Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Researchers in developmental psychology tell us it is normal for a man between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five to undergo a period of acute change in which he re-examines his entire life and as a result of which he may desire to ‘modify’ (in the words of the social scientist) ‘an oppressive life structure’.28 The oppressive life structure may be his occupation or it may be his marriage. The real prison, however, is probably harder to escape from than a job or a marriage. Jung, considering the monumental task of re-education confronting the psyche in the middle of life, laments that there are no colleges for forty-year-olds, to prepare them for the second half of existence. ‘Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.’29 In the past, said Jung, religions had served people as those colleges for forty-year-olds he whimsically imagined, but religions no longer have that hold on people’s minds.

  Unaided by the deeper side of religion (for Christianity had already become, for Dickens, little more than an organised form of sentiment, a species of practical benevolence), unaided even by the useful if unlovely formulations of the social scientists, Dickens faced the disintegration of his happiness alone, quite unaware that the radical dissatisfaction he was feeling was in some sense normal. Such an awareness could not have offered a solution, however, and it might not even have been consoling to a man of Dickens’s nature. Perhaps it would have irritated him to think that what he felt could have been felt by others. Probably he would not have believed it. For it is partly the source of his greatness as a writer – though the source, too, of whatever smallness one may see in him as a moral being – that he could feel his own life so intensely and project his imagination so powerfully onto the rest of life that he seemed to be living in a world with only one real person in it, himself. He could be kind and genial to the rest, but they remained supporting players.

  Dickens’s writing changed noticeably after the publication of David Copperfield in 1850, when he was thirty-eight, and critics frequently compare the early works of Dickens with the later. The earlier works tend to be more humorous and optimistic than the later. The later works are more complicated, more symbolic. There are differences in both style and content. Even his manuscripts changed, showing a new mode of composition much less spontaneous in his later years, the passages worked over and over as they had not been in his youth. He was having a harder time writing, but his imagination was in many ways more powerful than ever, if less spontaneously inventive. Dickens’s career provides an excellent example of Elliott Jaques’s hypothesis that the mode and content of the work of artistic geniuses change radically at mid-life, that they must change if the artist is to continue to be fully creative. In his art, Dickens found ways to change and grow. He was by no means imprisoned within his occupation as a novelist. It was his domestic situation that seemed insupportable when, in the year 1855, at the age of forty-three, he was offered the false hope of remaking his life by the reappearance of Maria Beadnell.

  What he craved was emotional intensity with another person, and he could not find it in his wife. Catherine Dickens was an amiable if limited person. To say that she was not Dickens’s match in complexity, energy and brilliance is to say nothing that would not have been true of virtually every other woman of her class and her time in England. ‘There was nothing wrong with my mother,’ her daughter Kate later said. ‘She had her faults, of course, as we all have – but she was a sweet, kind, peace-loving woman, a lady – a lady born.’30 Hans Christian Andersen praised her ‘womanly repose’ and noted that a light came into her china-blue eyes when she spoke and that her voice was charming. She reminded him of Agnes Wickfield. That shows what an obtuse house-guest Andersen was, for it was precisely Catherine’s lack of Agnes Wickfield’s managerial talents that first made Dickens consciously dissatisfied with her.

  With his love of orderliness and insistence on bourgeois comfort, Dickens demanded a well-run household. But Catherine no longer had the energy or the interest to manage the complex business of coordinating servants, dealing with tradesmen, disciplining children. She had given birth to ten children in sixteen years of marriage, and there were miscarriages in addition. Almost always pregnant or caring for an infant, she was exhausted. Living with one of the most energetic and high-spirited men in England, she was overwhelmed. Catherine seems to have given up – at least on running the household – and that job was taken over by her sister, Georgina Hogarth, who had been living with them from the time she was fifteen (as Mary Hogarth had lived with them in the early days of their marriage). By 1856 Georgina had effectively replaced Catherine both as head of the household and as Dickens’s domestic partner. It was to their aunt Georgina that the children turned with their problems. Catherine, flattened by fatigue, lay on the sofa, increasingly irrelevant in her own house.

  For her remained only the sexual role, a role in which she won little applause from her husband. Time made her no longer as exciting to him as she once had been. And she kept getting pregnant and producing all those babies! Dickens, who increasingly resented every new addition to the sum of his financial responsibilities, complained about his wife’s fertility as though he himself had nothing to do with it. Moreover, all that childbearing told on her body, along with age and perhaps too much rich food. Little of the beauty of her youth – except her lovely blue eyes – remained distinct in the general plumpness of her face; her throat subsided fleshily, vaguely, into the amplitudes of the rest of her body. Eminently resistible as he now found her, Dickens must have despised himself a bit for not, after all, resisting her, but he transferred the blame for that, as he transferred the blame for all the irritations and inadequacies of their marriage, to her. She was the one who kept having babies.

