Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Later accounts of Dickens’s courtship of Maria usually assert that her parents were chary of her young suitor, not only because of his own uncertain prospects but also because of his father’s chronic financial distress—especially alarming, no doubt, to a banker like Mr. Beadnell. In November 1831, around the time of “The Bill of Fare,” Mr. Dickens senior had been summoned to appear in the Court for Relief of Insolvent Debtors, a disgrace which would have furrowed Mr. Beadnell’s eyebrows when he saw notice of the summons in The London Gazette. Nor was it Mr. Dickens’s first appearance at the Insolvent Debtors’ Court. Perhaps this latest embarrassment determined Beadnell to scotch his daughter’s romance with the son of such a shiftless family. (Years later, when Dickens was prosperous and celebrated, it was Maria’s husband who went bankrupt.)

  The Beadnells’ wish to rid their daughter of her importunate suitor is often cited as the reason that Maria was at some point dispatched to school in Paris. “My existence was once entirely uprooted and my whole Being blighted,” Dickens recalled, “by the Angel of my soul being sent there to finish her education!” Just when she left for Paris and how long she stayed are mysteries, however. An early period in Dickens’s courtship seems the most likely time for the Angel of his soul sojourning abroad. Maria turned twenty-one in November 1831, and her schooling should have been finished by then, but the removal to Paris might nonetheless have come later. “The Bill of Fare,” composed about the time of her twenty-first birthday, makes no discernible allusion to any absence. But she seems curiously missing from letters written to Kolle during the latter months of the following year, 1832, with no requests that letters be smuggled into 2 Lombard Street, and in fact no apparent reference to Maria’s being around at all. One despondent note, written during a rainy week, remarks that “my cold is about as bad as a Cold can be, and on the whole I feel tolerably happy and comfortable to day, the state of the weather being so admirably adapted to dispel any gloomy ideas of which I always have a plentiful stock.” Perhaps his gloom was owing to Maria’s absence abroad.

  Her schooling in Paris, whenever it occurred, may have extinguished her flickering interest in Dickens. If so, Mr. Beadnell could have congratulated himself on his strategy—if she had in fact been sent abroad to disengage her from an unwelcome suitor. But there is no specific evidence that the Beadnells sent Maria away to separate them. Dickens’s relations with her parents were subject to fluctuations; an undated note to Kolle, possibly from early 1833, suggests the uncertainty: “With our friends the Beadnell’s [sic] too you can do no wrong; I am not so sure of coming off well.” But he maintained amicable relations with Mr. Beadnell for many years afterward: he was a dinner guest of the Beadnells five or six years later, for example, and on another occasion invited them to attend a play at Covent Garden Theatre with him; and he wrote Beadnell letters of condolence on the deaths of his son in 1839 and his wife in 1849. In 1852, when Dickens was on his way to perform in an amateur theatrical production in Shrewsbury, Mr. Beadnell, now retired and living near Shrewsbury, invited him to visit, and Dickens replied cordially: “Your handwriting is like a breath of my hobbydehoyhood and is delightful to encounter.” Beadnell may have been a bore, but Dickens seems to have borne no resentment.

  Even if parental disapproval asserted itself, moreover, Dickens’s pleas to Maria imply that she herself was much of the problem. In urging her to accept the gift of an annual, he had felt obliged to assure her: “Do not misunderstand me: I am not desirous by making presents or by doing any other act to influence your thoughts, wishes, or feelings in the slightest degree.” Did Maria typically receive gifts so ungraciously as to regard them as insidious persuasions, or bribes? That Dickens thought this abject disclaimer necessary suggests that she was a difficult customer. She had forbidden him to see her: “I cannot unless you will grant me an opportunity speak to you either on this, or any other subject;—I hope and trust you will not refuse: consider how long it is since I have seen you.” While her parents might discourage visits to Lombard Street, his entreaties suggest that the difficulties of giving Maria a gift and of seeing her had less to do with her scruples as a dutiful daughter than with her own resolve, or caprice: “Surely, surely you will not refuse.… I hope and trust you will not refuse.”

