Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  They were married in April 1836 and, in order to live as cheaply as possible, they decided to stay on in Dickens’s chambers in Furnival’s Inn, which were small, but tastefully furnished – the drawing room in rosewood and the dining room in mahogany. The household was lively and crowded, for Dickens’s younger brother, Frederick, came to stay with them, as did Catherine’s seventeen-year-old sister, Mary. Beloved, delightful Mary was as good a companion to Dickens as she was to her sister. The three of them went everywhere together, enjoyed all their amusements in common. Mary testified to what a happy young couple the Dickenses were. ‘She makes a most capital housekeeper and is as happy as the day is long – I think they are more devoted than ever since their marriage if that is possible.’4 They must have been having the fun that college students do when they leave their parental homes and move into a dormitory – the fun of being free and being young together. Not long after, already nostalgic, Dickens would write of those early days of marriage, ‘I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers three Stories high – never if I roll in wealth and fame.’5

  Very quickly they started having children. Charles, Jr, their first was born nine months after their wedding, in early January 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession. Mary Hogarth and Charles’s mother, Elizabeth Dickens, attended Catherine at her confinement. She recovered well, except that she proved unable to nurse the baby, which made her quite unhappy. Every time she looked at the baby she cried, imagining that if she did not nurse him, he would not love her. ‘Could she but forget this,’ Mary Hogarth wrote philosophically to her cousin in Scotland, ‘she has everything in this world to make her comfortable and happy – her husband is kindness itself to her and is constantly studying her comfort in everything – his literary career gets more and more prosperous every day and he is courted and flattered on every side by all the great folks of this great city – his time is so completely taken up that it is quite a favour for the Literary Gentlemen to get him to write for them.’6

  As Mary Hogarth noted, Dickens was, by 1837, a celebrity. Many people already recognised him as a literary genius. His inventiveness was astonishing. A world of delightful characters and incidents seemed to exist inside his mind, and he only needed time to put it all down on paper. In the year of Charley’s birth, Dickens was writing, and publishing in serial parts as he wrote them, both The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. No sooner did he finish Pickwick than he started on Nicholas Nickleby, which he wrote concurrently with Oliver Twist. In the history of literature, I can think of nothing comparable to this astonishing outpouring of invention – the sheer quantity of great work produced by Dickens in his twenties. By the time he was thirty, he had published, in addition to Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, Oliver and Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop. For a time, he also edited a magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, and he wrote many occasional pieces to boot. He worked unrelentingly, turning out his copy for monthly, and then, with the later novels, for the even more gruelling weekly publication schedule. The energy involved was immense, the sheer drudgery appalling. People do not work so hard unless they are driven. They cannot work so hard unless they are supported in the effort by those close to them.

  Why is it that today, when ambitious young women who have postponed marriage in order to launch their careers finally look around for someone to marry, so few men seem to be available? Perhaps because ambitious men marry young. Marriage and career, family and work, which so often pull a woman in different directions, are much more likely to reinforce one another for a man. Dickens provides a good case in point. Professionally, his marriage helped him. His household was arranged for him. His needs for sex and companionship were satisfied. No time-consuming courtships, no fretting about rejections, no hunting around, no wasteful fantasising. Most important, he had a reason to devote himself wholeheartedly to work. Not only was he working for his own advantage and to satisfy his own ambition, he was working for her, for them, for their children. The guilt a woman artist might feel in removing herself from her family in order to create is less likely to trouble a man, a man who imagines himself – as Dickens did – working for his family.

  Dickens’s children arrived in the world almost as regularly as his books. Charley was followed by Mamie in 1838, then by Kate in 1839 and Walter in 1841. (Between Charley and Mamie, Catherine had a miscarriage.) Not until after Walter’s birth did Dickens begin to get ironic about more additions to his family. The first four, at any rate, made him very happy. He was deeply concerned about Catherine’s health and safety during the deliveries. He enjoyed himself as a family man, the centre of a growing circle of devoted people. He took satisfaction in how well he was able to provide for them. He moved his growing family from the small chambers in Furnival’s Inn to a larger house in Doughty Street and then to an even larger and grander one in Devonshire Terrace near Regent’s Park.

  Regularly, he ended his novels with some image of domestic happiness, with a married pair happily generating children. The family, its population dividing and subdividing like bacteria in a Petri dish, was for Dickens the perfect emotional resolution of all discord. His early novels conclude as reliably with a domestic vignette as westerns used to end with a cowboy riding off alone into the sunset. This passage, near the end of Barnaby Rudge, may stand as typical:

  It was not very long, you may be sure, before Joe Willet and Dolly Varden were made husband and wife, and with a handsome sum in the bank reopened the Maypole. It was not very long, you may be sure, before a red-faced little boy was seen staggering about the Maypole passage, and kicking up his heels on the green before the door. It was not very long, counting by years, before there was a red-faced little girl, another red-faced little boy, and a whole troop of girls and boys: so that, go to Chigwell when you would, there would surely be seen, either in the village street or on the green or frolicking in the farm-yard … more small Joes and small Dollys than could easily be counted.7

