BY 1838, the shape of Charles Dickens’s life was firmly set. Its typical features were to remain unchanged thereafter for some eighteen years: celebrity, conviviality, restlessness, hard work, ambivalent domesticity, all forms of literary endeavor from the most private to the most public, and most forms of civic responsibility from private charity to public pronouncements.
Among Dickens’s many friends was the artist and illustrator Daniel Maclise, who painted a portrait of Dickens while he was completing Nicholas Nickleby that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The portrait was considered by Dickens’s friends to be an excellent likeness. It was unveiled at a dinner held to celebrate the completion of Nickleby and was later engraved and included in the bound volumes of the novel as the frontispiece. Here is Charles Dickens at twenty-seven, the most famous writer of his day. He is turned to his left, and light from some source falls full on his face. His countenance is handsome and youthful, with a high forehead, large eyes, a prominent nose, and curving lips. Light also falls on his hands, one of which is splayed across the pages of a manuscript. The fingers are long and graceful. Dickens’s hair is flowing and dark, he is clean-shaven, he is wearing a dark suit and a dark cravat at his neck. He looks pensive and “literary.” He also looks extremely young, younger than his age, his experience, and the self-confident sophistication of his writing style. If, indeed, his friends considered it a proper likeness, then surely one thing they saw in it would have been its air of quietness almost unto sadness.
But even so, Dickens’s more signal quality, the one most often commented upon by his acquaintances and the one he relied upon at all times, was his energy. It was in this period that he took up the habit of long, vigorous daily walks that seem almost unimaginable today for an otherwise very busy man with many obligations. At a pace of twelve to fifteen minutes per mile, he regularly covered twenty and sometimes thirty miles. Returning, as his brother-in-law said, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir. . . .” His energy contended with discouragement, fear, discontent, and illness—he had been frequently ill as a child, and recurrent bouts of a painful kidney ailment, as well as some sort of facial neuralgia, nervous exhaustion, and various infectious diseases, continued to plague him. He veered between overflowing vitality and prostration in a manner that seems to the modern sensibility almost hysterical. Every stimulus produced an enormous reaction, to the point that right around this period in Dickens’s life, it was rumored that he was mad. Certainly, he was frenzied, and certainly, in the grips of inspiration, he had only tenuous control over his facial expressions and his tongue. His daughter Kate as an adult recalled watching Dickens at work; the characters and their voices seemed to possess him—he spoke their lines and acted out their parts as he wrote them down, often looking into a mirror.
In the first five years of their marriage, Charles and Catherine produced four children and officially moved their household three times, but additionally, each summer they moved to various rented houses at Broadstairs, or Petersham, in Kent, and back to London in the autumn. They traveled abroad as well, to France, Belgium, and the Isle of Wight. That this restlessness was stressful to the marriage cannot be doubted—Dickens’s letters increasingly betray dissatisfaction with Catherine’s “slowness” and her invariable postpartum depressions. It seems not to have occurred to him that curbing his own appetites and relieving her from an endless cycle of pregnancy and parturition was a possibility. Rather he looked to her, or to her doctors, to strengthen her and fortify her capacity to live up to the image he had of what his wife should be and do. His sense of grief and loss over the death of Catherine’s sister Mary remained powerful and overt, and possibly distressing, to Catherine, but he showed no awareness, once again, that his behavior needed modifying. There is also no doubt that Dickens had strict and rigorous views about how the household was to be run. He expected absolute order and meticulous cleanliness, quiet when he was working, and boisterous fun, with many visitors, when he was ready for it. He was, in short, something of a domestic tyrant, whose sensitivity to the needs of his wife (toward whom he still seems to have felt considerable affection at this point) and children (in whose lives he always interfered) was minimal.
Nor was his professional life peaceful. Dickens’s entire career was marked by deals made in great jubilation and rather soon broken off in anger and enmity. There were, of course, always circumstances and issues. In the case of Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens was editing and where Oliver Twist had appeared, Dickens was annoyed when Richard Bentley, the magazine’s owner and publisher, inserted some pieces in the September 1837 number on his own. More important was Dickens’s feeling that he had not been paid enough for Oliver Twist, a feeling that intensified and, ultimately, led to a serious dispute after Oliver Twist became enormously popular; yet Bentley failed to offer more lucrative terms for Barnaby Rudge, the second novel in the contract Dickens had with him. Dickens’s sense of his own popularity and earning potential was now considerably changed from 1836, when he first went to work for Bentley. He was no longer “primus inter pares” among a group of authors. He was a star, the star. The legality or morality of contractual agreements had to give way, and give way it did. Dickens had already found more congenial publishers in the firm of Chapman and Hall, who had published The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby and were careful (under the urging of John Forster, who served as Dickens’s business agent) to be liberal both in their remuneration and in the flexibility of their contract terms. Dickens was beginning to feel, with justification, that anything he might choose to do would be popular and lucrative, and he was impatient for the freedom to do it.
