Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  FN

  Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson)

  MRT

  Mary Barton

  Biog

  J. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (1993)

  36. Fanny Fern 1811–1872

  I am convinced that there are times in everybody’s experience when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

  ‘Fanny Fern’ was a bestselling novelist, serial wife and newspaper columnist (some accounts say the first columnist in the country, others merely the highest paid). Born Sarah Payson Willis in Portland, Maine, she was the fifth of nine children of a minister who himself doubled as a journalist. Pert from birth, her family nickname was ‘Sal Volatile’ – no fainting when Fanny was around. New England, with its advanced views on female education, was a lucky place for her to have been brought up. Like her better known brother, N. P. Willis, with whom her subsequent relations were to be vexed, Sarah learned about journalism early, helping her father edit his periodical The Youth’s Companion.

  In 1837 Sarah Willis married the dashing young banker (some accounts demote him to ‘bank cashier’), Charles Eldredge. The happy couple had three daughters, but in 1846 Charles died of typhoid fever, leaving his wife and two surviving children destitute. The Willises proved unhelpful. Sarah went on to make a hasty second marriage with a widowed Boston merchant, Samuel Farrington, but they separated within two years. Sarah found herself once more without support and lost custody of her children. She turned to teaching and, in 1851, to her pen.

  Under the pseudonym ‘Fanny Fern’ she began to publish ‘fun’ sketches in the papers, which proved hugely successful. Her first book, Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, came out in 1853, when the author was a mature forty-two. She went on to write two novels, notably the autobiographical Ruth Hall (1856), which reportedly earned her the then massive sum of $8,000. ‘A domestic tale of the present time,’ the novel ponders the intertwining pressures of wifehood and female authorship in the form of Ruth Ellet’s happy marriage (evoking the author’s years with Eldredge), her early widowing, and her struggle for fame in the cut-throat, wholly masculine, world of New York journalism. It ends, inevitably, on the happiest and most pious of notes:

  As the carriage rolled from under the old stone gate-way, a little bird, startled from out its leafy nest, trilled forth a song as sweet and clear as the lark’s at heaven’s own blessed gate.

  ‘Accept the omen, dear Ruth,’ said Mr. Walter. ‘Life has much of harmony yet in store for you.’

  Ruth Hall is Jane Eyre Americanised, modernised and smartened up. As with Brontë’s novel, the fact that living figures (not least Sarah’s infuriated brother, Nathaniel) could identify themselves portrayed in its pages led to furore, which led to higher sales.

  In 1856 Sarah married the biographer James Parton, a husband eleven years her junior. Now experienced in the matter of such vows, a pre-nuptial agreement ensured that she would keep her substantial earnings. In the same year as her marriage she made a contract with the editor Robert Bonner to write her ‘Fanny Fern’ columns exclusively for his New York Ledger. He paid her a huge salary of $100 a week – an expenditure which he shrewdly made common knowledge. However, it was not all wispy fern leaves, blowing airily in the prints. A ‘Whitmanite’ (when affiliation with the ‘deviant’ poet was risky), Willis was also a feminist – if a passive one. The best strategy for women, she believed, was to play possum. Not all her co-ideologues agreed. A daughter born to Willis’s last marriage died and she herself died, prematurely, of cancer.

  FN

  Sarah Payson Willis (‘Fanny Fern’, later Eldredge, Farrington, Parton)

  MRT

  Ruth Hall

  Biog

  J. W. Warren, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992)

  37. William Makepeace Thackeray 1811–1863

  Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world?

  He was, said the historian G. M. Young, a man travelling through life in a first-class carriage, fearing that he was carrying a second-class ticket. The great ‘snobographer’ (‘snob’, incidentally, was a word Thackeray invented in its current sense) was himself, if not quite one of the genus snobiensis, unsure of his social status, and constitutionally irritable. His background was upper enough. The Thackerays were Yorkshire gentry, going back generations. William was born in India, where his father was a senior colonial administrator, before dying, prematurely, in 1816 – leaving, in addition to his only legitimate child, a by-blow sibling by his Indian concubine. Thackeray was never stable on the subject of race; nor did he ever acknowledge the existence of his half-sister.

