Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  In addition, while the purpose of Dickens’s trip, to the Americans, was to be looked at, for Dickens, it was to look—like other European travelers, he wanted to see what there was to see, and he had a particular interest in social institutions. He had criticized England for the piecemeal and often cruel ways in which the least fortunate members of society were cared for, so in America he was interested in orphanages, and schools, and prisons, and factories. He toured any number of them and, overall, was impressed, especially by the factory systems of such towns as Lowell, Massachusetts, where the working girls were regulated and given decent wages and places to live, as well as certain freedoms. He made friends, some of whom he corresponded with for the rest of his life. Notable among these was Cornelius Felton, a self-made scholar of humble origins, who taught Greek at Harvard and was not the sort of man Dickens could have come to know at an English university. He visited the South—Washington, Baltimore, and Richmond, Virginia—but was uncomfortable there with what he saw as the negative effects of slavery, both on the inhabitants and on the ambience of the city. He liked Cincinnati, did not like St. Louis, hated the southern Illinois reaches of the Mississippi River, disliked the roughness and danger of riverboat travel (though he pursued his walking regime with great energy when traveling by canal boat).

  Catherine was a patient and submissive companion and in fact made a better impression upon the Americans than Dickens himself did. He complained about her once, that she could not get into or out of any conveyance without stumbling, but in general he recognized the sacrifices she was daily making to accompany him on a journey that she had never wanted to take. They seemed to be well matched and happily married to those who witnessed them, and he seemed, in his letters to friends, to be pleased with her. They were equal in their hunger to hear from home and, as the end of the journey neared, to get home.

  At Niagara Falls, for once, Dickens’s expectations were more than fulfilled. He looked upon the “fall of bright green water” and “then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle was Peace. Peace of mind, tranquillity, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat forever.” They remained on the Canadian side for ten days, vacationing, enjoying the falls from every angle, shunning company (the Canadian side was less inhabited), and renewing themselves. Thus refreshed, they went on to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, where they had a better time—in Montreal, in fact, both Charles and Catherine acted in a theatrical production of several short plays, something Dickens hadn’t done in years and enjoyed very much (he was also a great success).

  They were more than eager to get home. On the seventh of June, he writes, he “darted out of bed” at dawn to check the wind (they were sailing rather than steaming home), and on the first of July they arrived. Of their homecoming, Dickens writes, “The country, by the railroad, seemed, as we rattled through it, like a luxuriant garden. The beauty of the fields (so small they looked!), the hedgerows, and the trees; the pretty cottages, the beds of flowers, the old churchyards, and antique houses, and every well-known object; the exquisite delights of that one journey crowding, in the short compass of a summer’s day, the joy of many years. . . .”

  If much of Dickens’s life seems emblematically Victorian to us, of more than historical interest only in the light of his literary genius, this American trip, by contrast, seems uncannily modern. The new machinery of capitalistic publishing had carried his work far and wide, bringing a single man, a single voice, into a personal relationship with huge numbers of people whom he had never met, and yet who felt intimate with him, because the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. But both the author and the readers had misread the relationship. The readers had mistaken the work for the man; the man had mixed fame and money together without realizing that they were distinct compensations that did not necessarily overlap. The intimacy they felt through the work came from the natural power of the novel to cross the boundaries of appearance and reveal the inner life, emphasizing the inner life in a delightful and, in a sense, false contrast to social life. This was the first time, but it had all the qualities of the countless similar episodes to take place between then and now, whether the art form in question is novel writing or moviemaking or television broadcasting. And then, the couple’s return is familiar, too, to anyone who has ever traveled from America to England—the loveliness, the tidiness, the gardenlike contrast to the rougher, vaster, less inhabited continent to the west. Tastes differ. Many of us discover a deep attachment to the unpredictability of America—Dickens discovered an attachment to the very circumscriptions, of fields, of villages, of private life, of the England wherein he had never before quite consciously felt at home.

  Dickens was eager to go to work. He commenced immediately upon American Notes for General Circulation, moved the family to Broadstairs for the rest of the summer, and adopted into the household as a permanent addition Georgina Hogarth, Catherine’s fourteen-year-old sister, who had been helping Fred Dickens with the children while Charles and Catherine were away. Georgina reminded Dickens of Mary, and he became very fond of her over the next years, installing her as the children’s general caretaker and governess.

