Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Excerpts from Claire’s letters to Byron have been printed before; what is overwhelming here is to see them complete. They show her growing desperation as she was denied the visits she had been promised (one only was allowed, in the late summer of 1818). She was denied even basic news about Allegra’s health, and had all her requests and sensible recommendations ignored, while Byron maligned her to others and Shelley – though sympathetic – remained ineffectual. For example, in May 1819 she ended a letter to Byron,

  May you live long 8c happy my dearest Lord Byron. And take care of your health. Likewise pardon in me the only fault I ever committed towards you – that of Co-existence. Visit Allegra oftener than you have. You ought indeed. Your affectionate Claire.

  On 23 April 1820 she wrote to him from Pisa, asking to have Allegra, whom she had now not seen for eighteen months, for the summer, and pointing out that the child’s health had already suffered from the climate and conditions of eastern Italy:

  the first summer she had a dysentery, at the end of the second an ague [ – ] both of these disorders were produced by the unwhole-someness of the air of Venice in summer. Ravenna is equally objectionable and nothing must induce me to venture her life a third time; I have always been anxious to avoid troubling you unnecessarily and to leave you quiet in possession of the child but if she be to live at all she must be guarded from the disorders of an Italian climate… Though I can scarcely believe it possible you will refuse my just requests yet I beg you to remember that I did not part with her at Milan until I had received your formal & explicit declaration that I should see my child at proper intervals.

  The postscript reads, ‘Pray kiss my dear child many times for me,’ enough to move a stone, you might think, but not Lord Byron.

  He then told the Hoppners, intermediaries whom Claire believed to be friendly (she was wrong about this – they joined in maligning her and referred to her as ‘this voluntary little lady’), that he would not let Allegra go to the Shelley household. At this Claire wrote to say she would have Allegra on her own:

  My letter is an appeal to your Justice… I have exerted myself to remove your objections 8c my claim is bare 8c obvious… I can find no words to express my gratitude to all those who have been kind to my Allegra.

  On 4 May she drafted another letter, urging him not to put Allegra into a convent as he now threatened. The next surviving letter, dated 24 March 1821, begins,

  I have just received the letter which announces the putting Allegra into a Convent – Before I quitted Geneva you promised me verbally it is true that my child whatever its sex should never be away from one of its parents… This promise is violated, not only slightly but in a mode and by a conduct most intolerable to my feeling of love for Allegra… Since you first gave the hint of your design, I have been at some pains to enquire into their system and I find that the state of the children is nothing less than most miserable… I resigned Allegra to you that she might be benefitted by the advantages which I could not give her. It was natural for me to expect that your daughter would become an object of affection and would receive an education becoming the child of an English nobleman…

  And she went on to propose that she should be placed in a boarding school in England, chosen by him or his friends, and promising not to interfere. No notice was taken. In February 1822 she drafted a letter begging to be allowed to see and embrace Allegra. No response. In April she wrote to Mary Shelley expressing her uneasiness at having no news and her fear that Allegra was sick. By then she was considering kidnapping her daughter, a course from which the Shelleys strongly dissuaded her. Again, she was right and they were wrong. Ten days after her letter to Mary, on 19 April, Allegra died. Claire was not told until 2 May, and then by the Shelleys. She behaved with calm dignity and courage, but for the rest of her life she held Byron responsible for wantonly and wilfully destroying Allegra. It is hard to disagree with her verdict from the evidence set out here. Byron will never look the same.

  The Times Literary Supplement, 1995

  Three Essays on Charles Dickens

  1. Dickens and Sons

  The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume VII: 1853-1855 edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson

  There are a thousand stories and a hundred themes in every volume of Charles Dickens’s letters. It makes them hard to survey, easy and unfailingly entertaining to dip into. As with the previous volumes in the Clarendon Press edition prepared by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson, nothing could be better than the presentation: you visit the past in a state of perfect enjoyment, safe in the surest of editorial hands.

  If you knew nothing of Dickens, you might almost fail to realize from these letters that novel-writing was his principal activity. True, in the two years covered by this volume he completed Bleak House, wrote the whole of Hard Times and started on Little Dorrit; but he says little enough to his correspondents about his novel-writing. The themes of the books are barely mentioned; he did not arrive at them, or develop them, by discussing them with his friends. When it comes to the process of writing, he is slightly more forthcoming. There are a few natural and cheerful expressions of self-satisfaction: ‘I like the conclusion very much and think it very pretty indeed,’ he remarked several times as he finished Bleak House. The painful business of gearing up to start a book is described to Leigh Hunt; he is ‘wandering – unsettled – restless – uncontrollable’ and becomes ‘as infirm of purpose as Macbeth, as errant as Mad Tom, and as rugged as Timon’; tired of himself, yet unable to be pleasant to anybody else. That has the ring of truth and self-knowledge. There are some equally natural complaints of exhaustion when he is racing to finish. At the conclusion of Hard Times, he is ‘stunned with overwork’ and ‘three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing’. One may think perpetual rushing was a routine condition for Dickens.

