The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  The problems the Western world faces today vis-à-vis the economics of welfare – whether it is the question of American medical care for the poor, or reform of the benefits systems in European countries; and the problem of ‘welfare dependency’ versus the duty of a state to the most vulnerable in society – all these have come about because of the way in which our ancestors chose to grapple with a set of formidable problems.

  Oliver Twist’s ‘Please, sir, I want some more!’ in some senses says everything about the problem, but in others demonstrates the fact that Dickens existed in an alternative universe, determined in his imagination, as we now realize, by the actual workhouse next to which he grew up in Marylebone; and by his sense – quickened every day that he was walking to work at Warren’s Blacking and dodging the street urchins, and working alongside the workhouse boys such as Bob Fagin – that the abyss of dependency, total poverty, absolute loss was a daily possibility. We have said that none of Dickens’s fellow novelists had been in this position, none of his fellow writers, but nor, of course, had any of the wiseacres we read in the histories of the Victorian age – not Bentham, not Dr Arnold, not Chadwick, not Gladstone or Derby or Cobden or Bright. Dickens had been there. They hadn’t. He had grown up with parents who did midnight flits to avoid the bailiff. He had seen, with the beady, knowing eyes of the clever child, the fecklessness and hopelessness of his parents. He had, in all likelihood, seen such scenes as were quoted in our second chapter, of a dying woman giving birth on the pavement because she did not belong to the particular parish which administered that particular workhouse. He translated these experiences into the fairy-tale burlesque of Mr Bumble and Oliver and the Artful Dodger not because it was unreal to him, but because it was real.

  Dickens’s essay, first published in Household Words on 26 January 1856, entitled ‘A Nightly Scene in London’ is one of his finest pieces of writing. It finds him in Whitechapel on 5 November. On the pavement, against the wall of the workhouse, are five motionless bundles: ‘Five great beehives, covered with rags.’ He accosts the porter of the workhouse and is told that the place is full, there is no room for the women. ‘The place is always full – every night.’ Dickens turns then to the mounds of filthy rags, from one of which emerges ‘the head of a young woman of three or four and twenty, as I should judge; gaunt with want, and foul with dirt; but not naturally ugly’:

  ‘Tell us’, said I, stooping down, ‘why are you lying here?’

  ‘Because I can’t get into the Workhouse.’

  She spoke in a faint dull way, and had no curiosity or interest left. She looked dreamily at the black sky and the falling rain, but never looked at me or my companion.

  ‘Were you here last night?’

  ‘Yes. All last night. And the night afore too.’

  ‘Do you know any of these others?’

  ‘I know her next but one. She was here last night, and she told me she come out of Essex. I don’t know no more of her.’

  ‘You were here all last night, but you have not been here all day?’

  ‘No. Not all day.’

  ‘Where have you been all day?’

  ‘About the streets.’

  ‘What have you had to eat?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Dickens gives her a shilling for food and lodging, which she says will be enough to see her through the night.

  I put the money into her hand, and she feebly rose up and went away. She never thanked me, never looked at me – melted away into the miserable night, in the strangest manner I ever saw. I have seen many strange things, but not one that has left a deeper impression on my memory than the dull impassive way in which that worn-out heap of misery took that piece of money, and was lost.

  In 1906 David Lloyd George, commenting on his fellow radical Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform, said that it had ‘focussed the opera glasses of the rich on the miseries of the poor. Once you do that, there is plenty of kindness in the human heart.’44 That is not socialism, but Dickens would have totally approved.

  One man alone, even so famous and influential a person as Charles Dickens, could not have supplied the needs of the Victorian poor, found cures for the sick children or salves for their wounded hearts. There is a danger that we should dismiss Dickens’s charitable endeavours either as what is known to our generation as mere virtue signalling or as a piece of Victorian subterfuge. He was not a socialist, he railed against the institutions for not doing enough for the poor, and then when they tried to do something, he railed against them for their patronizing, interfering attitude. It would be easy to leave it there and merely to dismiss Dickens as confused about such matters; at worst, a humbug.

  What I have tried to suggest in this chapter is that he was neither. He was not, primarily, an economist or a philanthropist; he was a great imaginative artist, responding to ills and abuses that were beyond his control, torn this way and that between naturally libertarian, individualist instincts and the sheer scale of the deprivation and need all around. We should utterly fail to understand him, though, and be completely unfair to his memory as a man, if we did not recognize how central Christian Charity was to him, as man and artist. His personal kindness and generosity were attested in dozens – hundreds – of examples. Hours of his time, which could have been spent on theatricals, or convivial dinners or walks or outings or journalism, as well as on the central business of his life, writing novels, were devoted to his charitable work. This is entirely of a piece with his art. Great Expectations, if you keep the true, the unhappy ending, is the story of what would happen to Dickens, or to any of us, if we sealed off the source of kindliness and goodness in our lives and pursued only success and worldly gain. A Christmas Carol, one of the most abidingly popular books ever written, reawakens in every reader the possibility of another life – not of the mystical side of Christianity, which meant precisely nothing to Dickens, but of its call to love one another.

