Charles Dickens: A Life

by Claire Tomalin

  Dickens took a lease on Tavistock House in 1851, intending to keep it for life.

  After this busy and distressing time the Dickens family could at last get to Broadstairs, although with many returns to London. Dickens went to the Derby with Wills, visited Charley at Eton, attended the Duke of Devonshire’s supper and ball for the cast of the play, and a banquet given by Talfourd in belated honour of Copperfield, to which Thackeray and Tennyson both came. There were more theatricals, with the first performance of the farce he and Mark Lemon had concocted together, Mr Nightingale’s Diary, which gave them both the chance to appear in many different disguises and to ad-lib to their heart’s content, Dickens wildly impersonating Mrs Gamp and Sam Weller at different moments. It was a big success with the public in London and the provincial towns to which they took it, and allowed him to prove once and for all that he could rival the man who had first inspired him, Charles Mathews, master of the monopolylogues.

  In July he finally acquired another large London house with a garden, Tavistock House in Tavistock Square, for £1,500. It was in very poor condition and needed a great deal of work before the family could move in. His friend, the impoverished artist Frank Stone, had lived in it with his family, and Dickens now lent them Devonshire Terrace. He took a fifty-year lease on Tavistock House, saying he intended it to last out his life, and sent in an army of workmen.27 Back in Broadstairs, he invited Forster for three sunny weeks in September, then in October Stone came down with Augustus Egg.

  Egg had been in love with Georgina for some time and now proposed to her. He was a handsome and sweet-natured man, a good friend of Dickens and a successful painter who could well afford to support a wife, but although she liked him she turned him down. Dickens told Miss Coutts later that he asked himself ‘Whether it is, or is not a pity that she is all she is to me and mine instead of brightening up a good little man’s house’, but Georgina, after nine years with the Dickens family, was too much in thrall to his charm and energy to consider any alternative to her position in his life.28 She was still his pet at twenty-four, but she was a pet with a steely centre, and in the organization of the household her voice was second only to his, and poor ailing Catherine let her rule. Georgy’s adoration flattered him and he flattered her in return, saying she was intellectually far superior to Egg, and that her capacities were greater than those of ‘five out of six’ men.29 With him she travelled, entertained and was entertained, enjoying an enviable way of life at the side of a great man. The children loved their aunt, but she and Catherine were both regularly required to be at Dickens’s side when he was away from home, leaving the little ones with nurses and governesses and, as the boys grew older, away at boarding school. Georgy cannot have seen much to envy in Catherine’s position: even now she was pregnant yet again, with a tenth child, due in March 1852.

  17

  Children at Work

  1852–1854

  For the next five years Dickens packed so much activity into his life that it is hard to believe there is only one man writing novels, articles and letters, producing A Child’s History of England, editing, organizing his children’s education, advising Miss Coutts on good works, agitating on questions of political reform, public health, housing and sewerage, travelling, acting, making speeches, raising money and working off his excess energy in his customary twelve-mile walks. At home, a tenth and last child was born, and Dickens put on ambitious plays for Charley’s birthday at Twelfth Night. All the children had parts, and in 1854 five-year-old Henry Fielding Dickens played in Tom Thumb, causing Thackeray to fall off his chair with laughter. The other Home at Shepherd’s Bush was often visited and supervised with meticulous care; he took a close interest in individual young women, and corresponded with Miss Coutts about them and about the many problems of administration. In Wellington Street he presided over Household Words with a sharp editorial eye, chivvying Wills with detailed advice by post when away, contributing articles of his own and writing a short novel, Hard Times, in weekly instalments to boost circulation in 1854. He travelled about with his theatrical troupe to raise money for the Guild of Literature and Art. When Forster was ill, as he often was, he visited him and read aloud to cheer him. With his newer friends Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg as travelling companions he revisited Switzerland and Italy. He made occasional dashes to Paris on the twelve-hour South-Eastern railway service, and one long stay there en famille. He mourned for three of his men friends, struck down unexpectedly during these years, all in their fifties: Richard Watson, dedicatee of Copperfield; the beautiful, Byronic D’Orsay, driven to Paris by his debts; and Talfourd, the ever hospitable playwright and stalwart liberal judge. Also Macready’s wife Catherine, succumbing to the tuberculosis that ravaged her children as well; she was a close friend of Catherine Dickens, who must have missed her badly.

