Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  By the time Catherine wrote her description of the storm to Fanny Burnett, they were safely on land and already beginning to see how it was possible to be killed with kindness. People everywhere seemed to worship Dickens, and their days were a perpetual round of dinners, visits and receptions. (Catherine foreswore trying to describe to Fanny the manner and customs of the people ‘and so on, as my powers of description are not great, and you will have it some day or other so much the better from Charles’.)14 In the annals of contemporary literary celebrity, there is nothing to which one can compare Dickens’s reception in America in 1842. The welcome was so extreme as to be more of a torture than a pleasure to the object of all praises, invitations, requests, demands. Even with his immense energy and intense enjoyment of toasting and jovial dinners, Dickens found his American reception exhausting and ultimately dismaying. He complained that his very coat was being torn to shreds by people reaching to touch him, or to grab some cloth as a souvenir. If he answered all the requests for locks of his hair, he would be totally bald. For celebrity to compare with this, one must think of rock stars, not writers. The mobs who oppressed The Beatles on their first trip to America or the stampeding crowd at The Who’s concert in Ohio provide analogies to the horrible force of popular fame which Dickens brought down on himself in America. In Boston and New York, he and Catherine daily received and shook hands with hundreds of people. Dickens described them as a kind of Queen Victoria and Albert, holding levees wherever they went. And wherever they went, wherever they received admirers, the framed portrait of their children by Maclise was set up beside them. The American literary establishment (as opposed to the crowds) scrutinised them more genteelly, and Mr and Mrs Dickens passed the test. Everyone noted Dickens’s youth, his lovely long hair and the mobility of his features. Even those who were shocked by a certain lower-class Cockney manner were dazzled by his brilliance and wit. Catherine was equally admired, for her unassuming manners, her evident sweetness and her good-natured appreciation of everything done for her.

  As they left the East behind, the physical going got rougher. There were fewer mobs, fortunately, but the terrors of nature took the place of the terrors of people in groups. Anne Brown, the maid, tripped on a patch of pavement and fell flat, but didn’t hurt herself. ‘I say nothing of Kate’s troubles,’ Dickens reported to Forster, ‘but you recollect her propensity? She falls into, or out of, every coach or boat we enter; scrapes the skin off her legs; brings great sores and swellings on her feet; chips large fragments out of her ankle-bones; and makes herself blue with bruises. She really has, however, since we got over the first trial of being among circumstances so new and so fatiguing, made a most admirable traveller in every respect. She has never screamed or expressed alarm under circumstances that would have fully justified her in doing so, even in my eyes; has never given way to despondency or fatigue, though we have now been travelling incessantly, through a very rough country, for more than a month …; has always accommodated herself, well and cheerfully to everything; and has pleased me very much, and proved herself perfectly game.’15 The first part of this report has been cited extensively to prove that Catherine Dickens was unusually clumsy, and that Dickens was irritated by her as early as 1842, but the letter as a whole is grateful, appreciative and affectionate. Dickens clearly realises that any woman, trained to physical timidity and immobility, would have a hard time keeping up with him, as would most men. Even in his eyes, measured by his demanding standard, she seems plucky.

  The rigours of travel made them, quite literally, cling together. In Ohio, the coach they were travelling in had to pass for a long time over a corduroy road – a road made of logs laid over soggy ground to settle as they may and provide whatever support they can. Dickens compared riding over such a road to going up a steep flight of stairs in an omnibus. One moment they were flung up against the roof, the next they were thrown into a heap on the floor. As one side of the coach sank into the mire, they held on to each other for comfort. Dickens even tried tying Kate into place, in order to make her more comfortable. ‘Still, the day was beautiful, the air delicious and we were alone: with no tobacco spittle or eternal prosy conversations about dollars and politics … to bore us. We really enjoyed it; made a joke about being knocked about; and were quite merry. At two o’clock we stopped in the wood to open our hamper and dine; and we drank to our darlings and all friends at home.’16

  When the Dickenses returned in late July of 1842, their friends and children were overjoyed to see them. Indeed, Charley, the eldest child, was quite deranged with joy and suffered convulsions, which a doctor had to be summoned to treat. The children had been well in their parents’ absence but not happy. The Macready household was run more severely than the Dickens house and the children had found it prim, gloomy and unjoyful.17 Their daily visits had not been pleasant. So one can imagine their happiness at their parents’ return.

