Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  In 1847, when Edith arrived in Dombey and Son, Dickens was thirty-five, in the middle of life’s journey—the age at which Dante described himself as wandering into a “selva oscura,” a dark wood. Dickens was basking in the sunshine of fame, prosperity, health, energy, and self-assurance. But a decade of discontent had begun.

  He remained busy during these years; indeed his life grew even busier; but something needful was lacking. In 1852 he complained of unproductive “Wandering days” when “I seem to be always looking … for something I have not found in life, but may possibly come to, a few thousands of years hence, in some other part of some other system,” and three years later he wondered “Why is it, that as with poor David [Copperfield], a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?” His sense of desideratum suggests his longing for a quickening feminine presence, a woman to arouse his affections. His wife was stolidly faithful and usually pregnant, “the specialist in childbearing,” her biographer notes, while her younger, more active sister Georgina usurped her other wifely roles. Georgina wholly devoted herself to Dickens, efficiently managing household and nursery; he became reliant on her and repaid her with gratitude and confidence. In the early 1850s, while he signed his letters to Catherine “Ever affectionately,” to Georgina he was “Ever, my dear Georgy, most affectionately yours.” But his affection for Georgina was fraternal, not romantic. Though she plainly loved him deeply, she had little choice but to accept things as they were.

  In 1850, soon after finishing David Copperfield, he founded a weekly magazine, Household Words, with himself as proprietor and editor. Henceforth weekly journalism made heavy demands on his time and energies. Household Words was a family magazine: “All social evils, and all home affections and associations, I am particularly anxious to deal with, well,” he announced at its commencement. It had a reformist mission, too, and his editorial duties contributed to his absorption in public issues, as he sifted through hundreds of manuscripts on topical matters. Like the dyer’s hand, he took on the tincture of the “great mass of matter” in which he was journalistically immersed.

  In the first issue of Household Words, he issued an optimistic, progressive manifesto:

  We seek to bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less tolerant of one another, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time.

  Despite the thrilling summer-dawn of time, however, he often gloomed in wintry discontent. His Christmas contribution to Household Words in 1850 was a bleak “December Vision”:

  I saw a poisoned air, in which Life drooped. I saw Disease, arrayed in all its store of hideous aspects and appalling shapes, triumphant in every alley, bye-way, court, back-street, and poor abode, in every place where human beings congregated—in the proudest and most boastful places, most of all. I saw innumerable hosts fore-doomed to darkness, dirt, pestilence, obscenity, misery, and early death.

  The Spirit of Death casts an angry eye on the dismal scene, especially on those responsible, “a small multitude of noisy fools and greedy knaves, whose harvest was in such horrors.” Nor in this Christmas vision do the knaves undergo any miraculous conversion, as in A Christmas Carol. The Spirit of Death condemns them:

  Whoever is a consenting party to a wrong, comforting himself with the base reflection that it will last his time, shall bear his portion of that wrong throughout ALL TIME. And, in the hour when he and I stand face to face, he shall surely know it, as my name is Death!

  A few weeks later, he greeted the New Year with equally sour cheer, imagining the Old Year dictating his final reflections and wishes:

  “I bequeath to my successor,” said the aged gentleman,… “a vast inheritance of degradation and neglect in England; and I charge him, if he be wise, to get speedily through it. I do hereby give and bequeath to him, also, Ireland. And I admonish him to leave it to his successor in a better condition than he will find it. He can hardly leave it in a worse.”

  So much for the joys of the summer-dawn of time.

  Characteristic of Dickens’s mood was his hostility to the Great Exhibition of 1851, an ambitious celebration of technology, industry, and arts held in the vast Crystal Palace, nine hundred thousand square feet of glass erected in Hyde Park. In his 1851 New Year’s article in Household Words, again speaking in the voice of the Old Year, he first praised the Exhibition:

  “I have seen,” [the Old Year] presently said, “a project carried into execution for a great assemblage of the peaceful glories of the world. I have seen a wonderful structure, reared in glass, by the energy and skill of a great natural genius, self-improved [Joseph Paxton]: worthy descendant of my Saxon ancestors: worthy type of industry and ingenuity triumphant!”

  Changing tone abruptly, however, the Old Year proceeds to dismiss the Exhibition as braggadocio: “Which of my children,” he demands, “shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants, of England, equally united, for another Exhibition—for a great display of England’s sins and negligences?” As a self-congratulatory, unreflecting celebration of British “industry and ingenuity triumphant,” the Exhibition reflected Dickens’s progressive sympathies. Yet its complacent worship of Progress and Technology offended him. Privately, he thought it “a very Fortunatus’s purse of Boredom” and complained of the crowds it drew to London. “I have always had an instinctive feeling against the Exhibition, of a faint, inexplicable sort,” he admitted.

