IN THE TWO YEARS between the end of Martin Chuzzlewit and the beginning of Dombey and Son, Dickens tried several things that failed to come to fruition, each in a different way, and that were expressive of his unsettled mind and his anxiety about how he was to live with his well-populated family. The first of these, of course, was the move to Genoa, first to the Villa Bagnerello and then, at the approach of winter, to the Palazzo Peschiere, which was easier to heat. Over the course of his Italian sojourn, he wrote Pictures from Italy (to be published in 1846), and in October, eager to repeat the success of A Christmas Carol, he began to write The Chimes, which has a more explicit satirical purpose than the earlier work but is similar in theme. Trotty Veck—an impoverished ticket porter who carries messages and does small jobs—is accosted by a magistrate, a Benthamite, and another idle gentleman, who discuss his meal and his life in utilitarian terms. Afterward, he has a dream or a vision of his future: himself dead, his daughter worked to death, and her fiancé a drunkard. Once again, Dickens expresses his opinion that mental images create worldly conditions. To embrace the utilitarian view, or the puritanical view, or the Tory view, that poor people have no reason to live, or are inherently prone to evil, or are a burden on the rich, is to create a more than self-fulfilling prophecy—not only do the individuals themselves live joyless, wasted lives, they are sundered from one another by suspicion and solipsism. Only connection, forgiveness, and hope can prevent such an outcome. The Chimes has not been nearly as popular as A Christmas Carol, and it was very controversial in its day, but it sold well and made Dickens a quick £1,000. As usual, it was faithful to his state of mind at the time he wrote it, so he was extremely pleased with it and went back to London for the publication, traveling alone by laborious stages.
Upon his return to Genoa, Dickens took up mesmerism. An Englishwoman, Madame de la Rue, had several long-standing complaints that Freud might have called hysterical and we might call schizophrenic. Dickens successfully hypnotized her over and over; during these sessions, he elicited background material and gave her instructions. The progress of her condition was in some ways alarming, but Dickens’s confidence in his “treatment” never flagged, and he persisted, ultimately affording her considerable lasting relief from the conviction that she was being visited at night by a phantom. For Dickens, of course, this “relationship” had irresistible fascination. For one thing, he became intimate to an unusual degree with just the sort of mental pathology and extreme idiosyncrasy that he always found interesting, and for another, his “treatment” was working, which he admitted gave him a sense of power. For a third, the relationship was with a woman, therefore it could be intimate and platonic at the same time. We can only marvel at how, once again, something that turned up in Dickens’s life, like his American celebrity, uncannily presaged a common feature of our time—the therapeutic relationship. That Dickens should prefigure Freud makes wonderful sense, since Freud loved Dickens and since both Freud and Dickens were essentially highly observant storytellers who gave large meanings to very small details and actions, creating worlds of interlocking meaning out of, in particular, repetition, unconscious actions, and habitual interactions. But Dickens’s pleasure and interest in his “treatment” of Madame de la Rue aroused a protest from Catherine, perhaps her first ever, and even though he was nettled by her reaction, he cooled the relationship. As with acting, perhaps, “therapy” was a great talent Dickens could have developed if circumstances had fallen differently.
While not exactly giving up his desire to live abroad, Dickens returned to England periodically and involved himself in yet another aborted scheme that redounded less well to his reputation, the founding of a daily newspaper. Dickens’s new publishers, Bradbury and Evans, thought it a good time to start a newspaper to rival the Times and the Morning Herald, but with radical sympathies. Much of the money was railroad money, and the railroad was the transforming technological news of the day. Controversy surrounding The Chimes had proved both profitable and enlivening; how better to build upon it than to make the famous Charles Dickens editor of a paper that would institutionalize his liberal views? Dickens was equally enthusiastic and entered with fervor into the planning of the first editions. He hired the staff (including his father, John Dickens, as manager of the parliamentary reporters). There was a setback—one of the money men went bankrupt. Dickens resigned. But the investors reorganized and found more money, and the project went forward again.
