Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Dickens’s techniques are all his own. In the early chapters, and in moments of high intensity, David moves between past and present tense in telling his own story, carrying the reader with a ‘Let me see …’, a ‘Now I am …’ or a ‘We are …’ In this way, talking of his childhood home, he writes, ‘Here is a long passage – what an enormous perspective I make of it!’ ‘Now I am in the garden at the back …’ ‘We are playing in the winter twilight, dancing about the parlour … I watch [my mother] winding her bright curls round her fingers …’ And as he describes his mother taking him through a lesson, with his stepfather and his sister in the same room, ‘I trip over a word. Mr Murdstone looks up. I trip over another word. Miss Murdstone looks up. I redden, tumble over half-a-dozen words, and stop. I think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does not dare, and she says softly: “Oh, Davy, Davy!” “Now, Clara,” says Mr Murdstone, “be firm with the boy.”’ And here he is leaving home: ‘See, how our house and church are lessening in the distance; how the grave beneath the tree is blotted out by intervening objects …’22

  His descriptions are so finely accurate that he seems to be watching something taking place before his eyes as he writes (and he may have been, as Thomas Hardy saw pictures in his mind when writing his poems). For example, when Peggotty is describing his mother’s last days and death to him: ‘Here Peggotty stopped, and softly beat upon my hand a little while,’ and later again, ‘Another silence followed … and another gentle beating on my hand.’23 This is wonderfully observed of someone who finds it hard to express herself and needs to search for the right words, unconsciously beating with her fingers as she does so. Another instance: when he makes David, worn out from his walk from London to Dover, and facing his formidable aunt Betsey at last as she stands in the front garden armed with her gardening knife, simply put out one finger and touch her. Anyone who has lived with a timid child recognizes that gesture, and doubtless Dickens had observed his younger brothers and sisters, and his own children, doing just that; and here he plucks it from his memory and makes perfect use of it.

  The detail is astonishing, and the establishment of the theme of the whole book – the education and development of a man from childhood, through suffering to happy maturity – is done with tenderness and humour. David is not the young Charles Dickens, although he is lent some of his experiences at the blacking factory. He transfers the callousness of his real parents to David’s sadistic stepfather, Mr Murdstone, and makes John and Elizabeth Dickens into the charming Micawbers, with whom he lodges while working at the factory. They, to a degree, counter the poverty and loneliness he has been consigned to, with the denial of education, comfort or hope, and offer him affection and respect. Micawber speaks with the voice of John Dickens, in torrents of elaborate speech, always hoping something will turn up, mood-swinging from elation to despair as financial disaster looms; and he offers David the dictum Charles was actually given by his father, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’24 A large and unforgettable character, he is glorious in his incompetence and absurdity, and always well intentioned; and Mrs Micawber is as absurd in her way, and also without a shred of blame for David’s unhappiness. Having divided his father in two, and cleared both parents of blame, he adds another interesting touch by making both Mr and Mrs Micawber appear oblivious of the fact that David is a child. They talk to him and treat him as a fellow adult and an equal – something that might suggest an explanation for the way in which the Dickens parents had treated their son, expecting him to deal with pawnbrokers, work in a factory and manage entirely on his own. His quick intelligence and clear capacity to carry out whatever was demanded of him had allowed them to forget that he was a child; but he did not forget how they had behaved, and used it.

