Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  The voice belongs to Rose Maylie, a young lady “in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood; at that age, when, if ever angels be for God’s good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers.” A passage canceled in manuscript makes plain Rose’s identity with the lost Mary: “Oh! Where are the hearts which following some halting description of youth and beauty, do not recal [sic] a loved original that Time has sadly changed, or Death resolved to dust.” Deciding on second thought that this exclamation was too personal, perhaps, Dickens deleted it, but went on to describe Rose as a girl of exactly Mary Hogarth’s age:

  She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions. The very intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and was stamped upon her noble head, seemed scarcely of her age or of the world; and yet the changing expression of sweetness and good humour; the thousand lights that played about the face, and left no shadow there; above all, the smile; the cheerful, happy smile; were made for Home; for fireside peace and happiness.

  As description, this is fuzzy, but as rhapsody, deeply felt: such elevated, exaggerated, indistinct rhetoric was for Dickens the language of exalted sentiment. Rose Maylie is an angel, only temporarily inhabiting—“enthroned in”—human form.

  She is the first of many Dickens heroines inspired by Mary Hogarth. Literary critics often cluck censoriously about these heroines, and certainly Rose and her successors lack the keen coloring of characters like Oliver Twist’s brutish Bill Sikes, or Fagin: gliding “stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.” Villains and eccentrics inspired Dickens to a vivid particularity lacking in the perfections of a Rose Maylie. But Rose was no fanciful invention: she was the fictional embodiment of Mary Hogarth, and Dickens’s ironic fancy would not play lightly with that sacred memory.

  More than simply a memorial to Mary, though, Rose Maylie also reflects Dickens’s considered reflections on the hard logic of Mary’s early death. It was not after all surprising, he had come to feel, that Mary should have died so young. So perfect a creature had not properly belonged to this world at all, but to the higher sphere to which she had willingly returned after her brief sojourn on earth.

  As if to relive Mary’s death, he inflicted Oliver Twist’s Rose Maylie with a dangerous fever. “It would be little short of a miracle, if she recovered,” the doctor declares. Nonetheless, Rose survives. Urgently summoned to her bedside, her foster brother and earnest suitor Harry arrives just when she is out of danger. Harry is a blandly virtuous character, but now, finding his beloved Rose alive and recovering, he speaks for Dickens himself. Dickens’s epitaph for Mary had described her as “young, beautiful and good”; Harry echoes:

  We know that when the young, the beautiful, and good, are visited with sickness, their pure spirits insensibly turn towards their bright home of lasting rest; we know, Heaven help us! that the best and fairest of our kind, too often fade in blooming.

  Though relieved, Harry is surprised that Rose has survived; he can understand why her pure spirit was eager to escape its mortal prison. If the guilty Satan feels the ignominy of his angelic spirit dwelling in serpent’s flesh—“O foul descent! that I who erst contended/With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained/Into a beast, and mixed with bestial slime,/This essence to incarnate and imbrute”—how much more incongruous for Rose, an unfallen angel, to be shackled to mortal flesh. Ordinary humanity shrinks from death, but pure spirits long for it; or so Harry imagines:

  “An angel,” continued the young man, passionately; “a creature as fair and innocent of guile as one of God’s own angels, fluttered between life and death. Oh! who could hope, when the distant world to which she was akin, half opened to her view, that she would return to the sorrow and calamity of this! Rose, Rose, to know that you were passing away like some soft shadow, which a light from above, casts upon the earth; to have no hope that you would be spared to those who linger here; to know no reason why you should be; to feel that you belonged to that bright sphere whither so many of the fairest and the best have winged their early flight.”

  His quill hurrying across the page, Dickens once again held the dying Mary Hogarth in his arms, praying for her life but well understanding her soul’s flight from captivity.

  Dickens has been accused of indulging himself with Rose Maylie’s recovery, imposing a wish-fulfillment ending on Mary Hogarth’s collapse. “The godlike novelist can answer his own prayers, of course,” one critic writes disapprovingly. “Poetry can indeed deliver a golden world—for the poet, anyway.” But however gratifying to her lover Harry, Rose’s survival is no reason for her to rejoice. Why would “one of God’s own angels” wish to remain amidst the corruptions and sorrows of earth? Dickens enjoyed lachrymose deaths, moreover; they would become a specialty, and Rose’s death might have been a powerfully affecting scene. Fictional imperatives, not self-consolation, dictated her survival: as young Oliver’s beloved protectress (also his aunt, it turns out), Rose could not be dispatched to the grave without throwing a gloom over his happy progress.

  Though happy for his little hero Oliver, Rose Maylie’s survival was awkward for Dickens himself. Mary Hogarth had died in his arms; he did not like to imagine her, even in the form of her surrogate Rose, in the arms of another man, not even the super-virtuous Harry. Rose’s recovery initiated what would become a recurrent dilemma for Dickens’s heroines: whether to die or marry. Readers generally prefer that heroines marry; Dickens did not. Marrying, the maiden dwindles into a wife. His reluctant concession to romantic convention is visible in the tepid romance of Oliver Twist, ending in Rose’s marriage to Harry.

