by A. N. Wilson
He asked the policeman if he knew who he was. The constable did. Rather than explaining to the policeman that he was a man whose own publisher had stopped visiting his house because he could not stand the way the novelist constantly swore at his wife, Dickens asked the officer to arrest the girl for using foul language. The copper had never heard of such an offence, and hesitated to do so. Dickens then ran home to get his copy of the Police Act. It is surely very revealing that he possessed a copy! He appeared at the police station, where the girl was being held, and said he wished to press charges. Next morning, in the court, the magistrate dismissed Dickens’s charge as frivolous. As Dickens told the story, very tellingly, he reduced the episode to one of fairy-tale pantomime. The girl, he said, had got herself up to resemble ‘an elder sister of Red Riding Hood’, leaving him with the only option, to resemble the Wolf. [‘The Ruffian’, UT 30] Surely, Mr Dickens, the magistrate asked, you do not want the girl to be sent to prison on such a charge? Yes, I do, answered Dickens, or I would not have come here. It was not the only occasion when he appeared in a magistrate’s court to bring charges: in 1844 he had done so to prosecute a man who had sent him a begging letter. [‘The Begging-Letter Writer’, RP]
He commended private citizens intervening when they witnessed minor crimes; suggested that at all times they should summon the police, but when a constable was not on hand, we could all do our duty with ‘our own riding-whips and walking-sticks’. The Ruffian, Dickens believed, was ‘the common enemy to be punished and exterminated’. [‘The Ruffian’, UT 30] He once told Lord Brougham that he would like to have been a police magistrate, and in his frequent walks through the capital he envisaged himself as ‘a higher sort of police constable doing duty’ on his beat. [‘On an Amateur Beat’, UT 35]
This was the man who set out to rescue the young women who were invited to go to Urania Cottage. Nevertheless – and here is the mystery or paradox of the charity of Charles Dickens – there was a mercy in his heart, though it is difficult to know whether the truer metaphor would be that he was a divided self: one half the nice cop, the other the nasty cop; or whether the two cops were in some strange way commingled. As a schoolboy at Wellington House Academy he had impersonated street urchins and beggars, more conscious than his amused classmates of how recently and how nearly he had been a factory boy at work among workhouse boys. In the young women of Urania Cottage he could see people who were only a little different, in their misfortunes, from the scrapes into which his own flesh and blood had fallen. Above a certain level in society, among the decently educated, the propertied or professional or landed classes, there was the possibility of life going wrong, but not so catastrophically wrong as when you had no schooling, no status, no class, no property – nuffink. All the great writers among Dickens’s contemporaries, even the poverty-stricken Carlyle (for he had been through the Scottish educational system and was a graduate of Edinburgh, married to a middle-class doctor’s daughter), were on the comfortable side of this dividing line: Tennyson, Browning, Mill, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Trollope, George Eliot, the Newman brothers. They might sink into shabby-genteel poverty (the Newmans’ father was an alcoholic publican who went bankrupt) but they could never be nobodies with nuffink. Dickens alone had not merely looked over into the abyss. He had lived in it.
Jenny Hartley makes the very convincing case that it was in hearing the life-stories of the young women that Dickens decided that he – who had once been a street boy on the edge of destitution – in 1849 or thereabouts would write out the Autobiographical Fragment, which he would later show to John Forster. He also freely plundered the experiences of the young women for his fiction.
Rhena Pollard was a case in point. Daughter of a farm worker near Petworth in West Sussex, she was the youngest of four. When she was nine years old, her mother was sentenced to fourteen days’ hard labour for stealing a dress worth four shillings. From the local workhouse, Thakewell Union, Rhena was apprehended for petty larceny and graduated to Petworth Prison, of which the Duke of Richmond was a governor. Having heard about Urania Cottage, the Duchess of Richmond recommended Rhena to Angela Burdett-Coutts.
