Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  CHAPTER SIX

  JUST AFTER Katey’s marriage, Dickens’s brother Alfred died, and Dickens brought his family to London (there were five children). He sold Tavistock House and gave most of the furniture to his sister, who was taking care of his mother, who seems to have been a victim of some form of senile dementia. From then on, Gad’s Hill Place was his home, though he also spent some time, at least, in rooms he rented and at a house he bought for Ellen Ternan in Houghton Place, in London (she sold the lease on the house in 1881). At the beginning of October 1860, he began work on Great Expectations.

  Dickens had been thinking of ideas and seems to have first come up with the notion of Pip and Magwitch, his fairy godfather/convict, thinking the idea a funny one and a return to an old comic style. His first plan was to write a novel of the length and form of Little Dorrit—twenty monthly parts. He had found the weekly schedule of A Tale of Two Cities very exhausting and the format constricting. But the serial running in All the Year Round was driving down profits and circulation, even to the point of threatening the solvency of the magazine, so almost as soon as he began writing, he started publishing the novel to perk things up. In spite of bouts of depression and ill health, in spite of his griefs and frustrations, his inventive energy did not fail him. The thirty-six installments of the novel were completed without much trouble, and Dickens, as always, was pleased with them.

  While Forster and others approved Dickens’s return to a more comic style, it is hard in some ways to see what they were talking about. The novel opens with Pip standing in the graveyard of the small village in the Kentish marshes where his parents and brothers are buried. Everyone around the boy (who seems to be about eight or nine) is either cruel or foolish, including Joe Gargery, his kindly brother-in-law, who is unable to protect Pip (or himself) from the unreasoning abusive treatment meted out by Pip’s sister. The glow of early acceptance and love present in David Copperfield, before it is poisoned by the Murdstones, is entirely absent in Great Expectations, and Pip’s world offers no alternative to harsh discipline and ridicule. When Pip’s companionship is solicited by Miss Havisham for some mysterious reason of her own, the world she and Estella inhabit is even stranger than the world of the village, and Miss Havisham is no less ready to abuse and ridicule Pip than his sister is. The loving companionship of Joe is less than effective in easing Pip’s condition, since any hint of collaboration between the two is met by the sister with even more resentment. These three women, plus Mrs. Pocket (entirely irresponsible and self-important) and Miss Havisham’s female relatives (parasites who hope only to get a piece of her estate upon her death), are hardly offset in their female monstrousness by Biddy, a girl of the village who seems to love Pip but is just another, and rather less well realized, of Dickens’s Esther Summerson types.

  In addition, Pip is constantly beset by doubts about his own intentions and nature. Whereas David knows the injustices of the world for what they are, Pip has a strong sense of guilt, which renders his response to obvious injustices more ambivalent. He holds himself accountable (and Dickens seems to agree with him) for ignorance that to the reader he certainly cannot help. When Magwitch, in the first chapter, threatens him in order to get him to steal food from his sister’s larder, Pip goes on at some length about his sense of guilt at this, contradicting the reader’s feeling that surely a nine-year-old boy is not to be blamed for being coerced by a frightening escaped criminal. This is not to say that Pip’s psychology is unbelievable, only that it is not exactly comic. Comedy requires belief in innocence. Pip never believes in his own innocence, and much of the rhetoric of the novel is geared toward convincing the reader that Pip is not innocent—he might not be especially blameworthy at the beginning, but as he gets older and rises in his expectations, his sins of profligacy, ingratitude, and fecklessness become real. David Copperfield, by contrast, has much to learn, and his arc through the novel is the arc of his moral education—his flaw is to attach himself to morally flawed characters like Steerforth and to blind himself to their faults. Pip’s flaw is to have no discrimination at all, but to withhold himself from everyone, unsure at all times what value they have for him and what value he has for them. Once again, a portrait full of psychological truth, but far from comic. And Dickens knows this instinctively—although Pip is morally redeemed by the end, he cannot get all the way to satisfaction or happiness. Neither the original ending, where he and Estella meet and part, nor the second ending, recommended by Forster, where they meet with a hint that they do not part, but with no depiction of their life together, is in any way a comic ending. Of all the heroes of Dickens’s fiction, Pip is the only one too flawed, by self-hatred and shame, to find no reward other than mere survival. Like Louisa in Hard Times, Pip finds domestic satisfaction in witnessing the satisfaction of others—Joe and Biddy, Herbert and Clara. The redemptions of Miss Havisham and Magwitch do not benefit Pip, nor do they entirely lift the burden of guilt from the novel. Pip’s sense of himself as undeserving grows more sophisticated, but it remains. Dickens presses Pip’s sense of his own guilt a little too hard, and in this the moral argument of the novel seems slightly off.