  This sentimental strain in Dickens’s work is hard for contemporary readers to swallow. Northrop Frye dismissed the moments in Dickens’s novels when he extols the values of hearth and home as ‘the commercial’. Since 1941 when Edmund Wilson created his striking image of a dark, tormented Dickens, it has crossed the minds of various readers that these domestic passages in Dickens are bad because his heart isn’t in them, his deepest sympathies being anarchic and rebellious. Resenting the family as a form of imprisonment, he is forced – by internal compulsion and external encouragement – to praise it. My own feeling, however, is that passages such as the one from Barnaby Rudge were produced in complete sincerity. If such passages fail, it is not because Dickens is insincere in describing the happiness of being part of a family, but because he believes in it too completely.

  His own childhood had been marred by his father’s improvidence, by their imprisonment for debt (the family was companionably allowed to join the debtor in prison) and by his enforced labour in a blacking (shoe polish) factory, for which he blamed his mother even more than his father. When Dickens told his parents how miserable he was in the factory, separated from the family, put to degrading work with degrading companions, kept from all hope of advancement, his father – consistently feckless – was willing to let him give up the job and return to them. But his mother insisted they needed the money, and she made him continue in exile and misery, supporting the parents who should have been supporting him. So Dickens valued highly – perhaps too highly – the kind of family in which the father worked and provided, the mother took care of the house and children and the children had nothing to do but enjoy themselves. Dickens admired family life. It made him happy. There was nothing hypocritical in his warblings about domesticity in his early novels. He was singing the praises of what he had, what he respected. He and Catherine were as devoted to each other as any young couple would be who, together, have made a life better than the ones they had known as children in their parents’ houses. I emphasise their happiness because Dickens, in his later
pain, denied that a time of happiness with Catherine had ever existed. In fairness to Catherine, I want to insist that it did exist.

  In later years, Dickens would say that he and Catherine never had anything in common. He would present himself as a misunderstood genius, mismated with a dull and uncomprehending woman. And it may very well be true that with Catherine he missed out on an ideal intellectual companionship. How many clever people ever find it with their mates? But Dickens had close male friends – John Forster, the lawyer and writer; Daniel Maclise, the painter; and William Charles Macready, the tragedian – with each of whom he dined frequently and with each of whom, especially Forster, he shared the details of his professional life. He was devoted to male conviviality, and he did not complain in his early years, when he was minded to be content with his life, about the absence of ideal companionships.

  In fact, he and Catherine shared a lot – above all, their children, but some non-domestic interests too. He tried out his work on her, and her extraordinary reaction to Sikes’s murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist gave Dickens an early indication of what a great success this passage would be. When he was sent books to read, he sometimes passed them on to Catherine. He gave her Lady De Lancey’s affecting narrative of her husband’s death at the Battle of Waterloo, and Catherine sobbed over it while Dickens wrote a thank-you note to the author’s brother, describing her reaction. Her grief gave him material for the letter and us some evidence that the young Mr and Mrs Dickens did more together than make and play with their children. As for Catherine, her pride in her talented husband comes through touchingly in an invitation to a distant cousin: ‘What pleasure it would give me to see you in my own house, and how proud I should be to make you acquainted with Charles. The fame of his talents are now known over all the world, but his kind affectionate heart is dearer to me than all.’8

  One tragedy marred the happiness of the Dickens’s early years, but it was the kind of tragedy which tends to bring people together rather than to drive them apart. Catherine and Charles were both devoted to Catherine’s sister, Mary Hogarth, who was in many ways the mascot of their establishment. In May 1837, not long after Charley’s birth, Mr and Mrs Dickens and Mary went to the theatre, enjoying a performance of Is She His Wife? They came home at about one at night. Mary went upstairs in her usual good health and high spirits and fell ill while undressing. She sank rapidly and died the next afternoon, in Dickens’s arms. There had been no sign of illness, but she probably died of heart disease. Dickens was devastated. For the only time in his career, he was unable to work and missed his monthly deadlines. There was no June 1837 number for either Pickwick or Oliver Twist. He dreamed about Mary for months. Catherine had a miscarriage, which she and her husband thought was brought on by her distress, and Dickens had to take her away from the house they had shared with Mary to the quiet of Hampstead (then a country village) to recuperate. Both of them felt, almost superstitiously, that they had had too much happiness to last. Mary’s death ended what was for both of them an idyllic period. Not that things started going badly after her death, but (one turns events into such milestones) it marked a peak of happiness which could never be matched.