  Catherine’s feelings in this situation have entirely to be imagined. Few of her letters are preserved (most of his are) to make her presumed despair known to later generations. She understood, from absences of enthusiasm, from trivial gestures, that he no longer found her appealing or even adequate to his needs. Somehow, what had seemed perfectly satisfactory to him once was satisfactory no longer. In her own mind, she was exactly the same person he had fallen in love with and married – good-natured, generous, not brilliant but solidly affectionate – and she did not know why that no longer satisfied him. Catherine could not understand what she had done wrong or in what way she had failed, but she knew she had failed and was miserable. She could do nothing about it, say nothing, for her husband set the terms of their marriage and of their daily life. She had to accommodate herself to him. ‘My poor mother was afraid of my father,’ Kate Dickens said. ‘She was never allowed to express an opinion – never allowed to say what she felt.’31 And in her supine acquiescence, he undoubtedly found more material for dislike. If only his energy could be matched by some from another person! If only she would provoke him, excite him, resist him!

  To his eyes, Catherine had become unresponsive, grudging, inert, close to inhuman. Had she really changed? Certainly she had aged. He had married a young woman, and she had turned into an older one. Perhaps the gap between them had widened in the years of her dedication to babies and of his to books. Perhaps there had always been an incompatibility between them, but he had been too busy to notice it – too busy establishing himself professionally, too busy assaulting the world to register insufficiencies closer to home. Nevertheless, he brought to bear on Catherine a rage which seems unjustified by anything she was, even granted that she had let herself become unattractive and lazy. Perhaps, as she left girlhood behind, Catherine became for him more and more the mother he hated and felt betrayed by, whom he blamed for keeping him at work when he was ten. It was Catherine keeping him at work now, always producing more children for him t
o support. And she refused to take responsibility for her own household, thrusting it onto other people, onto himself and Georgina. If Catherine lived now, she might well feel (as other women have felt) that her husband’s anger at her had nothing to do with her and a lot to do with his mother. But Catherine, in 1855, could have had no such consoling thought.

  When the fantasied reunion with Maria Beadnell and the hoped-for rebirth of his emotional life turned out to be a fiasco, Dickens was unable to laugh at himself or to accept his situation resignedly. It drove him, if anything, into a more acute state of despair. Would he never feel excitement with a woman again? Was he to be caged, confined, smothered within the limits of domesticity? Was it fair that one of the foremost novelists of his time should be denied the kind of emotional intensity in his life which he could project in his art? He envied French writers like Balzac and George Sand, who were not, in their writing, as constrained by their nation’s morality as he felt himself to be. He envied the frankness possible in their fiction, and, no doubt, the fabled sexual expressiveness of their lives as well.

  He was aware, above all, of a preternatural restlessness. He seemed unable to settle down to one task or one place, as though he could not find a comfortable point of repose in his life. He would sit down to work, get up, walk twelve miles, plan a trip to the Pyrenees, go back to his room, sit down, get up, pace the floor, make appointments and then not keep them. He went to Paris. He went to Boulogne. He was beginning to write Little Dorrit, and some of the restlessness was a writer’s normal spillover of energy at the start of a project, before the form and discipline of the work have channelled it usefully. But Dickens himself connected the restlessness that tormented him with his unhappy home life, with the irritations of life with a woman he found incompatible and with frustrated sexuality. He thought obsessively about his own restlessness, trying to convince himself it was somehow useful, that the wayward and unsettled feeling which so distressed him was part of the tenure on which he held his imaginative life – in short, that his misery was allied to his genius. But why had his genius been so untroubled in earlier life? Had he repressed his restlessness by riding over it like a dragoon? Why couldn’t he go on keeping his discontent buried? ‘The old days – the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then?’32 What he called the skeleton in his domestic closet – his closet dissatisfaction – seemed to be growing larger and threatening to break down doors.

  One outlet for Dickens’s restless energy was provided by the amateur theatricals he organised for his household. In 1855 he had staged a melodrama by Wilkie Collins in the children’s theatre in Tavistock House, their London residence. It was called The Lighthouse. Dickens, an electrifying actor who entered wholeheartedly into his roles and used his voice magnificently, tearing every passion to tatters, played the central role of the lighthouse keeper haunted by the belief he had murdered someone. On January 6, 1857, in honour of the twentieth birthday of his eldest son, Dickens produced another Wilkie Collins melodrama, The Frozen Deep. He, Collins, Charley, Mamie and Kate Dickens and Georgina Hogarth, had rehearsed the play twice weekly for months. Dickens had supervised the construction of flats, which were painted by his friend Clarkson Stanfield of the Royal Academy. Admission was by invitation only, and Dickens had to insist that the invitations were not transferable as room was so extremely limited (partly due to the voluminousness of ladies’ crinolines). He had to deal with the gas board to get special permission for the gas lights and yet to avoid an increase in his taxes. He managed every aspect of the production.