  In My Father As I Recall Him, Mamie Dickens, who never married, would testify to what a delightful parent Charles Dickens had been. His nature, she said, was home-loving. No man ever existed so naturally inclined to derive his happiness from home affairs, and the more famous he got, the more pleasure he took in the circle close to him, particularly his children. He entered enthusiastically into all their interests. He helped them with the decorations of their rooms (which he daily inspected). He provided treats. He arranged for games and sporting events and birthday celebrations. But his genius for family entertainment expressed itself most strikingly at Christmas, the family festival par excellence and, indeed, the holiday which his own Christmas stories would help to secularise and turn into a celebration of the family.

  Twelfth Night coincided with Charley’s birthday, and in 1843, after his return from America, Dickens began a tradition of performing magic tricks at the Twelfth Night celebration. He and Forster had purchased the stock of a conjuror who was going out of business, and together, with Dickens as conjuror and Forster as his assistant, they astonished young and old alike on Twelfth Night and selected birthdays during the Christmas season. Dickens turned watches into tea caddies, made pieces of money fly through the air, burned up pocket handkerchiefs without burning them. He caused a tiny doll to disappear and then to reappear with little messages and pieces of news for different children in the audience. But his greatest trick, the climax of all, was his manufacture in an ordinary gentleman’s hat of a plum pudding.

  On December 26, 1843, Jane Carlyle attended one of these Christmas extravaganzas, a birthday party for little Nina Macready. It was held at the Macready house but organised by Dickens, at least in part to cheer up Mrs Macready and the children for the absence of the head of the household, on tour in America. Jane called it the most agreeable party she had ever attended in London. Dickens and Forster, she reported, exerted themselves so hard that perspiration streamed off them and they seemed drunk with their efforts. Dickens played conjuror for an entire hour and was the best Jane had ever witnessed, including ones she had paid money to see. He turned ladies’ handkerchiefs into candies. He turned a box of bran into a guinea pig. And then he performed his pièce de résistance, emptying raw eggs, flour and other appropriate ingredients into a hat and, in seconds, turning out a plum pudding, cooked and steaming hot, before the astonished eyes of children and grown-ups – even the sceptical former belle of Haddington.18

  After the magic came the dancing. Gigantic Mr Thackeray, old Jerdan of the Literary Gazette and many other gentlemen of the arts were all ‘capering like Maenades’. Jane would not dance, although Dickens begged her to waltz with him. She preferred to talk. She talked, therefore, the zaniest nonsense with Dickens, Thackeray, Forster and Maclise. After supper, they went madder than ever, pulling crackers, drinking champagne and making speeches. Jane thought that nowhere in London, not in the most aristocratic circles, was there more wit and brilliance and fun than in that room that night. A country dance was proposed. Forster seized Jane Carlyle by the waist and made her dance. Once on the floor, you had to
keep moving or else be crushed, as on a treadmill. The room was that crowded. Jane cried out, ‘For the love of Heaven, let me go! you are going to dash my brains out against the folding doors!’ And Forster replied, ‘Your brains!! who cares about their brains here? let them go!’ The merriment surged, pooled, swelled and was rising (in Jane’s view) to something like the rape of the Sabines, when someone noticed it was midnight. Everyone made a rush for the coat room. Dickens, however, was determined not to stop, and left, with his wife, Thackeray and Forster, vowing to continue the party at home.