  The novel’s cult of Mary Hogarth contrasts with its less ardent Christianity as glimpsed in Harry’s priestly vocation. Abandoning his political ambitions, Harry takes holy orders—not for religious motives, but to secure a pleasant vicarage for himself and Rose, and to give himself a respectable occupation. His rural parish offers a refuge from the septic city of Fagin and Sikes: “There are smiling fields and waving trees in England’s richest county; and by one village church—mine, Rose, my own—there stands a rustic dwelling which you can make me prouder of, than all the hopes I have renounced, a thousandfold.” The shady vicarage plainly appeals to Harry more than the church itself, “henceforth to be the scene of the young clergyman’s labours”—as, scarcely able to disguise his boredom, Dickens describes Harry’s clerical duties.

  Harry’s lukewarm vocation should not be overanalyzed; it was mostly a convenient fictional device. He sacrifices worldly ambition for love, and that was enough; Dickens was untroubled by Harry’s view of the Anglican priesthood as simply a genteel profession (probably associated with low sex drive), which came with a pleasant house attached. (Jane Austen, daughter of a clergyman, concluded Sense and Sensibility with exactly the same arrangement.) Dickens demanded no more Christian fervor from Harry than he felt himself.

  But while the romance of Harry and Rose limps to consummation in a clerical cottage, the novel’s valedictory tribute to Rose (with no mention of Harry) soars into a glowing dream of Mary Hogarth still alive:

  I would fain linger yet with a few of those among whom I have so long moved [the characters of Oliver Twist], and share their happiness by endeavouring to depict it. I would show Rose Maylie in all the bloom and grace of early womanhood, shedding on her secluded path in life, such soft and gentle light, as fell on all who trod it with her, and shone into their hearts. I would paint her the life and joy of the fire-side circle and the lively summer group; I would follow her through the sultry fields at noon, and hear the low tones of her sweet voice in the moonlit evening walk; I would watch her in all her goodness and charity abro
ad, and the smiling untiring discharge of domestic duties at home;… I would recall the tones of that clear laugh, and conjure up the sympathising tear that glistened in the soft blue eye.

  The passage concludes with a wish: “These, and a thousand looks and smiles, and turns of thought and speech—I would fain recall them every one.” “Recall” here has a double sense, both “remember” and “summon back,” and Dickens no doubt meant both. Most of us can summon the dead only in memory; he could recall his beloved Mary to the vivid imaginary world of his fiction. So long as he was immersed in that world, Mary was with him. No wonder he wished to linger among Oliver Twist’s shadows.

  Dickens was twenty-one when he lost Maria Beadnell, twenty-five when he lost Mary Hogarth. The two young women who ignited his love as a young man could scarcely have been more different; or at any rate they affected him very differently. Maria allured and aroused; Mary pointed upward. That women are so central to Dickens’s fiction, morally and emotionally, owes much to both.

  Early in the next century, Henry Adams would lament that the Anglo-American imagination had lost its sensitivity to the “the force of female energy.” Take for example his friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold: “They felt a railway train as power,” Adams observed; “yet they … constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” Dickens himself was fascinated by the railway as a manifestation of Victorian energy, speed, and progress, and several dynamic passages in his novels celebrate trains.

  But his admiration for the railway, that clanging, roaring symbol of masculine power and self-assertion, was overpowered by his fascination with the feminine—especially those sister forces the Virgin and Venus. He could thank Mary and Maria for having met them.

  CHAPTER 4

  Of all my books, I like this the best:

  David Copperfield

  Yeats’s question “Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman won or a woman lost?” would not have been difficult for Dickens. For years he cherished his memories of the two women he had lost. Time had soothed his anguish, but it had scarcely diminished their sway. No woman since—no experience at all, in fact—had moved him so profoundly as Maria and Mary. “My attachments are strong attachments,” he once observed, “and never weaken.”

  There is no better evidence of Maria’s and Mary’s enduring sway than Dickens’s favorite among his own novels, David Copperfield. When he began writing it, the grass had been green over Mary’s grave for a dozen years; Maria had been out of his life for sixteen. Yet David Copperfield fondly summons up the spirits of both, not as incidental characters but as the two women most deeply loved by the novel’s hero David.

  Sisters as they were in Dickens’s affections, however, Maria and Mary were stepsisters to each other—Venus and the Virgin. In David Copperfield their opposition is most sharply drawn.