  A daguerreotype taken in 1852 shows Dickens clean-shaven, but he made occasional experiments with a moustache and by the summer of 1854 he had settled for one. In 1856 he added a beard, and the fresh-faced Dickens disappeared forever, to the sorrow of Forster, who had invited Frith to paint his portrait just too late to catch him, and of many others too, who thought the bristles hid the beauty of his mouth. His complexion was becoming weather-beaten, his frame lean as ever, his walking habits as vigorous, his pace still a steady four miles an hour.1 From 1853 the family spent most of their summer holidays in Boulogne, which replaced Broadstairs in his affection. And in December 1853 he read from his Christmas books in Birmingham to audiences of nearly 6,000, and told Wills afterwards that he was ready to consider paid readings. After the last reading on 30 December, Wills wrote, ‘If D does turn Reader, he will make another fortune. He will never offer to do so, of course. But if they will have him he will do it, he told me today.’2 The idea was firmly implanted, although the first paid public reading was not to be until 1858.

  Between 1852 and 1857 Dickens wrote three novels which addressed themselves to the condition of England, novels that have endured as accounts of mid-nineteenth-century life and as extraordinary works of art, poetic, innovative, irradiated with anger and dark humour, peopled by lawyers, financiers, aristocrats, bricklayers, circus performers, soldiers, factory-owners, imprisoned debtors and their jailers, child labourers, musicians and dancers, aesthetes, thieves, detectives, committee women, and wives jealous, fierce, tender and battered. There was less laughter than in the earlier books, and more reckoning of accounts, as a man in his forties might think right.

  The first of these novels was Bleak House. His earliest ideas for the story had been ‘hovering in a ghostly way’ about him since February 1851, but that year, with its deaths, house moving and fund-raising, allowed him no time to settle to a new book, although he was intermittently writing and sometimes dictating to Georgina his Child’s History of England.3 Any thought of starting serious work had to be postponed until they got into Tavistock House, which did not happen until mid-November. Then, within days of sitting down in his new study, he told his publisher Evans there would be a first number of his next novel ready for March 1852. The opening chapters were written in December, and they established at once that the personal themes of David Copperfield, attachment and loss, love and friendship, had been left behind for broader and more sombre ones. The scene was set with fog over London and mud underfoot:

  London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, fifty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun … Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dir
ty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.4

  Spreading his fog, and throwing in a dinosaur for good measure, Dickens makes this the most powerful beginning of all his novels, as he rolls out the dark, dirty English earth and sky to set the theme of the book. It will take on the worst aspects of the legal system – its inhumanity, sloth, corruption and obstruction – as a basis for a larger matter, the bad governance of society as a whole; and it will show the physical sickness of London – its toxic water, rotten housing, bursting graveyards and festering sewerage – as part of the effects of that bad governance. There will be almost none of the high-spirited comedy of the early novels: most of the jokes in Bleak House are edged with horror.

  Dickens is writing as a poet, taking as much delight in delineating wickedness and dark places as goodness and beauty. His imagination, always bold, now offers scenes as odd and inspired as Shakespeare’s, like half-crazed Miss Flite, whose madness tells the truth, and who keeps linnets and goldfinches caged in her window, giving them names, Hope, Joy, Youth, Ruin, Despair and Madness. The horribly respectable solicitor Vholes, given to entangling his victims like a snake, is shown giving ‘one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of his client’. The Smallweed family, worshippers of the god of Compound Interest, vicious in pursuit of money, despisers of storybooks, fairy-tales, dolls and games, are seen at home meanly doling out stale crusts and drops from the bottoms of used teacups for the supper of their child servant, Charley. She has left her small brother and baby sister locked in a room to keep them safe while she is out working, and she is their sole support. Such things were imagined by Dickens: their factual counterpart can be found in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published in the 1840s.