  This chill occurred only about halfway through his three-year pursuit of Maria, and perhaps she soon smiled on him again. But whatever the chronology of their romance—however long and however steadily the sunshine of her favor lasted—she eventually decided to cut him loose. The final crisis arrived in 1833, but had probably been gestating for months, if not longer; the glove letter suggests she had begun to fall away, or at least waver, as early as the autumn of 1831. Later he recalled “many” melancholy late-night perambulations to Lombard Street during their growing estrangement: “When we were falling off from each other, I came from the House of Commons many a night at two or three o’Clock in the morning, only to wander past the place you were asleep in.” The Beadnells’ by no means lay on his way home from Westminster; his detours to Lombard Street took him about two miles out of his way and left him a hike of another three miles along dark streets to reach his own home. Such melancholy late-night pilgrimages to the shrine of his beloved suggest that his own ardor was scarcely diminished—that the “falling off” was entirely on Maria’s part.

  In February 1833, Dickens turned twenty-one and his parents, perhaps prompted by Dickens himself, gave a party to celebrate his coming of age. Invitations to a journalist friend and to Henry Kolle and Kolle’s two brothers survive; there is no solid evidence that Maria was invited or attended. Thirty years later, however, he wrote a reminiscent essay, “Birthday Celebrations,” which purports to describe his twenty-first birthday:

  I gave a party on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years.

  Though “Birthday Celebrations” is hardly reliable autobiography, Maria may have attended the gala, as the essay claims. But by now her interest had vanished. Soon after, he wrote the first of a series of five despairing love letters to her, and moved by sentimentality or vanity she preserved them. Together they show a youthful romance in its waning days, and give us our best glimpse of young Charles Dickens in love.

  The first of these letters is dated March 18, 1833, six weeks after his twenty-first birthday. His letter about gloves, a year and a half earlier, had begun “My dear Maria”; now he salutes her as “Dear Miss Beadnell” and plunges into his motive for writing. After a “painful struggle,” he has determined to return “the little present”—probably a miniature portrait of herself—which she had given him “sometime since (which I have always prized as I still do far beyond anything I ever possessed).” In addition to this cherished icon, he is also returning other “mementos of our past correspondence” (tied together, he remembered more than twenty years later, “with a blue ribbon, of the color of the gloves”). This reluctant renunciation has been compelled, he explains, by her recent coldness—perhaps a snub at his own birthday party: “Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference” on her part, while for him “they have never failed to prove a fertile source of wretchedness and misery.” His courtship “has long since been worse than hopeless,” and “further perseverance … can only expose me to deserved ridicule.” Such being the case, it would be “mean and contemptible” of him to “keep by me one gift of yours or to preserve one single line or word of remembrance or affection from you.”

  He may have felt it chivalrous to return Maria’s letters and gifts; such tokens of past entanglements could, after all, be embarrassing, even dangerous (twenty years later, Lady Dedlock of Bleak House would be undone by old love letters). But the melodramatic gesture may simply have been an excuse for writing to Maria; as an avid theater-goer, Dickens knew stage protocol for a lover’s renunciation. Having explained his return of the mementos
, he went on: “I have but one word more to say and I say it in my own vindication,” a characteristic swerve into self-justification, for Dickens could not easily admit himself at fault, and “one word more” turned into several hundred, lauding himself—“I deserve the merit of having ever throughout our intercourse acted fairly, intelligibly, and honorably”—and chastising her: “I have never held out encouragement which I knew I never meant; I have never indirectly sanctioned hopes which I well knew I did not intend to fulfil,” and so on.

  Thinking it unwise to end on a sour note, however, he closed by assuring her of his eternal affection and good wishes: “Nothing will ever afford me more real delight than to hear that you the object of my first, and my last love, are happy. If you are as happy as I hope you may be, you will indeed possess every blessing that this World can afford.”

  Reading this poignant letter, any right-feeling woman would be moved by the magnanimity of her forlorn lover, stricken by reminders of her own inconsistency and neglect, flattered by the vehemence of his feelings, melted by his unalterable love, and alarmed that she might be about to lose her generous and devoted admirer—or so Dickens might have imagined Maria’s response.

