Mrs Merdle keeps a pet parrot who punctuates her talk with screams and screeches of sardonic-sounding laughter, like an alter ego signalling her real meaning to the listener. Flora Finching, once Clennam’s sweetheart, now a widow with romantic delusions and an inability to talk coherently, is given speeches of baroque intricacy and absurdity, wonderfully funny until they become rather too much of a good thing. The wittiest and saddest scene in the book is the one in which William Dorrit, in prison, entertains his old friend Nandy from the workhouse and his new friend and benefactor, Arthur Clennam, to tea. Dorrit condescends to Nandy and apologizes for him behind his hand. ‘Union, poor old fellow. Out for the day,’ he explains to Clennam, who has just sent Dorrit ten pounds, without which there would have been no tea. Making Nandy sit on the windowsill to take his tea, Dorrit gives a running commentary on his defects to Clennam, saying his hearing and his legs are going, his memory is weak, and that he ‘rusts in the life he leads’ – a description equally applicable to himself. And after Nandy has left, gently escorted by Little Dorrit, Dorrit remarks on his being ‘A melancholy sight … though one has the consolation of knowing that he doesn’t feel it himself. The poor old fellow is a dismal wreck. Spirit broken and gone – pulverized – crushed out of him, sir, completely!’ Dorrit is so cheered by being in a position to condescend that he goes to his prison window like royalty, and when other inmates of the prison look up ‘his recognition of their salutes just stopped short of a blessing.’26
The scene comes to mind again later when, after Mr Dorrit has left the Marshalsea Prison and is travelling grandly abroad, rich and well dressed, and attending a magnificent dinner party in Rome, he falters, becomes confused and asks who is on the lock and where the turnkey is, begs for alms and reveals himself as what he was for so long, the Father of the Marshalsea. It is a highly dramatic scene, but it comes across as true and tragic, faultlessly done. Dorrit is dying, and naturally reverts to the place where he had spent twenty-five years of his life. If occasionally the narrative wears thin or grows confused, it also offers some of the best moments in all Dickens’s writing – for instance when Mr Merdle, on a sinister errand, borrows a pen-knife with a tortoiseshell handle from his daughter-in-law Fanny, who watches him from her balcony as he goes on his way. It is a hot evening and she is pregnant and bored: ‘Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed of several Devils.’27 As indeed he is.
The last number of Little Dorrit appeared in June 1857. A few weeks before, Dickens had revisited the site of the Marshalsea. He described the visit in his preface to the bound edition, saying he had not been there since it was closed, and that he found some houses which preserved the great block of the former prison. He talked to a small boy in the street outside, and, pointing to the window of the room where, he says, Little Dorrit was born and her father lived, he asked the boy if he knew the name of the present tenant. The boy replied, ‘“Tom Pythick.” I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said, “Joe Pythick’s Uncle.”’ It’s a wonderful story, and much better than the readers of the introduction knew. The boy’s confident naming of the Pythicks is set against Dickens’s imagined Dorrits. The real link with the place, his father’s imprisonment in 1824, is left out, as is the small boy who used to visit him there.28 The memory of John Dickens remained powerful in his mind, and his own relationship with him, made up of exasperation, love and rage; and it may be that Amy Dorrit, who forgives her corrupt father even when he behaves cruelly and shamefully towards her, overlooks all his failings and gives him unconditional love and support, becomes a way of dealing with the anger he had felt against his father and that he wished to set entirely aside after his death. If she is, to a degree, an emblematic figure, she may be seen as his own perfected, ideal self, the child who is never angry with his flawed father.
He was forty-five when he finished Little Dorrit, his eleventh novel, in May 1857. It ends with a wedding between a hero in his forties with a sad history, Arthur Clennam, and Little Dorrit, young enough to be his daughter – indeed, ‘He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter.’ The final sentence of the book describes them leaving the church to take up ‘a modest life of usefulness and happiness’, and is beautifully thought through: ‘They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.’29
For him there was no such happiness, no inseparable beloved, no blessing on his life. There were duties and preoccupations, with his children’s careers and education, with the running of the Home in Shepherd’s Bush and the editing of Household Words; and there were always new plans to be made, a new house, a trip abroad, a play to put on. By good chance the house he wanted to buy at Gad’s Hill belonged to a contributor to Household Words, the writer Eliza Lynn Linton, who had inherited it from her father. It was inspected and negotiated for, and sold to him in March 1856 for £1,700.