  Some people have found Dickens’s attachment to his young sister-in-law unnatural. It seems to me rather a measure of how fiercely attached he was to those close to him, of whom Mary was the closest after Catherine and the first to die. Because of her youth and her beauty, her death was particularly shocking and cruel. As he did everything early, Dickens confronted death early, learning at the age of twenty-five the rending grief of having something you love taken away from you irrevocably, something which no amount of effort, no genius, no success can restore. The death of young people became – along with family happiness, frequently highlighting it – a subject which Dickens claimed in literature as distinctively his.

  In June of 1841, when Dickens was twenty-nine, he made a trip to Scotland – quite an event for this child of London who tended to stay close to home. As it turned out, it was a dry run for the triumphal tour of America he would make in the following year. Catherine accompanied him. She had been born in Edinburgh and was revisiting it for the first time since her childhood. In her native city, her husband was honoured with a huge testimonial dinner. Accompanied by one hundred and fifty ladies, Catherine came into the gallery after the banquet to hear the speeches. John Wilson, a Blackwood’s Magazine writer who was a respected literary figure in Edinburgh, made the principal address, calling Dickens the greatest writer then alive, a writer who had earned his popularity by his almost divine insight into the workings of the human heart. The only flaw in Dickens’s work (Wilson said rather gratuitously) was his failure to portray the female character in all its fullness and complexity. But who besides Shakespeare had been able to do that?9 Mrs Dickens had the pleasure of hearing her own health proposed by the sculptor Angus Fletcher, who gracefully said that Dickens owed much of his distinction to having chosen a Scotswoman as his partner in life. If this was a great moment for Dickens – the first public tribute to the extraordinary extent of his popularity – it must have been a great moment for Catherine, too, so warmly and pointedly included in her husband’s apotheosis.

  They went from one dinner to another. Everyone wanted to entertain the most popular writer then alive, and his wife. It was Dickens’s first experience of lionisation, and his reaction was to miss his home and his small circle of friends. To his best friend, John Forster, he wrote, ‘The moral of all this is, that there is no place like home; and I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won’t hold many people.’10 He longed for his house in Devonshire Terrace, and for Broadstairs, the seaside town where he and Catherine took the children every summer. He wanted to play battledore and shuttlecock and to have an informal and raucous dinner with Forster, Maclise and Macready, his chums. ‘The only thing I felt at the Edinburgh dinner (and I felt it very strongly) was, that except Kate there was nobody there I cared for.’11

  It was not the desire to be lionised that drew Dickens to America. He wanted new experience, and he hoped to see a perfectly classless, democratic society – the republic of his dreams. Certainly he needed a rest from writing. He had been on a daily production schedule for five years and had completed five major novels. Perhaps he would find new material in America. There were any number of reasons to go. When he first mentioned his idea to Catherine, she was distraught. She could not bear to think of being separated from him for months, nor could she bear the thought of being separated from her children, if she accompanied him. Whenever he mentioned America, she cried. Dickens took her distress quite seriously and consulted Macready about the advisability of taking the children along with them. (Macready had children and had twice been to America, so he seemed the right person to ask.) Macready advised strongly against taking the children, suggesting instead that he and Mrs Macready would look after them in the Dickenses’ absence. Gradually a plan developed which satisfied Catherine. Their house in Devonshire Terrace would be rented out and a smaller place for the children and their nurses taken in Osnaburgh Street near the Macreadys. Frederick Dickens would stay with the children, and they would visit the Macreadys daily. From the moment these plans were made, Catherine cheered up and joined her husband in excited preparations for their trip. She had the excellent idea of asking Maclise to make her a drawing of the four children, and this sacred object (exactly as a photograph of loved ones would be today) was a real source of comfort to her in her travels.

  They left from Liverpool by steamer in January 1842. It was not a good time of year for a crossing, and they could expect rough weather. But they were both excited and happy. Forster saw them off and reported to Maclise on Catherine’s cheerfulness. ‘She deserves to be what you know she is so emphatically called – the Beloved.’12 For four and a half months of hard travelling, Catherine and her maid, Anne Brown, were Dickens’s only companions. Although she was not trained to physical daring, was easily frightened and must
have had a harder time than Dickens in adjusting to the discomforts and trials of travel, Catherine rose to the occasion splendidly.

  The boat was crowded, the crossing dreadful and almost all the passengers were sick. Even Dickens. ‘We were eighteen days on our passage,’ Catherine later wrote to Dickens’s sister Fanny, ‘and experienced all the horrors of a storm at sea, which raged frightfully for a whole night, and broke all our paddle-boxes and the life-boat to pieces. I was nearly distracted with terror, and don’t know what I should have done had it not been for the great kindness and composure of my dear Charles.’13 All through that dreadful night, they expected to die at any moment. The smokestack seemed about to blow off, and if it had, the vulnerable ship inevitably would have caught fire and burned completely. Charles and Catherine Dickens thought a great deal about their children, whom they expected never to see again. Charles must have been pleased with himself – if one can be pleased on the verge of death – for having had the forethought to take out a special insurance policy to cover him on his travels. At least the children would be provided for. However, towards morning the storm abated and their lives were spared.