Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  Dickens’s reading tour in 1861 took him to twenty and more cities in two and a half months. He had earned £500 for six readings in the summer, so the work was profitable—the duration of the tour was short in comparison with the longer task of writing even one of his shorter novels (thirty to thirty-six weekly installments), not to mention a longer one (twenty installments over nineteen months). But Dickens was never one to stint on preparation. He rewrote, edited, and rehearsed each selection and came to feel that two hundred rehearsals was the minimum before the introduction of new material. His technique was not quite acting, but far more than reading aloud. He was especially good at modulating the nuances of every sentence, narrative as well as dialogue, in order to bring out its proper effect. Not a word was wasted—words and phrases and sentences that did well enough on the page were changed if they were a little flat in performance. His stage set was simple—a desk, a lamp, a few decorations. He strove to give the feeling of intimacy in even the largest halls and was a master at developing a sense of individual communication between himself and members of the audience, in part by not maintaining an impassive distance from them, but by reacting to what he was reading as they did. The original inspirations of his public readings were private readings of the Christmas books to groups of friends, and he saw no reason to change a successful model. Ellen Ternan and other friends were often in the audience. As his health declined, they could judge whether the readings were too strenuous, but he didn’t always follow their advice. The winter reading series concluded at the end of January 1862.

  English literary life was now full and varied. George Eliot followed Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede with The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). Tennyson published Idylls of the King (1859); George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859); Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860). Samuel Smiles, J. S. Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Ruskin were all active, in these years publishing their most famous works. In Russia, Turgenev was publishing Fathers and Sons, Dostoevsky was publishing Notes from Underground, and Tolstoy was at work on War and Peace, to be published in 1865. In France, Victor Hugo was publishing Les Misérables, Flaubert was publishing Salammbô. Dickens was not much older than most of these writers (and younger than Mill and Darwin), but he was their ancestor as well as their contemporary. The thread of English fiction that led back to Scott came directly through Dickens. In his essay “Epic and Novel,” the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin points out that of all the literary genres, only the novel does not predate Aristotle, and only the novel is not defined by Aristotelian poetics: “The novel is not merely one genre among other genres. Among genres already completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore, it is deeply akin to that era.” A genre doesn’t develop of itself, of course. It develops because its practitioners have ideas and talents that enlarge the form to encompass phenomena that are new or have not been portrayed successfully before. If we take Jane Austen, for example, it is often observed that the servant classes, the colonial plantations, and the naval establishment that supported the lives of her characters are never alluded to or depicted in her novels. The reasons for this are no doubt a combination of habits of mind, considerations of artistic form, and convention, but the basic fact is that Austen didn’t consider it necessary to broaden her canvas or her language. Dickens, about a generation younger than Austen and a descendant on his mother’s side of one of those serving families who do not appear in any of Austen’s work, found a way to satisfy his own urgent need to depict almost everyone in his English world who did not appear in Austen’s work, and a way to communicate with them as well. His natural predilections for exploration, investigation, mimicry, and drama, combined with his natural flair for figurative language and his access to nonrational states of mind, meant that he could not help expanding the possibilities of the novel and almost by himself creating the literary world that surrounded him in the early 1860s. But he was, in some sense, now outmoded. Having read his works, his contemporaries saw their flaws—his native deficiencies in tightness of construction and complexity of characterization—and learned from them. Their works were more subtle and nuanced, more private and less convivial, you might say, more focused on the inner life as lived rather than as projected outward. Even so, they existed inside the gates of the very broad world that Dickens had shown over and over was the appropriate home of the novel.