  But even while he was cavorting at Nina Macready’s birthday party, dancing like a Maenad and pulling plum puddings out of hats, Dickens had worries on his mind. Or rather, he had worries he was trying to put out of his mind by his wild cavorting. He had just undergone the incredible strain of writing A Christmas Carol and his usual instalments of Martin Chuzzlewit at the same time. He was almost thirty-two, seven years older than he had been when he produced Pickwick and Oliver and then Oliver and Nicholas Nickleby concurrently. It was getting harder to continue to pull those puddings out of hats. In all those seven years, with the exception of the trip to America, which had been a strain in a different way, he had been a work machine. And what did he have to show for it? The sales of Martin Chuzzlewit were consistently disappointing. And the Carol, which he had counted on to set him up financially, brought in much less money than he expected. He had switched publishers again (he had earlier moved from Bentley to Chapman and Hall, now from Chapman and Hall to Bradbury and Evans) in the hopes of increasing his profits, and it hadn’t worked. He resented his publishers, each in turn, feeling he had made them rich without making himself the same. The spectre of Sir Walter Scott, dying bankrupt, haunted him.19

  His financial responsibilities were enormous – not just to Catherine and his children, but, more irritatingly, to his parents and brothers as well. His father, in particular, was a torment to him, for he never knew when he would be presented with another bad debt contracted by John Dickens. He set up his parents in a house in the country, but his father, far from being grateful, wanted to be in Paris or London instead. Eventually, without his son’s consent, John Dickens rented out the house his son had taken for him and kept the money. He was always writing to Charles Dickens’s publishers and bankers asking for loans. Nothing Dickens did for his father would satisfy him. ‘The thought of him besets me night and day; and I really do not know what is to be done with him. It is quite clear that the more we do the more outrageous and audacious he becomes.’20 He felt that all of them – father, mother and brothers – looked upon him as something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. They did not care for him in any other way than as a provider. Their constant demands and the fear of ever more of them depressed him, weighed down his spirit, distracted him from work. The infuriating thing was that they were out of his control. He could not ever shut off that source of annoyance. ‘My soul sickens at the thought of them.’21

  He was beset, too, by his public, by constant requests for speeches, favours, endorsements, advice. He wrote a dozen letters a day and was always behind in his correspondence. In the latter part of 1843, he began to think longingly of leaving England altogether. He would take a long sabbatical on the Continent, in France or Italy, some place where he could live cheaply. Perhaps by renting out the Devonshire Terrace house again and by living cheaply abroad, he could cut down expenses and get ahead a bit. It seemed to him that, given his fame and success, he ought to be able to live like a rich man, and he kept finding to his bitterness that he could not. Distressingly, the old foe of Political Economy was discovering that for him, at least, a variation of the Malthusian principle seemed true. It was as though his dependants increased geometrically and his resources only arithmetically. Satisfied as he was with his family of four, overburdened financially as he already felt, he had to confront the fact that Catherine was pregnant again. She was, unusually for her, dull, depressed and frightened about the birth. No wonder, when her husband’s lack of enthusiasm for the new baby was so apparent. ‘We think of keeping the New Year, by having another child. I am constantly reversing the Kings in the fairy tales, and importuning the Gods not to trouble themselves: being quite satisfied with what I have. But they are so generous when they do take a fancy to one!’22 Francis Jeffrey Dickens, their fifth child, was born early in 1844. Five more babies would follow him by 1852.

  dickens dissatisfied

  We do not know for certain what prompted Mrs Henry Winter, after a silence of twenty-four years, to contact the man who had been dotingly in love with her and whom she had rejected when they were both young, but we do know the effect her letter had on him. Charles Dickens recognised the handwriting of the woman he had known as Maria Beadnell in the years before he had married, before he had become famous and successful as a novelist. ‘Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love.’23 He wrote her a long letter in reply – and another and another. He had told her the literal truth of his imagination: twenty-four years had vanished, and he was in love again, in love with Maria Beadnell, age eighteen.