  David Copperfield is the central novel of Dickens’s career. Seven novels came before, seven after. It was the last novel he wrote as a full-time novelist: soon after, he began editing his own weekly magazine, Household Words; later yet, public readings absorbed even more of his energies. Copperfield was the novel that most stirred his own affections and remained his “favourite child.” Parts of it were a straightforward memoir of his early years: “No one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing,” he testified. He felt a strong personal attachment to its characters and a sharp sorrow in relinquishing them at the end: it was like losing his own younger self again, and the two girls he had loved as a young man. “I am in danger,” he confessed in a preface, “of wearying the reader whom I love, with personal confidences, and private emotions.”

  In the months before he began writing Copperfield, his nostalgia was stirred by the loss of another woman, his older and favorite sister Fanny. She had begun to fail two years earlier. “I am deeply, deeply grieved about it,” he told Forster when he learned that she had consumption, for which the prognosis was always grim (within months of Fanny’s death, both Emily and Anne Brontë also died of consumption). As Fanny sank during the summer of 1848, he arranged for her to move from Manchester to a house closer to London—for more salubrious air, but also that he might visit her more frequently. Seeing her wasting away carried his thoughts back to their childhood. “His sister Fanny and himself … used to wander at night about a churchyard near their house, looking up at the stars,” Forster recalled Dickens reminiscing; “and her early death … vividly reawakened all the childish associations which made her memory dear to him.”

  The memories awakened by Fanny’s death permeate the novel he began six months later. Its predecessor, Dombey and Son, had been set in the present, the 1840s of the railway boom: the locomotive era to which Dickens in his progressive, dynamic moods was strongly committed. But David Copperfield has nothing to do with steam engines. It is set in Dickens’s own pre-railway youth, and from the beginning its mood is retrospective, reflective, wistful. Returning as a young man to the neighborhood of his earliest home, David remarks that he “had naturally an interest in … revisiting the old familiar scenes of my childhood”:

  My occupation in my solitary pilgrimages was to recall every yard of the old road as I went along it, and to haunt the old spots, of which I never tired. I haunted them, as my memory had often done, and lingered among them as my younger thoughts had lingered when I was far away.

  Nothing in David Copperfield is more autobiographical than its hero’s nostalgia, for in writing the novel, Dickens himself was traveling “the old road” of his youth. While he was always more or less in the grip of his past, David Copperfield was written when he was especially haunted by memories.

  His two most evocative memories were Maria Beadnell and Mary Hogarth. They had roused the most intense emotions he had ever known; they remained potent spirits. At the heart of David Copperfield lies a wishful fantasy: the novel’s hero marries one of the girls that Dickens had lost—and then marries the other.

  Though more than fifty named characters and sundry subplots crowd the pages of David Copperfield, at its heart lie three intertwined quests: orphaned and abandoned as a boy, David must become a man of strong character; he must find a prosperous (and genteel) profession; and most important, he must marry the right woman.

  Pursuing the first two quests, David encounters miseries, struggles, complications, mistakes, setbacks, grievous losses, painful lessons. But character and prosperity, while desirable, fall in the ordinary realm of ambition; with his native intelligence, determination, hard work, and helpful mentors, David achieves both.

  More difficult is the third quest—for a perfect wife is rarer and more precious than rubies. For David, in fact, she is even more: the perfect wife is life’s ultimate goal, a religious prize, the Grail. Dickens himself could not boast of having succeeded in this quest, but he knew the girl with whom he could have—Mary Hogarth.

  As a mythic recasting of Dickens’s own moral journey, David Copperfield converts Maria Beadnell into a stepping-stone toward his highest love, Mary Hogarth. Dearly as he had loved Maria, warmly as he cherished her memory, she could accompany the hero David only on his first two quests, spurring him to accomplishment and teaching him fortitude. She could take him no further. Descending into Hell and ascending the mount of Purgatory, Dante is led by a virtuous pagan, Virgil; but to ascend to Paradise he must follow a holier guide, his beloved Beatrice. So too Dickens. Though dearly beloved, Maria must be left behind in order that Mary Hogarth may lead him higher.

  But the journey begins with Maria: Dickens could hardly imagine a young man falling in love without recalling his own early passion for Maria. As he meditated David Copperfield’s amatory initiation, Maria returned to him with a rush of feeling. David enjoys several boyhood flirtations, but his introduction to the novel’s Maria, Dora Spenlow, is revolutionary, blinding,
drowning:

  All was over in a moment. I had fulfilled my destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction!

  She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was—anything that no one ever saw, and everything that every body ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.

  Narrating this event years later, the mature David recalls his infatuation with fondness, humor, fancy, and hyperbole—but for all this, there is no mistaking the intensity of the experience.

  Dickens did not need to fabricate the feelings of ardent youthful love; they rose unbidden from his own poignant memories. He would later confess to Maria herself:

  I fancy … that you may have seen in one of my books a faithful reflection of the passion I had for you, and may have thought that it was something to have been loved so well, and may have seen in little bits of “Dora” touches of your old self sometimes, and a grace here and there that may be revived in your little girls, years hence, for the bewilderment of some other young lover—though he will never be as terribly in earnest as I and David Copperfield were … it was true and nothing more nor less.