  Like most decades, the 1850s were both the best and worst of times, and his pessimism had as much or more to do with private malaise than with mid-century England. In his frantic pace of activities he was “more like a man/Flying from something that he dreads than one/Who sought the thing he loved.” Never idle, he pushed himself to become even busier. With fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton he founded a charity called the Guild of Literature and Art, and set about raising funds by means of elaborate amateur theatrical productions into which he flung himself with manic gusto:

  The amount of business and correspondence that I have to attend to in connexion with the Play, is about (I should imagine) equal to the business of the Home Office. As the time approaches, it will enormously increase.… Carpenters, scene painters, tailors, bootmakers, musicians, all kinds of people, require my constant attention.… To crown all, deducting Rehearsals and journies, I have but three days in the week to myself, and, in those, I have the Household Words to write for and think about.

  Meanwhile, he dealt with a “rolling of a sea of correspondence which always flows and never ebbs.” A few years earlier, in collaboration with the wealthy banking heiress Angela Burdett Coutts, he had established a home for homeless women, Urania Cottage, and he actively managed this enterprise, spending almost as much time there as at home. Even his recreation—long brisk walks—was strenuous. Warned by Miss Coutts against cold showers, he replied: “I have quite a remarkable power of enduring fatigue for which I believe I am very much indebted to this treatment.… It is because my cut-out way in life obliges me to be so much upon the strain, that I think it is of service to me as a Refresher—not as a taker out, but as a putter in of energy.” Yet his “cut-out way in life” and most of its strains were self-imposed.

  His ambitious theatricals, in particular, provided much that he craved: the “assumption” of another personality in acting, busy-ness, stirring activity, applause. “I left Liverpool at 4 o’Clock this morning,” he wrote in 1852, following a tour with the amateur company of friends and family that he had organized and directed, “and am so blinded by excitement, gas, and waving hats and handkerchiefs, that I can scarcely see to write—but I cannot go to bed without telling you what a triumph we have had”:

  I can most seriously say that all the sights of the earth turn pale
in my eyes, before the sight of three thousand people with one heart among them, and no capacity in them, in spite of all their efforts, of sufficiently testifying to you how they believe you to be right and feel that they cannot do enough to cheer you on.… They rose up, when it was over, with a perfect fury of delight.

  His audience’s furious delight was no greater than his own. “I have been so happy in all this,” he declared, “that I could have cried on the shortest notice any time since Tuesday.”

  Small wonder that he was reluctant to return home, where his portly wife was eight months pregnant with her tenth child.

  From his complex but strictly regimented amateur theatricals he derived another benefit—control. He was by nature a benevolent (usually) tyrant, and liked to think his managerial energies and force of personality indispensable. Encouraging Miss Coutts to attend one of his amateur company’s performances, he boasted:

  Yet I hope you will go to this Play, consoling your mind with the belief that we have on former occasions done a great deal of good by it, and that no such thing would ever be done but for me, and that there is no one else whom these men would allow to hold them together, or to whose direction they would good-humouredly and with perfect confidence yield themselves.

  His management of Urania Cottage, the “Home for Homeless Women,” similarly gratified his love of control. He relished the strict regimen imposed on the Home’s inmates:

  They rise, both in summer and winter, at six o’clock. Morning prayers and scripture reading take place at a quarter before eight. Breakfast is had immediately afterwards. Dinner at one. Tea at six. Evening prayers are said at half-past eight. The hour of going to bed is nine. Supposing the Home to be full, ten are employed upon the household work; two in the bed-rooms; two in the general living room; two in the Superintendents’ rooms; two in the kitchen (who cook); two in the scullery; three at needlework.…

  The conduct of the girls was graded: “The mark table is divided into the nine following heads. Truthfulness, Industry, Temper, Propriety of Conduct and Conversation, Temperance, Order, Punctuality, Economy, Cleanliness.… A separate account for every day is kept with every girl as to each of these items,” and so on, down to the last detail of how points were awarded or subtracted—there was something of the busy bureaucrat in Dickens, too. Urania Cottage and the Guild of Literature and Art were designed to aid the unfortunate; but in gratifying his “notions of order” and love of management, they benefitted him as well.

  It was a mystery to him, and a severe vexation, that the rest of the world resisted his sagacity and managerial skills. He could scarcely imagine that complex public issues might be more refractory than an unruly girl at Urania Cottage or a glitch in theatrical arrangements. “I found something frightfully wrong at the Philharmonic Hall,” he described preparations for the amateurs’ performance in Liverpool, “and had to find (in a moment) half a dozen upholsterers, 200 yards of calico, and no end of invention in the way of contrivance.” Why couldn’t Parliament govern with such dispatch and efficiency? He had no patience with complexities and conflicts in questions of national policy. The persistence of social problems argued either lack of good intentions or lack of effort: the government exerted itself too little, or wrongheadedly. He was supremely self-assured, and his political indignation often reflected the simple frustration that he was not in charge—of everything.

  Even more frustrating were vexations at home. Household Words, Urania Cottage, and his amateur players yielded to his rational and benignant governance; his family were rather less tractable. His sons caused particular anxiety. Charley, the eldest, “is very much grown—an excellent boy at home,” Dickens told Miss Coutts (who was underwriting Charley’s education at Eton). “All he wants, is a habit of perseverance.” Lack of self-discipline and purpose Dickens could scarcely understand or forgive. David Copperfield’s resolution might have been directed specifically to Charley’s notice:

  I will only add [David says], to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success.