Shortly after Rhena joined the Cottage, there was a breakout and one of the young women ran away wearing her Sunday best – she jumped over the garden wall. Dickens was always especially angered when the young women escaped on a Sunday, wearing their more expensive clothes. Rhena, who had a fiery temper and was not settling in, threatened to do the same. Dickens was at first in favour of letting her go, but the matron, by then a Mrs Morson, pleaded for her. Dickens summoned Rhena before the committee. It was a freezing day in January. He had just been in Birmingham doing the first of his public readings from A Christmas Carol. To and about Rhena, he was relentless. If Rhena, in one of her tantrums, had said she wanted to leave Urania Cottage, then she should be put out into the frosty streets.
He knew – Jenny Hartley tells us, and I think we must believe her – that Rhena would scream, howl and plead with Mrs Morson. Then he knew that she would break down ‘before all the rest’. He wanted her to be humiliated, and to beg to be allowed to stay. Eventually this was to happen. Dickens got two supreme rewards from the episode. On the one hand, he had found the character of Tattycoram:
A sullen, passionate girl! Her rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed and hot, and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with an unsparing hand.
‘Selfish brutes!’ said the girl, sobbing and heaving between whiles. ‘Not caring what becomes of me!’ [LD I 2]
But Hartley convinces me that Dickens also knew that, having received her shock treatment, Rhena/Tattycoram would come right. Tattycoram, in Little Dorrit, elopes with Miss Wade – the only lesbian, as far as I have noticed, in the Dickens oeuvre. Rhena stayed the course at Urania Cottage, to the point where she was thought capable of living a decent life. She emigrated to Canada, married, put down her roots in Ontario. Hartley tells us, ‘Otis and his family were Wesleyan Methodists. Rhena, to be different, joined the Salvation Army.’11 She died aged sixty-three, has many descendants living today and, satisfactorily, we have her wedding photograph.
Mrs Morson had appealed to the Christmas Spirit to persuade Dickens to be lenient, with the case coming up for consideration at the ‘great forgiving Christmas time’, something that she could do with some confidence, Dickens having just witnessed the response of enormous Birmingham audiences to the Carol.
Boz, in one of his very earliest excursions into print, had asserted:
There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas. Petty jealousies and discords are forgotten; social feelings are awakened, in bosoms to which they have long been strangers; father and son, or brother and sister, who have met and passed with averted gaze, or a look of cold recognition, for months before, proffer and return the cordial embrace, and bury their past animosities in their present happiness. Kindly hearts that have yearned towards each other, but have been withheld by false notions of pride and self-dignity, are again reunited, and all is kindness and benevolence! Would that Christmas lasted the whole year through (as it ought), and that the prejudices and passions which deform our better nature, were never called into action among those to whom they should ever be strangers! [SB 2]
A Christmas Carol changed not only Dickens’s life, but the Western world. It invented the modern Christmas. By February 1844 at least three theatrical productions based on the book were being performed in London alone. In the years that followed, he would publish further Christmas stories, including The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and The Battle of Life (1846). As far as he was concerned, Christmas had become the busiest time of year and one of the most lucrative – especially after 1853, when he had begun a series of public readings of A Christmas Carol. The Christmas edition of All the Year Round was something he spent six months planning.12 For it was always the Carol, of all his stories for Christmas, that captured the imagination of readers. Before the Carol was published, Christmas
Day was not a public holiday in Britain. By 1846 the newspapers were reporting that ‘Experienced salesmen at Leadenhall-market state that the demand for Christmas geese this year exceeded that of any previous season, and that the establishment of clubs has, within the last few days, brought upwards of 20,000 geese into the market. In some parts of the metropolis, “plum pudding clubs” have been established.’13
Three years after A Christmas Carol was published, the Hereford Times reported, ‘We notice that at Ross and other towns, Saturday next, as it intervenes between Christmas-day and Sunday, will be observed as a holiday; and a declaration to that effect is now being generally subscribed to by the respectable tradesmen of this city, who have agreed to suspend business on that day.’
As Dickens-descended Lucinda Hawksley said in her charming book Dickens and Christmas, ‘No one, it seems, wanted to be compared to Bob Cratchit’s employer.’14 The Victorians, who were discarding the formality of theological faith in increasing numbers, reinvented Christmas. Dickens was not alone in encouraging them to do so.