  Thinking back on the role she had played in his life, he became convinced she was its heroine. He had never been so in love as he had been with her. She had inspired in him whatever imagination, energy, passion, aspiration and determination he had. She was the reason he had exerted himself to work his way up from poverty and obscurity. He would have done anything for her – even died for her. She was to have been his reward. But she rejected him. The disappointment was so great that, as he looked back on his life, Dickens thought it had stifled one side of his nature. Never since the rebuff from Maria had he been able to display affection completely – except to his children, and only when they were very young.

  Mrs Winter was not appalled at being turned, after the fact, into the heroine of the great novelist’s life. His surge of emotion inspired confessions of similar feeling from her. She was also well into middle age and no doubt, like Dickens, was thinking about lives she might have lived, feeling the one she had chosen somewhat limited, investing the unchosen path with the glow of romance. Even respectable matrons, with prosperous businessmen husbands and two charming daughters may feel the impulse, in their thirties or forties, to re-establish contact with an earlier lover, to think that, if they had chosen this person instead of that, things might be more satisfactory, to wonder if it were possible to erase the past, to go back to the turning point and try again. Life must have seemed a very bitter joke to Mrs Winter, who had chosen her husband on the grounds of prudence and who, out of prudence, had rejected one of the most successful men of her time just two years before his success became evident. How pleasant to think that he loved her still, that her image, his love for her, was behind everything he had accomplished, as he said it was.

  Mrs Winter was less deluded than Dickens. She warned him, as he pressed her to agree to a secret meeting without their respective spouses, that she was ‘toothless, fat, old and ugly’,24 but he did not believe her. It was true that his wife, Catherine, who was forty while Maria was now forty-five, had grown old and fat – and boring and silly and lethargic. But she was an unusual case, a particularly vexing woman. If Catherine had aged badly it was her fault; something rotten in her character was expressing itself in her body. Maria Beadnell – charming, girlish, laughing Maria – she could not have aged.

  They met, as arranged, on a Sunday at an hour when Catherine Dickens could be counted on to be out of the house. Mrs Winter arrived at the Dickens residence between three and four, asked for Mrs Dickens, was told she was out, and was offered the attention of Mr Dickens instead, all as Dickens had foreseen. But his fantasy of a renewed attachment with the love of his youth was destroyed with one glance. Perhaps somewhere beneath the bulk of Mrs Winter there was a youthful Maria struggling to escape, but Dickens could not perceive her. One wonders what sentimental platitudes he mobi
lised to get through the painful interview he had unquestionably imagined as the beginning of a seduction. The past – how long gone. One’s children – how comforting, yet who could have imagined one would have them. Growing old – who could have foreseen that, either. Somehow he got through the time. Then he had to endure a dinner with Mr and Mrs Winter and Mrs Dickens, which the secret lovers had arranged before they had seen each other again. But after that, Dickens went to any rhetorical length to avoid seeing the travesty of his romantic past. ‘Whoever is devoted to art,’ he told her, ‘must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go my way whether or no.’25

  The woman who had inspired the representation of David Copperfield’s love for Dora Spenlow now inspired Arthur Clennam’s appalled response to Flora Finching: ‘Clennam’s eyes no sooner fell upon the subject of his old passion, than it shivered and broke to pieces.’

  Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now. That was the fatal blow.26

  With her disjointed volubility, her sentences connected by little sense and less punctuation, Flora stands out as one of the great successes of Little Dorrit. ‘I am so glad you like Flora,’ Dickens wrote to the Duke of Devonshire. ‘It came into my head one day that we have all our Floras (mine is living and extremely fat), and that it was a half serious half ridiculous truth which had never been told.’27 The truth was the truth of time’s power. Girlish charm, unmodulated after twenty-four years, is no longer girlish charm but eccentric affectation. Beautiful women age, thicken and are no longer attractive. The dreams of one’s youth become depressingly, ludicrously, the flabby realities of middle age. One can become famous and successful without becoming happy. One can have married at twenty-three a woman one loved dearly, then realise at forty-three that one has nothing in common with her but years spent in the same house and ten children one doesn’t really want.