Other distractions in his life during the Little Dorrit period were two women who caught his imagination in different ways. The first was Caroline Maynard, calling herself Mrs Thompson, whose younger brother Frederick wrote to Dickens in the autumn of 1854, asking for advice and help. She had paid for him to be articled to an architect when she was the mistress of a gentleman, but after nine years with him his business failed and he abandoned her. She had a small child and no income, and she turned to prostitution. Her brother, unable to continue his training, lived with her in a small house in Bute Street, off the Brompton Road – the same house in which she received her clients – and he was in despair, himself earning a pittance only as a draughtsman, and wanting to rescue her from her way of life. She was in her thirties, and when Dickens first saw her he described her as ‘rather small, and young-looking; but pretty, and gentle, and has a very good head’.30 This was to Miss Coutts, whom he consulted about how they might be able to help her. He said how strongly he had been impressed by the brother’s story: ‘his perception of his sister’s disgrace, and undiminished admiration for her, and the confidence he has grown up in, of her being something good, and never to be mentioned without tenderness and deference – is a romance at once so astonishing and yet so intelligible as I never had the boldness to think of.’31 At once Dickens saw the situation as it might be used in fiction, even if a fiction he would never write.
Dickens called on her at Bute Street in December, when she told him she would willingly go to South Africa as long as she could take her child. He wanted Miss Coutts to meet her and after his return from Paris he arranged for a meeting at the Home in February 1855. There was no question of her becoming an inmate, since the Home did not take mothers with children; besides which, said Dickens, ‘her manner, character and experiences, are altogether different.’32 Miss Coutts had meanwhile sent another adviser, a clergyman, to visit Caroline, and he observed that she was well dressed, kept a maid and seemed ‘by no means destitute’. He felt she had been softened by a life of luxury and would not be able to maintain herself by needlework, or face the life of an emigrant to the Cape or Australia, and noted that her father had been a drunkard, her mother was a nurse in the Kensington Workhouse, and her younger sister ‘a milliner alas! of damaged reputation’. She was not after all so different from the girls at the Home.33 The suggestion that she might emigrate was not pursued.
When the clergyman called on her again he learnt that her mother had died, and this time he suggested Miss Coutts might consult with Dickens again about how best to help her. In March, Dickens invited both brother and sister to visit him at Devonshire Terrace, putting the question ‘What am I to do?’ to Miss Coutts before their visit. Miss Coutts evidently suggested some course of action that Caroline could not accept, and Dickens wrote to Coutts again, saying, ‘There is, of course, an end to it,’ adding that he
believed Mrs Thompson to be perfectly truthful and that ‘she will recover herself somehow yet.’
But it looks as though Miss Coutts changed her mind and did set her up as a lodging-house keeper, presumably in a part of London where she was a stranger and could pass as a widow.34 To disappear and transform yourself into a different person was something to interest Dickens the novelist, but nothing more is heard of her until the following May (1856), when he told Miss Coutts he had seen her, and that her letting of lodgings had not succeeded well enough for her to continue with it. She had given notice that she was leaving the house, and she would sell her furniture and use the money to emigrate with her little girl and her brother to Canada, where Dickens was confident she would find work as a housekeeper or some similar honest occupation. He did what he could to ease their journey by contacting the Canada Railway, and after this their story goes blank. Caroline Maynard, or Thompson, goes down in history as having stirred his imagination and kept his interest for over eighteen months. She had been persistent in seeking his help and in trying to remake her life in London, and she raised her own fare to Canada. She had also shown him another sort of prostitute from the girls at the Home and the bedraggled, ill-spoken creatures portrayed in his books. He noted that she could even do accounts.