In the meantime, Dickens wrote his third Christmas book, A Cricket on the Hearth, which had no social dimension at all but was the tale of a jealous elderly man and his young wife, perhaps, according to Ackroyd, a reworking of Dickens’s own marriage with the genders reversed. There are two important things about A Cricket on the Hearth. One of them is that work on the newspaper affected the time and attention Dickens was able to devote to his narrative. The other is that it was a commercial success, selling twice as many copies as The Chimes. That the Christmas books established ever more clearly Dickens’s direct relationship to his public was of great importance to him, and all the more important as the first issues of the Daily News began to take shape.
January 21, 1846, was the first day of publication, and it was not quite a success—there were typos and mistakes; Dickens was dissatisfied with his staff and his work arrangements. It quickly became clear that the project was not going to work as planned, and on February 9, Dickens resigned. In fact, his resignation was considered appropriate by most parties, since he was not exactly suited to the day-to-day detail work of an ambitious newspaper—there was too much of it, and he was constitutionally incapable of delegating editorial duties, as other experiences with weekly and monthly periodicals showed. Nevertheless, at first the transition seemed like a crisis—Dickens had formed the staff and the paper as much in his own image as possible, and there was some question about whether it could go on without him. But the crisis passed, and John Forster became the editor for about nine months. After that, the paper grew and established itself and continued to publish into the twentieth century. The contradictions in Dickens’s character—his impulsiveness, his energy, his resistance to being the least bit fettered, and his readiness to blame others—all emerged in this battle, and the partners complained both that he was not doing his job well and that he didn’t want to do it any longer. Clearly, however, editing a daily newspaper, while it appealed to the commercial, social, and political sides of Dickens’s character, did not appeal to his deeper need to make art.
Dickens decided to relocate to the Continent again, and this time he chose Lausanne, Switzerland. He and Catherine now had still another son, Alfred, born at the end of October 1845, the sixth child and fourth son. Dickens was thirty-four. In ten years, he had written six full-length novels and three novellas, not to mention any number of occasional pieces. He had fathered six children. He was still working with Angela Burdett-Coutts on charitable projects, most notably the home for reformed prostitutes, Urania Cottage. He was directing, producing, and performing in ambitious amateur plays (in 1845, Dickens and some friends did a production of Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour). His energy, sociability, and liveliness still struck everyone, including, now, his children, who recalled later how much fun he had been in their early childhoods, playing with them, chatting with them, charming them, attending to them with particular affectionate concentration that caused them to adore him in return.
Lausanne was clean, quiet, and pretty. Shortly after arriving there, at the end of June 1846, Dickens went back to his real work and began to write Dombey and Son. As with Martin Chuzzlewit, he had been planning the structure of Dombey and Son carefully and as a whole. He also, from the beginning, intended to introduce some autobiographical material and based the establishment of Paul’s “caretaker,” Mrs. Pipchin, on a woman he had stayed with as a boy. But Dombey is different from earlier novels in that the protagonist, the character to be transformed, is an already mature man who bears some resemblance to Scrooge rather than to the many youthful heroes of earlier works. This choice immediately gives the novel more structural coherence—Dombey is an established man with a household, a mode of life, a set of acquaintances, and a very particular agenda. It is his certainty and pride that form the world of the other characters.
Dombey and Son, like several other nineteenth-century works (Vanity Fair, for example, which was published at the same time, and A Doll’s House, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) concerns the commodification of familial relationships. Dickens is explicit—of Dombey’s estimation of his daughter Florence, he writes in the first chapter, “But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested—a bad boy—nothing more.” When Paul Dombey is born, as proud and pleased as his father is, the man gets no present enjoyment from his child but only anticipates their future business partnership. Impatient to get the necessary processes of childhood, like illnesses and education, out of the way, he hardly notices Paul’s actual circumstances—delicacy and ill health—and is astounded to be informed of them. Nor does he experience the affection of his favorite child, who is cared for by others and who rather shrinks in his father’s presence. He looks upon the love between Paul and Florence with jealous impotence. The sight moves him to envy, and to spite toward Florence, but not to any form of self-doubt or introspection. What is especially interesting about Dombey is that the origins of his pride and remoteness are not at all investigated. His identification as a wealthy merchant serves to explain why as well as what he is. It is this sense of Dombey’s character originating in his business life that differentiates him from Scrooge, for example, and makes Dombey and Son all the more pointed a critique of capitalist relationships.