The fact was, though, that Dickens’s work, career, and domestic life were bound together in a tight knot not easily unraveled by anything as clear as contractual obligations. When the subject was money, there could be no uncomplicated thoughts or feelings for Charles Dickens. Money—what could be earned, how it would be spent, what it meant, its effects on a man’s or woman’s character and fate, whether and how it would be given away—was a subject that obsessed Dickens for his entire life and, it may be said, finally killed him. The deals he made and broke over the years were only the most straightforward symptom of the whole tangle.
If we see Dickens as the first true celebrity of the popular arts—that is, a man whose work made him rich and widely famous, as close to a household name as any movie star is today—then we also can see him as the first person to become a “name brand.” For many years, his name on the first installment of a serialization sold copies in and of itself. By the third or fourth installment, sales would have either climbed or dropped off (in which case Dickens would modify his plan to bolster them), but he counted on his name to bring in a certain number of readers, and he felt a strong obligation toward them. He always felt his job was to please and entertain readers, not to shock and confront them, and certainly not to offend them. Unlike writers such as Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens’s contemporaries and friends, he had no resources of family money or land to fall back upon; and unlike, say, Charlotte Brontë, he had no desire to live a modest or retiring life. He put his faith in hard work, and in hard work that would always be tremendously successful. His financial obligations left little leeway for the natural ebb and flow of audience loyalty or the vagaries of artistic experimentation. His convivial temperament expressed itself in a natural love of display—he was a snappy dresser (a little flamboyant, according to most of his contemporaries), and few of the joys and pleasures of life that he cherished were ascetic ones. He was generous and hospitable, for the most part, though he had a streak of frugality that some of his family might have considered to be miserly. The fact was, he had an ever growing set of dependents, not only his wife and children and household servants, but also his parents and, from time to time, his brothers. He tried to live out the earthly paradise that his books so frequently depicted—fecundity and domestic peace, liberality and comfort, freedom and safety. Such things were not only images that appeared in his writings, but also principles and personal aspirations. What is important to remember about them, however, was that they had their entire source in his own sense of himself. As much as any public figure of his time, Charles Dickens was more than a self-made man, he was a self-made phenomenon—he generated out of his own being all the energy and imagination to both envision his goal and get himself to it. His particular visionary literary style not only found favor with Victorian audiences, it defined for them the world that they inhabited, not only as it was but as it could be.
At the same time, there is never as much money to be made in art, no matter how popular, as there is in manufacture or speculation. The machinery of composition never powers itself, but instead draws more and more deeply upon the inventiveness and the astuteness of the artist. An artist who relies, as Dickens did, upon always outdoing himself in order to pay for obligations already contracted and habits already formed inevitably feels pressed for money and is always underestimating the creative cost of adding one more endeavor.
In his late twenties, though, the readiness of Dickens’s response to the creative demands of the moment was astounding. His first notion of the publication he was going to produce for Chapman and Hall was a weekly periodical to be called Master Humphrey’s Clock. The conceit would be of a small group of retiring men, friends of “Master Humphrey,” who would find in his old grandfather clock “sketches, essays, tales, adventures, letters from imaginary correspondents, and so forth.” The model was to be eighteenth-century journals such as The Spectator. Dickens began to serialize The Old Curiosity Shop in the first week of April 1840. The first issue sold well, but not the next few, and it was clear that the original concept left something to be desired. Dickens’s response was to expand upon what had been a freestanding sketch concerning Nell, Kit Nubbles, and the grandfather’s shop, told by Master Humphrey. In a few weeks, all of Master Humphrey and his friends had dropped away, and the weekly journal consisted entirely of the serialization of Nell’s story. Commercially, Dickens’s story performed exactly as he hoped—it was an enormous success. It was published in weekly installments, which were gathered and republished in monthly installments, and at the end it was published in volume form. It sold over a hundred thousand copies per week, better than any previous Dickens novel, in some sense anticipating that phenomenon of the late twentieth century, the popular weekly television series. That American dockworkers met the ship carrying the installment wherein Nell died with shouts of “Is Nell still alive?” may be only a legend, but even so, the novel was hugely successful on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although he had miscalculated the costs of the handsome weekly numbers, thereby reducing his profits to some degree, Dickens himself was very pleased with the novel and wrote in March 1841 (around the time of completion) that he expected to always like it best. Certainly he was deeply involved with Nell and deeply affected by her death.