  She was in fact strongly moved—moved to send his letter straight back to him, with a note complaining of its bitter tone (although before this dramatic gesture, she took the trouble to transcribe a copy for her records).

  Her stern rebuff must have seemed promising, however. His own letter had been a desperate attempt to provoke some show of interest—even anger. Any response was better than apathetic silence. In eliciting a reply, even a rebuke, he achieved his purpose. By replying to his fervent rhetoric, Maria became, ironically and accidentally, one of his earliest appreciative critics. Indeed, she seems to have admired his letter more than she admired Dickens himself. Her literary judgment, at any rate, was sound, for in his stagy farewell we may glimpse the embryonic novelist. For all the urgency and even desperation of his feelings, his letter sketches a small romantic melodrama: a beautiful, fickle charmer is confronted by her earnest, devoted lover; remonstrating indignantly, he returns her gifts; and yet, though heartbroken, he shows generosity of spirit and hope for reconciliation.

  The only element missing in this story was the heroine’s change of heart: her contrition, repentance, and loving embrace of the loyal hero. Several years later, Dickens would write a play, The Village Coquettes, with much the same plot, and a happy ending. But though enjoying her leading role in Dickens’s melodramatic courtship, Maria refused to write the final happy scene.

  Nonetheless, he persisted. Her rebuke had at any rate given him a reason to write again, and he sent her a conciliatory letter, “expressive of the same sentiments as I ever had felt and ever should feel towards you to my dying day.” This letter does not survive; once again, in her preferred means of rebuff, Maria sent it straight back “without even the formality of an envelope” (he complained). So promptly did this second letter rebound that she did not even pause to make a copy for her private archive; perhaps she found his epistolary style less interesting in its conciliatory vein. To this second snub, he refrained from responding: “I know what your feelings must have been,” he remarked later, “and by them I regulated my conduct.”

  With this second rejection, his courtship of Maria was apparently over. The following month, April 1833, his friend Kolle became engaged to Maria’s sister Anne, and Dickens congratulated him with morose self-pity: “Although unfortunately and unhappily for myself I have no fellow feeling with you—no cause to sympathize with your past causes of annoyance, or your present prospects of happiness,—I am not the less disposed to offer my heartfelt congratulations to you because you are, or at all events will be what I never can—happy and contented.” Even so, he had not given up hope of seeing Maria again, for he was in the process of organizing and directing an evening of private theatricals which he expected her to attend.

  The theatrical evening took place some five weeks after she had rejected his two letters. The Dickens house was elaborately converted into a small theater, and, setting the pattern for many later theatricals, he marshaled the production with vigorous generalship: “The family are busy, the Corps dramatique are all anxiety, the scenery is all completing rapidly, the machinery is finished, the Curtain hemmed, the Orchestra complete.” Three plays would be performed: an operetta titled Clari; or the Maid of Milan, followed by two short farces. Dickens managed the entire production and acted in all three plays. His brothers, sisters, and father were all assigned parts; friends and family connections filled out the cast. A poster advertising the performance was printed. A band, “numerous and complete,” was assembled and rehearsed.

  To this elaborate event, the Beadnells were invited. If friendship and curiosity were not sufficient inducements, they were likely to attend because Anne Beadnell’s fiancé Henry Kolle had a role in Clari and had also helped with the scenery.

  Clari was a melodrama in three acts, interspersed with songs. It had first been performed ten years earlier, at the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Its single lasting contribution to English-speaking culture was the song “Home, Sweet Home”:

  ’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

  Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!

  Home, sweet home!

  There’s no place like home.

  The plot centers on a country girl, Clari, induced by a false promise of marriage to elope with Duke Vivaldi—a cad with no intention of marrying a peasant maiden. Despite appearances, however, Clari remains chaste, even while closeted at the duke’s summer palace waiting for him to fulfill his promise. She longs to return home—hence “Home, Sweet Home”—and when her conscience (like Claudius’s in Hamlet) is stung by an interlude within the play, she resolves to flee the duke, return home, and throw herself on her parents’ mercy. The duke, repentant and remorseful, follows her, and the play ends with Clari reconciled with her parents and betrothed to the reformed duke. Dickens’s older sister Fanny played Clari; Dickens played Clari’s angry father, Rolamo, who appears only in the last scene, allowing Dickens to devote himself to off-stage management until the end.

