Charles Dickens in Love

by Robert Garnett

  Dickens disapproved of Lady Dedlock, not for her sexual transgression—he was forgiving of that—but for her proud and weary manner, her aristocratic aloofness: “an exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction.” Yet despite her languor, we are told at her first appearance, she is susceptible to fads and fashions, and can be manipulated into taking up any vogue: “Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of jewelry, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set up?” Many astute tradesmen “can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby.”

  But this initial concept of Lady Dedlock—vain, frivolous, gullible—soon disappears. It is testimony to the improvisational, sympathetic quality of Dickens’s genius that he so often altered his attitude toward his own characters. In particular, he never created a beautiful woman whom he could not pity and forgive. Lady Dedlock begins in affectation, ennui, and foppery; but in each successive appearance she grows stronger and more admirable. Like Edith Dombey, she has a tormentor, and as she battles him we pity her vulnerability and discover her courage. The mature Lady Dedlock—that is, Dickens’s mature concept of her—would never betray any vulgar weakness for a new fashion, let alone the latest dwarf. Dickens needed time to understand his own creation.

  Lady Dedlock’s enigmatic reserve perplexed him. His views on most issues were fixed and certain; but the emotions of a strongly passionate woman carried him into unfamiliar territory. In a curious excursion outside her aristocratic haunts, for example, Lady Dedlock makes a clandestine pilgrimage to the grave of her former lover. Presumably she is moved by nostalgia and piety, a wish to pay her respects to the man she had loved; yet her harsh, abrupt manner during her pilgrimage seems neither nostalgic nor pious, and we are given no glimpse into her thoughts. Even the anonymous narrator, usually self-confident and intrusive, refrains from drawing aside her veil. By this point we are not surprised at her daring or resolution in seeking her dead lover, despite the danger of discovery: “She has a purpose in her, and can follow it.” But her feelings remain inscrutable. The mystery Dickens had created, he himself could scarcely penetrate.

  His fascination grew. At first he had qualified her beauty: “She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn. She has a fine face—originally of a character that would be rather called very pretty than handsome.” But her beauty grows more potent. “She was as graceful as she was beautiful; perfectly self-possessed; and had the air,” Esther testifies, “of being able to attract and interest any one, if she had thought it worth her while”; she has an “air of superiority, and power, and fascination.” As with Edith Dombey, “beauty” becomes Lady Dedlock’s standard epithet. In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer is struck by “the mysterious authority of beauty” in Countess Olenska (ch. 8). Lady Dedlock’s beauty, too, exercises power and command—even over its creator.

  She becomes more formidable, growing into a character of perspicacity and penetration. “You see everything,” says her husband admiringly. Not overly observant himself, Sir Leicester Dedlock is enamored of his perceptive lady, but even the skeptical narrator concedes “the quickness of her observation.” Her “intelligence … is too quick and active to be concealed by any studied impassiveness, however habitual.” Even her tormentor, a lawyer named Tulkinghorn, an “oyster of the old school,” admits: “This woman understands me.”

  Her intelligence and refinement are stiffened by courage. “My lady … is afraid of nothing,” the housekeeper at the Dedlock manor in Lincolnshire asserts. Her most appreciative admirer is her enemy Tulkinghorn, who recognizes in her a worthy adversary, a lady of “sense and strength of character.” Confronting her with his knowledge of her illegitimate child, he studies her reaction: “Anger, and fear, and shame. All three contending.… And he thinks,… ‘The power and force of this woman are astonishing!’” Her fate in his hands, she braves her danger: “It is not in her nature, when envious eyes are looking on, to yield or to droop.”

  Edith Dombey and Lady Dedlock were Dickens’s first heroines of mature intelligence, keen sensibility, and strong passions, a world apart from the maiden heroines who for all their nascent womanly qualities are comparatively girlish. While Lady Dedlock can be maternal and tender, she can be as fierce as Lady Macbeth. When her nemesis Tulkinghorn is murdered, she feels a “wicked relief,” for she “has often, often, often wished him dead.” We wonder if she has shot him herself, and Dickens establishes her as the primary suspect. But Tulkinghorn has actually been shot by another woman, who has vicariously enacted Lady Dedlock’s wish. “What power this woman has to keep these raging passions down!” Tulkinghorn himself had earlier observed.

  While the young heroine Esther is coy and loquacious, Lady Dedlock is cool and self-contained. She is a woman of strong unfulfilled desires which express themselves silently—in her reserve, her dark beauty, her boredom, her remoteness, her haughtiness, her feelings of guilt. She is consistently associated with cold, rain, shadow, darkness, loneliness, secrecy, ghosts, pursuit, death. Her reticence is a veil, both concealing and hinting at strong emotions. “The deepest feeling shows itself in silence,” Marianne Moore observed: “Not in silence but restraint” (“Silence”).

  That Lady Dedlock acts as hostess for houseparties at the Dedlock manor and frequents fashionable entertainments in London ironically emphasizes her isolation. It is curious that she bothers to go out at all, in fact, as she seems indifferent to social intercourse. Her silence conceals deep currents of feeling, invisible beneath the shallow chatter rippling across the drawing room and ballroom. In the novel’s final glance at Lady Dedlock, she is entombed in the Dedlock mausoleum in Lincolnshire, secure forever in her privacy and silence.