  Inattentive to David’s example, however, Charley had “less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son.” Walter, the second son, showed even less promise: “I don’t think he is so clever as Charley, but he is a very steady amiable boy, of a good reliable capacity,” Dickens praised him, tepidly. At sixteen, Walter was sent to India, never to return.

  Worse yet was Catherine’s reckless fecundity: for even as Dickens labored to launch his eldest boys in careers, new sons kept arriving. His six youngest children were boys (a daughter among them died as an infant). The male preponderance was a misfortune; he much preferred girls. The fascinating young women of Urania Cottage seem in fact to have served as an alternative family. At home he had a houseful of respectable middle-class children—mostly disappointing sons—taxing his purse and his patience; across town, in less fashionable Shepherd’s Bush, was a seraglio of temperamental, colorful young women supported by Miss Coutts’s money. For almost a decade he spent nearly as much time with this amusing second family as with his own.

  Catherine was not only prolific but disposed to nervous complaints, which became acute after the birth of her ninth child. “As her case is a nervous one and of a peculiar kind,” Dickens wrote to a physician, cryptically, “I forbear to describe it … until I have the pleasure of seeing you.” To confidants he described her symptoms as “an alarming disposition of blood to the head, attended with giddiness and dimness of sight” and “alarming confusion and nervousness at times.” He sought professional counsel but characteristically preferred his own: “After taking the most sensible advice I could get (including my own) I have resolved to carry her down to Malvern, and put her under rigorous discipline of exercise, air, and cold water”—also characteristic of Dickens was the notion of punishing illness with cold water and “rigorous discipline.”

  Catherine was undergoing her invigorating cold-water treatment at Malvern when, back in London (she had never been able to nurse her babies), their infant daughter Dora suddenly died. Dickens was distressed, but not overly so: “If, with a wish, I could cancel what has happened and bring the little creature back to life, I would not do it.” And yet a little daughter might have been a great consolation among his quiver of sons.

  In 1852 another child arrived, their tenth, Edward (nicknamed “Plorn”), a child “whom I cannot afford to receive with perfect cordiality,” Dickens joked grimly, “as on the whole I could have dispensed with him.” He felt himself blameless. “Mrs. Dickens and her boy are in a most blooming condition,” he told a correspondent. “I am not quite clear that I particularly wanted the latter, but I have no doubt that he is good for me in some point of view or other.”

  After one of his theatrical tours, he lamented: “What a thing it is, that we can’t be always innocently merry, and happy with those we like best, without looking out at the back windows of life!” The view from the back windows included (among other things) many mouths to feed and a stout and overly prolific wife with bad nerves.

  Plorn would be their last child. Given Catherine’s fertility—ten children and a miscarriage in sixteen years—and her relative youth (in 1852 she was thirty-six), it seems likely that after Plorn, their marital intimacy greatly slackened or ceased. “Repeated pregnancies were exhausting Catherine’s sexual role,” one biographer suggests, “and, lacking the personality to keep her in favour with Dickens, she had no other.” Dickens, just forty, was trim and vigorous, still enjoying brisk twenty-mile walks; Catherine was heavy and sedentary. He blamed her lethargy for their son Charley’s “indescribable lassitude of character.” She was clumsy; during a rehearsal of Dickens’s amateur players in 1850 she fell into a stage trap and sprained her ankle so badly that she was hobbled for week
s.

  Did he recall, as the 1850s dragged on, that David Copperfield’s domestic joy had been “perfect”? It would have seemed a sad irony.

  In every disturbance, Alexander Dumas advised, “cherchez la femme”—look for the woman. But in Dickens’s case, there was no woman—and that was the problem. He felt the lack keenly. He recalled the young Maria Beadnell with warm nostalgia; he revered the spirit of Mary Hogarth—but he could no longer sustain himself on the memory of two long-lost girls, however beloved. David Copperfield had been a wistful tribute to both, a return to the idols of his early years. His next novel, Bleak House, was anything but nostalgic.

  Like Dombey and Son, Bleak House features contrasting heroines: a virtuous maiden and a mature, haughty beauty. The maiden, Esther, is a sunny, sociable, voluble busybody. She narrates her own history, expansively.

  But Bleak House has a second narrator as well, an anonymous voice observing the action from above. While Esther’s perspective is domestic and feminine, the second narrator is implicitly masculine: ironic, lofty, sometimes genial, sometimes indignantly prophetic. The narration alternates between them. The chatty Esther is the heroine of her own story. Her fellow narrator ignores her.

  His heroine is the novel’s most private and incommunicative character: Lady Dedlock, Dickens’s finest tragic heroine.

  Like Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock began as a stale character type, a great lady with a guilty secret: an affair years earlier which issued in an illegitimate child. Her lover having vanished, however, and the infant having died—she thinks—she has married Sir Leicester Dedlock, a wealthy baronet, and become a celebrated figure in Society, her secret safely buried—or so she thinks.