Dickens was pleased with the first numbers of Dombey and Son but found the going difficult. He attributed this to being away from London. He wrote Forster, “A day in London sets me up and starts me. But the toil and labor of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!!” Nevertheless, theme, story, and, most important, style fell together seamlessly in the new novel. A great novel is, as much as anything else, an exercise of sustained stylistic felicity, and everyone—Dickens, Forster, other friends, the critics, and the public—recognized with the first number that Dickens had uncovered his sharpest, easiest, and most flexible voice. The first paragraphs draw us in effortlessly, wittily, and economically. The scene has a momentary stillness and intimacy, like a movie close-up. The father, sitting beside the fire, is connected to the newborn son, drawn up to the fire in his basket. Both are bald, red, and not quite beautiful; both are subject to the depredations of time. We are asked immediately to regard them not only as characters and agents of the story, but as objects of contemplation. The invitation is graceful, almost homely—the son is likened to a muffin; his just born appearance is “somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet,” but out of the simplest of contrasts between the baby and the man, Dickens draws a beautifully evocative figure: “The countenance of Son was crossed and recrossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.”
Dickens’s tonal and stylistic choices were always remarkable for their richness and variety. He could do low comedy, melodrama, farce, fairy tale, confession, sarcasm, lyricism, romance, extended analogy, dialect imitation. He had an ear for every sort of discourse, both written and oral. He did not always use an elevated literary style, something for which he was criticized in his time. He was not always considered to be in control of his material, but rather he was sometimes accused of being carried away, into sentimentality or tastelessness. Certainly, in Martin Chuzzlewit, extended use of personification and figurative language to little apparent purpose had tried his audience. But the control he shows throughout the nine hundred pages of Dombey and Son is exceptional, especially for a novelist publishing in serial parts. Certain critics have pointed out that the characters of the novel are particularly “Dickensian”—that is, they show vivid, repetitive, almost mechanically unchanging behaviors. Only the most extreme challenges can wrench them out of the habitual modes of expression and behavior. In part because the novel is a kind of tableau vivant, this “Dickensian” effect works better here than in some of the other novels, but because the characters are very distinct, the author has to vary the tone and style of the narrative. The style of Dombey routinely accomplishes all of this. Chapter 29, for example, where Dombey’s sister informs Miss Tox of Dombey’s engagement to Edith, is a hilarious set piece, where the mutually exclusive viewpoints of the two women, the brother-in-law, the spying Major Bagstock, and Major Bagstock’s Eastern servant all clash and contrast, only to be briefly but gracefully resolved in the last paragraph, with the narrator’s own voice: “While poor excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and a toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one, and had ever borne a faithful friendship towards her impeacher, and had been truly absorbed and swallowed up in devotion to the magnificence of Mr. Dombey—while poor excommunicated Miss Tox watered her plants with her tears, and felt that it was winter in Princess’s Place.”
Dickens’s characters in general have often been criticized for not being “realistic” or “rounded,” especially his women characters. Certainly they contrast with those of, say, George Eliot or Henry James. Whether this contrast arises from something lacking in Dickens or something present in Dickens that is not present in the others (comic exaggeration, for example), Dickens’s characters often seem weirdly truer to life than those of more realistic novelists. While some readers consider the oft-repeated calling cards of some characters evidence of one-dimensionality, in fact, it is a standard literary device to give minor comic characters taglines or bits of repeated business so that they can distinguish themselves. Additionally, such calling cards are features of romance as well as the literature of the spiritual journey, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, in which a rather colorless hero meets personifications of tests, challenges, or qualities that he needs to assimilate in order to achieve his goal. Dickens, with his many innocent heroes and heroines from Pickwick to Esther Summerson, clearly writes in these traditions. Furthermore, the novel as a genre is particularly capacious in terms of the confluence of theme and form. That it is written in prose seems to make it more naturally “realistic,” but in fact it may use the devices of any type of narrative. Dickens repeatedly pushed the English novel away from standard realism at the same time that he pushed it away from depicting the English bourgeoisie. He expanded the social/economic scope of the novel while expanding its linguistic resources with no regard for class status or stylistic propriety—he gave his narrator and his array of characters many tongues to speak in, quite a few of which were visionary or poetical, and which themselves undermined the “realism” of the form. Ultimately, he required, or allowed, the reader to regard more of the life around him by allowing it to be important enough to get into a novel. He thereby expanded the audience of the novel itself.