  When the secret of her youthful liaison and love child is about to be exposed, Lady Dedlock flees the Dedlock mansion in London. The sagacious detective Mr. Bucket, accompanied by Esther (the love child herself), tracks her through the night, out of the city and far into the countryside, in a heavy snowstorm, until he deduces that Lady Dedlock, baffling pursuit, has doubled back to London. Returning in her footsteps, Bucket and Esther finally overtake her at the gate of a London graveyard, where her old lover, Esther’s father, lies buried. But Lady Dedlock, now dead herself, has eluded them again.

  Her veil is finally lifted. Dying, she chooses her lover’s grave for her own death. “Whither thou diest, will I die,” says the Old Testament’s Ruth to Naomi, “and there will I be buried.” Lady Dedlock similarly professes her loyalty. In her journey through the snow to a squalid London graveyard, we discover that her secret is not her sinful liaison and illegitimate child, but her persistent love for a man who fell out of her life years earlier. Since his disappearance, her most intense feelings have been suppressed but not extinguished.

  In her devotion to an old lover, Lady Dedlock is Dickens himself. The cool, elegant, beautiful aristocratic lady has little else in common with the self-made dynamo from the heart of middle-class England. But he too remained emotionally bound to a lost love—two of them, in fact. No successor to Maria and Mary had loosened their hold on him. Frozen in death, Lady Dedlock reaches futilely through the iron bars of the graveyard gate, unable to pass beyond, just as she had been barred from her lover during her life—for the iron gate is death itself. Her dying journey to his grave recalls Dickens’s frustrated desire to be buried next to Mary Hogarth in Kensal Green.

  Though academic critics of Bleak House usually belabor its social and political themes, it is more profoundly a novel about love. With her elegance, beauty, and refinement, Lady Dedlock lives a world apart from the crowded graveyard of her lover, with its rats and bones and rank exhalations of decay. Yet in her love for him, beauty and wretchedness converge. Her pilgrimage to her lover’s grave offers an allegory of the spirit seeking embodiment, of the soul descending into blood and sweat and bone. Human love is ambiguous, a paradoxical marriage of imperishable s
pirit and corruptible flesh.

  “Fair and foul are near of kin,” William Butler Yeats’s Crazy Jane exclaims:

  “And fair need foul,” I cried.

  “My friends are gone, but that’s a truth

  Nor grave nor bed denied,

  Learned in bodily lowliness

  And in the heart’s pride.”

  (“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”)

  Bleak House has a strong satiric, indignant flavor; there was much in England that irritated Dickens, and he intended to chastise and exhort. But lured off course by Lady Dedlock, he wandered into emotions and ideas beyond the earlier good cheer of the Christmas Carol philosophy, or his various vehement opinions on contemporary issues, or even his adoration for Mary Hogarth.

  Ten years later, in Great Expectations, Dickens would write one ending, discard it, and write another.

  Bleak House also has two endings—side by side. As with the halcyon ending of David Copperfield, the final chapter of Bleak House jumps ahead, “full seven happy years” beyond the main action. Esther narrates this last chapter, updating us on herself and the rest of her circle. She has married a conspicuously virtuous physician and they are living with their two daughters in a rural Yorkshire village. She modestly reports herself highly esteemed by the villagers and doted on by her uxorious husband. They regularly see the novel’s other virtuous characters, making for a tight little circle of virtue. It is a characteristic Dickens ending for good characters—much like the rosy ending of Oliver Twist, for example, fifteen years earlier.

  But this concluding idyll follows a more melancholy scene in the previous chapter, which describes the broken fortunes of the Dedlocks. Lady Dedlock herself lies in the family mausoleum at their desolate Lincolnshire estate, Chesney Wold:

  Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless always—no flag flying now by day, no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it;—passion and pride, even to the stranger’s eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire, and yielded it to dull repose.

  The children of storm, the passionate Lady Dedlock and her rake lover, have been succeeded by the children of calm, Esther and her contented circle. “Passion and pride” have given way to rational, complacent virtue; fire and ice to tidy domesticity. The gain seems ambiguous, but Dickens was always drawn to cozy visions of snugness and punctilious housekeeping.

  But Lady Dedlock inoculated Bleak House with a fundamental discontent alien to his earlier novels. A detour into moral complexities was not on his agenda; he preferred straightforward preaching. But Dickens the creator knew about feelings unknown to Dickens the moralist. The novel’s anonymous narrator diagnoses Lady Dedlock’s icy manner as a case of benevolent natural feelings sadly inhibited, implying that a night of fearful dreams might convert her, like Ebenezer Scrooge, into a more sociable and cheerful citizen. But the lonely woman created by Dickens resists his own facile explanation of her character. No overnight change of heart will whisk away Lady Dedlock’s malaise, for her deepest affections lie in the past, and in the grave.