  His mother remarried. Her second husband, Major Carmichael Smyth, was a man she had loved as a girl, but whom, she had been told, was dead – to forestall what her guardians saw as an imprudent match. It was a common ruse in that class, at that time. Thackeray loved his stepfather, and immortalised him as his Quixote de nos jours, Colonel Newcome, in The Newcomes. His mother – sternly evangelical – he had a much harder time with. Psycho-biographers, who have been attracted to Thackeray like bees to a honeypot, see strains running through all his subsequent emotional life. His mother is depicted in the person of ‘virtuous’ characters such as Amelia Sedley, or Mrs Arthur Pendennis (to whom, mischievously, Thackeray gave as maiden name that of the most famous courtesan of the time, Laura Bell: both Mrs Pendennis and Mrs Carmichael Smyth were very severe on sexual immorality).

  Young William was returned to England, aged seven, to receive the education of a gentleman at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge. On the way back, the ship touched at St Helena, where he caught a glimpse of the Corsican monster – sowing the seed of a lifetime fascination with the Napoleonic Wars. He went on to let his family down – an idler at school, he left the university ‘plucked’ (without a degree), having lost most of his sizeable patrimony gambling. And, it is likely, having picked up the gonorrhea which would curtail his life and cause him lifelong urethral difficulties. On being introduced to a Mr Peawell in later years, he sighed ‘I wish I could’. On the plus side, his early errors supplied the raw material for his fine Bildungsroman, The History of Pendennis (1850). Novelists waste nothing – even their own wastefulness.

  After false starts in law in England, and drawing and journalism in Paris, the prodigiously gifted – but still wayward – young man embarked on a ten-year-long stint, ‘writing for his life’ with anonymous or pseudonymous ‘magazinery’. It was an apprenticeship but, at a penny-a-line, a tough one. By 1836 he had squandered what remained of his personal fortune and had married, improvidently, an Irish girl with no dowry. Having borne him two surviving daughters, Isabella developed incurable insanity. After 1840 they lived apart and by the time of the publication of Jane Eyre in 1847, his situation was exactly that of Mr Rochester – although Thackeray did not keep his wife in the attic, but in a comfortable asylum in Camberwell. It cost him three guineas a week.

  By the early 1840s, Thackeray had made a reputation for himself as a savage and incorrigibly ‘cynical’ satirist, with works like the Hibernophobic Barry Lyndon (1844), the autobiography of an Irish bully and braggart (thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s film, now among the author’s best-known works). He had his first unequivocal success as a writer with The Snobs of England (1846–7), published in the congenial columns of the newly launched magazine Punch. At the same time he was having difficulty placing a more ambitious narrative, what he then called ‘A Novel without a Hero’. Eventually Vanity Fair, as it was brilliantly renamed, came out in Dickensian monthly parts, with Punch’s publisher, illustrated by the novelist himself. He was thirty-five, had published millions of words, but this was the first work to proclaim his name to the world. He was a scribbler no more.

  After a slow start, the ‘Waterloo novel’ – following the intertwining careers of two young women, one wicked, one virtuous – was a huge hit. Thackeray only managed a fraction of Dickens’s sales but, at his
zenith, his critical reputation stood higher. Success mellows a man and his worldview was markedly less cynical after Vanity Fair. It also accompanied changes in his domestic arrangements: he set up home in Kensington with his daughters and – while remaining a clubman – was also a paterfamilias and less the bohemian. Now at the ‘top of the tree’, as he crowed to his mother, and regarded as the literary heir to Fielding, he wrote a Victorian Tom Jones with his next monthly serial, Pendennis (1848–50). As in Vanity Fair, one of Thackeray’s projects (with characters like Dobbin and Warrington) was to ‘redefine the ideal of the gentleman’ for his age and for England’s dominant middle classes. Another was to raise ‘the dignity of literature’: to make it a gentlemanly occupation. Dickens, by contrast, was ‘low’.