His religious outlook, like much in his life, was divided. In 1850, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he saw John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents. He was not alone in hating the picture, which caused a storm of protest. The Times warned its readers, ‘Mr Millais’s principal picture is to speak plainly revolting. The attempt to associate the holy family with the meanest details of a carpenter’s shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, even of disease, all finished with the same loathsome meticulousness, is disgusting.’ Far from thinking this was the voice of Pecksniff, Dickens entirely agreed, stating in Household Words that the picture was ‘mean, odious, and repulsive’. Even some years later, when he had made friends with Millais, he felt the need to write to the painter to make plain, ‘My opinion of that point is not in the least changed.’15
One wonders whether Dickens, with his mania for neatness, was chiefly offended by the fact that the carpenter’s workshop in Nazareth is depicted as having wood shavings untidily littering the floor, as a beautiful Virgin Mary kneels to be kissed by a beautiful, very English little Jesus.
Although his Life of Our Lord, written for his children, professes to believe in the miracles and the Resurrection, his definition of what it means to be a Christian makes no allusion to any of the theological reasons given in the New Testament – namely, a belief that Christ’s death is a sin-offering which saves the believer from personal guilt, that Calvary washes away the believer’s sin. ‘It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to show that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything.’ [LOL 11] That was how he ended The Life of Our Lord. For four years of Dickens’s life, he joined the Unitarians, who specifically deny Christ’s divinity. He wrote to a friend that they ‘would do something for human improvement if they could’, and they ‘practise Charity and Toleration’.16 This was at a time when the Church of England was torn, especially in Oxford, by esoteric rows about the rival claims of the Church of Rome and Anglicanism, with reference to the 1,500-years-old – 1,500 years dead, as Dickens would have thought it – early councils and doctrinal disputes of the Mediterranean Church. The Oxford dons who led the country into this obsession themselves hankered after the church of our ancestors. Dickens, when he came into possession of Gad’s Hill, decorated the false-spines of books on his library door. One set of volumes was entitled ‘The Wisdom of Our Ancestors – I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III. The Block. IV. The Stake. V. The Rack. VI. Dirt. VII. Disease’.17 He would have no time at all for the historicism or nostalgia of the Oxford Movement.
His cult of Christmas, in which he led his contemporaries, was a cult not of old superstition but of kindness and generosity. The better Victorians realized – as they looked about at their rural communities, impoverished by tariffs on imported corn; at the wretchedness of Irish peasants, soon to be starved in their millions; at the cities into which rural workers had fled, to be overworked, from childhood onwards, down mines, in mills and factories and refineries – that their beliefs in Free Trade and Industry and Progress had brought into being a nightmare. Their cult of Christmas was part of their attempt to fight back in the name of decency.
Henry Cole, one of the masterminds of the Great Exhibition of 1851, invented Christmas cards. The Queen and Prince Albert, in their German enthusiasm for Christmas trees, helped to popularize what now seems central, not merely to the decoration of Christmas households and townscapes, but to the meaning of the festival itself. But there can be no doubt that Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in capturing the Christmas ‘mood’, also helped to drive it forward.
The Great Forgiving Christmas Time was central to Dickens’s view of life, just as his most enduringly famous story, A Christmas Carol, is central, really, to his oeuvre. Dickens was sometimes spoken of in his lifetime as a great social reformer, and his novels as exposés of great social evils. This is to overlook the templates both for his fiction and for his life-view and life, namely fairy stories and pantomime. In protesting against the plight of illiterate street urchins or ‘fallen’ women, or in giving speeches in favour of better sanitation, Dickens might have seemed to be aligning himself with the worthier social radicals and liberals of the day, figures such as John Stuart Mill, perhaps. George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian socialist who sat for years on St Pancras Council and was a profoundly political man, spoke of Little Dorrit as more revolutionary than Das Kapital and by implication, therefore, a document of the Left. Its radicalism, which was indeed profound, was, however, of quite a different order from that of Marx, Mill or even his friend (with whom it had most in common, ultimately) Carlyle. These are all grown-ups attempting to change and improve the grown-up world in grown-up ways. Dickens’s philanthropy was undertaken with a view to Cinders being allowed to go to the ball. Dickens was the figure of Buttons, who persuaded the audience she would be able to do so, if only they hallooed loud enough, or repeated the same silly jingles that he had taught them, and booed and hissed when the demon king or the Ugly Sisters stepped out of the wings.