The Old Curiosity Shop was in Dickens’s Oliver Twist mode rather than his Nicholas Nickleby mode. As in Oliver Twist, his protagonist is an innocent child lost in one of the crueler byways of adult commerce, beset by human predators whose features are both mechanical and demonic. Those whose job it is to protect her are powerless to do so. The villain of the novel, the dwarf moneylender Daniel Quilp, gains control of Nell and her grandfather through the grandfather’s attempts to win sustenance for Nell by gambling. In a related plot, Dick Swiveller, a young law clerk who is covetous of Nell, is redeemed through coming to understand the true nature of his employers, Sampson Brass and his sister Sally, and through the love of their oppressed maidservant. Kit finds marital redemption, but Nell dies, pure and uncorrupted.
The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens’s most interesting novel in terms of the extremes of reaction it elicits in readers. Legendarily popular and lucrative in its day, it is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians. Oscar Wilde remarked, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Nell without laughing,” and others have been at least as critical. The kindest thing most modern readers think of it is that it vividly shows the differences between the sensibility of the mid-nineteenth century and our own. Critics and social historians point out that the progress of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic was marked by the steadily increasing suppression of public displays of emotion among men, as the image of proper manhood was modified by the influences of colonialism, industrialism, militarism, and financial speculation. After the marriage of Victoria and Albert, in 1840, gender roles became more sharply divided, with women exaggerating the putative qualities of femininity (privacy, tender feeling, fragility) and men the putative qualities of masculinity (public action, stoicism, strength). The theory goes that the effect of The Old Curiosity Shop, which relies upon the reader’s readiness to feel the extreme pathos of the sufferings and innocence of Little Nell, would be blunted for the post-Victorian reader, who filters his or her sense of pathos through more layers of irony than Dickens’s contemporaries did.
The Old Curiosity Shop defines an outer boundary of one of Dickens’s modes of imagining his world, and it is a world peopled by unrealistic, fairy-tale figures of ogres and princesses and fools. Dickens often told his friends that he had loved fairy tales as a child and that he still approved of them as an adult for their antidote to the dead, commercial, mechanical life that seemed to be taking over all around him. Among the many risks Dickens takes in The Old Curiosity Shop is setting the stark fairy-tale world of Nell and her grandfather right next to the somewhat more comic and realistic world of Dick Swiveller. Nell’s life-and-death journey continually breaks into and overwhelms the much less desperate psychological journey that Dick takes, but they are meant to coexist and to comment on each other, mimicking the ways in which different lives have different tonal and mythic qualities. That Dickens can’t quite balance them at this point in his career is not especially surprising. In part we see the temptation and the pressure of improvisation—Dickens was writing in short weekly parts, and he was acutely aware of what the selling points of the serial were. The novel surely felt like a high-wire act that was succeeding magnificently, encouraging him to write from instinct even more than he had in the past. Nell’s fate also certainly drew upon his still fresh sense of grief at the death of Mary Hogarth.
Dickens’s own sense of pleasure and accomplishment at the completion of the novel indicates that its extremes felt right to him and that its sales proved to him that they were right in fact. The tone of the novel is almost a denial of the tone of Nickleby, with its broad and cheery qualities. Certain Nickleby figures return, especially the figure of the moneylender, but now the recognizably human Ralph Nickleby (who even has a few softer notions and second thoughts) has become Daniel Quilp, deformed and inhuman, a monster with a sense of wit and huge energy. Nell herself is similar to the young women in Nickleby, in that she must go into the world unprotected, but now her very purity forbids contact with it—there is no young man, like Nicholas, pure enough to protect her, and death is the only option.
Without engaging in excessive Freudian second-guessing of the author, it is interesting to accept the invitation offered by the quickness and ease of the novel’s gestation, and ask what light it sheds upon Dickens’s sense of himself and of his life’s possibilities at this point, a time when to all appearances he was hugely successful. Clearly, he saw innocence itself as something possessed in its purest form by certain presexual women. The ideal of domesticity that he had written about and attempted to live now came second, morally, and was good enough for the redeemed (Dick and Kit), but not for those who had never fallen (Nell). Nell’s particular brand of innocence had specific qualities—endurance, forgiveness, martyrdom—that were to be seen in contrast with the dark, manic forces all around it. Quilp is not the only frenzied character—to a greater or lesser degree, the contrast between all of the other characters and Nell is in their greater expression of liveliness, or life. It is as if Nell must die because the energy of life is in itself tainted and destructive. Every novel is a logical argument—an assertion of the author’s sense of what life is, embodied in characters, plots, and images. Some of these arguments have wide appeal, some don’t; some have an appeal bolstered by intense emotional energy, some appeal essentially to reason and shared experience. The argument of The Old Curiosity Shop strikes many readers as a strange and unbelievable one.