We may add to this by pointing out Dickens’s pivotal position in the shift in English literature from a countryside-based production to an urban-based production. Not only does Dickens’s work look back to Pilgrim’s Progress, it looks forward to Dostoevsky, Freud, and Kafka, three authors who were greatly influenced by Dickens. Many of Dickens’s characters seem diagnosable, at least as harmless neurotics, but sometimes as murderous psychotics or tormented obsessive-compulsives or manic-depressives. How they present themselves has the repetitive clarity of mental dysfunction translated into social dysfunction. In his comic mode, the characters manage to overcome the isolation attendant upon their individual dysfunctions and connect with one another. In his tragic mode, they do not, but instead suffer further isolation and death. The question is not whether Dickens’s characters are “realistic,” like those of Jane Austen, but whether he makes a compelling case for the origins and resolutions of their dilemmas, which are, in many cases, extreme and melodramatic. These are exactly the terms in which most people experience their own dilemmas—life-or-death propositions that are tremendously challenging to resolve. Kafka, for example, often wrote of his conflict with his father as if one or the other of them had to die. Freud depicted the suffering of “the Wolfman” and of “Dora” (named after David Copperfield’s first wife) in vivid terms, even though to the average reader their problems seem almost negligible. Dickens excelled at bodying forth the drama of the inner battle. Sometimes it is truly an inner battle, as in Scrooge or in Edith Dombey. Other times it seems to be a social or political battle, as in Barnaby Rudge or Oliver Twist, but the resolution always takes place within the character first and then in the social nexus. The difference between Dickens and Dostoevsky or Kafka has to do with the persistence of the social and political world. The very thing that Dickens worked against, and grew increasingly frustrated by in his social concerns—that is, the apparent resistance to change of English society—is what gives the world of his novels their reassuring comic stability. Conditions don’t change, but people can; so Dickens, his characters, and his readers are afforded some measure of relief while still protected from the sort of terrifying vertigo that is a feature of later European literature.
Charles Dickens was a secretive man. Acquaintances, friends, relatives, and children always commented upon the fact that he could withdraw as readily as he could extend himself, that while he was so eagerly observing others he was also resisting observation himself. In our own time we see that great celebrity creates secretiveness, because the natural middle ground of private life is so difficult of attainment for those who live in the eye of the media. Certainly, secretiveness as an aspect of celebrity operated intermittently in Dickens’s life—especially during his sojourn in America, where his fans were much more intrusive than his English ones. But the larger part of Dickens’s secretiveness had deeper origins and longer-lasting effects. The fact is that modern readers know more of Dickens’s early life than any of his contemporaries, including his wife and children, precisely because he made it his business to keep his family origins and his childhood to himself. There are several aspects to this. For one, Dickens did not come from a respectable family. His father, John Dickens, was persistently impecunious. Though he had many jobs and did well at them, he was not able to live within his income and had a habit of not only borrowing from his son, but also trying to make money by selling Dickens’s manuscripts and autographs behind his back or approaching Charles’s friends and asking for loans. Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth Barrow Dickens, was the daughter of Charles Barrow, who worked as a clerk at the Navy Pay Office. In 1810, the year John and Elizabeth’s first child, Fanny, was born, Charles Barrow was discovered to have embezzled several thousand pounds and escaped the country before he could be prosecuted. Most of Dickens’s antecedents came from the serving class rather than the professional or propertied classes. The routine and even required American process of leaving one’s origins behind was much more difficult in England, even in the England of Dickens’s time, which was undergoing a vast social shift. Dickens’s friends—Maclise, Macready, Wilkie Collins, and Forster himself—were usually men who, like Dickens, had used talent and energy to make their own way. But as they rose in economic and social status, they encountered more conservative elements of society, men and women who gave them respect for their accomplishments, but a respect always circumscribed by reservations about dress, or education, or behavior, or modes of speaking. Dickens’s colorful manner of dressing, for example, was always judged as a bit déclassé. The sheer weight of his talent and charm gained him passage pretty much wherever he wanted to go in English society, but it did not gain him the invisibility of perfect acceptance. One index of this was the difficulty his daughters had, later on, in making good marriages. For all these reasons, Dickens’s secretiveness and shame at his origins was a realistic response to the closed, judgmental nature of English social life.