In his magnificent critique of Hard Times, F. R. Leavis entered into the question of Dickens in relation to the two British institutions that, collectively, were making an attempt to address the social wrongs which he himself was trying to put right: namely, the Chapel and the Trade Union Movement. It is only here that I would wish to part company with Dr Leavis, even though one sees where he himself was coming from (his was the generation that fought in the First World War; retrospect made them see the virtues of the British nonconformist tradition, and its contribution to the betterment of working-class life through organized labour). He wrote:
Just as Dickens has no glimpse of the part to be played by Trade Unionism in bettering the conditions he deplores, so, though he sees there are many places of worship in Coketown, of various kinds of ugliness, he has no notion of the part played by the chapel in the life of nineteenth-century industrial England. The kind of self-respecting steadiness and conscientious restraint that he represents in Stephen did certainly exist on a large scale among the working-classes and this is an important historical fact.18
That this may have been a case in historical fact does not make it a fact that could easily be absorbed into Dickens’s imaginative world-view, either as a philanthropist or as a novelist, or – to use Leavis’s in a way better perception – as a poetic dramatist. Leavis took Dickens to task for regarding Parliament as the ‘national dust-yard’ [HT II 9] where the ‘national dustmen’ entertain one another ‘with a great many noisy little fights among themselves’ [HT II 12] and appoint commissions that fill blue-books with dreary facts and futile statistics – of the kind that helped Gradgrind prove that the Good Samaritan was a bad economist, and which Marx liked to pore over, for evidence in Das Kapital about the miserable conditions in which men and women worked. There
are other readers of Dickens who would remember that his earliest writings – alas, we possess almost none of them – were reports of debates in the House of Commons. The Canadian mage Northrop Frye made the point that ‘For him the structures of society, as structures, belong almost entirely to the absurd, obsessed, sinister aspect of it, the aspect that is overcome or evaded by the comic action.’19
Dickens’s burlesque manner of describing men of affairs – whether the politicians standing for election at Eatanswill in The Pickwick Papers, or the activities or, rather, non-activities, of Tite Barnacle and the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit – might be borrowed from pantomime and political cartoons. The reality he described seems to many readers, more cynical than Dr Leavis, to be palpably and obviously accurate.
In a similar way, Dickens’s hatred of the Chapel went very deep, and it is a tragicomic fact that, had he ever returned to earth to read Dr Leavis or to hear him lecture, he would indubitably have seen in him a secular equivalent of Chadband or of the Reverend Melchisidech Howler. Much as Dickens mocked and disliked priestcraft, Catholicism and ‘Puseyism’, he reserved his most sustained and repeated invective and satire, as far as Christianity was concerned, for the chapel ranters. Again and again, with hammer blows, in his journalism and in his fiction, he returned to the attack. In Coketown, the sensible workers avoid worshipping at all eighteen chapels that have been erected for their edification. The cruel Murdstones in David Copperfield were evangelicals, as was Mrs Clennam with her great Bible full of murderous and misanthropic thoughts. In American Notes, Dickens summarized American evangelicalism: ‘Wherever religion is resorted to, as a strong drink, and as an escape from the dull monotonous round of home, those of its ministers who pepper the highest will be surest to please. They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous.’[AN 3] Even the fact that the American evangelicals were foremost in the anti-slavery movement did not prompt Dickens to speak in their praise – fervent as his hatred of slavery always was. In one of the many speeches made by Dickens at official dinners and charitable functions, he alluded to Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘courage to face the worst and commonest of all cants; that is to say, the cant about the cant of philanthropy and benevolence’.20