On June 19, 1841, the Dickenses took a trip to Scotland. The high point, and a turning point in Dickens’s sense of his own position in public life, came in Edinburgh on June 25, when the city threw for him a public dinner, a sort of occasion unfamiliar to us, but rather like a cross between the Academy Awards and getting the key to the city. Weekly serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop had given way, in the late winter, to weekly serialization of Barnaby Rudge, which was also quite popular. Walter, child number four and boy number two, had been born in February, the day after Dickens’s twenty-ninth birthday. Dickens was used to fame, adulation, and importance, but somehow this public dinner, with 250 male guests eating and 200 women coming in after dinner to listen to the speeches from galleries above, impressed upon him that he was more than famous and more than a literary man, but something on the order of a national treasure (if it is possible for someone to think of himself as such a thing). He had achieved not simply literary success, but something else, a separate status. His voice and his vision had become beloved; as Ackroyd puts it, he was “public property.” His first reaction was very typical of the public Dickens—when he stood to make his own speech, he was poised, articulate, modest, cool, and, most of all, charming. When he later wrote to Forster about it, the tone of his letter was exultant, pleased, and, at least to some degree, amazed. He seems to have been especially struck by the fact that he was so young and the men who came to celebrate him were old and established.
In his Charles Dickens: A Literary Life, Grahame Smith points out that in the twelve years between the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s last book, Redgauntlet, and the publication of The Pickwick Papers, novel writing in England had been going through something of a lull. Publishing itself changed in those twelve years, as periodicals found their way to a more numerous and socially broader audience, taking their place beside the expensively bound three-volume novel, which cost just over a pound and a half, equivalent to something like $52 today. The Romantic period was long over, and the Victorian era had not begun. Interesting novels were being published in France by Balzac, Stendhal, and others, and in the United States by Washington Irving, but in England only Tennyson’s lyrics, De Quincey’s memoirs, and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus were of any note. When Chapman and Hall began publishing the novels of Charles Dickens, the idea that a company would publish only books and profit from them, rather than printing books and newspapers and selling them along with stationery, was a very new one.
The new thing, in every way, was for an author to support himself or herself through sales of his or her work, and in this Dickens was pioneer and exemplar. The form of serial monthly or weekly publication not only helped him find a wide audience (every issue sold, it has been estimated, found fifteen readers), it also helped him keep that audience interested. The analogy, of course, is to weekly television or soap opera–type serials. Dickens’s exquisite natural responsiveness, combined with his amazing inventiveness, meant that a form other authors found onerous was perfectly suited to him.
Another thing that made Dickens a national treasure, though, had nothing to do with publishing and everything to do with Dickens’s class origins or, rather, the fluidity of his class origins. Carried upward and downward by the vagaries of his father’s career and poor money management, and then by his own hard work and genius, Dickens found himself in a unique position to observe all facets of English society. He was unconstrained by a classical education, untrained, as it were, to look at English society in the traditional way. His first thirty years were, in a fashion that contrasted with that of almost everyone around him, a training in freedom—in forming his own opinions, in judging for himself, in observing the effects of one group upon another, one class upon another, of institutions upon individuals and individuals upon institutions. He differed from all of his contemporaries in that he represented no group, therefore he came to represent all. His medium, the novel, enhanced his freedom, since the novel can never work except through freedom—the author is free to write, and the reader is free to read. Dickens understood as well as anyone ever that the reader can always close the cover, and his art always responded to the fact that the reader can choose to buy or not to buy the next number. The very oddities of both the man and his work further promoted his freedom, since his mind ranged freely over all sorts of characters, ideas, and settings. And he frequently took pains to speak out against abridgments of freedom, such as the closing of shops on Sunday, the only day when working people were able to buy, and other laws restricting the lives of the poor, as well as narrow and joyless religious and charitable institutions. By temperament, by training, and by intention, Dickens was a modern man, whose essential quality was the desire for freedom of thought and action.
The lull in the production of English novels between 1824 and 1836 marks the birth of modernity. Austen and Scott, whose novels are set in the countryside, give way to Dickens, a man of the city. The tissue of relationships and obligations that mark traditional society give way to the casual meetings and commercial connections that mark modern society. For me, the moment where literature enters the modern world is very particular. In Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose,” published in St. Petersburg Stories in 1835, the protagonist searches all over St. Petersburg for his vagrant nose. He pauses in his search to look at an advertisement in a shop window for ladies’ stockings. He is struck by the picture of the woman’s leg slipping into the stocking. He moves on, but he has just had a thoroughly modern moment—sex and graphics have combined to turn him into a potential customer. The other features of modernity—rapid transportation, industrial production, financial speculation, the wholesale dissemination of information, the rise of the middle class, the elevation of materialism, general education—all of these are still to come, but advertising is the singing canary, alerting us to what is in store. The power of advertising and its capacity to connect him to and enlarge his audience was something Dickens comprehended at once and completely. He was at home in his milieu.