But Dickens’s shame was not merely social embarrassment, and in the months after the completion of Dombey and Son he seems to have understood intuitively that his growth as an artist depended upon the excavation of his boyhood and the revelation of some of those experiences. The success of Dombey permitted this in several ways. One was that the novel was a rousing success, both critically and financially, and the terms of Dickens’s contract with Bradbury and Evans meant that he profited handsomely. He became financially secure and remained so thereafter (though he was at times beset by worries, especially late in life). Another was that he had approached one of the critical episodes of his childhood through the depiction of Mrs. Pipchin, and he had enjoyed writing about it. From the evidence of Dombey, he had, as it were, reduced her to her proper size—his adult mind had come to comprehend her and his power over his childish self, and he had experienced one of the special privileges of writing novels—putting powerful early experiences into a context. That Dickens felt a kinship with his former friend Madame de la Rue seems undeniable. That he helped her find a process for contextualizing and releasing herself from ideas and fears that oppressed her seems equally undeniable. Now he was ready to do something similar for himself, and he set about it with his usual energy. No doubt an additional motivation was the death from tuberculosis of his sister Fanny, only thirty-eight years old.
Dickens had finished writing Dombey at the end of March 1848. The final number appeared in April, when the novel was also published in volume form. In April, Dickens and several friends also put on eight performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor as well as another farce, for the charitable benefit of the purchase of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford. Catherine was pregnant again, with the Dickenses’ eighth child, sixth son. (Sydney, son number five, was two.) As Frederick W. Dupee notes, “To his more and more open dismay, she continued to bear him children at brief intervals. . . .” The modern reader must wonder how he expected her to stop bearing these children, but nineteenth-century sources don’t engage substantively with the harder dilemmas of reproductive rights and choices. Ackroyd notes only that while Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins was reputed to have recourse to the seamier side of London life, and while Dickens showed no judgment of, and some interest in, Collins’s activities, there is no evidence that Dickens himself conducted his sexual life with anything but the greatest propriety. He was a firm believer in the Victorian domestic ideal of male-female familial companionship, except that the companion he had chosen was proving less and less satisfactory.
During this time, it is not clear exactly when, Dickens began to write an autobiography. The fragment, amounting to some seven thousand words, was written, according to Forster, without any corrections, evidence of strong feeling and much previous thought. Its subject was a period he had not otherwise talked about, which has since become the most famous of his early life—at twelve, young Charles was removed from school and sent to work at a shoe polish factory, where he stood in a little window, pasting labels onto bottles, where passersby could watch him. Warren’s Blacking Factory was situated by the Thames in London, at Hungerford Stairs, near the Strand (next to Hungerford Market, which was torn down when Charing Cross Station was built upon the site). We now associate the area with tourism and shopping, but before the neighborhood was rebuilt and Trafalgar Square was created, it was ancient, damp. And frightening to young Charles, who later wrote, “My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of [the experience] that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.” Not long after Charles went to work (living at the lodgings of Mrs. Roylance, who was the original of Mrs. Pipchin), John Dickens was taken into custody for nonpayment of debts, and the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, on the south side of the river, across London Bridge.
