The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  Throughout his life he had friends of both sexes who flouted the conventions. Wilkie Collins is the best known, with his two illicit households, but there were plenty more. The divorced Mrs Frances Elliot, whom he advised in her matrimonial problems, was another. He was intimate with the Count d’Orsay and Lady Blessington, whose reputations – whether justly or unjustly – were deeply tarnished. He was on friendly terms with Fanny Kelly, who had an illegitimate daughter living with her, and with Fanny Stirling, separated from her husband and living with another man. Julia Fortescue, who took part in his amateur acting group, had a large family by Lord Gardner, whom she was able to marry only after the death of his wife in 1856. Privately Dickens accepted all this; publicly he kept up a strict front and never felt strong enough to defy the prevailing social codes. When, for instance, he learned (on a bachelor trip to Paris in 1850) that the highly regarded French actress, Mademoiselle Denain, whom he had previously entertained in his home in London, was known to be the mistress of the British ambassador, Lord Normanby (a married man), he immediately wrote to Catherine instructing her to apologize to all the ladies who had been present when she dined at their house.16

  The same taboos prevailed in his writing. He might protest to Forster, as he did in 1856, of the partial and unnatural portraits he was forced to give in his novels because of the tyranny of ‘your morality’; but he made no attempt to break out of the tyranny, and the young men of his later novels are as emasculated as those of the early ones. There’s little change in his sweet, silly, plump, fluttering young women either. Paradoxically, the most alluring of his heroines is Estella (in Great Expectations, not written until 1861), who is made frigid by her upbringing as part of the plot. All the others are inoculated against sexuality by their creator before their stories begin; they are about as tempting as wax fruit.

  This is a commonplace of Dickens criticism. It fits oddly with what is known of his relations with real women. Leaving aside his own family – an insistently pleasure-loving mother, a notably fertile wife, the two idealized sisters-in-law, Mary who died at seventeen and Georgina who made herself into a super-servant – a whole category of other young women he knew and studied to the point of obsession is missing from his work.

  Dickens expended an enormous amount of time and energy working with the delinquents – or more properly the victims – of the Victorian sexual system, and he went out of his way to be understanding and helpful to them. The interest began early. As a young man serving on the jury at a coroner’s inquest, he helped to get the sentence on an unmarried girl accused of killing her baby lightened.17 He sent comforts round to the prison during the trial and insisted that medical evidence suggesting the child could have died naturally should be properly attended to; and he appears to have followed up the fate of the girl. He was still concerning himself with this sort of problem in the last years of his life: on his visit to America in 1867 he gave money to a chambermaid in his New York hotel to enable her to leave for the West with her illegitimate child.18

  Between those two cases there were many more. In 1848 he helped Mrs Gaskell to arrange for a sixteen-year-old girl, who had been ‘seduced’ at fourteen by a surgeon with the connivance of her dressmaker employer, to be saved (in theory at any rate) by being sent to Australia in the care of a kindly couple. He was able to help her in this way because he was already involved in similar efforts in London. This work for young prostitutes covered many years in the middle of his life, from 1846 to 1857, during which, with the help of Miss Coutts, he established a refuge or Home, Urania Cottage, at Shepherd’s Bush, intended to reclaim them and help them to emigrate.* He interviewed and selected many of the girls himself, working with the governors of Bridewell, Pentonville and Tothill Fields prisons, and visiting Ragged Schools for likely candidates. It is obvious that he was fascinated by their appearances, their manners, their histories, and noted down his observations and talks with them with relish. He made frequent visits and involved himself closely in all the details of the organization of Urania Cottage, from the question of the girls’ clothing – he favoured bright colours – to whether they should be encouraged to think of marriage after their reformation: he thought they should be, whereas Miss Coutts took the conventional view that they should not.

  Many of the girls had already served prison sentences. Some were hardly more than children, sold into prostitution by their families. Some genuinely didn’t know their own ages; at least one had concealed the birth of a child, for which she had to stand trial. Many were lousy on admittance; one so covered in sores that she had to be sent to hospital. Some trembled when he spoke to them, but little Sesina, he noted, ‘would corrupt a Nunnery in a fortnight’. Emma Lea was violent and defiant, but Mary Anne Church was a smooth liar, all too good at deceiving chaplains, and he was not surprised when she returned to a life of crime. Isabella Gordon caused Dickens great anxiety; when he spoke to her about her misbehaviour, he was not sure whether she looked white from anger or contrition; she was expelled, then pardoned, then expelled again. On one occasion Dickens recorded how he followed a girl who had been expelled up the road towards Notting Hill. It’s a curious picture, the great author slouching along secretly behind the anxious, angry little reject. Sometimes he worried that the very men who recommended girls to the refuge were implicated in their fates. If he ever questioned his own motives at all, he left no record of that anxiety.