Just as he was involving himself in helping Caroline Maynard, he had a letter from another woman. It came out of the blue and with overpowering effect. This time it was Maria Beadnell, the beloved of his youth, now a married woman, who wrote to him. Almost certainly he had not seen her since she jilted him in 1833.35 He had kept in desultory contact with her father and knew of her marriage in 1845, when he was in Italy, and that she was now Mrs Winter, but the arrival of her letter, ‘so busy and pleasant’, with its news that she had two children, led him into a rhapsodic reply. ‘Believe me, you cannot more tenderly remember our old days and our old friends than I do … Your letter is more touching to me from its good and gentle association with the state of Spring in which I was either much more wise or much more foolish than I am now’ – and so on.36 He told her he was about to leave for Paris – this was the trip with Collins – and offered to bring back anything she wanted for her daughters; and he added that Mrs Dickens would call and arrange a meeting between the two couples. In fact he said nothing to Catherine. Five days later he wrote another long letter to Maria from Paris, telling her he ‘got the heartache again’ from seeing her handwriting, and recalling the blue gloves she had worn and he had matched for her. It begins to sound like a love letter. ‘Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me, I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted little woman – you – whom it is nothing to say I would have died for … that I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual idea of you … I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy.’ He even suggests her reaction to reading about Dora in David Copperfield: ‘How dearly that boy must have loved me, and how vividly this man remembers it!’37
The excitement was rising in both of them. A third letter, written on his return home, assured her that ‘No one but myself has the slightest knowledge of my correspondence, I may add in this place. I could be nowhere addressed with stricter privacy or in more absolute confidence than at my own house.’ She had given him a version of the reasons for the end of their early love, no doubt obedience to her parents, and in return he told her that ‘the wasted tenderness of those hard years’ left him with a habit of suppression which made him chary of showing affection, even to his own children. He suggested they might once again enjoy a mutual confidence ‘in perfect innocence and good faith … between ourselves alone. All that you propose, I accept with my whole heart.’ She boldly suggested meeting in the streets, somewhere near St Paul’s. That might be dangerous, he replied, because he could be recognized, and he proposed instead that she should call at Devonshire Terrace between three and four on Sunday, asking for Catherine, who would infallibly be out. The stage was set for a secret romance and a revival of a love on which they both looked fondly back. She warned him she was ‘toothless, fat, old, and ugly’, to which he replied, ‘You are always the same in my remembrance.’38
The meeting took place. He saw an overweight woman, no longer pretty, who talked foolishly and too much. The edifice he had built up in his mind tumbled, and he beat an immediate retreat. There was, however, a dinner with their two spouses, which allowed him perhaps to compare the appetites and girths of Maria and Catherine and brood on their resemblances. Still, he showed himself at his best in writing a charming letter to Maria’s daughter Ella, telling her about his new pet raven (‘he will peck little holes in your legs if you like’) and his own three-year-old, ‘the Baby’, Plorn, who was in bed with the measles and a large cart and two horses, a Noah’s Ark with all the animals and people, a military camp with four cannons, a box of bricks, a clown and four crusts of buttered toast – a perfect letter for a child.39
A child was one thing, but from now on he made excuses not to meet Maria. He sent her theatre tickets and failed to turn up for the show himself. He explained that he must wander about ‘in my own wild way’, and that he held his inventive capacity ‘on the stern condition that it must master my whole life … and sometimes for months together, put everything else away from me’.40 He informed her he was going to be out of town for several Sundays in succession. When her baby died in June, he wrote to commiserate and added with dreadful firmness, ‘It is better that I should not come to see you. I feel quite sure of that, and will think of you instead.’41 Steely Dickens, armoured against his mistake.
Worse, as he thought of her in her latest incarnation, he created Flora Finching and gave her a leading part in Little Dorrit, overweight, greedy, a drinker and garrulous to match, absurd in her unstoppable and only half-comprehensible conversation, and given to arch reminders to her old lover of the distant past. Poor Mrs Winter was silly no doubt, but not so stupid as to fail to recognize herself when she read Little Dorrit. Although Flora was at any rate shown as a kind-hearted woman, this was a good deal crueller than what he did to Hunt with Skimpole. Writing to a reader who appreciated the character, he said, ‘It came into my head that we have all had our Floras (mine is living, and extremely fat), and that it was a half serious half ridiculous truth which has never been told.’42 While he was still writing Little Dorrit, he sent Maria copies of eleven of his books, each inscribed ‘In remembrance of old times’, and replied in a friendly way to her letter of thanks, explaining again how busy he was and how few letters he had time to write. She had paid for the double disillusionment she had inflicted on him, but she might have reflected that she had also been his muse and inspired two of his most memorable female characters.