  Yet so many of the letters seem to be written in high or holiday spirits that you would hardly guess that the books under way were three novels of social analysis in which he dwelt insistently on the wrong-headedness, inefficiency and cruelties of his country. In the first, the judicial system was held up to contempt, and one woman’s existence shown as senselessly blighted by her having once borne an illegitimate child. In the second, a group of characters was shown to be morally stunted by an educational system that cut them off from the life of the imagination and pressed them into a commercial mould. In the third, the contrast was again drawn between the spontaneous and generous world of art and imagination and the rigid, money-driven values controlling society. ‘Nobody’s Fault’, Dickens’s original title for Little Dorrit, expressed his disgust with the condition of England. They are passionate as well as melodramatic books, driven by a tragic sense of things being rotten and wrong. In all three, Dickens insisted on society being indivisible: as he saw it, you do not – you cannot – cushion and protect the rich by excluding, neglecting or punishing the poor, because the poor will avenge themselves one way or another, through disease or crime if in no other way. There is no need to press the remarkable relevance to today’s Britain.

  These powerful themes remain inside the books and hardly appear in the letters; although one, not published before, written in August 1854, after completing Hard Times, offers a square statement of Dickens’s view of the moral and propagandist aspect of fiction. ‘One of Fiction’s highest uses,’ he wrote, was to ‘interest and affect the general mind in behalf of anything that is clearly wrong – to stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate or indignant feeling that it must not be.’ What he meant by ‘the public soul’ and ‘the general mind’, and how he thought they should express themselves, is not specified; but the following year he was writing to John Forster to say he thought ‘representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that the whole thing has broken down…and has no hope in it’. Evidently the general soul was not capable of being r
oused enough to indignation, to the determination that certain things must not be. Dickens was a reformer, but always impatient with the realities of politics.

  In these years of the mid 1850s he grew exasperated by the government’s failure to run an efficient war in the Crimea, or to deal with London’s dangerous drainage system; and he used his magazine, Household Words, as well as his novels, to campaign against things that were ‘clearly wrong’. He was also deeply involved in continuing his private charitable work. He raised money for various working people who had fallen on hard times – the actress Mrs Warner, dying of cancer, was one – but his chief work was aimed at reducing the particular wrong of prostitution, clearly observable every day and night on the London streets, through the running of a Home for Homeless Women. It was otherwise known as Urania Cottage, and was set up at Shepherd’s Bush with the financial backing of the philanthropic Miss Coutts. His letters to her about its organization are mostly well known already; but they remain extraordinary in their vivid attention to detail and commitment to the enterprise, which plucked a few bedraggled, sometimes grateful, sometimes mutinous creatures from the streets and prisons and did its best to turn them into self-respecting young people who might live useful and happy lives. Emigration to the great Victorian dustbin of the colonies was the favoured path; Dickens hoped some would marry, though Miss Coutts’s Christianity did not allow her to go as far as that. A hitherto unpublished letter (8 February 1855) suggests that he also believed she would be upset should any of the inmates be ‘in the family way’: ‘the matter would necessarily be painful to Miss Coutts’. He directed that the girl should be removed from the Home if she were pregnant as feared, but does not go into any consideration of what her fate might then be.

  Considering that these were the years of the height of his fame and achievement, Dickens’s involvement in the Shepherd’s Bush Home stands as one of the most striking manifestations of the energy that drove him. He continued to keep a close eye on its affairs even when spending long summers in France, as he did in 1853 and 1854; the several cross-Channel dashes from Boulogne back to London to make sure Household Words was not in trouble allowed him also to check on Urania Cottage and its staff and inmates.

  Boulogne pleased him so much that his summers there extended from June to October, and one of the themes of this volume is his steadily growing love of France and the French way of life. In July 1853 he was writing like any schoolboy, ‘J’ai si longtemps demeuré – on the Continent – que j’ais presqu’oublié my native tongue’; by the winter of ‘55, when he took the family to Paris for a stay of six months, he had mastered the language well enough to be able to go regularly to the theatre with perfect enjoyment.

  He also decided to send four of his sons to boarding-school in Boulogne. They were there over a period of seven years, an arrangement which one of them at least (Henry) did not find as delightful as his father believed it to be; the food was bad, and served on tin plates, and the boys were encouraged to spy on one another. Perhaps this was because the headmaster was an English clergyman; and perhaps Dickens, whose letters to the headmaster speak of dancing lessons and extra porter, did not realize the drawbacks, and credited the place with the French virtues he had come to love. Education was a matter he was often uneasy about.

  So was the question of his sons. His relations with them become increasingly interesting – and depressing – in the course of this volume, the first that does not contain the birth of a little Dickens. Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, the youngest, appeared in Volume VI, and is still delightful to his father through the pages of Volume VII. Catherine Dickens observed how much her husband liked babies, a view that is borne out by his frequent boasting of Edward’s physical splendour and bestowal of preposterous pet names, starting with ‘Plorn’, proliferating into the ‘Comic Countryman’, ‘the Plornishghenter’, ‘Madgenter’, ‘May-Roon-Ti-Goon-Ter’, and rising to a baroque ‘Plornish Maroontigoonter’, under which style the infant appeared on stage at Tavistock House, wearing top-boots, in a play directed by his father, at the age of two.