  The transposition of Mr and Mrs Dickens to the Micawbers is exceptional, however, and almost all the characters David encounters as he grows up are supplied by Dickens’s imagination. Peggotty’s family of Yarmouth fishermen, living in an inverted boat on the sands, with Ham and Little Em’ly, a blue-eyed orphan brought up by her uncle Peggotty, have no known models. Nor has Steerforth, David’s older schoolfriend, a Byronic figure irresistible to him. Even as David sees him behaving badly, he worships him for his charm; this is the nearest approach Dickens made to showing romantic homosexual love, and it is frankly done. When they meet again as young adults Steerforth takes David home to meet his mother and her companion, Rosa Dartle, and she appears as the most interesting woman in the book, with her scarred lip and biting intelligence. David is too innocent to understand her or her exchanges with Steerforth, whom she finds as attractive as David does, but for whom she refuses to be ‘a doll’, whereas David is happy to be called ‘Daisy’ by him. When Steerforth, who has met the Peggotty family through David, speaks of them as ‘that sort of people’, meaning they are less sensitive than those of higher social class, Rosa responds with ‘Really! … I don’t know, now, when I have been better pleased than to hear that. It’s so consoling! It’s such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don’t feel …’25 While David in his innocence misreads the exchange and thinks Steerforth is joking and teasing her to get a rise, Rosa’s sarcasm is her way of rebuking his callous view. David is wrong, and his friend is about to lay waste to the lives of the Peggotty family, carelessly, to amuse himself. But David will always find excuses for Steerforth, and always remember how he would think of him after going to bed at school: ‘[I] raised myself, I recollect, to look at him where he lay in the moonlight, with his handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm …’26

  David’s aunt Betsey is another formidable independent woman, not the type usually admired by Dickens, and he gives her her due in her good works and good sense, and especially in her care of her protégé Mr Dick, whom she has saved from a lunatic asylum. Mr Dick, who has difficulty in thinking coherently, takes David out with him to fly his kite, and David is happy with him, and believes that the kite lifts his mind out of its confusion as it rises in the sky. Very possibly it does, and certainly Dickens believed in the beneficial effects of games and imaginative play for everyone. Further on in the book, Dickens mocks his own taste for child-brides when he makes David fall in love with the adorably pretty and near-imbecile Dora Spenlow, and marry her. His love for her is intense, and believable, since she is another version of his mother, and there are scenes of rueful comedy as they struggle to keep house, and he comes to realize he has made a mistake he must live with. We know from his notes that, as author, he found it hard to make up his mind whether to let her live or to kill her off, partly perhaps because he drew on his memories of Maria Beadnell when writing about her. In the chapters involving Dora he several times reverts to the present tense, underlining the link with the chapters about his mother, where he did the same. So the book binds past to present and present to past.

  Inevitably in a work of this length, written in monthly instalments with no choice to rethink and revise, there are weaknesses. The chapters set in Canterbury – the old schoolmaster Dr Strong with his child-bride, wrongly suspected of infidelity, and the Wickfield family, lawyer father and virtuous daughter, Agnes, who loves David selflessly – are thin stuff, although Wickfield’s evil clerk Uriah Heep, red-haired, red-eyed and clammy of hand, is entertaining, one of Dickens’s monsters with a leitmotiv, continually declaring himself to be ‘umble’. The big drama of the plot comes when Steerforth seduces Little Em’ly and takes her away to Italy on his yacht, her uncle sets off to search for her, and Steerforth is drowned in a storm. Here again the links are made between past and present, when David is reminded by the sight of Steerforth’s drowned body of how he looked as a sleeping schoolboy. But Em’ly is characterless, and the prostitute Martha who helps to find her speaks in the dismal clichés of melodrama: ‘Oh, the river! … I know that I belong to it … I can’t keep a
way from it … It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!’ Or, again, she urges Mr Peggotty and David to ‘Stamp upon me, kill me! You can’t believe – why should you? – a syllable that comes out of my lips …’27 The young women at Shepherd’s Bush whom Dickens knew so well did not talk like this, and yet he could not resist giving Martha the same stage language he had given to Nancy in Oliver Twist. Agnes Wickfield, promoted to heroine, is calm, efficient and sexless, and as lifeless as Em’ly; and, as John Gross has remarked, David’s literary success has to be taken on trust, and ‘after the splendour of the childhood scenes one is grateful, on the whole, not to be told anything about books written with Agnes at his side as an ever-present inspiration, “pointing upwards”.’28 But even these weak points are not enough to spoil the achievement of the whole book. David Copperfield is a masterpiece built on Dickens’s ability to dig into his own experience, transform it and give it the power of myth.