  This sort of practical work, whatever its origins within his psyche, was greatly to his credit, the response of a decent man to a society that worked a cruel double standard. The decency appears in his writing here and there, though in a curious form. Dickens spoke up in his journalism for a kinder attitude to erring women and boldly published Mrs Gaskell’s story of a Manchester prostitute, ‘Lizzie Leigh’, in the first issue of Household Words; and in his novels he invited compassion rather than censure for women disgraced for sexual reasons, from Nancy in Oliver Twist and the smart girl at the race meeting who buys flowers from Little Nell to Lady Dedlock with her guilty secret in Bleak House. But his presentation draws entirely on stereotypes of the Fallen Woman. Nancy shows the self-loathing the good reader required of a prostitute; beyond that, she is null. None of the knowledge Dickens picked up from his encounters with such girls and women was ever allowed to get anywhere near his fiction. It’s as though an automatic shutter came down when he approached the subject.

  Imagine what he could have done with the story of Caroline Maynard, if he had felt able to tell it. Dickens was involved in trying to help her for eighteen months, between the autumn of 1854 and the summer of 1856. She was an unmarried mother in her early thirties, working as a prostitute. She was also strikingly unlike any of the Fallen Women of his novels. Nothing about her – not her background, not her appearance, not her character – resembles in any way those weeping, breast-beating, clothes-tearing, passionately remorseful sinners. He described her as ‘rather small, and young-looking; but pretty, and gentle, and has a very good head’.19 He found her manner exceedingly natural and decided that ‘there can never have been much evil in her, apart from the early circumstances that directed her steps the wrong way’. Consulting Miss Coutts as to how best to help Caroline, he insisted that Urania Cottage would be quite unsuitable for her, as her manner, character and experiences were altogether different from those of the girls installed there. He went on:

  It is a very remarkable case. I very much wish you would see her, and judge for yourself of its peculiarity. There is nothing about her from which you could suppose she had come to this. You might see her and her brother a thousand times – you might meet them in the street, every day in the year – and only notice them as brother and sister who were no doubt living together and taking care of one another. I cannot get the picture of her, out of my head.20

  It was through the brother that Caroline had come to Dickens’s attention. Frederick Maynard had been trying to get work as a ticket-seller at the Olympic Theatre to augment his slender income as a
n architect’s draughtsman, but he had no luck, though perhaps it was at the theatre he heard of or saw Dickens and thought of applying to him. Maynard’s architectural work brought him only £1 15s. a week, and with this, he told Dickens in a letter, he was trying to support his sister and her child. Dickens agreed to meet him. The young man burst into tears as he told his story.

  He was only twenty-three. Caroline, ten years older than her brother, had lived for nearly a decade with a businessman, to whom she had borne a daughter, now two years old. The man was either married already or unwilling to marry her; and although they had lived in a seemingly conventional ménage, when his business failed, he simply abandoned her and disappeared. She had no money and felt she could make no personal application to anyone under the circumstances. Caroline was devoted to her small daughter. According to Frederick, she had gone on the streets and remained a prostitute ever since, as this was the only way of supporting the child.

  Dickens’s first suggestion was the standard colonial solution he had offered for little Em’ly and Martha in David Copperfield, for the inmates of Urania Cottage, and for Mrs Gaskell’s Manchester protegée: that Caroline should emigrate to Australia or the Cape. Frederick took this to mean she would have to leave her daughter behind, and he told Dickens that nothing would make her part with the child. Then in November 1854 Caroline wrote directly to Dickens. She was living in South Kensington, at 23 Bute Street, presumably a lodging house. She wrote:

  My Brother has acquainted me with the kind interest you expressed in my unhappy affairs, and of the hopelessness of my securing a situation in England. Altho’ as you may imagine I should prefer remaining in this Country, still for my Child’s sake I should gratefully accept any honourable opportunity of redeeming my position, even to the breaking of all ties that hold me here – I have no words to thank you for your goodness in listening to my miserable tale, and the hope you have given me of at least one way of escape and which appears to be the only alternative – Should it lie in your power to aid me in this matter you will confer a lasting obligation on me …21

  Dickens called on her in December and found she was indeed prepared to go to South Africa if necessary, with her child, in order to retrieve the past. But the brother and sister were deeply attached to one another and dreaded separation.

  Dickens’s interest was clear, but Miss Coutts had to deliver her approval and the money to help Caroline. Christmas, with its usual family festivities, intervened, and in January 1855 he had an anxious letter from Caroline, to which he replied reassuringly with a renewed promise that he was indeed trying to do something. In March he asked her to come to Tavistock House with her brother for another talk. An invitation to his home must have been the strongest indication that he regarded her as a socially acceptable person, though one caught in a ‘perplexed and complicated’ situation – as he explained again to Miss Coutts, who appears to have been reluctant to act – and not a pariah. The gulf between this attitude and the one he adopted in his fiction is striking; evidently Caroline had a dignity and self-possession unknown among the Fallen Women of literature.

