Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  At the end of the month, he again resigned as editor of the Miscellany. For a full day Dickens, Forster, and Ainsworth sent notes to one another and to Bentley, attempting to persuade the publisher to appoint Ainsworth the new editor under favorable terms. Reluctantly, he agreed, though both Dickens and especially Forster felt that Ainsworth had bungled his negotiations, settling for less money and editorial control than he could have gotten. Dickens turned over to his lawyer his negotiations with Bentley, who accepted his resignation and agreed to pay him two thousand pounds on the delivery of the manuscript of Barnaby Rudge, which was to be published only in book form, and another two thousand pounds if the sales should be strong.25 In fact, after the completion of Oliver in April 1839, Bentley was never to publish anything of his again. Represented by Mitton, and with Forster as his literary spokesman, Dickens had burst the self-imposed “Bentleian bonds.”

  UNLIKE HIS CONTRACTS WITH BENTLEY, HIS BOND WITH HIS PARENTS was unbreakable. He tried to adjust it to make the relationship more satisfactory. Elizabeth Dickens had only her youngest son, ten-year-old Augustus, to look after by the time of the completion of Pickwick. By the early 1840s, she balanced matriarchal stoutness with some affectations of youthfulness, particularly “the juvenility of her dress” and her semicomic confusions of speech. Her son described her wardrobe as “the attempt ‘of middle-aged mutton to dress itself lamb fashion.’” The incongruity between her increasingly “worn, deeply-lined face” and her love of “youthful amusements,” particularly dancing and party games, amused casual onlookers. Though it apparently made her son uncomfortable, she was a frequent guest at dinner, at family Sundays, on vacation holidays. He did sometimes recognize that she had practical abilities, and he expressed no outward disrespect. But he kept his emotional distance, aware that his anger at her early neglect of him prevented any effort on his part to find nurturing there.

  Though he could be sentimental about them, and perfunctorily generous, his hostility to his parents was sufficiently close to the surface to explode, sometimes into wrath, even into bitterness. On one occasion, provoked by his father’s using his name to guarantee a loan, Charles thanked “God for one thing especially—that His [own] Gracious Providence had saved him from dying in the gutter or in the penitentiary, so infamously had his father neglected him in his young days.” With a preference both for staying out of prison and for not antagonizing his son, John Dickens in 1837 tried again to borrow from Chapman and Hall, requesting that they prevent “a breech of a most distressing nature” by not telling Charles. Disgusted and frustrated, his son repaid Edward Barrow the money he had loaned his father in a crisis in December 1834. Whether or not there were “most discreditable and dishonest dealings on the part of the father towards his son,” as Charles’s sister-in-law Georgina later maintained, by March 1839 he had had enough of his father’s efforts to borrow against his credit and reputation. As unconfessed additional debts came to light, he was furious. “And so it always is;—directly I build up a hundred pounds, one of my dear relations comes and knocks it down again.”26

  Bitterly, he paid the most recent debts, probably with scenes in which his father played the role of the prodigal son. Dickens accurately described his father as “an optimist—he was like a cork—if he was pushed under water in one place, he always ‘bobbed up to time’ cheerfully in another, and felt none the worse for the dip.” The portly, good-humored John Dickens seemed constitutionally incapable of not borrowing against his son’s credit. Charles decided to have the satisfaction and the advantage of having the “Governor” out of sight. With peremptory incontrovertibility, he decided to exile his parents, with Augustus, to a cottage in a rural village. He went himself by coach to Devonshire, found a house in Alphington, near Exeter, made the basic arrangements for their comfort, and provided them with a carefully calculated but realistic allowance. It was true, but also convenient for his conscience, that it was “a jewel of a place … in the most beautiful, cheerful, delicious rural neighborhood I was ever in.” He expected them to like it, “if they will.”27 For his parents, it was a painful rejection, an exile to the distant provinces, where low cost was bought at the price of dullness. For him, it was self-protection with a touch of revenge.

