by David Lodge
Dickens not only wrote novels which became classics of English literature in his own lifetime; he transformed the methods of publishing fiction and thus changed the possibilities of authorship for his contemporaries and their successors. He was a brilliant entrepreneur as well as an artist, driven by painful memories of what it was like to be poor, and the excitement of making money by his own efforts. The story of his first meteoric success is worth recalling. In his early twenties, without private wealth or a conventional gentleman’s education behind him, he was eking out a meagre living as a Parliamentary reporter and freelance journalist. Some “sketches” of contemporary life among the lower classes, published under the nom-de-plume “Boz,” attracted enough attention to win him a commission that another writer might have treated as hackwork: providing narrative copy to accompany the monthly publication of a series of sporting prints by a popular artist of the day, Robert Seymour. Dickens seized the opportunity to create The Pickwick Papers. Very soon the artist found himself playing a subordinate role, obliged to take instructions from the courteous but determined young writer. The unfortunate and mentally unstable Seymour apparently couldn’t bear the humiliation, and blew his brains out while working on the second number. He was replaced by Hablôt Knight Browne (“Phiz”); and the sales of The Pickwick Papers, which had been sluggish at first, suddenly took off on the wings of Dickens’s comic genius. Only 400 copies of the first issue had been published. Before the end, the print run was 40,000.
The success of the monthly publication of Pickwick encouraged Dickens to use the same or similar methods for his subsequent novels, from Oliver Twist onwards, before issuing them in volume form. He launched a miscellany called Master Humphrey’s Clock in which The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge were published in weekly installments. Later he founded a magazine, Household Words, which provided a platform for serialization of his own and other novelists’ work. Publication in parts and magazine serialization, pioneered by Dickens, became the standard form for the initial publication of novels in the Victorian age, and is one reason why he and other writers of high literary quality, like Thackeray, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, commanded a huge popular audience. Smiley is not the first to draw a parallel with modern television drama. The serialised Victorian novel was something between a mini-series and a soap opera, its installments often appearing over a period of more than a year. The audience absorbed the story and became familiar with the characters in a rhythm almost as slow as their own lives. And because Dickens and some of his contemporaries started publishing their novels serially before they had finished writing them, feedback from the audience could affect the development of the story and the roles of the characters. Dickens, for example, sent young Martin Chuzzlewit to America in an effort to revive flagging sales, and wrote more and more scenes for Mrs. Gamp as she proved more and more popular with his readers.
Towards the end of the century this solidarity between literary novelists and the reading public began to disintegrate. Some writers—Hardy was a notable example—fell foul of the prudish constraints imposed by magazine editors on the representation of sexuality Others, like Henry James, found that the pursuit of formal beauty and psychological subtlety in their fiction made it less marketable. It is recorded that in 1900 the business manager of the Atlantic Monthly, which had serialised several of James’s novels, “begged the editor . . . ‘with actual tears in his eyes’ not to print another ‘sinker’ by him lest the Atlantic be thought ‘a high-brow periodical.’”2 The plea was revealing and prophetic. In the modern period a split developed between cutting-edge literary fiction and middlebrow entertainment fiction. Practitioners of the former, like James, Conrad, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, resigned themselves, with good or ill grace, to addressing a small but discriminating readership, and were often exiles from their own society in either a literal or a metaphorical sense; while exponents of the traditional, page-turning novel, with well-made plots and an unproblematic rendering of social reality, like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Compton Mackenzie, and J. B. Priestley, were the commercially successful literary “celebrities,” interviewed in, reported by, and themselves contributing to the mass media. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, this divide became less evident, indeed almost invisible. For a variety of reasons, some cultural, some socioeconomic, literary fiction became more reader-friendly and an object of exploitative interest to the mass media and big business. The “literary best-seller” (that is, an artistically ambitious and innovative book that also sells in huge numbers, like Midnight’s Children or The Name of the Rose)—a concept that would have seemed a contradiction in terms in the period of high modernism—once again became an achievable goal, as it had been in the era of Dickens, and the authors of such books are now celebrities. Even the modestly successful literary novelist today is expected to take part in the marketing of his or her work by giving interviews, appearing on TV and radio, taking part in public readings, book signings, and other meet-the-author events, and thus experiences, in a pale form, the phenomenon of author-as-celebrity that Dickens’s career inaugurated, and the stresses and contradictions that go with it.
Dickens was of course “the Inimitable”—it was the epithet he most liked to be applied to himself—and he experienced both the gratifications and the penalties of celebrity on a heroic scale. The success of his early novels was phenomenal. By the age of thirty, Smiley observes, he was already the most famous writer of his day. “He had achieved not simply literary success, but something else, a separate status. His voice and his vision had become beloved; as Ackroyd puts it, he was ‘public property.’” A letter to his friend and confidant John Forster about a public dinner given for him in Edinburgh in June 1841 shows his awareness that there was something unprecedented about the position he had attained in English life. “The tone of his letter was exultant, pleased, and, at least to some degree, amazed. He seems to have been especially struck by the fact that he was so young and the men who came to celebrate him were old and established.”