  Dickens’s public readings, in addition to being a scheme for making money and for performing and for getting a feeling of connection to his audience and fans, were also the next step in the idea of the novel, a step into a territory where other novelists were not able to follow (except in a pale sense that novelists today go on book tours and read more or less skillfully from their own work). If the novel by nature seeks to communicate more and more about a world that contains more and more material worthy of communication, then Dickens, with his rehearsals and his rewritings and his careful projection of his words, was attempting to make every single word count. The ideal would be that every word would be both clear and evocative of many overlapping meanings—that is, the natural complexity of the novel, both overall and sentence by sentence, would be taken to its limit. For Dickens, “meaning” included both large quantities of ideas and large quantities of emotion, so the proper audience reaction would be both emotional and intellectual (a reaction he found in France and in Scotland most frequently). In addition, the mutually subjective writer/reader experience, wherein the reader feels his or her mind is in direct communication with a single other mind, the author’s, would also be fulfilled by the staged intimacy of the setting. Nor could the novels be acted out—the author/narrator was essential to the public reading as a novel-like enterprise rather than a more impersonal drama-like enterprise. So even when his contemporary novelists were in some sense disdaining Dickens for déclassé self-promotion, he was testing the boundaries of the novelistic enterprise—that is, the boundaries of how a narrative can be communicated. It is thus no coincidence that his work has some affinity with film, a narrative form that portrays some aspects of modern life more effectively than the novel does.

  Between January 1862 and April 1866, Dickens did no reading tours; he did not begin his next novel, Our Mutual Friend, until November 1863 (though he thought of several ideas and names that later appeared in it). There is no record of where Ellen Ternan lived at this time, only that she and her mother did not attend Maria Ternan’s wedding in the summer of 1863 (though there is no evidence of a breach between them). Dickens worked on All the Year Round and traveled back and forth to France, sometimes for only a few days at a time. He even went during the summer of 1862, when Georgina Hogarth was seriously ill. Most commentators believe that Ellen and her mother were in France, supported by Dickens, though no scholarly investigations have uncovered where they were living. Some believe that Ellen had a baby in these years; Dickens’s daughter Kate told a friend of hers many years later that there had been a son who died (a story corroborated by Dickens’s most successful son, Henry). At any rate, Dickens was depressed, he reported to Forster, and the evidence of Pip and the later character of Jasper, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, show that Dickens was exploring the idea of guilt in his novels. There is no reason to believe that Dickens’s feelings toward Ellen, about his situation, and about himself didn’t fluctuate over the years. It is not uncommon for a man or a woman to act in accordance with his or her desires, only to find that the accomplished goal doesn’t have the imagined results but must be accommodated anyway. Dickens didn’t have much experience with being satisfied or at peace. Even if he was able to arrange things as he liked, that may not have worked to settle him.

  In the absence of all evidence as to the terms of Dickens’s relationship with the Ternans, there is only speculation about the probable effect upon Ellen’s life and reputation were she to become Dickens’s a
cknowledged mistress and bear his child, even in France. Those who think she did become his mistress and those who don’t all agree that her prospects would be clouded—her career would court scandal (and she had not shown much talent for the stage anyway), and her ability to make a respectable and prosperous marriage would be compromised. Her most marriageable years were passing—she turned twenty in 1860, thirty in 1870. Rationally, she was wasting her prospects, and according to their biographers, both she and Dickens would understand this. Was Dickens thoughtful and foresighted enough to restrain his ardor and remain a loving but avuncular figure in her life, as Ackroyd maintains? Or was he willing to risk her well-being for love, his or theirs, as Tomalin maintains? And what was her mother, famously respectable and very much in the picture, willing to risk, and for what?

