George Norton brought a suit for ‘criminal conversation’ (that is, adultery) against none other than the man who would become Queen Victoria’s beloved first prime minister, Lord Melbourne. In Pickwick, this became fictionalized. As well as the case brought by Mrs Bardell against Pickwick, the novel has two interpolated stories of failed marriages – ‘The Stroller’s Tale’, in which a dying alcoholic husband confesses to sustained and persistent marital cruelty, and ‘The Convict’s Return’, in which a woman stays loyal to a drunken bully.

  As far as the Norton case was concerned, it was really a clumsy attempt to blackmail Lord Melbourne, which led Norton to demand £10,000 from the Whig prime minister.

  Although, or perhaps because, Norton was a barrister, the jury threw out his claims and he lost the case. His wife Caroline, a granddaughter of the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was herself a novelist, author of The Sorrows of Rosalie, and a person of courage. Norton, as the law stood, had the power to prevent her, when she left him, from seeing her three sons. Nevertheless, Caroline Norton was a heroine in the story of ‘the road to divorce’. When Parliament was discussing the matter in 1855, pri
or to the 1857 Act, she was brave enough to disclose to MPs details of her own miserable marriage to a bully. She could remind them, in a written statement, of the current state of the law.

  An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for restitution of ‘conjugal rights,’ but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge… and carry her away by force…

  If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself… She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages’…

  If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband, a vinculo, however profligate he may be…

  Those dear children, the loss of whose pattering steps and sweet occasional voices made the silence of [my] new home intolerable as the anguish of death… what I suffered respecting those children, God knows… under the evil law which suffered any man, for vengeance or for interest, to take baby children from the mother.49

  Caroline Norton’s open letter to the Queen made an enormous impression.