  Thackeray’s development as a novelist was impeded by his falling victim to the 1849 cholera epidemic, which swept its deadly way through London until put down by the redoubtable Dr John Snow, who realised the capital’s water supply was to blame. He survived – thanks to Dickens, who dispatched his personal physician – but Thackeray’s energies were never quite up to the literary tasks he set himself thereafter. None the less, he followed up with his most ‘careful’ novel, The History of Henry Esmond (1852). Published in the traditional ‘three-decker’ form, there was none of the earlier month-to-month helter-skelter with deadlines. The narrative – loosely modelled on Scott’s Waverley – is set in Thackeray’s favourite Queen Anne period. Like Macaulay, and other proponents of the Whig thesis, Thackeray saw the early eighteenth century as the moment when British parliamentary democracy, and its middle-class hegemony, came into being. The mood of Esmond, brilliant as its plot structure, political thematising and prose are, was darkened by the novelist’s falling in love, desperately and hopelessly, with his best friend’s wife. This imbroglio explains a famously unsatisfactory ending. As George Eliot sharply put it: ‘the hero is in love with the daughter all the way through and then marries the mother’.

  Thackeray’s career, thereafter, was glorious but its products less good. None of his subsequent full-length fictions (The Newcomes, The Virginians, The Adventures of Philip) equals what went before. But as editor of the newly launched Cornhill Magazine, with the highest-ever stipend for such work, he could, in The Roundabout Papers, lay claim to being the best essayist in the language since Addison. No Victorian ‘prosed’ better. In his last three years, Thackeray was wealthy enough – thanks, in large part, to remunerative lecture tours in America – to design and build himself a Queen Anne-style mansion in Palace Green (it is now the Israeli Embassy in London, something that the casually anti-Semitic novelist would have found suitably ironic). There were recurrent bust-ups with Dickens and his bohemian proxies – notably the ‘Garrick Club Affair’ in 1856. He always played the ‘gentleman’ card, which more often than not trumped his opponents. He died, prematurely, in 1863, before being able fully to relax into his fame, or his earning power, or to become what he always wanted to be – another Macaulay, or, failing that, an MP. The post-mortem revealed that his brain was preternaturally large: something that surprises no one who reads his fiction.

  FN

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  MRT

  Vanity Fair

  Biog

  D. J. Taylor, Thackeray (1999)

  38. Charles Dickens 1812–1870

  Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. Mr Micawber’s economics

  There have been some eighty ‘lives’ of Dickens. Yet posterity knows little more of that life, or at least, its inner compartments, than his intimate friend John Forster grudgingly divulged in the biography published while Dickens’s body was practically still warm. Dickens was born at Portsea, the son of an £80-a-year clerk in the Naval Pay Office. His mother was the daughter of another clerk who had been disgraced as an embezzler. There were ten Dickens children, five of whom survived, leaving Charles the eldest son. His early childhood was massively unsettled. The family moved to London in 1816, back to Chatham in 1817, and back yet again to London in 1822 to settle in a seedy quarter of Camden Town (immortalised in the Staggs’s Gardens chapters in Dombey and Son).

  John Dickens’s salary of £350 a year should have been more than adequate but, like Mr Micawber, he lived beyond his means. The home atmosphere was friendly but lacked the intense love that young ‘Boz’ (a corruption of his family nickname, ‘Moses’) craved. By 1824 the family finances were in ruins, and at the age of twelve, Charles was sent off to work in a shoe-blacking factory on the bank of the Thames for a measly few shillings a week. Although this menial labour lasted only a few months, the ‘secret agony of my soul’ scarred him for the rest of his days. His parents, he bitterly recalled, could not have been happier than if he’d gone off to Cambridge University. The relevant chapters in David Copperfield are poignant. But John Dickens, imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, may be thought to have had it harder, if more deservedly. Dickens is unforgiving in his depiction of his father as ‘the father of the Marshalsea’ in his 1857 novel Little Dorrit. Time softened neither his hurt nor his resentment. Fathers have a hard time of it in his novels.