  Marley’s Ghost was in torment:

  ‘Oh! captive, bound and double-ironed,’ cried the phantom, ‘not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness…

  ‘Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?’ [CC Stave 1]

  In the workhouses and hospitals and ragged schools of London, from the 1820s to the 1860s, there were thousands of people who had met the author of those words, following that Star.

  FIVE

  THE MYSTERY OF THE PUBLIC READINGS

  A FRIEND REPORTS that, a day or two before his death, Dickens was discovered in the grounds at Gad’s Hill re-enacting the murder of Nancy.1

  That ardent Dickensian, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, was right to say that Great Expectations and David Copperfield were ‘his great twin masterpieces’, and they were also the most closely autobiographical. They were parody autobiographies with, as we have observed, anything that was imaginatively inconvenient or aesthetically surplus to requirements, such as all his brothers and sisters, ruthlessly, deftly, excised. Yet we have come far enough in our pursuit of Dickens’s mystery to realize that the self and selves he projected were very far from being in his control, and there were selves which, with that twinkle in the eye, he put on display without anyone else in the memory game being au courant. (Ralph Nickleby’s breakfast is his breakfast; he is Quilp, etc.)

  The readings do something else. In their mesmeric, enchanting way, they bring forth a Dickens who had not perhaps ever been so forcefully or nakedly displayed. The American member of the public who was disappointed by them, because what he heard in the performance was not the Dickens he knew or the Dickensian characters he recognized, i
s a material witness here. ‘That ain’t the real Charles Dickens.’ Well, no. But would the ‘real Charles Dickens’ please stand up? We are trying to make him do so in this book, but something tells me, reader, that you are going to be disappointed, and that, by the end, we shall be looking round and shall find that he has made his escape. We shall find that while the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey have buried him as an Eminent Victorian with a Nation’s Lamentation, the Real Charles Dickens, like a secret agent, has vanished into the Victorian crowd, one tall silk hat, one set of beard and whiskers, one frock coat, waistcoat and watch-chain among a million.

  Vladimir Nabokov suggested that it was Dickens’s voice that is the principal attraction in all his work: ‘We just surrender ourselves to Dickens’s voice – that is all… the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher… this attitude seems to me the only way of keeping Dickens alive, above the reformer, above the penny novelette, above the sentimental trash, above the theatrical nonsense.’2

  This is right, but only if we interpret ‘voice’ in that sentence to mean much more than it does in the case of many writers. The hypnotic power of the ‘enchanter’ and the control in that voice are indeed what cast their spell, even when the material being delivered in that voice is, or comes close to being, ‘trash’. The real proof of this is that we yield to the enchantment, as when we are in the presence of a truly great performer on the stage, even when we can see it coming, and in some cases resist it or dislike it. The death of Paul Dombey is so schmaltzy that we simply refuse to be moved, but then, damn it, we read it and the tears well down our cheeks. Likewise, the Trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, which would be so unfunny if anyone else were narrating it, never fails to make us (me, anyway) laugh. Something similar happened to me when I was taken to see the great comedian Ken Dodd on the stage of the London Palladium – the ancient jokes, told by the equally ancient comedian, were surely not going to work, but within ten minutes I was laughing with the rest of the audience. Mind you, there are moments when the deep gulf fixed between us and the nineteenth century appears unbridgeable. One of Dickens’s favourite set-piece readings – a favourite with himself and with audiences – was Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn. It is a story that, very loosely and broadly, Wes Anderson reworked to superb effect in his film Moonrise Kingdom: namely, two children in love who elope together, in the Dickensian case, described by the ‘Boots’ in a hotel on the Great North Road. In Anderson’s treatment there is comedy, of course there is, but it is principally touching. One witness said that Dickens’s embodiment of Boots was ‘remarkable for ease, finish, and a thorough relish for the character. The swaying to and fro of the body, the half-closing of the eye, and the action of the head, when any point in the narrative is supposed to require particular emphasis to make clear… all assist to make it a perfect example of pure comedy acting.’3 For Dickens and his audiences, it was ‘one roar’. The little girl in the story is not given so much as one line to speak – compare and contrast with the serious-minded, articulate and highly competent little girl in Moonrise Kingdom.

  The ending, too, makes for uncomfortable reading or listening. Considering the fact that Dickens was on the road in the very year he had legally, and so publicly, separated from his wife Kate, the ‘two opinions’ of Boots do not seem as hilarious to us, perhaps, as they evidently did to both reader and audience: ‘firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to be married, who are half as innocent as them two children; secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in time and brought back separate’.4

  We are in deep water when it comes to the readings. All the witnesses – especially those closest to him, such as George Dolby, Dickens’s manager in the last tours, both in Britain and America – attest their power, the fervour and frantic energy of them. The fact that he was found in his Kent garden re-enacting the death of Nancy, months after the reading tours had been discontinued because of ill health, is a demonstration of how vital a part of Dickens these performances were. And above all, what a reminder they were of Nabokov’s point, about the voice being all.