Every biographer of Dickens has noted the profound impact these events had upon the boy and the man and speculated about the reasons. Certainly the change was fairly sudden and amounted to a class humiliation for the boy. Dickens had been born in Portsmouth, where his father worked in the Navy Pay Office, a respectable and promising appointment. His sister Fanny was about fifteen months older; two years later, his brother Alfred was born but died as an infant, and, two years after that, his sister Letitia. The Dickenses were, in fact, a large family, and by all accounts Charles came legitimately by his sociability, energy, and lively spirits, since the parents enjoyed singing, dancing, celebrating, and performing and encouraged the children’s talents. The family lived briefly in London, and then the Navy Pay Office sent John Dickens to Chatham, a naval town on the Thames estuary, when Charles was five. Three more children were born by the time Charles was ten, making seven in all.
The five years in Chatham constituted Charles Dickens’s happy childhood. He was, by his own account, very attached to his sister Fanny, and Chatham was an interesting place to grow up in—a naval town still resonating from the Napoleonic Wars, where much of the population was attached to the military in some way. It was a rough town, but Dickens always spoke of it more fondly than he spoke of neighboring Rochester, a more respectable cathedral town that Dickens considered oppressive. He was taught to read by his mother and then sent off with his sister to a nearby school when he was about six. He reported over and over as an adult that the great resource and joy of his childhood had been books—eighteenth-century novels, like Peregrine Pickle and Tom Jones, but especially Tales from the Arabian Nights. Adults who knew him in childhood commented upon his devotion to reading, and it seems evident that his parents were eager to supply him with both education and books (his mother taught him some Latin). But John and Elizabeth Dickens’s good intentions were overwhelmed by their improvidence, and the fiscal life of the family got shakier and shakier.
When John was sent to London in the summer of 1822, now the father of seven, he simply could not live on his pay, and even though he enrolled Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music, Charles’s schooling apparently came to an end. He had thought he was going to be educated for some profession, and it appeared that those hopes were to be utterly given up. His sister Fanny was not, by contrast, required to leave her studies. Ackroyd suggests that the humiliation of doing his work in the window of the blacking factory and being observed by passing strangers was especially galling to a child of Dickens’s sensitivity—the nightmare counterpart to performing songs and speeches, which he always enjoyed. He had a horror of the factory and the district, and portrayed them later on as representations of evil and corruption. He was ejected from his family—while they lived rather comfortably together in the debtors’ prison, he was required to make his way through the streets alone, purchasing his own provisions and running the gauntlet of all the street people and eccentrics who might notice him. He was small and unprotected and suddenly required to grow up without sympathetic companionship. And yet, of course, as he well knew then and later pointed out to his readers over and over, there were thousands of children in London suffering under far greater danger and hardship. His servitude lasted five months, after which his father’s debts were relieved by a providential act of Parliament. His mother (no doubt attracted by the idea of a little extra money and one less mouth to feed) was reluctant to end his employment—something that Dickens never forgot or forgave; but he did go back to school for a few more years, before leaving finally at fifteen and embarking on his working life.
Dickens had other memories of childhood, some of them cherished. It was not only the unpleasant ones that compelled him as he began to address his early life in his work. In her last weeks, his sister Fanny had recounted to him an odd experience, which he related to Forster: “In the night, the smell of the fallen leaves in the woods where we had habitually walked as very young children had come upon her with such strength of reality that she had moved her head to look for strewn leaves on the floor at her bedside.” Dickens’s characteristic hypersensitivity to everything, but especially to sensory experiences, surely was a permanent feature of his makeup, and, of course, he had an extraordinary and well-developed memory. The impressions left by his childhood were a treasure; in order to revisit them, he had to rob the darker ones of their power, which he began to do through the autobiographical fragment. The fragment portrays the young Charles as the hapless victim of those around him, which Dickens the experienced author certainly sensed was not quite right, rhetorically, for a work that was to see publication. Confession and self-regard are the trickiest forms of rhetoric, the most likely to arouse ridicule or antagonism in the reader. Dickens the editor could distinguish between a document that had value for the author in organizing memories of experience and a document that had value for the reader in telling an entertaining or enlightening story. The autobiographical fragment didn’t succeed, and Dickens subsequently sent it to Forster, who waited until after Dickens’s death to publish it.