  In the version of Great Expectations we have, we can see the ghost of the version Dickens originally planned—more on the scale of Little Dorrit than A Tale of Two Cities. Shrinking his execution to fit the circumstances of All the Year Round streamlined the book but leaves fascinating themes and characters relatively unexplored. Great Expectations was a commercial and, with a couple of exceptions, a critical success. Forster liked it very much, and modern critics have adored it. It is totally Dickensy, yet shorter than the real Dickensy novels. Its shortness amounts to restraint. Its undeniable darkness is edged with light, in a kind of reverse of Dickens’s youthful work, where the lightness was edged with black. Angus Wilson maintains that it is the one novel of his oeuvre wherein Dickens meets the criteria set by Flaubert and James for the well-made novel, and is therefore more perfect (though not greater) than his others. This is an interesting argument, because it suggests that novelistic greatness lies in the author’s success in working out his vision most completely in his most characteristic manner. Dickens’s manner, then, would be naturally unrestrained, so “perfection” would be less characteristic of him than vastness and variety; therefore his most perfect novel would be less characteristic and therefore less great than his more imperfect novels.

  After the completion of Great Expectations in June 1861, Dickens seems to have embarked upon a double life that was marked by increasing ill health, mysterious disappearances, successful and remunerative reading tours, and the deaths of friends and relatives. In October of that year, his tour manager died, as well as his brother-in-law. His mother died, at the age of seventy-four, in 1863. Her death was followed by that of his son Walter (in India), only twenty-two years old, and that of Thackeray, in December (Thackeray was younger than Dickens). The next year, another old friend died, and in 1866, Jane Carlyle, and Dickens’s brother Augustus, who had gotten as far as Chicago. In 1867, another old friend, Clarkson Stanfield, died in April, and in 1868, his brother Fred. In 1870, Daniel Maclise, the painter, died in the spring.

  Other friends were thriving, though—notably the actor Charles Macready, who married a second wife thirty years his junior in 1861 and had a son with her at the age of sixty-eight, in 1862. Macready’s remarriage reminds us that Dickens’s choice to live two lives, one public and one secret, was, in spite of our conventional image of Victorian life, more in his own nature than in the social requirements of the time. Several of his friends, including Daniel Maclise and Wilkie Collins, as well as George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, managed to live openly in an irregular manner and were not especially ostracized for doing so. Given Dickens’s open attacks on “Society” in Dombey and Son and all subsequent novels, and his penchant for rewarding his heroes and heroines with retired lives of honest labor and benevolence, rather than wealth and social position, his own resistance to the option of claiming Ellen Terna
n as his mistress and making a life with her requires at least some investigation and explanation—one would think that social ostracism would be right up his alley. But he pursued secrecy with inveterate energy.

  Almost no biographer has a good explanation for this, but Claire Tomalin, the author of a life of Ellen Ternan, speculates that vehement early assertions that his relations with Ellen were platonic and fatherly, and therefore that she was a virtuous young woman, like a daughter to him, gave him both a cover story and further motivation for secrecy. We already know from letters of 1858 that he created a version of his marriage that suited him—groundless jealousy on the part of Catherine, perfect virtue on the part of himself, Georgina, and the Ternans. Tomalin quotes a letter Dickens wrote to one of the Ternans’ cousins, in which he protests the perfect innocence of his liaison with the family, yet the style and the circumstances of the letter indicate an unusual degree of intimacy. Mrs. Ternan is known to have made a reputation for herself and her daughters in the theatrical world that was based on both artistic and personal respectability—the progress of her career demonstrates the transitional but still questionable social status of acting, and particularly of actresses, through the nineteenth century. While all actresses were no longer considered automatically to be prostitutes, as they had been, their social status continued to be tainted by the display of themselves and their talents for money.

  As time went on and Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan evolved (at one point, he provided the funds for Ellen’s older sister to travel to Italy and study singing, chaperoned by her mother, leaving Ellen and her other sister unchaperoned in London), the habit of secrecy and the necessity of secrecy became inextricably entangled. Undoubtedly, the embarrassment he felt at the exposure of his family life during the months he was divorcing Catherine motivated him never to allow any sort of exposure again. Ackroyd makes the point that the worst part of Dickens’s employment in the blacking factory was having to stand in the window and paste labels while passersby watched him. He made a contest of it and became marvelously quick, but perhaps this was a pattern in his behavior—if he was required to reveal himself, then he would do so as a phenomenon, but his real preference was for privacy. By the time he was in his fifties, as often happens, contradictory elements in his personality had become almost irreconcilably extreme. He was used to, and enjoyed, being a phenomenon and a star, and he courted unprecedented stardom in every aspect of his public readings, from the material he chose to the dramatic manner in which he rendered it. But the yearning for concealment was no less strong, so he made romantic arrangements that required concealment and possibly gained preciousness from that very concealment. Orthodox family life, with a large household, one child after another, and marriage had been a failure. A hidden affair—“a circle of one,” as Dickens called it to one correspondent—possibly retained more piquancy and drama. And, at the very least, leading a double life gave Dickens’s lifelong restlessness a point. He was now on the train all the time, traveling all the time, moving from Gad’s Hill, to his bachelor flat above the offices of All the Year Round on Wellington Street, to the house in Houghton Place where Ellen lived, and later to the house in Slough, and later to the house in Peckham. It is also likely that Ellen and her mother lived for a couple of years in France, which would have been no problem for Dickens—rather an added pleasure, since he loved France and wrote more than once of his pleasure in setting out for French destinations.

