Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  Every novelist understands that a novel is a conceit, that making up stories gives the novelist the opportunity to try out emotions, ideas, images, relationships, causes, and effects. A novelist might drop Leigh Hunt into a narrative, but he is not taking Leigh Hunt’s actual life and circumstances and depicting them as they are—they would not in that way fit into the other fictional parts of the novel. The purpose of the game changes from novel to novel and novelist to novelist, but in general it is to make sense of the ongoing chaos. We don’t have to make Ellen into Lucie, Estella, Bella, and Rosa in order to see Dickens’s contemplation of her changing role in his life. The fact is that in his last novels, Dickens’s views of women deepened and grew more complex. This must certainly be owing to some sort of ongoing interaction with not only Ellen, but also her mother, her sisters, and his own growing daughters.

  When his American friends James and Annie Fields visited England in the late spring and summer of 1869, Dickens went all out to entertain them both in London, where he took rooms at a hotel, and at Gad’s Hill, where he planned picnics and outings for them. Mrs. Fields was a dedicated diarist and astute observer. She noted that while he was charming, convivial, and even playful, there was a constant undercurrent of depression—“he is a sad man,” she wrote. When they departed from the train station near Gad’s Hill, she wrote, about their last moments together on the platform, “he in his cheery way making us look and think of other things until the signal came. A crowd had collected to see him by the time we started but he did not seem to see it and the blood rushed all over his face as the tears came to ours. . . .” This is the eternal Dickens, jolly and kind, quick to feel, possessing quantities of natural social grace. But also in July, he wrote a review of Forster’s life of Walter Savage Landor (the original of Boythorn in Bleak House) in which he said, “The life of almost any man possessing great gifts would be a sad book to himself. . . .” Always, with Dickens, sadness and even despair went hand in hand with laughter, ready wit, and an appreciation of absurdity.

  Dickens began writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood in October. He complained about the composition and in fact had to rewrite and reshuffle the first two numbers at the last minute because each was six pages too short, but the extant text shows few other changes. It may not have been easy, but it does seem to have come out as he wanted it. He was pleased with it, too. The plan was no longer for twenty monthly parts to be published in nineteen numbers—Dickens and his publishers felt that the era of such long serials was past (perhaps this was the lesson of the low sales of the last numbers of Our Mutual Friend)—but, rather, for twelve monthly parts and a shorter, more concentrated story. The contract provided for the death of the author, too. The first number of Dickens’s last, uncompleted novel was not published until almost six months after he began writing. No longer could Dickens sit down, as he had with Great Expectations, and produce prodigally at will.

  Dickens had always been drawn, by what he called “the attraction of repulsion,” to murders and stories of murder. Now, partly through the work of Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend, the murder mystery had gotten rather more formalized, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood was planned along those lines. The tone of Drood is darker than that of Our Mutual Friend, and the storytelling is far less expansive, much more plot based than character based. Instead of allowing his characters to embroider freely upon the theme of their personalities, he moves the plot forward rather quickly, pausing to expatiate more on setting and atmosphere than on motivation. Cloisterham has an intentionally gothic feel—Dickens is always referring to the dead in their crypts and in the churchyard. One character carves headstones and also explores the various secret chambers of the cathedral. Even so, Drood is not traditionally gothic or horrible. For one thing, images of death are counterpointed by strong images of youth and vitality and wholesomeness. For another, it is not the restful dead who are threatening, but the restless and dissatisfied John Jasper. Dickens, certainly aware of death because of his various illnesses, portrays it as a kind of circumambient stillness and coldness, a natural winteriness, not light, but not horrible, either. True horror is reserved for Jasper’s aggression—he says to Rosa, “I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.” The danger is not that a ghost will walk, but that an ungovernable man will commit rape.

  Rosa flees to her guardian, where she is almost at once surrounded by three men and two women. It seems that if Dickens had not died, he would have at this point focused upon the ensnaring of Jasper.

  Critics have praised the restrained, somber style of Drood rather as they have elevated Great Expectations for similar reasons, of being Dickensy enough, but not too Dickensy. It is clear from Jasper’s machinations that he is the killer and that Rosa suspects him almost as much as the reader does. The only mystery concerns the whereabouts of Edwin’s body. Rosa’s protectors are all strong, resourceful men. It is hard to see how Dickens could believably deliver her to true jeopardy. Some of Dickens’s familiar plotlines—the moral education of a young man, for example—could obtain with Neville Landless, but by the end of the first half of the story, Neville is still a minor character. The disillusionment of Mr. Crisparkle and the comeuppance of Honeythunder the philanthropist, as well as the exposure of Mr. Sapsea, the pompous mayor, are also tried-and-true Dickens themes, but at this point in Drood, they are not especially well developed. Heavily plotted novels are by nature difficult to engineer without careful planning and the opportunity to rewrite and rethink in order to tie up threads and bolster implausibilities. Although I admire much of the writing of Drood, I don’t think the form of the murder mystery is congenial to serial composition, and I think even a novelist of Dickens’s inventiveness and genius would have been hampered by the shortness of the rest of the projected story and by the fact that as he would be composing the climax and denouement, the earlier developments of the plot would already be written in stone.