  It ran in its green-paper wrappers, with the Phiz illustrations which became an integral part of it, from May 1849 to November 1850. Dora and Steerforth were killed off, Heep sent to prison, the Micawbers, Em’ly and her uncle Peggotty to Australia, taking Martha with them; and David became a famous author, happily married to a second wife. It sold less well than Dombey, but went on to become his best-known book all over the world. Tolstoy particularly admired it, and it has always been turned to for comfort by those who have suffered in childhood from loss or unhappiness, unkind or unjust treatment.

  As he wrote, he was conscious of how far he had surpassed any expectations he could have had himself as a child. His books had made him a man of substance who could live as he chose. His household was efficiently run by an adoring sister-in-law, and he could provide summers at Broadstairs for his thriving brood of eight children, governesses for his daughters and superior schools for his sons: Charley was to go to Eton in January 1850. He could take himself to Paris or go walking in his beloved Kentish countryside whenever he felt the urge. He could very publicly raise money for good causes while indulging his passion for acting and directing, and discreetly and privately devote himself to his work at the Home in Shepherd’s Bush. Miss Coutts, the wealthiest woman in the country, friend of royalty, listened to his recommendations for good works, funded them and was a devoted personal friend, intent on ensuring that his eldest son should have every advantage in life, from outsize birthday cakes to the finest education money could buy. And he was still married to the wife of his youth, and still called her ‘My Dearest Kate’ in his letters.

  Delivering the monthly numbers on time was not as troublesome as it had been with Dombey, and he was able to keep part of each month free: ‘If it be only half an hour’s sitting alone in the morning, in my leisure part of the month, and half an hour’s look at pen ink and paper, it seems to keep me in the train. And with so much before me, and the necessity always present to me of doing my best and sustaining my reputation at its highest point, I feel it better and wiser to keep near my oar.’ This was to Richard Watson, who had suggested they all return to Switzerland for the summer.29 Instead Dickens took a villa at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight, where Thackeray saw him arriving on 23 July and noted, with a touch of envy, ‘I met on the pier as I was running for dear life, the great Dickens with his wife his children his Miss Hogarth all looking abominably coarse vulgar and happy.’30

  Friends were summoned to share in the pleasures of the villa with its private bathing and waterfall made into a shower bath, and Dickens gave one of his displays of conjuring tricks, which he described as being, in one case, the product of ‘nine years’ seclusion in the mines of Russia’, and in another acquired for 5,000 guineas ‘from a Chinese Mandarin, who died of grief immediately after parting with the secret’.31 You can see what fun he could be as a father. After this Bonchurch let him down. He developed a cold which turned into an obstinate cough and he began to feel weak; a doctor examined him with a stethoscope, and recommended rubbings of the chest of a particular kind used against tuberculosis. No doubt the memory of Fanny’s suffering and the fear that he might be going the same way came to him. He had a bilious attack, his legs trembled, he had no energy to walk, or to read, or even to brush his hair, and he became convinced that he would die if he remained for much longer on the Isle of Wight – all this he told Forster by letter. Suddenly his symptoms disappeared, but then Leech, who was with them in Bonchurch, was knocked over by a large wave and became so ill that Dickens had to treat him with magnetism. This done, with good effect, he hurried away to a hotel in Broadstairs to write the next number of David Copperfield, and was not back in London until mid-October. In November he was invited by the Watsons to Rockingham, and enjoyed being a guest in their fine and ancient castle with keep, portcullis and all modern conveniences, twenty-six servants, and a beautiful and well-run estate. He told Forster it was ‘a very pleasant spectacle, even to a conscientious republican like yourself or me’.32

  Two annoyances involved him with lawyers during the autumn. One he brought on himself by drawing a character in Copperfield too closely from life, with Miss Mowcher, a dwarf and beauty specialist who is shown doing Steerforth’s hair, and preparing to help him in his seduction of Em’ly. Mrs Seymour Hill, a close neighbour of Dickens, herself a dwarf and a chiropodist, wrote objecting to his portrayal of her as Miss Mowcher, which was understandably causing her distress, professional and personal. Dickens at once wrote back admitting he had taken some characteristics from Mrs Hill, and that he had meant Mrs Mowcher to be badly behaved, but that he would now change the plot and make her into a good character. He made the same assurances to her lawyer, whom she had already consulted, and did what he had promised, transforming Miss Mowcher into a doughty fighter for virtue in later chapters. The other legal battle involved a rascally Englishman, Thomas Powell, who published a hostile and worthless biography of Dickens in America. When Dickens wrote exposing Powell’s past as a thief and forger who had escaped justice in England by having himself committed to a lunatic asylum and then fled the country, Powell threatened to sue him for libel. The Americans relished the attack on Dickens and the quarrel rumbled on.