Dickens in Edinburgh in the middle of his thirtieth year is an original without a progenitor. Most other great innovators owe something to someone—even Shakespeare was preceded by Christopher Marlowe, and he did not create the theaters in which his plays were performed or the companies that performed them. Dickens, however, spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness. That he did so in English at the very moment when England was establishing herself as a worldwide force is the root source of his importance. That he combined his artistic vision with social action in an outpouring of energy and hard work is the root source of his uniqueness.
Charles and Catherine returned to London from Scotland in mid-July, then went to Broadstairs in Kent for the rest of the summer. Dickens had begun to think of traveling to the United States, no doubt encouraged by a letter from Washington Irving, who promised, in the wake of the success of The Old Curiosity Shop, that a Dickens tour of America would be an unprecedented triumph—and certainly for Dickens this meant not only fame, but money. In addition, the themes of Barnaby Rudge, which takes place during the American Revolutionary era, had inflamed his desire to see the land of newness for himself. Notes and memoirs by European travelers to America abounded in the 1830s and 1840s—it was practically a cottage industry, and surely Dickens knew that he had something original to contribute. He broached the topic to his friend Forster in mid-September and had already made up his mind a week later. Unfortunately, Catherine, mother of four, including a seven-month-old baby, did not want to go. Ackroyd notes that she wept every time he mentioned his plans, but as usual, he was not to be denied, and within weeks plans for the journey, to be made by steamship (and the first steamship had crossed the Atlantic only four years before), were in full swing. Of course, it was to be a lengthy journey, almost six months, and the children were to be left behind in the care of Dickens’s brother Fred. Dickens was undaunted, as well, by an operation he elected to undergo in the autumn—the repair of a fistula in his rectal wall, without anesthetic, so painful in the retelling, according to his friend Macready, that Macready could hardly force himself to sit still to listen to Dickens’s recounting it. Nevertheless, Dickens completed the last installments of Barnaby Rudge while recuperating.
On January 2, Charles and Catherine boarded the Britannia and set sail for America. The journey was not quite as it had been advertised—the couple’s stateroom was so tiny that he likened stowing their trunks to forcing a giraffe into a flowerpot. But he took his usual lively interest in everything there was to see, writing later in American Notes that “one party of men were ‘taking in the milk,’ or, in other words, getting the cow on board; and another were filling the ice-houses to the very throat with fresh provisions; with butcher’s meat and garden stuff, pale sucking pigs, calves’ heads in scores, beef, veal, and pork, and poultry out of all proportion. . . .” The captain later arrived in a small boat, and he was just what Dickens hoped for, “a well-made, tight-built, dapper little fellow; with a ruddy face, which is a letter of invitation to shake him by both hands at once, and a clear blue, honest eye that it does one good to see one’s sparkling image in.” What boded well did not go well—the eighteen-day journey was an arduous labor of heavy seas, dazed seasickness, cold, and fear. Even so, even though both Charles and Catherine were nearly overcome by anxiety, Dickens, as always, was able to enjoy certain things and to evoke them for his readers—after days at sea, he writes, “the captain (who never goes to bed and is never out of humor) turns up his coat collar for the deck again; shakes hands all around; and goes laughing out into the weather as merrily as to a birthday party.”
Dickens was thrilled to get to America, and not only to terra firma. His popularity there, combined with his critique of English society, had convinced him that he and the citizens of the United States would feel an instant and abiding sense of kinship and would recognize themselves in each other. There was also an assumption on both sides that too much celebrity was not possible—the Americans had prepared to make the most of Dickens’s visit, with balls and parties and receptions and every sort of opportunity to view the author. Dickens, used to fame of a familiar sort, public events interspersed with private time to work and spend with his family, was unprepared for what was expected of him (though it looks perfectly familiar to us). In Boston, Hartford, New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia, there were just too many occasions, too many expectations, and Dickens’s mood soured. We can recognize it as a nightmare book tour, the author and his wife unprotected by publicists or any sort of previous experience. All the features of modern American celebrity leap forth, full grown—the public’s sense that they have the right to gaze upon the Dickenses at will, the gossip in the press about their every characteristic, the sense the Dickenses have of being objectified and hounded and intruded upon, the resentment of the public at any sort of behavior on the part of the author other than gratitude and good cheer, and, above all, the assumption that all fame, all the time, must be a good thing.