  American Notes was written quickly, largely because Dickens could refer to all the letters he had written Forster from abroad. He originally wrote a strongly hostile introduction, which Forster persuaded him to drop. The volume was published in October, only three and a half months after his return. Reviews and sales in England were disappointing—he had not had as much to say of interest as his public expected. Reviews in America were angry, but sales were good. Unfortunately, owing to the very copyright questions that had been at issue while he was there, he earned nothing from them. Nevertheless, in contrast with the many other travel narratives of the time, American Notes does now seem “Dickensian.” While the style does not have the density and power of his best work, it is lively, witty, and intelligent, and the author discusses typical subjects for him—prisons and other public institutions, odd characters and odd characteristics. Dickens was possessed of tremendous powers of observation, greater than those of any other writer. American Notes stands out from other books of its kind for these qualities of precise notice. He did not, however, have the same sort of distilled and profound understanding of American institutions and the American landscape that he had for England and, subsequently, for France and Italy. Nor did he have the love for the place and the leisure it would have taken to develop a vital relationship with the United States. That the journey was a tiresome disappointment in many ways is evident in the volume’s lack of real power. It was only subsequently, in Martin Chuzzlewit, that Dickens managed to incorporate America into his inner world and give it his characteristic qualities and symbolic force.

  It is clear that upon his return from America, Dickens’s sense of what he wanted to do in his work enlarged considerably, along with his sense of social responsibility. As soon as American Notes saw publication, he was off to Cornwall to have a look at the tin mines, as he had had a look at schools for Nicholas Nickleby. The contrasts he found between the United States and England did not all redound to the credit of the English—many social institutions, especially in New England, did a better and more complete job of taking care of citizens, especially indigent ones, than their English counterparts. Ackroyd is worth quoting on the state of London in the 1840s—indeed, almost throughout Dickens’s life:

  For most of his life Dickens lived in a city in which the odour of the dead emanated from metropolitan graveyards, where adults and children died of malnutrition or disease, where open sewers and cesspools spread their miasma into the foggy air, where it took only the shortest period to turn off one of the grand thoroughfares or
respectable streets of the city and enter a landscape of filth, destitution, death, and misery. We have here glimpses of an urban life which is so alien to us as to seem almost incredible; but which for Dickens and his contemporaries was both common and familiar.

  Just to make the point, let me add, “Burial grounds in the city . . . were now overflowing . . . the bodies were piled high upon each other, sometimes breaking through the soil and emitting noxious gases which poisoned and killed those in the vicinity.” Ackroyd quotes one gravedigger: “I have been up to my knees in human flesh by jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space at the bottom of the graves in which fresh bodies were afterwards placed.”

  Dickens, of course, was as familiar with such sordid scenes as any other Victorian, given his habit of perambulating the streets by night and day and his readiness to go anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps the London of his day is more analogous to the Mexico City or the Calcutta of our day than to any city in Europe or North America. Certainly an impoverished population was pouring into London all through the 1840s—there was a net increase of population of 250,000, in a time when the average life span of a Londoner was twenty-seven and almost half of all deaths were of children under the age of ten. Rather as Harriet Beecher Stowe was criticized in America for exaggerating the abuses of slavery when actually she tried to mitigate them in order to make reading about them palatable to her readers, Dickens saw and knew far more than he wrote of, simply because he always chose to appeal to rather than to confront his readers. His famous wish not to “bring a blush to the cheek of the young person” applied to the horror of social conditions as well as to sexual matters. Nevertheless, both as a social reformer and as a writer, the Dickens of late 1842 was more ambitious than the Dickens of 1841.

  After completing American Notes, he was delayed for a bit casting about for the right name and title for his next serial. He tried Chuzzlewig, Sweezleden, Chuzzletoe, Sweezlebach, Sweezlewag. Chuzzlewit was it—the rightness of the name calling forth everything else, rather in the way Sir Laurence Olivier once said that putting on a false nose opened up everything else about a character for him. Dickens kept lists of names, noticed names in graveyards and newspapers. He was careful to name everything, including the periodicals he founded, before attempting anything further. That the names he chose were strange and evocative makes it all the more fascinating that many of the oddest ones, like “Flite” and “Guppy,” were actual names of individuals.

  Martin Chuzzlewit was the first of Dickens’s novels to be written around an overriding idea—in this case the forms and effects of selfishness—and so marks a departure from the more personal and character-driven novels of his earlier period. In Pickwick and Nickleby, the eponymous heroes had gotten around quite a bit, and their travels had brought them into contact with various examples of human folly and knavery. Oliver and Nell, too, had embarked upon dark, and then darker, journeys. But the progress of each character toward his or her individual fate was paramount. Episodes and adventures and strange encounters could be a little arbitrary. The American journey had given Dickens many more specific opinions about himself and his society; more important, it had given him a vision that was more of a piece. When he arrived back in England on that first day, and saw everything rather smaller and more connected, it was as if it could be encompassed somehow, and understood, and, indeed, fixed. The reforming impulse begins, perhaps, in criticisms of society, but it relies upon the faith that what is wrong is only somewhat wrong—some money here, some effort there, some changes somewhere else, and the structure will yield to improvement. Additionally, improvements in the structure, be they sanitation, education, election reforms, or whatever, will produce better, more enlightened citizens, who will behave in a more community-minded fashion, turning away from evil and crime. In other words, human nature, too, is only somewhat wrong, not irredeemably corrupt and sinful. In this, Dickens differed from many of his fellow reformers, like Lord Shaftesbury, who were Evangelicals and promoted, first and foremost, the prohibition of sinful acts such as prostitution and alcohol consumption, who combined teaching the poor to read and write with rigorous religious instruction. Both sorts of reformers saw the inhumanity and, indeed, danger of the social chaos all around them, but Dickens always ridiculed the Evangelical impulse to look for sinfulness and evil nature, instead interpreting kindness, fellow-feeling, charitableness, and social conscience as virtues of generosity and love. Society would be reformed through an expansion of love and responsibility, through the cultivation of comfort and beauty, not through a clamping down. With Martin Chuzzlewit, he was beginning to grope toward a theory of how human networks function. Social ills still had their source in personal qualities—selfishness, for example—but he was now interested in the social ramifications of this single quality.