  At the end of 1863, Dickens began to write Our Mutual Friend. The gestation of the novel was prolonged and difficult, and Dickens was especially concerned that he would get behind the publication schedule—his sense of his powers had diminished since he sat down three years before to begin Great Expectations because his magazine needed a serial. He hadn’t filled one of his large canvases since Little Dorrit, begun in 1855, and for the first time in his life, he was daunted by the prospect. During the writing of David Copperfield, he had told Forster rather gaily of entering a stationery store to buy paper, and overhearing a woman ask for the next number of the novel, knowing that he hadn’t even written it yet—that was the only time, apparently, he was ever intimidated by his chosen publishing format. While he was working up Our Mutual Friend, he complained several times to Forster that he didn’t quite know what he was getting at. The ideas he had pivoted upon character (for example, the idea of a man and a woman both scheming to marry for money, only to discover after the wedding that neither had any) rather than theme (by contrast, his first thoughts about Little Dorrit concerned the social problems implicit in the phrase “Nobody’s Fault,” the first title of the novel). One aspect of English life that still annoyed him was narrow-minded John Bullishness—portrayed in Our Mutual Friend in the person of Podsnap. Tradition has it that Podsnap was based on none other than John Forster, as Harold Skimpole had been based on Leigh Hunt, and once again Dickens managed to betray a friend and portray a characteristic at the same time, though tradition also has it that he got away with it and that Forster never revealed whether or not he realized what Dickens had done.

  Once he started, the writing was slower than usual—he was working hard but felt he was no longer as quick and inventive as he had been. One number came up two and a half pages short—a flaw that had to be corrected and seems to have indicated to Dickens that he was losing his professional edge. All in all, the composition of Our Mutual Friend did not give him the pleasure that others had (though much of the information about Dickens’s views on Our Mutual Friend is not available, because the final volumes of his letters have not yet been published).

  Yet the novel is a delight. The opening two chapters set the theme—in the first chapter, Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam are out upon the Thames, engaged in Gaffer’s line of work, which is salvaging from the river. They find a corpse. In chapter 2, gossip about a strange will comes up at the high society dinner table of Mr. and Mrs. Veneering; at the end of the meal, a young lawyer, Mortimer Lightwood, is handed a message. The beneficiary of the will has been found drowned. Gossip neatly defines the circle of the novel—the highest are linked with the lowest, not by an institution (the court of Chancery) or a system (capitalism), but by the much more casual and yet permanent human inclinations to tell a good story and to investigate a secret. As the characters come into relationships with one another, they do so voluntarily, because they conceive an interest in one another. Their relationships proliferate; desired connections lead to undesired connections as well as other desired ones, until everyone is connected, much of London is explored, and the plot works itself out clearly, logically, and with pleasure for the reader. Throughout, the novel is driven by character and style rather than by theme.

  If we compare Our Mutual Friend with Bleak House and Little Dorrit, for example, we see that the imputation, in the earlier books, that characters’ views and actions are determined by their circumstances is no longer present. All the characters in Our Mutual Friend act in accordance with their sense of who they are morally, or who they would like to be; even Rogue Riderhood has a motto—he “makes his living by the sweat of his brow.” The good characters, of whom Mr. Boffin is an example, are able to retain a sense of right and wrong in spite of circumstances. Much of the novel turns upon the moral education of Bella Wilfer, in whom those who love her see an inherent sense of compassion and integrity, but who acts in a mercenary and spoiled fashion. Mr. Boffin intends his ruse of miserliness to uncover the real Bella, not to change her from one sort of girl to another. Dickens is careful, in the beginning, to show Bella’s true affection for her father—the question is how she will reveal her naturally good nature, not whether she will. Eugene Wrayburn undergoes a similar testing—when he finds Lizzie in her hiding place and has a last interview with her, his motives are still dishonorable—although he is strongly drawn to her, he cannot bring himself to cross the social gulf between them and ask her to marry him. Even after she rescues him and cares for him, he is hesitant and wonders if his moral weakness is, or should be, fatal. But the experience of marriage (as with Bella) and friendship and connection bolsters his resolve, and the novel closes with Eugene at last attaining a moral vision. Instead of the last note of Little Dorrit, which has Clennam and Amy subsumed into the “usual uproar,” at the end of Our Mutual Friend, the principal characters have made themselves a small society of friendship (and prosperity) that is a refuge from the shallowness represented by Lady Tippins, the snobbishness represented by Lord Snigsworth, the blind pomposity represented by Podsnap, and the passion, greed, and criminality represented by Headstone, Wegg, and Riderhood. In short, Dickens has returned to a comic vision of the world, in which choice and agency determine fate, connection is possible, and individuals are able (and indeed required) to understand their true situations and act on them.