Dickens quickly offended his hosts. He had not reckoned with the New England conservatism and provincial snobbishness of those he met in Boston, who were eager to see his mode of dressing and speaking as evidence of ungentlemanly origins. He was short, he had big ears, he talked quickly—he was not the titan Americans expected. In addition, he mentioned several times his indignation that American newspapers and periodicals were in the habit of reprinting his works without paying for them, that this was, in fact, standard publishing procedure. Over this issue, he did something that every media-savvy man or woman knows, after fifty years of television, is exactly the wrong thing to do—he lost his temper. The response in the press was immediate and, to us, predictable. He was attacked, denigrated, ridiculed. Everyone, including Dickens, realized at once and completely that Dickens was an Englishman, with characteristic English ways of doing and perceiving things, and more important, that he was a man and not an ideal figure, not the amazing, soothing, genial, and visionary voice of the narrators of his books, coming into the home with every new number of each novel, taking his place at the fireside and in the reader’s consciousness, but a specific male human being, not always lovable or wise or admirable. Thus the perennial disappointment of celebrity was played out at once, with the first great media celebrity. His works had made promises of a personal nature that the man himself was bound to renege upon, no matter how much energy and goodwill he possessed.
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.
But Dickens’s larger ambition for Martin Chuzzlewit is evident, too, in its failures. In his eagerness to press his point, he belabors it, and the first chapters of the novel are tedious and wordy. This tendency to expand upon each idea until it is driven into the ground is a feature of Martin Chuzzlewit more than of earlier or later novels, evidence that Dickens doesn’t trust his readers to understand the larger theme of which he is enamored, and it gives the novel a tiresome quality. Critics who are impatient with Dickens’s abundance and see it simply as surfeit have ammunition in Martin Chuzzlewit.
In fact, Dickens is attempting a bildungsroman unlike anything he has done before—his theme is the moral education of young Martin, whose origins in the selfish bosom of the Chuzzlewit family compromise his innocence in a way that Oliver’s, Nicholas’s, and Nell’s have not been. The question of the narrative is whether or not Martin will go the same way as Jonas, his cousin, who is so much cast in the family mold that “he had gradually come to look, with impatience, on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate, which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly called a coffin, and banked in the grave.” Martin’s tale has no inherent structure, unlike Nicholas’s tale, which takes its structure from the popular melodrama, or Oliver’s tale, which takes its structure from orphan narratives. Nor is Martin himself of particular interest as a character; he is overshadowed by the changelessly grotesque comic figures like Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, in whose variations upon the theme of selfishness and solipsism the author finds more of interest.
In volume form, Martin Chuzzlewit, which was dedicated to Angela Burdett-Coutts, did sell well enough. Dickens himself was enthusiastic about it, no doubt for the same reason that he was enthusiastic about The Old Curiosity Shop—it satisfactorily expressed his state of mind while he was writing it. He was, in fact, coming up with a unified social vision, something that marks the maturation of every serious novelist, since the novel is first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don’t fit, into their social worlds. That this novelist, just thirty, hadn’t quite refined his ideas, that he belabored some of them, that some of them were unsophisticated and harsh, should come as no surprise. Equally, that he fell back upon his natural gifts of language, invention, and character drawing to get himself through, while failing at story construction, something he always had to work hard at, comes as no surprise, either. That his social, as opposed to what might be called his “interpersonal,” vision would be dark surely had its source in the inequities, suffering, and indifference he saw around him. While by Dickens’s time the novel had not yet become the dominant European literary form, it had been around long enough to explore one broad theme—the discovery of the World—and to begin upon the second: the exploration of domestic life. Dickens’s own favorite novels, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (Dickens named his eighth child and sixth son Henry Fielding Dickens), Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which Dickens loved as a child, all followed their heroes on adventures of discovery. What the heroes discovered was not as important, historically, as the conviction that there was something to discover, that whatever it was would be interesting, illuminating, or enriching in some way. This mimics the European adventure of discovering and colonizing the New World. The adventure winds up bitterly, in the hands of Voltaire, when Candide returns, resolved henceforth to cultivate his own garden. The assumption of adventure literature is that domestic life is by nature already known, worth hardly a backward glance. In addition, the domesticated Cunegonde, originally Candide’s romantic inspiration, ends up as a drudge and a disappointment, hardly worth depicting.