In the autumn, Dickens wrote his last Christmas book, The Haunted Man. The haunted man in question, a chemist named Redlaw, is an isolated scholar beset by memories of the death of his sister and of his betrayal by a trusted friend, who many years before had seduced away Redlaw’s beloved. Like Scrooge, he is visited by a ghost, who offers to remove his faculty of memory and to give him the power to do likewise for everyone he meets. A kind and benevolent man, Redlaw suffers so much with his memories that he accepts this gift. In The Haunted Man, Dickens makes his most explicit argument for the primacy of mental attitude over external circumstances in the achievement of peace, happiness, and even prosperity. Redlaw’s associates and acquaintances live in more problematic circumstances than he does—Mrs. Williams, his housekeeper at the college, has never had children after the death of her firstborn. Her eighty-four-year-old father-in-law has seen his older son lead a life of increasing depravity. One of Redlaw’s students is recovering from a life-threatening illness and is impoverished. Neighbors of this student, the Tetterbys, have little money, little space, and too many children. But until Redlaw comes along, everyone is happy enough. In particular, the portrait of the Tetterbys is one of Dickens’s very best evocations of family life and absolutely sparkles with a sense of lived experience. There is even a touch of homely forgiveness, since Mr. Tetterby is a small man and Mrs. Tetterby is fat (something Dickens seems to have held against Catherine). But every time Redlaw interacts with another character, even incidentally, that character loses his or her memories and is transformed. The effect is illustrated comically with the Tetterbys: “The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny’s hand—the patient, enduring, and devoted Johnny—rose against the baby! Yes. Mrs. Tetterby, going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child.” The other characters are transformed as well, until Redlaw comes to realize the horrifying manner in which he is remaking the world and seeks reversal of his gift. Dickens’s explicit point is that memories of both pleasure and suffering are the source of forgiveness and, indeed, the source of our capacity to live with one another in toleration and happiness. Without memories, only the present inconveniences of life can assert themselves, breaking connections and driving people apart.
Whether or not this philosophical assertion is true, Dickens worked it out in detail in The Haunted Man and then built upon it when he began perhaps his greatest, and certainly his favorite, novel, David Copperfield, in February 1849. It was just around the time of his thirty-seventh birthday, and exactly twenty-five years after the commencement of his employment at Warren’s Blacking Factory.
It was Forster who suggested that Dickens use the first-person point of view to tell the story. He was possibly influenced by the popularity of Jane Eyre, published in 1847, though Dickens himself never read it. Dickens was no longer alone in the field of the Victorian novel—the publication of Vanity Fair coincided with that of Dombey and Son. Thackeray’s feelings of rivalry (which Dickens does not appear to have shared) could not have been soothed by the comparative sales of the two novels—five thousand for each number of Vanity Fair, thirty thousand for Dombey. Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 as well, and Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton in 1848. Dickens was still the most popular serious novelist of the age, but other voices were emerging from his shadow, expressing distinct visions of their own. That they fed his inspiration, at least secondhand, is another manifestation of Dickens’s natural inclusiveness. He seems to have been far less aware of them as rivals than they were of him—throughout his writing life, he was the primus inter pares. Writers who lived during his lifetime (and just after) felt they had to define themselves in relationship to him, but he did not reciprocate the feeling—he was generous with praise and invitations to write for the periodicals he edited, and honest, though tactful, with criticism. His own work filled up his thoughts while he was creating it; he paid no attention to what other writers might be doing.
David Copperfield did not go as smoothly or easily at first as Dombey. His letters to Forster were filled with complaints, and certain details, such as the title of the novel, the names of some characters, and the nature of David’s profession, remained undecided or were changed well into the composition of first numbers, evidence of indecisiveness that was unusual for Dickens and in contrast with the high degree of planning that had worked so well for Dombey. Nevertheless, and even though David Copperfield sold fewer copies than Dombey, Dickens grew increasingly pleased with it and wrote steadily, without interruption.