19
Wayward and Unsettled
1855–1857
In October 1855 Dickens and Georgina travelled to Paris and found, with some difficulty, an apartment – ‘a Doll’s house’ – on two floors at No. 49 Champs Elysées, into which they moved. During their first night there ‘my little right hand’, as he put it, woke him with her restlessness, telling him the place was dirty and that she could not sleep for the smell of her room. Georgina was no longer a girl – she was twenty-eight – and effectively the woman in charge of the Dickens household, and he at once ordered a thorough cleaning. Once it was done, the place was ‘exquisitely cheerful and vivacious … and with a moving panorama outside, which is Paris in itself’.1 Paris delighted him. A bright, wicked and wanton place he had called it in the 1840s, not altogether disapprovingly, and since then he had come to admire the intelligence of its inhabitants, and their mixture of refinement and coarseness. Now he relished the many pleasures he found in the miles of streets to walk, the sophistication of the people, the theatres and the opera, the seductive restaurants with their mirrors, red-velvet upholstery and attentive waiters, the ‘tact and taste in trifles’ shown in the displays in the shops.2 He had told
Miss Coutts that his intention was to give his daughters, Mamie now seventeen, and Katey just sixteen, some Parisian polish: they were to have dancing lessons, art classes, language coaching and wardrobes of French clothes. Catherine was coming on with the girls and the little ones from Boulogne, where she must have lingered to see her three boarding-school boys, and soon they were all settled in the Champs Elysées.
Dickens’s command of the language had improved so much that he could now understand everything said at the theatre ‘with perfect ease and satisfaction’, and he boasted to Georgy, during his February trip with Collins, of receiving ‘many compliments on my angelic manner of speaking the celestial language’.3 Better still, Chuzzlewit was currently being serialized in a Paris paper, and it was extremely agreeable to be well known and well liked, to be greeted in shops with ‘Ah! C’est l’ecrivain celebre! Monsieur porte une nomme [sic] très distinguée. Mais! Je suis honoré et interessé de voir Monsieur Dick-in’ (his version). Not only this, they knew and loved his characters, ‘Cette Madame Tojair (Todgers) Ah! Qu’elle est drole, et precisement comme une dame que je connais à Calais.’4
He worked hard in the flat on the Champs Elysées, and he walked, in a spell of frosty January weather, round the walls of Paris from the Barrière de l’Etoile to the river, and the next day along the river to the Bastille, under a sky of Italian blue.5 There was a great deal of celebratory marching with bands through the centre, because the war in the Crimea was coming to an end and a peace conference would begin in Paris in February. Henry, aged six, remembered being put in a képi – the French soldier’s hat – and held up to shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ at a regimental review. Dickens permitted Ary Scheffer, a well-known artist, to embark on painting his portrait, but found it unrecognizable. He was pleased to meet Lamartine again, who, despite his own reduced circumstances, had asked to see him and spoke warmly to him of his work and his excellent French; and to renew his acquaintance with the playwright Scribe, and marvel at Scribe’s wife, who, although mother of a grown-up son, was still a beauty and had kept ‘the figure of five-and-twenty’.6 The singer and friend of Turgenev, Pauline Viardot, invited him to dinner to meet George Sand, but since he hardly knew her work there was no meeting of minds. He summed her up as ‘Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed’ and ‘with nothing of the blue-stocking about her, except a little final way of settling all your opinions with hers’, and he was not encouraged by the meeting to read her work.7 The great publishing firm of Hachette approached him with a proposal for a complete edition of his novels, with new translations, and this was happily negotiated over some excellent dinners with editors, translators and booksellers. Mamie and Katey enjoyed themselves, coached in Italian by Daniel Manin, the exiled Venetian patriot, and spending a good deal of time with Thackeray’s daughters, Annie and Minnie, who were in Paris with their grandparents while their father lectured in America.
Charles Dickens: A Life Page 34