  Of the six others, Henry, who turned out far the most able, is said by his father to be ‘deficient in originality’; whereas Sydney is reported to be slow in learning, but praised as an ‘original’. Frank, described by Dickens as the cleverest of all the children, is suddenly discovered to have a horrible stammer, which his father complains ‘they have kept… from me’; he exercises Frank to help overcome the problem, evidently without much success. As the boys get older, Dickens’s enthusiasm for them wanes. Walter, intended for the East India Company from the age of ten, is found at thirteen to be lacking in the abilities that might have got him into their Engineers; at fourteen his return to school is a cause for celebration, apparently because he walks about in noisy boots. Six months later Dickens discovers he is deaf, and rather ominously tells Catherine, ‘I am going to try a simple remedy of my own on him’, though he adds that he will send him to ‘the best Aurist’, should his treatment fail. Walter did go to India two years later, at sixteen, boots, deafness and all, and died there.

  But it is Charley, the eldest, who takes pride of place in this volume. He is sixteen at the start, and has just left Eton, to which his godmother, Miss Coutts, had insisted on sending him. Dickens had his doubts about ‘the Eton system’. While still there, Charley had disturbed him by telling him he wanted to go into the army; Miss Coutts offered him a cadetship, but after Dickens told him he doubted if the army ‘would bring him to much self respect, contentment, or happiness, in middle life’, and ‘set before him fairly and faithfully the objections to that career’, Charley changed his mind and decided instead to become a merchant. Dickens then arranged for him to go to Leipzig to learn German and business methods: a slightly Gradgrindian arrangement, perhaps, for charming Charley, who made friends among the musicians and artists of Leipzig, and was found to lack the determination to become a merchant, or the application to form correct business habits. Too eager to be amused, perhaps?

  Some of Dickens’s most self-revealing remarks occur in this volume, when, apropos Charley, he wrote: ‘I think he has less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son [my italics]. He went on,

  When I told him this morning that when I was a year older than he, I was in the gallery of the House of Commons, and that when I was his age, I was teaching myself a very difficult art, and walking miles every day to practise it all day long in the Courts of Law; he seemed to think I must have been one of the most unaccountable of youths.

  Add to this, ‘with all the tenderer and better qualities he inherits from his mother, he inherits an indescribable lassitude of character’, and you can see the coming tragedy of the whole Dickens household. The sons have eaten sweet grapes, and the father’s teeth are set on edge. Further, he blames the mother. No son of Dickens could have properly satisfied him unless he had been himself again; or, to put it another way, David Copperfield was the only son in whom he could take real satisfaction.

  Dickens brings Charley back from Leipzig, and hopes to place him in Birmingham – ‘it would be an unspeakable satisfaction to me if I could associate myself with the town through my hoy [my italics]. Then, finding Birmingham unsuitable after all, he looks for a London merchant house. At least that will keep Charley at home, to be ‘armed against the Demon Idleness’; again, there is the faintest echo of Gradgrind in his father’s tone. Charley enjoys being with his sisters at home, joins in the family theatricals and is good at them. Did Dickens never think of putting him on the stage? It seems not.

  Charley was the only son to be sent travelling in Europe. All but one of his younger brothers were packed off to the colonies with much the same efficiency as the reformed inmates of Urania Cottage, and with the same partial success.

  Parental love is one of the most delicate subjects, and looking at Dickens’s behaviour towards his children like this, through the medium of his own letters, is a procedure he would have found unacceptable
. A letter in this volume (not published before) shows him refusing to publish a paper containing biographical details about Charlotte Brontë, shortly after her death: ‘I have a particular objection to that kind of interest in a great mind, which prompts a visitor to “take a good look” at the mortal habiliments in which it is arranged, and afterwards to catalogue them, like an auctioneer.’ The objection is well put. On the other hand, Mrs Gaskell (one of his correspondents and contributors, with whom he quarrelled a great deal) did ‘take a good look’ at the details of Charlotte Brontë’s life, and made from them a marvellous and important biography. Dickens was right and also wrong, as is always the case with this particular debate. No one can own their own life once they are dead; everything depends on tone; and it is not easy to defend the view that some bits of history are allowable and others not.

  The Times Literary Supplement, 1993

  2. Carlo Furioso

  The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume VIII: 1856-1858 edited by Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson

  Outrageous as the characters Dickens created could be, he was himself capable of behaviour as disconcerting as any of them, as Volume VIII of The Letters of Charles Dickens amply demonstrates. At the age of forty-four, this most quintessentially English of writers, adored by his public as no other writer had perhaps ever been, perched himself in France and shot monthly darts across the Channel, in which he attacked the narrow-mindedness of his countrymen and women, the pompous slowness of their bureaucracy and the meanness and crude social divisions that crippled their national life. The darts were in the form of instalments of Little Dorrit; and although Blackwood’s magazine called it ‘Twaddle’ and Thackeray said it was ‘dead stupid’, the public rushed to buy in unprecedented numbers.