  Although The Mystery of Edwin Drood is one of Dickens’s minor works, it sheds important light on his state of mind at the end of his life, especially with regard to lifelong concerns. Primary among these, of course, is love. Jasper is similar to Pip and to Bradley Headstone in the power of his passion, but his is far more unscrupulous. In Great Expectations and in Our Mutual Friend, the beloved woman remains a distant and inviolable object. Eugene is a little like Jasper—he pursues Lizzie, but his own ennui, his conscience, and his desire bring him to an impasse. He asks himself whether he should marry Lizzie, but he never asks himself whether he should force himself upon her—Dickens doesn’t allow that thought to rise to consciousness. Jasper’s desire, on the other hand, is aggressive. In the first six parts, there is no countervailing idea of love—Edwin’s love for Rosa is compromised and dissatisfied, Mr. Crisparkle is almost virginal in his outlook, and Neville’s infatuation with Rosa has elements of aggression in it, too.

  It is tempting to link Jasper with some elements of Dickens’s own psyche. He is an accomplished artist leading a double life driven by passion. He is no less a part of Dickens than Quilp or Carker or all the other villains. It is also tempting to see Edwin as another version of one of Dickens’s autobiographical young men, ripe for the painful passage from shallow boyhood to rueful manhood. Dickens and Ellen Ternan seem to have changed their relations in the spring of 1868 from an intimacy to a friendship; perhaps this is reflected in the Edwin/Rosa plot. And then there is Crisparkle, a physical culturist of perfect charity and innocence, also not unlike his creator. It is as if, once again, Dickens is asking himself what a man is, and is looking within to embody contradictory impulses as narrative figures. What is clearly true is that Dickens’s experience of Ellen Ternan and his passion for her continued to the end of his life to feed his imagination. At his death he was still working out what a man was, what a woman was, and what their proper relations might look like.

  Dickens’s
works are often seen to be all of a piece—he did a certain sort of thing, or he employed a certain sort of technique, from the beginning to the end of his career. He was Dickensy. In fact, though, Dickens’s novels, stories, plays, and letters show that his ideas and his worldview were dynamic, not static. There were things he came back to again and again—for example, the figure of the innocent girl or the callow youth, the figure of the boorish philanthropist or the termagant wife, the large ideas of comic integration or tragic isolation—but he came back to them with fresh experiences and fresh ideas. His novels propose different solutions to the dilemma of incompatibility while his analysis of the dilemma gets more and more complex and refined. The solution in Our Mutual Friend is patience, forgiveness, and communication. Unfortunately, the solution in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is forever lost to us. Dickens did not “work out” a static Weltanschauung that he carried with him from childhood. His vigorous engagement with his world gave him a perennially evolving worldview that was dissolved into and transformed by the richness and idiosyncrasy of his writing style.

  By winter 1869, Dickens was unmistakably ailing. At Christmas, he couldn’t come down from his room until the evening, and his left leg and foot, very swollen, were giving him constant pain. His left hand swelled and his left eye began to trouble him, too. Nevertheless, after New Year’s 1870, he became enthusiastic about doing a last series of farewell readings in London. On January 11, he gave the first of the readings. The performances grew increasingly taxing, steadily driving up his blood pressure until by the end his pulse was 124. On March 9, he had an audience with Queen Victoria. They spoke of mundane matters; Dickens, of course, was required to stand throughout, a hardship. On March 15, he gave the last reading. The huge audience cheered his entrance. He read beautifully and effortlessly (or so it appeared), and the audience cheered and applauded until he began to weep. For the man and his audience, Dickens’s readings from his work were, from first to last, an unmitigated success.

  Dickens was as active as he could be to the end. He visited Ellen, he dined out, he read parts of his new novel to friends, he planned improvements at Gad’s Hill, he continued his mystery, he wrote and directed an amateur play, he went to the offices of All the Year Round. The infirm Dickens kept up a round of activities that would have exhausted a healthier, younger man. It left him exhausted, too, which almost everyone he encountered noticed, but the habits of industry and restlessness could not be broken.

  There are two stories of Dickens’s death. The standard one, related by most biographers, has him at Gad’s Hill with Katey, Mamie, and Georgina on the evening of Monday, June 6, after a day’s writing. He and Katey stayed up late discussing her career plans. On Tuesday morning he got up at the usual early hour and wrote. Later that day, he was well enough to take a walk with Georgina. On Wednesday, he got up early and went straight to his writing. Katey and Mamie had returned to London. He worked all day, then complained to Georgina of feeling ill at dinner. Before she could react, he began to talk unintelligibly, and when she got to him, he asked to be laid upon the ground. He became unconscious. His doctors and daughters, and Ellen, were sent for by telegram. He was placed on the sofa, never regained consciousness, and died the next day, June 9.