  By spring 1839, the basic contours of his family life had been drawn for the next decade. None of his siblings had more than minor to nonexistent artistic talent. Acting the part of father to his brother Frederick, he soon used his influence to secure him a position as a junior clerk in the treasury department, where he gradually ascended over the next twenty years to the post of second-class clerk. Alfred, who was studying civil engineering, soon became a surveyor and assistant engineer working for the railroads. Letitia and Fanny had married in the summer of 1837, Letitia to Henry Austin, the architect and engineer, Dickens’ friend and companion in amateur theatricals since 1833. Fanny had married a fellow music student, the singer Henry Burnett, who began with a burst of theatrical promise that took him as high as Macready’s Covent Garden company in 1838. Dickens felt affection and respect for both his brothers-in-law, which did not diminish when in 1841 Burnett’s childhood religious training surfaced so strongly that he retired from the stage because of “scruples” and moved to Manchester, settling, with Fanny, into a pietistic life of dissenting observance. Burnett’s voluntary retirement from the stage seemed to Dickens partly unintelligible, partly ironic. Dickens’ every energy had been exerted to place himself stage center. Even Macready, though, had impulses similar to Burnett’s, reflecting a culture in which early religious training often focused opposition to worldly ways in the image of the theatre as vanity.

  Dickens’ own household became an expanding domestic theatre dominated and controlled by the author-manager. Not having had a dependable family to look after him as a child, he began to create a family so dependent on him that in the long run their neediness would become a burden. But for now he reveled in the role of household manager and paterfamilias. By 1841, when his friends looked at Dickens they saw a youthful-looking, brown-haired, fancifully dressed, immensely successful author. Slim, of medium height, with a clear complexion and a mobile, expressive face highlighted by attractive gray-blue eyes, he seemed to have been destined by timing, talent, and personality to be center stage at his personal hearth and the star actor on the stage of the family of Victorian culture. As the family grew, it needed more elbow room, especially since his social and professional elbows expanded widely as the boy-wonder of Sketches and Pickwick revealed a mature staying power. In April 1837, he took a three-year lease on 48 Doughty Street, at a rent of eighty pounds a year, the twelve-room house just large enough for Charles, Catherine, Frederick, visits from Mary Hogarth, and the son born the previous January. In retrospect, the two and a half years at Furnival’s Inn and the brief time at Doughty Street before Mary’s death seemed golden, the happiest of his life. With a heavy writing schedule, he sometimes worked nights as well as mornings. But his energetic confidence and casual conviviality made the workload a source of pride and strength. He sometimes wrote even when there were guests quietly conversing around the fireside in the same room.28 In March 1838, his first daughter, Mary, named after Mary Hogarth, was born, then, in October 1839, Catherine (Kate) Macready Dickens.

  Now, with a family of three children, with the need for live-in servants, with occasional guests, and with an increased sense of social expansiveness, he began to look in the autumn of 1839 for a new house. By mid-November, he was “in the agonies of house-letting, house-taking, title proving and disproving, premium paying, fixture valuing, and other ills too numerous to mention.” Disposing of the remaining time on the Doughty Street lease, he bought, at a cost of £800 and an annual rent of £160, the eleven years remaining on the lease of 1 Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, a handsome, sizable house near Regent’s Park.29 On the basis of his talent alone, in a few short years he had established himself as decisively upper middle class. And the “agonies” were irresistible pleasures for the exp
ansive, managerial Dickens, who orchestrated carpenters, painters, and masons like a master producer who could not get enough of being in charge. A few weeks before Christmas 1839, the family moved into their new home, where the next decade of childbearing and Christmases were suffered and celebrated.