  Dickens had a reputation for moral optimism, and disapproved of regressive emotions like Lady Dedlock’s. He believed in the healing power of memory—the Ghost of Christmas Past melts Scrooge’s frozen heart—but Lady Dedlock’s memories are less therapeutic. Bleak House betrays a suspicion that urgent memories and longings cannot easily be reformed. Though censuring Lady Dedlock’s chilly hauteur and unsociability, he sympathized with her too. How could he censure her? Despite his public bonhomie, he too held much in reserve.

  Lady Dedlock nudged his fiction for the first time into tragedy. There is a Greek quality in her fatal progress: her warm, indiscreet love as a young woman, leading her into a guilty transgression; her rise to social and fashionable heights; an impulsive betrayal of her buried feelings; pursuit by an implacable avenger who exhumes her past; and the eventual exposure of her secret, leading to her death. She never becomes a repentant sinner, like Scrooge, contrite and eager to reform. Instead, she broods on the what-ifs and might-have-beens:

  … still my Lady’s eyes are on the fire.

  In search of what? Of any hand that is no more, of any hand that never was, of any touch that might have magically changed her life?

  Far from regretting her ruinous love, she dies struggling to rejoin her lover.

  “You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock,” another character compliments her. “‘So much!’ she repeated, slightly laughing. ‘Yes!’” Her self-mocking irony reveals her awareness of the emptiness of “success” and celebrity. Her doom approaching, she remarks, “I must travel my dark road alone, and it will lead me where it will.”

  Did Dickens see himself beside her, traveling the same gloomy road?

  Finishing Bleak House in 1853, he hoped to take at least a year off from novel-writing. Within months, however, he was at work on another novel, Hard Times. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr. Johnson observed, and Dickens too had a pragmatic attitude toward writing: it was a business, not recreational self-expression. Hard Times in particular originated in mundane commercial considerations, the need to boost circulation of his magazine Household Words, in which it appeared in weekly installments.

  Hard Times is the most journalistic and tendentious of Dickens’s novels, and in consequence a frequently assigned college text. His imaginative energies depleted after two years’ labor on Bleak House—Pegasus’s wings drooping, as it were—he filled Hard Times with topical issues: utilitarianism, education, industrialism, labor conflict, divorce law. Among the titles he considered was Black and White, suggesting the novel’s simplistic moral oppositions. With easy classroom talking points and comparative brevity—only a quarter the length of Bleak House—Hard Times is often imposed on bemused undergraduates who no doubt emerge from the encounter thinking the “Sparkler of Albion” a pretty dull dog.

  A few months before beginning Hard Times, Dickens wrote an article for Household Words defending fairy tales. “In a utilitarian age, of all other times,” he argued, “it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected.” Innocent fantasy was the nursery of “gentleness and mercy”: “Forbearance, courtesy, consideration for the poor and aged, kind treatment of animals, the love of nature, abhorrence of tyranny and brute force—many good things have been first nourished in the child’s heart by this powerful aid.” But even as it dramatizes this same theme, the moral value of fancy and romance, Hard Times is ironically the least fanciful and romantic of Dickens’s novels.

  Two hard businessmen, Gradgrind and Bounderby, represent the evil in Hard Times; the redeeming influence is of course feminine, embodied in two heroines. The better to inspire, both heroines are denied romantic distractions. In love with a married man, the elder, Rachael, not only renounces any irregular intimacy with him but saves his wretched wife from accidentally poisoning herself, although her death would benefit everyone. While the husband would prefer Rachael’s embrace, she gives him, instead, uplift: “As the shining stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life.”

  The novel’s other heroine, Sissy, daughter of a horse rider in a traveling circus, is young and darkly attractive—“so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous color from the sun.” But despite the sensuous warmth hinted by her rich coloring, Dickens vetoed love for Sissy as well: “Lover for Sissy?” he queried in his plans. “No. Decide on no love at all.” Her role is redemptive, not romantic. “Carry on Sissy—Power of affection,” Dickens noted tersely in his working memoranda. In a climactic encounter with the novel’s aristocratic cad, Sissy triumphs with gentle earnestness:

  The child-like ingenuousness with which his visi
tor [Sissy] spoke, her modest fearlessness, her truthfulness which put all artifice aside, her entire forgetfulness of herself in her earnest quiet holding to the object with which she had come; all this, together with her reliance on his easily-given promise—which in itself shamed him—presented something in which he was so inexperienced, and against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless; that not a word could he rally to his relief.

  No scene in Dickens better illustrates the irresistible power of the feminine spirit—the moral heart of his fiction. Despite all the ideas and opinions knocking about in Hard Times, the example of Mary Hogarth remained his only effective answer to the world’s ills.

  But Hard Times features a third heroine as well, much unlike the two exemplary heroines. Louisa Gradgrind is a girl of strong emotions strangled by a rationalist upbringing:

  … struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

  By denying her any childhood fancy, Louisa’s father has stunted her natural feelings, and a starved imagination issues in emotional poverty. As with Edith Dombey and Lady Dedlock, Louisa’s natural warmth has been frozen—on the surface. When her father relays a marriage proposal from an undesirable suitor,

  … she sat so long looking silently towards the town, that he said, at length: “Are you consulting the chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?”

  “There seems to be nothing there, but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!” she answered, turning quickly.