  And everything went wonderfully. Evidence from the manuscript and the notes shows that he set about writing the first numbers more carefully than any previous serial, and evidence from letters shows that he was quite pleased with the results, especially with Pecksniff and Tom Pinch. In the meantime, his intimacy with Angela Burdett-Coutts was growing. She had the purse and he had the energy and the mobility to serve as her agent.

  He first acted for her in investigating what were known as “ragged schools”—that is, charity schools for the very poorest children. While working on Martin Chuzzlewit, he took time to visit the Field Lane School in Saffron Hill, to report on conditions there and to suggest ways in which Miss Coutts might help. Saffron Hill was widely considered to be one of the very worst “rookeries,” or slums, and coincidentally was familiar to Dickens from the Oliver Twist days. He remarked that the school was just where he had set Fagin’s establishment. The condition of the children appalled him when he first visited—the stench was so great that his companion had to leave, and his very foremost recommendation to Miss Coutts was that the children be given a place to wash. Better ventilation, a larger space—there were certain basic changes that could be made, but in the absence of any sort of welfare structure or, indeed, any general social belief in what we might call the obligations of the state to care for its citizens, even the depth of Miss Coutts’s purse was insignificant. Dickens was ambivalent about the ragged schools, feeling that they were not good schools in general and that the structure for educating the teachers was sadly wanting. He was hardly able even to name what we can readily see was a failure of the entire system, reflecting a wholesale shift in the social structure of England from rural to urban, from traditional to capitalistic, from patriarchal to democratic. But one thing to be said for Charles Dickens was that he remained undaunted. The energy he expended for Miss Coutts, the example he set in his public speeches, and the ambition of his novels steadily expanded.

  Nevertheless, his ambitions were not immediately rewarded. Sales of Martin Chuzzlewit fell off almost at once. A hundred thousand copies of The Old Curiosity Shop had dwindled to twenty thousand copies of the new novel, and the terms of his contract meant that he had to pay back a portion of his advance if sales fell below a certain level. He was in debt to Chapman and Hall, American Notes had not done well, and his obligations were greater than ever. Not only was his household growing, his father and brothers were clamoring for assistance. In some sense, he had wasted his moment; instead of following Barnaby Rudge with a surefire repeat of “Dickensian” forms and themes, he had gone to America on an expensive trip that would not, owing to American copyright piracy, repay itself in sales. Dickens was enraged by the idea that he might have to fulfill the letter of his contract and make the payments to Chapman and Hall—he declared that he would write nothing for them ever again. As earlier, with Bentley, he was ready and even eager to feel himself ill used by his publishers, as, truly, he was ill used by the Americans. Sales did not pick up. It is possible that a general business slowdown was the main cause. At any rate, Dickens decided that he could have it both ways—not only a strong overarching structure, but a bit of improvisation
as well—and he sent Martin and his henchman, Mark Tapley, to America to seek their fortune, which they certainly did not find. Nor did the American chapters provide the sales boost Dickens hoped for. In the end, Martin Chuzzlewit turned out to be something of a commercial failure and got mixed reviews.

  It is not uncommon, though, for a novelist to lose part of his audience as he grows more ambitious. The willingness, and maybe even the ability, of the audience to follow a favorite writer into work of greater complexity and more somber vision isn’t always immediate, and every author whose sole income is from his writings has to reckon with this dilemma. Dickens had experienced the freedom, importance, and warm regard that come with great popularity; now he was discovering that the freedom was not absolute, and that the potential for corruption exists in artistic support through sales as well as through patronage. In our day, for example, the disinterested “patronage” of the university and the National Endowment for the Arts is attacked by conservatives who always assert that the marketplace is the best test of artistic value. It seems clear, though, from the history of novel writing since Dickens’s time, that the production of enduring literary art has little or no relationship to market success, except insofar as a publisher can fund the publication of more complex and difficult works with the profits of a steady stream of popular stories. Even the most “loyal” readers grow “disloyal” when the work fails to please them.