  A windfall legacy helped the Dickenses out of their plight, as it does the Dorrits, and afforded Charles some belated schooling. Cambridge, however, was never in prospect. In 1827 the family finances were again rocky and he articled himself as a solicitor’s clerk in Gray’s Inn, at a pound a week. He hated law, he decided, and drifted to nearby Fleet Street, where he found journalism very much to his taste. He taught himself shorthand and, at the age of seventeen, was an in-demand parliamentary reporter for the London press. He was also beginning to write the newspaper pieces which would eventually be gathered as Sketches by Boz – vivid snapshots of London (all but one of his later novels would be set in the city: he never stopped sketching it).

  He was now on £5 a week and had hopes of marrying a banker’s daughter – but her family frustrated the match. In 1835, work for the Evening Chronicle led to his engagement to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the co-editor of the paper. This time he was not obstructed and they married and set up home with Kate’s younger sister, Mary. Dickens had the tenderest feelings for his sister-in-law and her sudden death, in May 1837, was another lasting wound. He kept articles of her clothing, as treasured relics, until his death. There is considerable speculation as to what, precisely, his inner feelings were towards Mary Hogarth – as, indeed, there were scurrilous allegations of an incestuous interest in his other sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, twenty years later. The speculation leads to no worthwhile conclusion. Forster knew; we never shall.

  Another death proved useful to him in the mid-1830s – that of his senior partner on the new monthly serial for which he was contracted by Chapman and Hall. The illustrator Robert Seymour’s suicide (arguably partly inspired by the aggressive energy of his young collaborator) left Dickens in charge of the project. The Pickwick Papers, which began publishing in April 1836, started poorly but by the end of its run, in November 1837, it was selling an unprecedented 40,000 an instalment and was the talk of England. Dickens was at the top of the tree. A rival publisher, Richard Bentley, offered the young star editorship of his new Miscellany. Dickens accepted and contributed Oliver Twist (brilliantly illustrated by George Cruikshank) to its pages. The story of the parish boy who asked for more was gloomier by far than the gallivantings of Mr Pickwick and established a new genre of ‘social problem’ fiction.

  In 1837 the first of Dickens’s ten children was born – he was a fond but continuously distracted father. The distractions were gratifying in the extreme, however: well before his thirtieth birthday, he was the country’s favourite and best-paid author. Novels such as Nicholas Nickleby earned him thousands and sold by the tens of thousands. He rashly took on so many contracts at this stage of his life that there was fear of his ‘busting the boiler’. And he was increasingly v
exed at the ‘brigandage’ of publishers – specifically Bentley. He hated other people’s hands on his work.

  In 1842, a first trip to America – where his novels were all the rage – produced the sharply observed American Notes and supplied the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit. The failure of that novel to maintain his sky-high sales led to a break with Chapman and Hall. Dickens transferred his fiction to Bradbury and Evans, who were printers. Publishers interfered too much: he did not need them. As innovative as he was energetic, he invented the seasonal gift book market with A Christmas Carol (1843). At the same period he took time out to travel in Europe and rethink the whole basis of his narrative art. The result was Dombey and Son, a palpably darker work, organised by his new narrative planning systems (the famous ‘worksheets’). Dickens experimented with autobiographical narration (and some discreet introspection) in David Copperfield (1850). His attack on the iniquities of the English legal system, Bleak House (1852), continued the experiment and contained his most pointed social criticism to date. Among all else, Dickens was enlarging the sphere and seriousness of English fiction. It could now be a weapon in the novelist’s hand.

  He drew on his fame to enter public life. With the bank heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts, he set up a rehabilitation home for London prostitutes called, rather unhappily, Urania Cottage. With Edward Bulwer-Lytton he established the Guild of Literature and Art for indigent writers and artists. In 1850 he started a 2d weekly magazine of his own, Household Words, which became the vehicle for his ruminations on current events. His hard-hitting novel on the great Preston strike of mill workers, Hard Times (1854), was published in the paper, alongside his journalistic articles on the topic.