  The second chapter of Bleak House sets the plot in motion, as Lady Dedlock, a society beauty married to an elderly landowner, faints when she catches sight of the handwriting on a legal document brought by the family lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn. His curiosity is aroused and he decides to find out why she fainted. Mr Tulkinghorn dislikes women, seeing them as creatures who have secrets and interfere in his relations with his aristocratic male clients, and he is pleased to have a reason to hunt her down. This will be a mystery story, a whodunnit, as well as an account of English society. Dickens believed in entertaining his readers, and giving them a good plot was a way to do it. For him, popularity and high art were not at odds, and Bleak House is one of the first detective stories in the language, with a classic three-suspect murder at the climax. It is also a nineteenth-century fairy-tale or pantomime, with good and evil spirits, reversals, discoveries of lost parents and children, comedy and pathos, violent and tragic deaths and triumphs of love.

  The third chapter introduces a narrator, Esther, and moves for the first time into the past tense. Throughout the book the author’s narrative remains in the present, while Esther’s account of her experiences is threaded in the past tense, varying the perspective. Esther is self-deprecating and anxious to be loved because she has grown up without parents and been told that she is the child of a sinful mother; happily, when her gloomy female guardian dies, she comes into the care of a benevolent cousin, Mr Jarndyce of Bleak House, who is also taking in two other orphaned cousins, Richard and Ada. They are all wards of Chancery, and its victims too, since the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has been running in the Chancery court for decades, wrecking lives as it goes. The kindly Mr Jarndyce has turned his back on the case and advises them to do the same; Esther becomes his housekeeper at Bleak House, and loves Ada and Richard like a sister.

  Readers from Charlotte Brontë on have been irritated by Esther’s tone, always the cheerful little woman and nobly forgetful of self. There were probably more women of her type about in the mid-nineteenth century than now, self-sacrificing to the point of masochism because of the way they had been reared and trained. But she is not stupid, and she can make trenchant remarks. When Miss Flite talks of honours given to good people, it is Esther who observes that ‘it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services … unless occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.’5 There is a small link with life in that, as suggested in Chapter 12, Dickens took her name from Esther Elton, the orphaned girl he helped from 1843 on, who impressed him so strongly with her ‘quiet, unpretending, domestic heroism; of a most affecting and interesting kind’. Her having been her father’s housekeeper, her devotion to her younger sisters and brother and what he called ‘her self-denial in a hundred ways’ – all indicate that she was in his mind as he created the character of Esther Summerson.6

  In Honoria, Lady Dedlock, and her sister, there may also be an allusion to the beautiful Sheridan sisters, brought up in society but without any fortune, marrying into the aristocracy in the case of Henrietta and Jane, and in Caroline’s case involved in a scandal. It is situation, not character, he is using here, and Lady Dedlock is defined by her situation, shown as hardly more than a face, a figure and a haughty manner over the secret that threatens her with scandal. Other borrowings from life are well known: the detective Mr Bucket modelled on his friend Chief Inspector Field, and the French lady’s maid Hortense on a notorious Frenchwoman, Mrs Manning, whom Dickens saw hanged. Mr Boythorn, drawn from Walter Savage Landor, appears like him as a good-hearted blusterer, and pleased everyone who knew him. But Leigh Hunt, his family and friends were distressed by the portrait of the aesthete Skimpole, charming of speech and then revealed as a cold-hearted sponger, and although Dickens protested he had not meant to portray him, he was not believed, and the harm was done.