By Dickens’s time, in many ways as a result of Sir Walter Scott’s interest not only in the hero and his adventure, but also in the social and domestic circumstances of the hero’s world, domestic life becomes as interesting as the adventure; in Dickens’s work, domestic life becomes the goal of the journey, the prospective haven from the alienation and cruelty of homelessness. Dickens’s heroes and heroines take many journeys, but only the travels of the Pickwick Club are embarked upon willingly. Most often, the protagonist is ejected from his original home and forced out upon a quest to make another. Dickens’s social vision is formed by the recognition that in the world around him there are few bonds of social responsibility or generous humanity linking class to class or individual to individual, and that the government speaks and acts only for a small portion of the citizens, whereas the majority have no voice, no power, and no privileges. By contrast, small social groups, such as families, groups of friends, theater companies, and gangs of thieves, can mediate between the isolated individual and the vast social machine. But their mediation and companionableness can go either way, morally and spiritually, depending upon whether the members are motivated by love and kindness or by greed and selfishness. In all of Dickens’s early novels, at least one group represented the possibility of sociable safety and contentment—the Pickwickians, Mr. Brownlow’s household, Nicholas’s family and friends. In Martin Chuzzlewit, the selfish, greedy groups are dominant; Martin must find his way against a strong tide.
Much of what Dickens was trying to get at in Martin Chuzzlewit was distilled in nearly perfect, supremely popular, and highly theatrical fashion in A Christmas Carol, which Dickens conceived of suddenly a few weeks after visiting the Field Lane School for Miss Coutts. He worked on it during October and November 1843, while the tenth and eleventh numbers of the longer novel were appearing; and in spite of his vow of the summer, A Christmas Carol was published by Chapman and Hall. He delivered the manuscript in early December, to be published for the Christmas trade. In an effort to avoid the sorts of contractual problems he had encountered with the low sales of his longer novel, he agreed with the publishers to publish on a commission basis—that is, he would design, edit, and produce the book (rather like book packaging today). Unfortunately, his desire to produce a beautiful artifact as well as a popular story meant that production costs were very high, and he realized, once again, only a small profit on what turned out to be a very large sale.
A Christmas Carol, like Martin Chuzzlewit, concerns itself with the social ramifications of selfishness, but the characters of young Martin and old Martin are combined in that of Ebenezer Scrooge, and his moral journey, which takes place in three acts in one night, has the force of revelation rather than the tedium of a lengthy trek by ox-drawn wagon. Some of the narrative had its origins in one of Dickens’s own vivid dreams, and surely the idea of using dreams as a structural device had its origins there as well. The thirty-one-year-old Dickens was evidently in a state of considerable psychological turmoil. He was beset by money worries and family obligations at the same time that Catherine was pregnant with a fifth child. He had found his experience at the Field Lane School disturbing, and he must have recognized the vast insolubility of the larger task no matter what he and Miss Coutts were able to do with her funds. He was halfway through a serialization that no one considered a success, and he was in conflict with his father and mother as well as with his publishers. Just as every literary character is the author in some guise, just as Ralph Nickleby and Daniel Quilp were “Dickensian,” so Ebenezer Scrooge was Charles Dickens, a man for whom money itself offered the prospect of safety, a man for whom isolation from the obligations of human relationship might be a form of peace.
The story is familiar from countless renditions, takeoffs, and parodies. In fact, pirates began to appropriate Dickens’s characters and ideas immediately upon publication. But what makes A Christmas Carol work—what makes it so appealing a novella that William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s most self-conscious literary rival, called it “a national benefit”—is the lightness of Dickens’s touch. Instead of hammering his moral points home, as he does in Martin Chuzzlewit, he is content (or more content) to let his images speak for themselves. For example, when Scrooge returns home after business, he sees Jacob Marley’s face in his door knocker: “Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” Subsequently, ascending his staircase, Scrooge sees a hearse in front of him, but he seeks no more light than that of his candle—“Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that: darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it.” After a further series of mysterious noises, which Scrooge declines to believe in, Marley himself appears, and Dickens’s description of him is economical but perfectly apt: “Marley in his pig-tail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pig-tail, and his coatskirts, and the hair on his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent: so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.” Not only are these details both picturesque and thematically evocative, they are conveyed without any overbearing tone of self-display. Melodrama (which Dickens loved) always carries a lack of conviction, because the gestures of the characters and the tone of the author overstate rather than understate the emotions that are being conveyed. Here, Dickens’s descriptions underscore Scrooge’s resistance to the implications of the scene, enhancing our sense of Scrooge’s coldness, but also his bravery. Additionally, it enables the reader to see what is happening more clearly than if Scrooge’s feelings cluttered the picture. Every line performs more than one literary function, something that is a hallmark of Dickens’s best writing. When he is trying too hard, every line performs less than one function, simply because he elaborates until he is sure the reader gets it. Immediately in the next paragraph, Dickens goes for a laugh—“Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.” Scrooge’s state of mind is believably mixed. He is observant, alert, frightened but incredulous, stubborn, ironic, and, most of all, interested. The scene is a masterpiece of narrative depiction, conveying simultaneously what is being seen, who is seeing it, and the narrator’s attitude toward it, as only narrative can do.