  Catherine did much of the suffering. She bore her children at the price of the usual pain and exhaustion. Ironically, like her husband, she was in this line a steady, hard, though semivoluntary worker. After the birth of her first child, Charles Dickens, Jr., she had a difficult two months. To help her recovery, during February 1837 they took a cottage at Chalk, in Kent, not far from his boyhood haunts and where they had spent their honeymoon. Dickens had been sick as well, and overworked, and the notion of an escape into the country appealed to both of them. Her sister’s death in early May 1837 shocked her into a miscarriage, and then numbed her into a depression from which she rallied slowly. Becoming pregnant again during their subsequent stay in Hampstead helped her through her grief. After the birth of Mary, in March 1838, she became “alarmingly ill,” in “great pain.”

  Her husband was not insensitive to the dangers of child-bearing both to the mother and to the baby. Finding the latter part of confinement and delivery a great strain, he probably had in back of his mind the image from his childhood of dead infants laid out like pigs’ feet or skinned rabbits. With a sigh of relief, he commented, after the birth of his second daughter, “Thank God it is just now all safely over, and Kate and the child … as well as possible.” In 1841, Catherine came through the delivery of the first of the children born at Devonshire Terrace, Walter Savage Landor Dickens, “not merely as well as can be expected, but a great deal better. “30 The wear and tear, though, of four children in four years took its toll on her nerves and appearance. While his world expanded, hers narrowed.

  From the birth of his first son onward, Dickens could afford the advantage of summer holidays and impromptu stays by the seaside or in the country. Since he needed to work closely with his illustrator and publisher, his inclination was to go far enough away so that it would be a real change but close enough so that he could commute to London some days each week. In September 1837, they spent two weeks in Broadstairs, falling in love with the glittering ocean and the convivial days and weather, and then a week in Brighton. The next summer, they vacationed for two months in Twickenham, and they were in Broadstairs again for most of September 1839. Dickens did not conceive of such holidays as private times with Catherine. They were family vacations, and his extended family was included. He needed the support and companionship of his friends. Calls went out from Twickenham and Broadstairs to his widening circle to join him for comradeship, excursions, and play. Marital intimacy had its pleasures and its consequences, but even at his most intimate he kept his distance. Though he rarely even whispers of marital sex in his letters, he seems to have had little difficulty in allowing his general good feeling to overflow into expressions of endearment. He apparently took Catherine into his confidence, partly because she was his wife, partly because she was there, partly because he tended to be expressive. She could be a convivial, amiable, tolerant companion, adequately competent in managing herself and the obvious things of the household. Her emotional focus alternated between her efforts to survive when pregnant and ill and her desire that her all-encompassing domestic world be pleasant and relaxed.

  For a brief while there was another woman in his life, whom he shared with his friends and with the nation, and who provided a nonthreatening alternative to middle-class domesticity. Playfully alert, imaginatively restless, and incapable of being fully satisfied in his relationship with Catherine, he began the first of a series of tightly controlled amorous flirtations. This one was totally in his imagination. It was partly an elaborate joke, partly a serious expression of romantic passion. In June 1838, he and his friends watched Queen Victoria’s coronation procession from a third-floor room he had rented. The next February he distantly rubbed shoulders with the young glamorous queen at Covent Garden. In full court dress, she watched Macready’s performance in Bulwer’s The Lady of Lyons, a play on which Bulwer, Forster, and Macready had spent long hours collaborating. She had read and liked Oliver Twist, which she probably had learned about from Maclise, whose paintings she adored. While there is no reason to believe that she adored Maclise, the handsome Irishman had many female admirers, including Lady Henrietta Sykes, whose affair with him, after her affair with Disraeli, had become a public scandal. The news appeared on the front page of the Morning Chronicle when she “was caught in the arms of Maclise … in her own Bed, in her Husband’s House in Park Lane.”31