  Bleak House contains few happy families and many single people, broken relationships and children orphaned or divided from parents. Esther, Ada, Richard, Charley Neckett and her siblings, Phil Squod, Guster and Jo have all lost their parents. Jarndyce, Boythorn, Krook, George Rouncewell, Gridley and Tulkinghorn are bachelors, and Skimpole, who has a wife and children, scarcely allows them to impinge on his life. Miss Flite is a spinster. Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are seemingly childless, and Lady Dedlock prefers death to the social stigma of being revealed as the mother of an illegitimate child. The Snagsbys are childless, although Mrs Snagsby suspects her husband of having fathered the street boy Jo. Mrs Jellyby has a family she neglects and a husband she reduces to bankruptcy. And so on. The Smallweeds are a close family, joined by mutual dislike and mistrust. Only the Bagnets present a warm and united group, the father an Army man, the mother indomitable, the son and daughters good and well behaved.

  Child workers always caught Dickens’s attention, and in this book there are several: Jo, the ignorant and solitary boy who sweeps crossings; Charley, a ‘very little girl’ who claims to be over thirteen, lives alone with her younger brother and baby sister, and goes out to earn their keep by washing for the Smallweed family and others. Guster, a slavey who came from the workhouse and has fits, is now over twenty, but has clearly grown up working for her employers; and Phil Squod, a crippled and disfigured adult who doesn’t know his own age, describes how he started his working life at the age of eight, assisting a tinker. They are all reminders of what Dickens wrote in the proof of The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘the poor have no childhood. It must be bought and paid for.’7 His imagined children stand in parallel to the real girls he was currently interviewing for the Home at Shepherd’s Bush, most of them half starved, detached from any families they ever had, some from the workhouse, some from prison, needlewomen, dressmakers or artificial-flower makers, casual or reluctant prostitutes: in the letter to Miss Coutts in which he discussed details of several of them, he told her, ‘I have been so busy, leading up to the great turning idea of the Bleak House story, that I have lived this last week or ten days in a perpetual scald and boil.’8

  In the book, Caddy Jellyby has been forced to work for her mother and denied a natural, cheerful childhood; and Esther, although kindly treated at her boarding school and happy enough there, works as a pupil teacher and tr
ains herself to put the service of others before her own desires always. Each shows courage and ingenuity, and goodness too. Guster gives her supper to Jo, Squod helps to nurse him. Caddy, once escaped from her mother and married, looks after her preposterously selfish father-in-law and helps her dancing-master husband; Esther is loved by the girls she teaches. Charley remains as good as ever when she is promoted by Mr Jarndyce to become Esther’s maid; only poor Jo, always moved on and too starved and neglected to fight for his life, gives up and dies. He became the most admired and popular figure in the book, taken to the hearts of all the readers who were moved to read of the deaths of children. Dickens has Jo repeating the first few words of the Lord’s Prayer on his deathbed. They mean nothing to him, but he likes ‘Our Father’ – ‘yes, that’s wery good, sir’ – and feels for the hand of the doctor beside him as he says them. Some find this a sentimental presentation, but when it comes to Dickens’s outburst of rage and sorrow that follows Jo’s death there is no doubt that it is linked to a reality well known to him, and he is writing from head as well as heart: ‘Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.’9 There is no talk of angels here, or suffering turning to happiness for Jo.

  The theme of the book does not need to be tied to a precise year, but the time is stated as being just before the railways arrived in the mid-1830s. This sets Esther’s birth at about 1815, so that her soldier father would have fought at Waterloo, her mother would have been born in the later 1790s and Sir Leicester Dedlock in 1775, which makes a convincing timeline for each of them.10 The story it tells is mostly grim, although peopled by comic and curious characters. There are survivors, and promises of happiness for a few, but many are left dead, or damaged.11 Bleak House was ignored in the chief critical reviews, the Edinburgh, the Quarterly and the Saturday; and where it was noticed, although many critics allowed that Dickens was popular and possessed of genius, they also expressed disappointment that he had abandoned humour for the grotesque and contemptible, and that it was ill constructed. Even Forster, while praising its structure and declaring that ‘novels as Mr Dickens writes them rise to the dignity of poems’, found much of the book ‘too real to be pleasant’.12 Readers may have moments of impatience when tension slackens and the strain of keeping all the different strands going is felt, but soon the breadth and richness of Dickens’s conception grows clear again, and his superabundance is felt not as a weakness but as a strength.