The exceptional popularity of his books extended to the New World. The story of the crowds waiting on the quays in New York for the ship carrying the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop to dock, calling out to the passengers and crew, “Is Little Nell dead?” is well known. But it was on his first visit to America in 1842, not long after that triumphal dinner in Edinburgh, that Dickens discovered celebrity could be a curse as well as a blessing. He was lionised, feted, royally entertained, and at first delighted by all the attention. But soon the relentless glare of publicity, the intrusiveness of American journalists, and the impossibility of securing any peace and privacy for himself and his wife Catherine (who had reluctantly accompanied him) became too much. “We can recognize it,” says Smiley, the seasoned modern pro, “as a nightmare book tour, the author and his wife unprotected by publicists or any sort of previous experience.” Dickens became uneasy, irritable, and openly critical of the host country. His bitter complaints about American publishers’ pirating of his work, however justified they might now appear to us, were not well received. The euphoria of his initial reception turned sour, with disillusionment on both sides. Smiley comments shrewdly:
The new machinery of capitalistic publishing had carried his work far and wide, bringing a single man, a single voice, into a personal relationship with huge numbers of people whom he had never met, and yet who felt intimate with him, because the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. But both the author and the readers had misread the relationship from either side.
The same kind of misreading would in due course occur in England; but there, because of its stratified class system, and more complex code of manners, the line between public and private life was still implicitly understood and respected. American society in the 1840s, brash and democratic, prefigured our own Age of Publicity, in which anyone in public life is deemed to
be a legitimate object of public curiosity, all the time. Politicians and film stars have learned to cope with this by performing their private lives in public while actually living them in secret, in the company of other celebs, protected by walls and security guards. But the professional lives of politicians and film stars do not entail the kind of self-disclosure that seems inherent in writing novels. As Smiley emphasises, the novel is, among all the literary genres and artistic forms, peculiarly focussed upon consciousness, on the representation of the thoughts and feelings that most of us, most of the time, keep to ourselves: “the intimacy [Dickens’s readers] felt through the work came from the natural power of the novel to cross the boundaries of appearance and reveal the inner life . . .” That is to say, not only the inner lives of the characters, but also the inner life of the man who created them. “Authors live in a dialogue with their work, and their work is their inner life made concrete.” Modern novelists have developed various defences and disguises—limited point of view, impersonal or unreliable narrators, metafictional tricks of all kinds—to deter readers from making simplistic inferences about the author from his work; but the convention of the omniscient authorial voice favoured by Dickens and most other Victorian novelists encouraged their readers to feel that the text they held in their hands was a direct line to a real human being—that the “Charles Dickens” whose name appeared on the title page of the novel was identical with the person who actually wrote it. But the authorial persona is a rhetorical construction, a “second self,” as Wayne Booth called it in The Rhetoric of Fiction. When the real author encounters real readers, it can be an uncomfortable experience on both sides.
It is important to recognize, however, that Dickens’s celebrity was not forced upon him. He invited it and, most of the time, enjoyed it. It satisfied an element in his character that delighted in public performance and role-playing. Smiley rightly emphasises Dickens’s love of the theatre, and his enthusiasm for acting. While writing Pickwick he sometimes went to the theatre every night of the week. As a young man he seriously considered becoming a professional actor, and only indisposition prevented him from attending an audition that might have set him on a different career path. As it was, he somehow found time, amid all his writing and editing and business and philanthropic enterprises and domestic responsibilities, to produce and act in elaborate amateur theatricals which were often performed in public theatres, before large audiences. A painting by a Royal Academician portrays him in magnificent costume as Bobadill in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, which he also directed. This fascination—one might almost call it an obsession—with the theatre left its mark on Dickens’s novels, not only in those that deal directly with the stage (the Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby or Wopsle’s Hamlet in Great Expectations) but in his distinctive way of creating characters and making them speak and interact. Ackroyd notes his remark to a friend, that “he believed he had more talent for the drama than for literature, as he certainly had more delight in acting than in any other work whatever.” It seems obvious that if the Victorian theatre had been as receptive to the literary imagination as the Elizabethan was, Dickens would have been a playwright like Shakespeare rather than a novelist, but the Victorian theatre was in fact trivial and philistine, reducing tragedy to melodrama and comedy to farce. Indeed, even its melodrama frequently degenerated into unintentional farce, as Dickens recognized:
The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it. An outlaw had been very successful in doing something somewhere, and came home in triumph, to the sound of shouts and fiddles, to greet his wife—a lady of masculine mind, who talked a good deal about her father’s bones, which it seemed were unburied, though whether from a peculiar taste on the part of the old gentleman himself, or the reprehensible neglect of his relations, did not appear. This outlaw’s wife was somehow or other mixed up with a patriarch, living in a castle a long way off, and this patriarch was the father of several of the characters, but he didn’t exactly know which, and was uncertain whether he had brought up the right ones in his castle, or the wrong ones, but rather inclined to the latter opinion, and, being uneasy, relieved his mind with a banquet, during which solemnity somebody in a cloak said, “Beware!” which somebody was known by nobody (except the audience) to be the outlaw himself, who had come there for reasons unexplained, but possibly with an eye to the spoons.