Dickens took easily to the form of the novella, understanding intuitively that in focus and scope it is similar to a play but offers a novelist the opportunity to explore a single idea in depth and, in a way, at leisure. He seems to have had no trouble controlling his natural expansiveness, which the serial form of publication both tested and encouraged. The musical model for the composition (not only are songs evoked in the title of the work, but each part is called a “stave”) gave him a sure sense of rhythm and symmetry. The style is free, but the freedom stays within the tight confines of the plot—the first bit, Scrooge in company, disdaining others, balances the last bit, Scrooge in company, welcoming others, while the three dreams, of course, fall into the utterly natural symmetry of past, present, and future—what Scrooge has forgotten, what he is missing, and what might happen if he persists in his misanthropic ways. The philosophy and psychology of A Christmas Carol are so familiar to us now that we forget that in Dickens’s own day, his views competed with much less sophisticated notions of the origins and effects of states of mind. Indeed, this idea—that shifts in objective conditions, such as wealth, social relationships, and class disparities, begin within the individual and are then manifested outwardly in material changes—runs counter to notions of materialism and determinism that were beginning to take hold among such political thinkers as Bentham, Marx, and Engels, who were at work in the same period. Karl Marx, in fact, seems to have been quite a fan of Dickens. But Dickens’s Christmas stories (A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Haunted Man in particular) are increasingly specific and pointed about where necessary social change must come from. It is not enough to seize power or to change where in society power lies. With power must come an inner sense of connection to others that, in Dickens’s life and work, comes from the model of Jesus Christ as benevolent Savior. The truth of A Christmas Carolthat Dickens understood perfectly and bodied forth successfully is that life is transformed by an inner shift that is then acted upon, not by a change in circumstances.
The conditions that so appalled Dickens constituted the major political and philosophical challenge of his era. The novel, like any other artistic form, makes an inherent philosophical assertion—that the mental life of the individual is worth anatomizing and that the disruptions that exist among individuals and between individuals and groups are understandable and soluble through individual transformation and action. Dickens expanded and expanded his canvas because he intuited that the complexities of the social dilemmas he was interested in could not be convincingly portrayed in miniature. Other thinkers, not novelists, had other ideas about the significance of individuals and individualism, but Dickens’s chosen form saddled him with a philosophical question he tried ardently to solve, both artistically and personally, for his entire life. The controversies that arise about Dickens’s real political views, in my opinion, arise primarily from the fact that a novelist always, and increasingly, sees the trees rather than the forest, and is naturally unsympathetic to a collective solution, while always more or less in favor of a connective solution.
When the first six thousand copies of A Christmas Carol showed a very small profit, owing to the expenses of production, Dickens panicked. He wrote Forster, “Such a night as I have passed! I really believed that I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever” (meaning a serious, delirious illness), and added, “I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.” He became convinced that he needed to remove his household of wife, sister-in-law, and five children to continental Europe, where they could live more frugally and where Dickens could write more travel pieces. Ackroyd points out that Dickens was afraid of overexposure. He did not want to wear out his welcome with his audience and possibly thought that it was overexposure that accounted for the continuing poor sales of Martin Chuzzlewit.
Catherine’s pregnancy with Francis, the fifth child of the family in seven years, seems to have marked a turning point in Dickens’s attitude toward his wife. The agitation he betrayed in his money worries and his eagerness to go abroad met with great reluctance and depression on her part. He seems to have held against her both the inconvenience of the pregnancy and her inability to rally quickly after the birth. The stresses of their life together accentuated their temperamental differences. Where perhaps he had valued her placidity in the past, now he grew impatient with it and was willing to air his impatience to friends. Georgina Hogarth, too, was a continued contrast to Catherine—quicker, younger, perhaps able to share Dickens’s mental life more readily than her sister. The balance among the three was shifting, and Dickens seems at this point to have begun to have brief infatuations with young women. The first of these was an eighteen-year-old girl he met while giving a speech in Liverpool, Christiana Weller, in whose album he wrote, “I love her dear name which has won me some fame / But Great Heaven how gladly I’d change it.” Some weeks later, a friend of his, T. J. Thompson, informed Dickens that he wished to marry Christiana, and Dickens asked him to save the dress Dickens had first seen her in, just as he had saved one of Mary Hogarth’s dresses after she died.
When the family departed for the Continent at the end of June 1844, it is safe to say that every aspect of Dickens’s life was in turmoil, including, again, his relationship with his publishers. With the end of Martin Chuzzlewit, he left Chapman and Hall for Bradbury and Evans, still smarting over the idea that fifteen months before, it had been suggested that he repay part of his Chuzzlewit advance. Finance, family life, relations with his parents, the direction of his work, his emotional attachments, and, of course, his domiciliary arrangements, all were in flux. He was determined that these worries were to be resolved in Genoa, where the family settled in a large house in the suburbs overlooking the sea.