  The trial solution he offered her was also less absolute, more daring and more humane than might have been expected. Caroline was to be installed in a house in a district of London where she was not known and could safely take on a new identity. Dickens was confident that this manoeuvre could work – that it was possible to become someone else simply by moving from one part of town to another. (Later he was to demonstrate the trick himself.) The house rented for Caroline would be furnished – you can’t help wondering whether Dickens chose the furniture and decorations himself, as he had done for his parents when he moved them – and she would be able to earn a living by letting out furnished lodgings. She would appear as that most respectable figure in Victorian London, a widowed landlady. Dickens had ascertained that ‘Mrs Thompson’ was a good housekeeper, had received a decent plain education and ‘acquired accomplishments’ during her years with her protector. There was nothing gaudy or silly about her.

  In the midst of dealing with Caroline Maynard’s problems, he received a jolt from a very different sort of woman. The girl he had loved as a young man, parted from bitterly and not seen again, Maria Beadnell (now Mrs Winter), wrote to him. He was painfully stirred, and still more painfully disillusioned when he came face to face with her: virtuous and respectable but now charmless. Mrs Winter was firmly excluded from further intimacy and her middle age cruelly immortalized as the fat, giggling Flora Finching in Little Dorrit: she made a notable contrast with the culpable Caroline, who remained quiet and charming but could never be written about truthfully.

  He kept in touch with Caroline, both by letter and meetings. He took his family to Paris in the autumn of 1855, where they remained until the following spring; but he made constant journeys back to England during these months. Meanwhile Caroline struggled with her new role as landlady with little success. Perhaps the district chosen was unsuitable – we don’t know where it was – and there was simply not enough demand for rooms; or she may not have known how to go about it. Possibly she found she disliked being a landlady almost as much as being a prostitute; however respectable it was, it also demanded toughness which may not have come easily to a gentle and anxious young woman.

  By May 1856, when Dickens brought his family back to Tavistock House, Caroline had decided she could not make her lodging house work. She and Dickens agreed that she would give notice, sell the furniture and, with the £150 raised from the sale, emigrate to Canada after all. She hoped to find work there as a companion, housekeeper, superintendent of children, or anything which would allow her to be with her daughter. Dickens made a final appeal to Miss Coutts to think of some way of helping her in Canada, and said he himself was trying among the Canada Railway people, though he was doubtful if they would be able to do anything. Once again he insisted on her virtues: ‘She writes very well, is a good plain accountant, and generally neat and handy.’22

  This is his last known reference to Caroline Maynard Thompson or her brother. Two things about the episode are especially striking. One is the sheer amount of time and energy Dickens was prepared to put into this single case during a period when he was writing Little Dorrit in monthly instalments, dealing with an emotional upheaval of his own and making frequent cross-Channel trips. Another is the straightforwardness of his approach. Caroline appears in his description as a credible human being, small, neat, pretty, efficient, a good housekeeper, able to keep her own accounts and devoted to her brother as well as her child. In short, she was not a Fallen Woman but just the sort of young woman he admired. She had been driven to prostitution for one clear reason only: because she had trusted a man who failed to make proper provision for her.

  Although he would not, or could not, draw a realistic portrait of a Caroline Maynard or a Mary Anne Church, the years of his involvement with these young women also produced novels in which his humour was increasingly subordinated to social analysis and criticism, to a degree that nettled the establishment and also some intellectuals who thought he had no right to diagnose the ills of the nation.† The first of the three, Bleak House (1853), put on display an England in which the connecting tissue of society is provided by disease, bad drains, bad housing, bad education, a bad legal system and sexual hypocrisy. The plot is centred on an illegitimate child, and a woman who faces social disgrace should the existence of the child be revealed; in fact, she chooses to die rather than be so disgraced. The child is raised with the burden of her mother’s sin on her shoulders, and she is saved partly by the kindness of a whimsical guardian and partly by her own virtues. These virtues are so low key that most readers find her exasperating and the ‘happy ending’ falsely contrived. Bleak House is essentially a tragic story peopled by a cast of comic characters, and from now on this became the hallmark of Dickens’s work.

  The next book, Hard Times (1854), dedicated itself to declaring that imagination, relaxation and entertainment are all essential i
ngredients of civilized life, even and especially for the poor, including the factory fodder of the midlands and north. The entertainment may take the form of the circus, poetry, the theatre or any other imaginative art; Dickens’s message is that if people are not amused, they will become not merely dull and desiccated but brutal and evil. Hard Times has another bleak ending: although its heroine draws back from the abyss of adultery, she is left facing a peculiarly grim future, still a young and passionate woman but with no prospect of love or happiness.

  Little Dorrit (1857) again cut a cross-section through London society. In part it is a satirical attack on the greed and corruption Dickens observed around him, with the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, remembered so well from his childhood, as its central symbol; but it also draws a contrast between the mean and rigid world of the hero’s supposed mother, a joyless religious bigot, and the spontaneous and generous world of his real mother, who is a singer, sweet but imprudent, and made to suffer for it. The dichotomy is the same as in Hard Times. The real mother, however, is kept entirely out of sight, killed off before the book begins. Dickens does not accept the challenge of presenting her as a person rather than as a symbol, and her behaviour is tidied up for the purposes of family fiction; she is said to have gone through a form of marriage before becoming a mother, and she dies conveniently soon afterwards, so that she can remain a pure, sweet, simple memory.