  Alert to gossip, prone to tease his friends, Dickens had learned that Forster, before they had met, had been in love with Letitia Landon, the sentimental poetess of bland language and modest talents who had been the darling of the poetry annuals and keepsake books for a few years in the early 1830s. Forster had used the rumor that she had been the lover of the editor and writer William Maginn to withdraw his proposal. Rumor maintained that she had been among Maclise’s conquests as well. By the time of her death in 1838, Dickens had a good sense of the past and present amorous aspirations and involvements of Maclise and Forster. He delighted to tease both of them. One revealing tease was a love letter to Forster from Dickens, loosely disguising himself as “Louisa,” a name close enough to Letitia to have serious resonances. The spurned Louisa, who “wished with all a woman’s ardour that you were mine,” confesses her love—“think me capricious—strange—romantic”—and hopes that “you may be happy, as happy, Mr. Forster, as you deserve.”32

  In the world of London artistic society, pietistic prohibitions and middle-class idealizations had less force than in the community as a whole. London street life, particularly around the theatres, was openly bawdy, Drury Lane Theatre an active marketplace for prostitution. On the higher levels of social life, sexual arrangements, some romantic, many mercenary, flourished with a freedom that evangelical reform and middle-class values hardly touched. Maclise, whose artistic success and good looks had opened many drawing-room and bedroom doors, was an aggressive womanizer. Forster was inhibited and conservative. Unlike Dickens, they were bachelors. On one occasion, Forster urged Ainsworth to come with him “to see a wonderful actress and most fascinating woman (with whom your unhappy friend is over head and ears in love).” Passionately in love with Talfourd’s niece, Maclise joked seriously about the “ruthless devastator of feminine blossoms.” The married Dickens found an extraordinary excitement and a special bonding with his bachelor friends in the fiction that they were all in love, though he and Maclise more so than the phlegmatic Forster, with the beautiful young queen.33

  With the titillation of multiple participants, this imaginary affair reached its climax in February 1840 in the self-consciously humorous and arousingly voyeuristic focus on the queen’s honeymoon at Windsor. For Dickens, it was an opportunity for the safest kind of alternative to the domestication of his emotional and sexual life at Devonshire Terrace. Aware of his good looks, a “Fancy Man” himself, dressing elaborately in the colorful dandy fashion, he particularly enjoyed the line in a song popular in the London streets immediately before the royal wedding, “Prince Hallbert he vill alvays be/My own dear Fancy Man.” The erotic joke was irresistible. It could not be suppressed, especially since it was perfectly safe to express it humorously. “I have fallen hopelessly in love with the Queen, and wander up and down with vague and dismal thoughts of running away to some uninhabited island with a maid of honor.” He had in mind the beautiful Lady Frances Cowper, whom he soon “dreamt of … all night.” When he and Maclise “sallied down to Windsor,” they “prowled about the Castle, saw the Corridor and their private rooms—nay, the very bedchamber (which we know from having been there twice) … bespeaking so much bliss and happiness—that I … lay down in the mud … and refused all comfort.… I am very wretched, and think of leaving my home. My wife makes me miserable, and when I hear the voices of my Infant
Children I burst into tears.” He would rescue the beautiful lady from her groom by “heading some bloody assault upon the palace and saving Her by my single hand.”34 It was a satisfying fantasy whose characteristic humor did not disguise the need it served.

  MUCH OF HIS ENERGY, THOUGH, WENT INTO HIS WORK AND INTO HIS friendships, the most alert of which by 1839 were with Forster and Maclise. After some tension with Ainsworth, he had been dropped from the “Trio Club,” and the new trio relaxed under the banner of the “Cerberus Club.” Dickens had a growing sense of personal and professional power, of being a man whose presence and ideas counted, and a sense that relationships were best developed within the structures of a formal community. A founding member in 1838 of the short-lived Shakespeare Club, he soon became a member of the Parthenon Club, where he frequently dined, then of the Garrick and the Athenaeum. Though they were sometimes forums for contention (he resigned from the Garrick in support of Macready, who had argued with the management, and rejoined some years later), the clubs were mainly places of elite male conviviality into which neither women nor domesticity could intrude. In personal relationships and in club life, he developed a network of supportive friendships essential to him and central to the Victorian literary community. He needed friends to encourage him in his work and to assist him as he assisted them in creating an artistic and practical environment in which their works would be appreciated and rewarded.