  Who was the audience for Dickens’s secret life? Undoubtedly himself. He had a strong need to feel himself virtuous, youthful, benevolent, and important at all times. The friends he broke off with after the divorce were precisely those whom Dickens had betrayed himself in front of. Thackeray remarked that he could see through Dickens now. The others, like Mark Lemon and Miss Coutts, did not have to actually challenge him in order for him to feel that what they had seen of him and the way in which they reflected him back to himself was intolerable. They had gained knowledge of a side of him that he himself did not want to know, so he broke off relations. As with later public men and celebrities, his importance and power had led him to believe that he could do as he wished until he discovered that fame in the larger world is at least as constricting as, say, small-town notoriety.

  Dickens and his work had always been contradictory. He professed virtue, and acted virtuously in the world, but he was drawn to crime, criminals, prostitutes, detectives, social disruption, and the Victorian underworld of hypocrisy, cruelty, ignorance, sickness, and death. Every novel he wrote explored innocence, but his innocent characters are far less alive than the villains, ne’er-do-wells, social climbers, usurers, cheats, liars, fools, murderers, grotesques, and madmen who surround them.

  Once again, as with Mary Hogarth and Catherine, then with Catherine and Georgina, Dickens tried to strike a balance between his contradictory desires (which he felt with desperate intensity), this time between the public life of the readings and the secret life of his heart. We may suppose that his secret life was at least occasionally frustrating or unsatisfying, or even painful and tragic, and that at least some of the energy that went into his readings came from the secrets that he kept about his other life, as when, in the character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep, he was able to express feelings that he could not reveal in person in a manner that almost overwhelmed his audience. Dickens may have felt, in fact, that the way he had structured his life—compartmentalizing it into several rather distant locations, one the family location, one the love location, one the All the Year Round location, one the fame location, with occasional holiday locations—worked wonderfully well to externalize his inner compartmentalization. In each location he had a faithful companion—Georgina, Ellen Ternan, W. H. Wills, and, for the readings, George Dolby, who was happy to assist and care for him—but they didn’t have to get along with one another particularly often. Since he lived this way for thirteen years, the system must have worked well enough most of the time, but it was a taxing and delicate one and visibly told on his health (though one observer wrote in the summer of 1864, “I met Dickens . . . clad in spruce frockcoat, buttoned to show his good and still youthful figure; and with a brand-new hat airily cocked on one side, and stick poised in his hand”).

  Of all the things that a novelist does, the first among them is to make repeated attempts to rationalize the world. Every time he or she writes a novel, he or she is systematizing what seems chaotic to others. In order for the product to satisfy the novelist, it has to have a certain rightness about it; order of some kind, comprehensibility of some kind, and truth of some kind are always present. As the novelist masters his or her materials and techniques, his or her novels approach more and more closely the novelist’s natural cast of mind, or most essential vision, and the logical or systematic qualities of the novel speak back to the novelist, confirming his or her power to make something real. It is thus a tremendous temptation for a novelist, especially a successful one, to attempt to transform the world itself so that it fits the novelist’s sense of the right sort of life. Dickens was always both active and energetic in his attempts to make the world fit his model; education, charitable works, social criticism and activism, aid to friends and their families, essays and articles and novels—all attest to his will to shape the world to a certain idea, as does his insistence on quiet, order, good dress, and excellent behavior on the part of his children. Certainly much of Dickens’s discomfort in his domestic life in the 1850s was due to an abiding feeling of wrongness—the wife and the children and the houses simply did not mesh, however strenuous his efforts, with what felt right, and vast expenditures of energy in changing this or that part of the picture had no effect. That the life that did finally mesh with his sense of rightness was unusual, marked by less and less resistance or opposition on the part of his associates, with its terms dictated by him, shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should it surprise us that it was a life he could not easily live. A novelist’s late, eccentric life is analogous to
his late, eccentric novels. His ties to the mainstream have loosened. His primary job is no longer to be representative, as when he was a young writer looking for a publisher and an audience; it is to be still interesting. But it may be that those to whom he is still interesting are not his contemporaries, whose world he reflects, but his descendants, whose world he intuits and predicts. Long association has convinced his contemporaries that they know him; this will not necessarily be so for those who have a different historical perspective. As with the work, so with the life. In the last years of Dickens’s life, he seems to have embraced a freer, more individualistic pattern, no longer striving to fit in, but actively seeking the sorts of relationships that are primary in our century—one-to-one intimacies on the one hand, joined with star-to-audience performances on the other. The intermediate circle of family, friends, clubs, and associations that had been a prominent feature of his thirties and forties had largely dropped away.