  When Rolamo does come on stage, however, his melodramatic grief and wrath dominate; it was characteristic of Dickens to give himself a Lear-like role with lavish histrionic emotions—both melting:

  A father’s curse is heavy! dreadful his anguish when that curse is wrested from him! Shall I paint this agonizing suffering to you, child? I can do so, for I have felt it.—I feel it now. (Weeps.) Once I had a daughter.

  … and raging:

  (Violently) Hence, hence! I know you not. My sight rejects you—spurns you. If you have wasted all the spoils of guilt, there, there’s gold! your idol, gold, gold, for which you bartered all your hopes of bliss! (Dashes down a purse violently on the earth.)

  Dickens had seen Clari performed professionally, and his fondness for it reveals his taste for the melodrama on which he had been theatrically suckled. Clari’s predicament—a humble maiden’s innocence and virtue tempted by love for an upper-class rake—foreshadows several novel plots—the seduction of Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, fifteen years later, for example, and later yet the dilemma of Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend. When, as Rolamo, Dickens wept for his daughter Clari, Dickens was only twenty-one; but in his rants and tears, the future was fermenting.

  No account of the Clari performance exists. Several months later, he wrote a comic sketch, “Mrs. Joseph Porter ‘Over the Way,’” about an ambitious family theatrical:

  Most extensive were the preparations … as the day fixed for the representation of the Private Play which had been “many months in preparation”, approached. The whole family was infected with the mania for Private Theatricals; the house, usually so clean and tidy, was …“regularly turned out o’ windows”; the dining room, dismantled of its furniture and ornaments, presented a strange jumble of flats, flies, wings, lamps, bridges, clouds, thunder and l
ightning, festoons and flowers, daggers and foil, and various other messes in theatrical slang included under the comprehensive name of “properties”. The bedrooms were crowded with scenery, the kitchen was occupied by carpenters. Rehearsals took place every other night in the drawing room.…

  In “Mrs. Joseph Porter,” this elaborate amateur performance of Othello degenerates into a debacle.

  Given Dickens’s energetic and efficient management, Clari probably went off more successfully, but with respect to Maria the evening was another disappointment. A letter he wrote several weeks later implies that she attended, as it casually alludes to an incident of the evening as if she were familiar with it. But if present, she apparently made no attempt to greet him, let alone ingratiate herself, for Dickens complained that “on the night of the play after we went up stairs,” he was instead bothered by a close friend of Maria’s, one Mary Anne Leigh: “I could not get rid of her.” Had Maria commissioned Mary Anne to distract her tiresome lover? Or was Mary Anne taking advantage of Maria’s neglect of him? Later, Maria—cynically?—accused Dickens of carrying on a flirtation with Mary Anne.

  The Clari production took place on April 27, 1833. Two weeks later, Dickens and Maria somehow encountered one another again, for we hear of him protesting to her in person that he had never made the troublesome Mary Anne Leigh a confidante in any matter touching himself and Maria; but that he had just heard “by chance that days even weeks ago” Mary Anne had made such an outrageous claim. The day after encountering Maria, he sat down to write her an indignant letter, vigorously repeating his protest. In fact, he claimed, Mary Anne had “quite unasked volunteered the information that you had made her a Confidante of all that had ever passed between us without reserve.” Again, one wonders exactly what had passed between Maria and Dickens—but in writing to Maria, he had no reason to spell out what she herself knew. His wording hints at an understanding of some kind, perhaps even (in his suggestible mind) an engagement: “Situated as we have been once[,] I have … too often thought of our earlier correspondence, and too often looked back to happy hopes the loss of which have made me the miserable reckless wretch I am, to breathe the slightest hint to any creature living of one single circumstance that ever passed between us—much less to her” (that is, Mary Anne Leigh).