The sublimely funny episode of Nicholas Nickleby from which this is extracted shows that Dickens was well aware of the absurdity of much of the popular drama of his day, but he drew directly on melodramatic diction and gesture at the emotional climaxes of his stories, and this can create problems for modern readers. Dickens does not mean us to smile when, in the same novel, the young hero prevents the tyrant schoolmaster Squeers from beating the boy Smike in this kind of language:
“Wretch,” rejoined Nicholas, fiercely, “touch him at your peril! I will not stand by and see it done; my blood is up, and I have the strength of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for by Heaven I will not spare you, if you drive me on!”
In the winter of 1856–57 Dickens collaborated with his friend and fellow-novelist, Wilkie Collins, on a melodrama entitled The Frozen Deep. The story was loosely based on the British Arctic expedition of 1845 to find the North West Passage, in the course of which all the participants lost their lives. Collins wrote the script, but Dickens worked on it as well, and took the role of the leader of the expedition, Richard Wardour. Collins had represented him as the villain of the piece, but Dickens rewrote the part, making him into a more complex individual who redeems himself by a final act of self-sacrifice. This inspired the character of Sydney Carton (“It is a far, far better thing that I do . . .”) in Dickens’s next novel, A Tale of Two Cities; but the play was to have other, more private and personal consequences. In portraying Wardour as a man “perpetually seeking and never finding affection,” Dickens was acting out (in the psychoanalytical sense) his own increasing dissatisfaction with his marriage, and the play was eventually to bring into his life a woman who would apparently satisfy that longing.
By all accounts The Frozen Deep is a typical melodrama of its period, a creakily contrived vehicle for extravagant displays of emotion and overblown rhetoric. It was first performed privately at Dickens’s London home as a Twelfth Night entertainment for friends, with Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina and two of his daughters in the cast. But an indication of the importance Dickens attached to this production is that he invited newspaper reviewers to watch it. They, and the rest of the audience, were stunned by the intensity of Dickens’s performance. Later that year he arranged public performances of the play in Manchester, to raise money for a deceased friend’s family. Realising that his own womenfolk would not be able to hold the stage in a large auditorium, he hired the services of a family of professional actors: Frances Ternan, a widow, and her three daughters, Fanny, Maria, and Ellen (“Nelly”). The first night was a sensation. Dickens reported to a friend: “It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together in the palm of one’s hand . . . and to see the hardened Carpenters on the sides crying and trembling at it.” Maria Ternan, an experienced actress, could not restrain real tears as she cradled the dying Wardour in her arms at the climax of the piece.
Obviously something very extraordinary was happening in these performances. Like a great professional actor, Dickens was transmuting dramatic base metal into gold, but he was doing so by drawing deeply on all kinds of conflicted personal emotion. The frozen deep of his own psyche was melted, and the experience was a kind of therapy. He wrote to Collins subsequently, “I have never had a moment’s peace or content since the last night of The Frozen Deep.” But perhaps that remark also reflected his growing attachment to Nelly Ternan and the trouble it caused in his domestic life. As he began to see more a
nd more of her, Dickens also began proceedings to obtain a legal separation from Catherine, but he indignantly denied that there was any connection between these developments, and insisted, in rather embarrassing and undignified public pronouncements, that his friendship with an unnamed “young lady” was entirely proper and her character irreproachable. In due course he set up Nelly and her mother (who conferred a kind of respectability on the arrangement) in various houses in England and France, and visited them discreetly, but whether she was actually his mistress, and, as was rumoured, bore him a child, no one has been able to ascertain, including Claire Tomalin, who has written the definitive study of the relationship. Dickens had by this time learned to protect his private life with great skill, and Nelly, who outlived him by forty-four years, kept their secret.
Dickens’s attitude towards love, marriage, and sexuality, in his life and in his work, is a complex and puzzling subject. Most of his biographers have been baffled by his choice of Catherine Hogarth as a wife. His letters to her written during their courtship give no clue, conveying little sense of real passion. She was rather dull, and not particularly good-looking. Gamely as she tried, she was quite incapable of responding adequately to her husband’s intelligence, wit, imagination, and energy. What did he see in her? Perhaps the simplest explanation is that he was a virile but idealistic young man who wished urgently to satisfy his sexual drive in a morally and socially approved fashion, and she was the first woman to accept him. He had courted the love of his youth, Maria Beadnell, for four frustrating years, only to be rejected by her and her family because of his uncertain prospects. When he met Catherine these were improving, and he married her on the strength of the Pickwick commission. He claimed later that he realised after only two years that the marriage had been a mistake, yet he went on sleeping with Catherine, and impregnating her, until, after twenty-one years, ten children, and several miscarriages, he instructed her maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that they could sleep apart. That was in 1857, the year he met Nelly Ternan.