  In December he took Charley to be interviewed at Eton, where he was due to start in January. He was found to be well up on Virgil and Herodotus, and intelligent, although in need of a little extra coaching in writing Latin verses on the Horatian model. Dickens was ‘inexpressibly delighted’ by the way his son went through the ordeal of the interview with a strange schoolmaster, and reported proudly to Miss Coutts on his success. Otherwise the end of the year was given to dealing with visits to the Home, on 21 December and Boxing Day. At Christmas he resigned for the second time from the Garrick Club, giving no reason.33 There were the usual family jollities, and some dining out and pantomime-going with Mark Lemon and Stanny – Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter and one of his dearest old friends. Catherine was pregnant again, the baby expected in August 1850.

  16

  Fathers and Sons

  1850–1851

  On the second Saturday in January 1850, a week after Charley’s thirteenth birthday, his sisters and brothers set up a great wailing at Devonshire Terrace as he left home for Eton, accompanied by his father. Dickens was suffering from a cold that made him feel his head had swollen to an enormous size, but he managed to dine with Charley’s tutor, a classical scholar and clergyman, while Charley ate by himself in a large empty hall. It was a glum start for him, no other boys having yet arrived – a little like David’s introduction to Mr Creakle’s school – but he took it well and as soon as they appeared he began to make friends, proved popular and learnt to turn out Latin verses with the best of them. A few days into term Dickens heard of the death of his friend and mentor Lord Jeffrey, whose last letter to him, written a week before, had warned him against Eton: ‘what is most surely learned there is the habit of wasteful expense, and, in ordinary natures, a shame and contempt for plebeian parents.’1 Jeff
reys had added tactfully that he expected Dickens’s son to resist these effects, and Dickens threw himself into the Eton experiment, arranging swimming lessons for Charley so that the boy could row on the river as he wished, and descending on him from time to time with picnics to treat his friends; but he must have remembered his own sardonic description of a well-born and fashionable London clergyman who had been ‘celebrated at Eton for his hopeless stupidity’, and he was never entirely convinced that this was the right sort of education for his boy.2

  January was also the month in which he wrote of Little Em’ly’s fall, wickedly seduced by Steerforth. He told Forster he hoped he would be remembered through her ‘for many years to come’, as indeed he was.3 He was busy as ever visiting the Home, where other less glamorous Em’lys were being saved from disgrace, and at the same time he was setting up his new periodical, fixing on its name, Household Words, in February. His friend Wills from the Daily News was appointed assistant editor in daily charge, Forster became a salaried adviser, and letters went out to many possible contributors. Mrs Gaskell was one of the first approached, already known to him through Forster, who had placed her first novel, Mary Barton, with Chapman & Hall. It was one of the earliest to be centred on the lives of industrial workers, and Dickens told her there was no other writer he was keener to enlist, explaining that the aim of the journal was ‘the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition’.4 He warned her that everything in Household Words appeared anonymously, but she was pleased to become a regular contributor, and two thirds of her stories and articles were from now on published by Dickens, including the Cranford series and North and South. They also shared a concern for the fate of young women who fell into prostitution, and she asked, and received, his advice in helping a protégée to emigrate. A touch of flirtatiousness surfaces in some of his letters to her – ‘Dear Scheherazade’, ‘I receive you, ever, (if Mr G will allow me to say so) with open arms’, ‘O what a lazy woman you are, and where IS that article!’ – and she teased him for his grand style of life at Devonshire Terrace, and held her own against his editorial pressures, while he confided to Wills, ‘Mrs Gaskell, fearful – fearful. If I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her!’5