  Also in contrast with every novel after David Copperfield, Dickens explores the postmarital relationships of his characters, developing images of domestic connection. The weddings are not the end. Bella continues to be tested after hers. Her husband tempts her greed, her trust, her dedication to household management, her relations with her mother and sister. These chapters not only allow Bella to win wealth and integrity together, they allow Dickens to expatiate upon his ideas of a good marriage, which he has hardly ever done before. The foundation of this ideal marital relationship is romantic love combined with gratitude; its goal is some sort of substantial “improving object”; it is lived out among a community of like-minded friends rather than familial kin. Eugene and Lizzie’s marriage reflects the same ideals, except that enlightenment and strength flow not from the man to the woman, as with John and Bella, but from the woman to the man. What is important here is that in contrast with, say, Pip and Sydney Carton, the reformed characters of Our Mutual Friend are allowed to reap the rewards of salvation; their feelings of guilt and shame do not prohibit them from intimate connection. In addition, that salvation takes place in the world rather than in the afterlife.

  Dickens has stepped back from his wholesale critique of English society and, in so doing, allows his characters to assert their freedom within what he continues to portray as a corrupt structure. Corruption, he is saying, is a fact of life, but not the determiner of the individual’s moral direction. The average man or woman (not just the exceptional Amy Dorrit type) can understand right and wrong. Twemlow, Lightwood, Jenny Wren, Riah, Mrs. Lammle, and Georgiana Podsnap are all required to assume a moral stance against one sort of pressure or another, and all do, and thus a right-minded community is formed within the larger community of fools and knaves.

  In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens doesn’t seem to be pressing grand themes and motifs, as he h
ad in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, or even Great Expectations, and as a result, critics have not always taken this last completed novel as seriously as earlier ones. But in fact, Dickens’s style and character portrayal in Our Mutual Friend show that his political and social opinions have been successfully and gracefully dissolved into his use of language. At 820 pages, Our Mutual Friend is certainly one of the greatest examples of sustained perfection of style in the English language. Examples of felicitous phrasings abound on every page, from the satiric (“A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young person’ may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter”) to the comic (“ ‘Who is it?’ said Mrs. Wilfer, in her Act-of-Parliament manner. ‘Enter!’ ”) to the violent (“In an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked, flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the sky”) to the lyrical (“Up came the sun, streaming all over London, and in its glorious impartiality even condescending to make prismatic sparkles in the whiskers of Mr. Alfred Lammle as he sat at breakfast”). But grace of style meshes with delicacy and complexity of character drawing. Dickens’s typical florid repetitiveness, which sometimes works in earlier novels (Mrs. Gamp, Flora Finching, Miss Tox, Josiah Bounderby, Carker the manager) and sometimes does not (Esther Summerson, Miss Wade, the Frenchman Rigaud), has given way to something much more subtle in Our Mutual Friend. In allowing for the possibility of transformation in almost all the characters of the novel, Dickens has changed his mind about human nature—he revisits old character types and sees them anew: the Reverend Frank Milvey, clergyman, is a forgiven Chadband. Eugene is a forgiven James Harthouse. Lightwood the lawyer is a forgiven Tulkinghorn. Boffin the miser is a forgiven Scrooge. Fledgeby is Ralph Nickleby brought low, given a drubbing, and peppered into the bargain. Lammle has certain Murdstone characteristics, but when he canes Fledgeby, the reader has to acknowledge that he has his uses. Bella is not unlike Dora. Lizzie is Agnes with strength and initiative. While I don’t want to make too much of these similarities, I do want to stress that Dickens’s comic vision in Our MutualFriend is partially retrospective—the greatness of the novel comes from a new vision of the world that more successfully integrates the conscious mind with the subconscious and the individual with the group, and at the same time more successfully integrates all the various parts of a novel—plot, character, style, setting, and theme.