  And this, too, is why – to reiterate – the ‘Dickens’s Dream’ idea of the characters being the chief or central part of the Dickens experience is inadequate. Take the famous public reading of Mrs Gamp, one of his best set-pieces – though never an especially popular one, strangely, with audiences; he dropped it after the 1858–9 tour.5 Mrs Gamp is, indeed, one of his most superb creations, and she stands out like a good deed in a naughty world, being almost the only undilutedly good thing in that (largely) failure of a novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. (Interesting, this. You could attribute the failure of Martin Chuzzlewit to the fact that Dickens had been writing too much and too fast, and that, after Pickwick, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist, it just was not possible to keep up the pace. But whereas all those previous books are good books, with many poor or sloppily composed intervals, Martin Chuzzlewit is actually a flop, a dud. The reason, perhaps, is that, whereas all his successful books feast on the rich material of his own childhood, this one – for its mythological base, its core – plunders the new experiences Dickens had had as a grown-up. Whereas the great fiction, so much of it, is concerned with the horror of imprisonment and the disgrace of loss, Chuzzlewit follows the Ben Jonsonian conceit of a rich man being sponged upon by all his relations: certainly an experience of which Dickens complained after the success of Pickwick, but one that in a strange way is, when handled by him, wearisome and unnourishing.) But in the middle of its tedium, up sprang Mrs Gamp. No one else could have created Mrs Gamp, nor – and this is the point – could anyone else have created her in the Dickensian way.

  ‘Ah,’ repeated Mrs Gamp, for that was always a safe sentiment in cases of mourning – ‘ah! Dear! When Gamp was summonsed to his long home, and I see him a-lying in the hospital with a penny-piece on each eye, and his wooden leg under his left arm, I thought I should have fainted away. But I bore up.’6 [originally in MC 19]

  The underlining is Dickens’s own, in his prompt-copy, preserved in the Berg Collection in New York Public Library. And it is, of course, Dickens’s voice. He never lets go of the puppet-strings, nor will he simply let us contemplate Mrs Gamp’s voice describing her dead husband in the hospital. It is his own voice that wants us to understand what she is saying – namely, that the unscrupulous old woman has sold her husband’s body to the surgeons. He adds: ‘If certain whispers current in the Kingsgate Street circles had any truth in them, Mrs Gamp had borne up surprisingly, and had indeed exerted such uncommon fortitude as to dispose of Mr Gamp’s remains for the benefit of science.’7 [MC 19]

  The experience of reading Dickens, of falling under the spell of the enchanter, to use Nabokov’s phrase, is to accept the habitual heavy irony of his language: ‘The face of Mrs Gamp – the nose in particular – was somewhat red and swollen, and it was difficult to enjoy her society without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits.’8 [MC 19]

  No theatrical or cinematic version of Mrs Gamp could capture the Dickens voice, which is at least half the reading experience. We are not just confronted with the ‘character’, but with his rendition of her: it is the difference between seeing a cheap photograph of an old woman and seeing an oil painting of Rembrandt’s mother. The same is true when Dickens is tub-thumping – ‘Dead, Your Majesty… Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order… And dying thus around us, every day.’ [BH 47] (Oh, the pompous comma!) The same is true of the many meteorological and natural descriptions – the storm blowing over Yarmouth in Chapter 55 of David Copperfield, the sweltering heat of Marseilles at the opening of Little Dorrit, the fogs of Bleak House, the many extraordinary evocations of the River Thames, especially in Our Mutual Friend and The Old Curiosity Shop, or, again in that novel, the descriptions of the slums on the outskirts of London gradually giving way to open country; or, in The Old Curiosity Shop, Hard Times and
Dombey and Son, the appalled and vivid glimpses of England’s industrial heartlands: ‘Now, the clustered roofs, and piles of buildings, trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour, which hung in a dense ill-favoured cloud over the housetops and filled the air with gloom; the clank of hammers beating upon iron, the roar of busy streets and noisy crowds…’ [OCS 43] Or Mr Dombey, passing through the same sort of country on the train: ‘Louder and louder yet, it shrieks and cries as it comes tearing on resistless to the goal; and now its way, still like the way of Death, is strewn with ashes thickly.’ [DS 20] There are many comparable moments in Hard Times where we see wind-blown, rain-lashed, smoke-choked Coketown through Dickens’s eyes and hear it evoked by Dickens’s voice, and no photographer or film director, however brilliant, could convey the actual prose of the enchanter, which fixes these scenes in our minds. It is untranslatable into another medium.

  At the same time we recognize that Dickens, in his decision to perform some of his work in a series of public readings, was making a step towards dramatizing his fiction. The readings, then, are an essential part of the Dickens mystery. His friend John Forster was opposed to his undertaking them. He saw it as a loss of dignity, and he also saw it as distracting Dickens from his prime purpose, which was to be a writer, not a public entertainer. In the months after he completed Little Dorrit, however, Dickens could not settle. His marital unhappiness had turned into an obsessive hell.