  The second story, appended to Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ellen Ternan, has Dickens leaving Gad’s Hill on Wednesday about midday and going to Ellen in Peckham, where she still sometimes met him. There he collapsed, speaking his last words to Ellen, not Georgina. She then found a carriage to take him back to Gad’s Hill and went with him. They arrived there that evening; then the two women carried Dickens to the sofa, and Georgina and Ellen agreed on a more seemly story for relatives and friends. There are only a few bits of evidence for this possibility. One is a story in the family of the caretaker of the Peckham house, that he (the caretaker) carried the unconscious Dickens out of the house. The other is that Dickens cashed a check on June 8 for £22 (equivalent currently to some $700) and was found to have £6.6 in his pocket when he died. He had not given the money to Georgina, because she soon had to request money for housekeeping expenses from Dickens’s lawyer. Tomalin suggests that he took the money to Peckham for Ellen Ternan’s household expenses and gave it to her there.

  At any rate, Dickens was dead, and his death was the occasion of astonishment to those around him. Forster said, “The duties of life remain while life remains, but for me the joy of it is gone forever.” Charles Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey on June 14.

  AFTERWORD

  CHARLES DICKENS was a phenomenon by any standard. His stature as a novelist—as the paradigmatic “great novelist,” whose work is both popular and important—has only grown since his death. But in addition, his very public life—as an editor, democratic gadfly, theorist of capitalism and modernity, doer and promoter of the common good, champion of both the overlooked classes and eccentric individuals—makes him unique among novelists as a wholly productive and dedicated citizen. And on top of that, his strange habit of prefiguring twentieth-century life gives him unusual interest for us. The consequences of his celebrity—his public divorce and his secret life and his obligation to live out his inner life under the gaze of the world—are fascinating enough. But even more so is his readiness to do such things as hypnotize his friend Madame de la Rue and “cure” her mental distress, or to bring Sikes and Nancy to the stage, for the shocking entertainment of all. Dickens’s works and his life show the same thing—a vast intuitive grasp of the possibilities of urban capitalist life. His works explore and touch upon almost every facet of modern life (public sanitation, education of the masses, proliferating litigation, social tensions brought about by class fluidity, waste management, high-speed transportation, dislocation of traditional neighborhoods, divorce, the alliance of religion and economic exploitation, governmental incompetence and corruption, the commodification of family and social relationships, even addiction and colonialism). In the same way, his life expresses social mobility, fame, and freedom of action and of thought generally supposed to be more characteristic of our time than of his. His prescience about the nature and workings of established capitalism is like the prescience of Alexis de Tocqueville about the nature of the United States. Other philosophers and novelists and political theorists have come and gone, but Dickens is still with us, reminding us always that the individual and the group are both present simultaneously, never to be dissolved into each other, but never to be separated, either.

  Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Sussex and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel—to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way.

  For Further Reading

  THE INTERESTED READER could well read all Dickens, all the time, for several years. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens runs to twenty volumes and includes all the novels, Christmas books, and stories, as well as Master Humphrey’s Clock, A Child’s History of England, American Notes, Pictures from Italy, and selected journalism. Many publishers offer most or all of Dickens’s novels in a uniform edition. The Clarendon Press has also published the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 11, 1865–1867, was published in February 2000. At $140 and more per volume, these books are not cheap or easily available, an unfortunate publishing choice! Also from Oxford University Press, the 1999 Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, edited by Paul Schlicke, is invaluable and packed with information, pictures, interpretations, charts, and so on. Dickens, the 1990 biography by British novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd, is compendious and highly readable, e
specially good on Dickens’s social context. Ackroyd takes a somewhat more benign view of Dickens than does Fred Kaplan, whose Dickens: A Biography was first published in 1988. Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan (1990) will probably not be superseded, simply because Tomalin seems to have unearthed all the information there is to find about Ellen Ternan. The grandfather of all Dickens biographies, John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (1872–1874), was reissued by J. M. Dent in the mid-1970s but is now out of print. Criticism and interpretation of Dickens’s works is voluminous, and several journals are devoted entirely to Dickens studies, including Dickens Quarterly and The Dickensian. The Dickens scholarly industry seems to be an infinitely branching tree, bolstered by films of novels as well as shows and even novels about Dickens (for example, Peter Ackroyd’s play The Mysterious Mr. Dickens, which ran in London in 2000, and Frederick Busch’s 1978 novel The Mutual Friend). But the newcomer to Dickens can do no better than to begin with a novel—my suggestion is David Copperfield, to be followed by Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, and Our Mutual Friend, in that order, light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens’s most characteristic and accessible work.