  Dickens loved to act – there is a painting of him playing the role of Bobadil, the braggart, in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour – and his amateur theatricals, like his later public readings, served his emotional needs in complicated ways. For one thing, acting was for him, as it had been for Shakespeare, an expression of human freedom and flexibility. For Shakespeare this image was counterbalanced by a sense of theatre as shadow-activity, an emblem of the vanity of earthly life.33 But for Dickens the theatre seemed increasingly truer than life. Aware in his youth (as in Nicholas Nickleby) of the comic limitations of actors and acting, Dickens, as he aged, grew oppressed by the not-so-comic limitations of life. Life did not measure up so satisfactorily as theatre to his demands for intensity.

  The theatre answered, too, his need to control. For it was not just acting he enjoyed. He liked producing, co-ordinating the efforts of many people – the writer, the scene painter, the actors – liked seeing a work of art take shape through co-operative effort and not, as was more usual for him, in the loneliness of his study. Putting on a play was like writing a book in company, and performing it allowed him to ‘feel its effect coming freshly back upon me from the reader’.34 His performance was a text whose impact, unlike that of his novels, he could witness instantly. Watching his effect on an audience, establishing his power over an ever greater number of people visibly present before him, became increasingly important to Dickens.

  Collins’s melodramas, with their heightened emotionalism, were peculiarly suited to offer release from the monotonous and depressing irritation of his domestic life. In The Frozen Deep, which was to play, one way and another, such an important role in Dickens’s life, he acted the part of a man who sacrifices himself to save the life of his rival in love. Richard Wardour discovers himself on an Arctic ice floe with Frank Aldersley, the man Clara Burnham has rejected him for and whom he has sworn to kill. But instead of killing Aldersley, Wardour carries him over snow drifts and ice floes, staggering on with the sick man and bringing him to safety, at the cost of his own life. Time after time, in rehearsal and in the four-performance run, Dickens sacrificed his life to save a man he hated. It was the role he felt he was enacting in his own life. He felt torn between the urge to sacrifice his own happiness for what he felt he owed to others and the urge to break loose and seek his own happiness at whatever cost. And this conflict registers in the way he keeps returning to the themes of self-sacrifice and self-indulgence in his novels of this period, in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities.

  As Wardour, he triumphed. Most of the audience and many of the actors were in tears. ‘O reaction, reaction,’ he wrote to Collins when the public performances were over.35 He would not let go of The Frozen Deep. When his friend Douglas Jerrold died in June, Dickens organised three more performances of the melodrama with a paying audience to benefit the widow and her family. He hired the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street for the purpose. The play was becoming widely known. The queen herself requested and was given a special performance. Then Dickens, who had given public readings in the provinces to raise money for charity, got the idea of taking The Frozen Deep on the road. They would perform it in Manchester, in a theatre that could seat three thousand! He would continue to play Richard Wardour, but it was out of the question for Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens girls to continue in the female parts. Their voices would never carry in such a large theatre. They would have to be replaced by professional actresses.

  That Dickens did not immediately think of Mrs Ternan and her interesting daughters suggests that the story of his backstage meeting the previous spring with Ellen Ternan, crying at the scantiness of the costume she had to wear, may, after all, be apocryphal,36 or that, if they did meet, the impression made upon the novelist by the crying ingenue was not so great. Or perhaps he was greatly attracted to her and precisely for that reason tried to find a different actress. He asked Mrs Henry Compton to join the cast for the Manchester performances, but she was busy. Then, at the recommendation of the manager of the Olympic Theatre, he asked Mrs Ternan and her daughters, Maria and Ellen. Maria, the more talented actress, played the part of Clara Burnham, in whose arms Richard Wardour dies. Even though her back was to the audience and no one could appreciate it but Dickens, the distress and agitation on her face when she recognised Wardour were extraordinary. She had to kneel over him as he was dying and be said goodbye to. Dickens, playing the part of
the dying man, testified that tears streamed out of her eyes into his mouth, down his beard, all over his rags, down his arms as he held her. ‘At the same time she sobbed as if she were breaking her heart, and was quite convulsed with grief. It was of no use for the compassionate Wardour to whisper, “My dear child, it will be over in two minutes – there is nothing the matter – don’t be so distressed!” She could only sob out “O! It is so sad, O it’s so sad!” and set Mr Lemon … crying too. By the time the curtain fell, we were all crying together.’37 Ostensibly a tribute to Maria’s wholehearted acting and her vibrantly compassionate nature, this account by Dickens of the Manchester performance also serves as a testimonial to his own power, his impact as an actor and the beauty of the self-sacrificing role he had chosen to play.

  Dickens was moved by dependency and weakness in women – but it had to be an active, quivering, sensitive weakness, a weakness which could testify to his strength, not the bovine and lethargic weakness of his wife. Still, it is not wholly surprising that his fiercest response was evoked not by Maria Ternan but by her younger and less gifted sister, who was the same age as his favourite daughter, Kate, eighteen, the age that Maria Beadnell had remained in his mind, and who may or may not have cried months before at the thought of appearing on the stage in too little clothing. By the second of the two performances of The Frozen Deep in Manchester, after three days of rehearsal in London and a train ride up to the Midlands in the company of the Ternans, Dickens’s life took a sharp new turn. He became obsessed with Ellen Ternan as an alternative to his domestic misery. He was in love.