He loved it as if it were his autobiography, but in fact the incidents of the novel and the incidents of Dickens’s early life were quite different. David Copperfield, of course, is the scion of a much different family from the populous and convivial Dickenses. His father, twenty years older than his mother, is already dead by the time David is born. He lives happily with his mother and the servant, Peggotty, near Yarmouth. His father’s sister, Betsey Trotwood, is a woman of property, though eccentric and embittered by her failed marriage. The first chapters of David Copperfield detail a sort of early childhood idyll, with David the treasured male child, that is brutally ended by David’s mother’s remarriage to Mr. Murdstone. Murdstone and his sister, Jane, are classic portraits of just the sort of Victorian parents that Dickens detested. They are harsh, serious, authoritarian, and unimaginative. Their cruelty arises from their own joylessness and lovelessness. Their most evil effect comes not from how they treat David and his mother (which is bad enough), but from how they cast a pall of heavy sobriety and restraint over everything. What Murdstone says is just close enough to what a typical stepfather might say to or about his stepson as to be especially chilling. When David bites Murdstone in the midst of being punished, he is sent away to boarding school.
The characters of Peggotty and her brother, Ham, Little Em’ly, and Barkis the carrier have no known analogues in Dickens’s family, nor had Dickens ever been to Yarmouth until just before he began the novel. Nevertheless, David Copperfield seemed to Dickens to evoke the feelings he had had as a child, and therefore to be true to his life as he had experienced it. The events themselves were less important than the feelings they gave rise to in the author, and the first-person point of view allowed Dickens to evoke how it feels to be a child. This was certainly one of his special talents, and in David Copperfield, he did better than he had in Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop in mediating between a growing child’s sense of his own power and his sense of being in the power of others. David is not a hapless victim; in fact, once he gets to school, his immaturity and ignorance hurt others, most notably Mr. Mell, whose family circumstances David knows he should not reveal but does anyway, leading to Steerforth’s ridiculing Mr. Mell and Creakle’s firing him. While we never lose sympathy for David, we also never forget that he has a task, which is to learn how to be a good man—his innocence is no guarantee of good judgment or right action. In this sense, the portrayal of David is far more sophisticated than earlier portrayals of children; even Paul Dombey is characterized at one point as sometimes imperious but never shown to be other than unusually wise and loving. The depiction of David’s infancy and childhood is the sine qua non of such later depictions of childhood as the first chapters of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dickens’s experience and his natural sympathies with children in general led him to understand that the tone and style of childhood are different from that of adulthood and worthy of artistic representation. This is surely in part the reason Freud was so fond of David Copperfield—Dickens apprehended that the symbolic world of the small child was rich and had lifelong power, and in the course of relatively few pages of text, the life is lived and the symbolic links are forged. The narrative also reinforces the idea that a consciousness can understand how it came to be through memory and reconstruction of early experiences. David has no “analyst,” but the narrator himself serves as the analyst, mediating through language and selection of incident between the reader and the protagonist.
The death of David’s mother ends his schooling at Creakle’s institution. He returns to Blunderstone for the funeral and subsequently is sent to work at the counting house of Murdstone and Grinby, wine merchants. He lodges with the Micawbers, but soon Mr. Micawber is arrested for debt and the Micawbers move into the King’s Bench Prison. Of his working life, David notes, “All this time I was working at Murdstone and Grinby’s in the same common way, and with the same common companions, and with the same ceaseless sense of unmerited degradation as at first. But I never, happily for me no doubt, made a single acquaintance, or spoke to any of the many boys whom I saw daily in going to the warehouse, in coming from it, and in prowling about the streets at meal-times. I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same lonely, self-reliant manner.” The contrast to Dickens’s own life is specific. The Micawbers are comic representations of his parents; the counting house, while tedious and unpleasant, is not quite as appalling as the blacking factory. In fact, when Murdstone speaks to David before sending him out to work, he says something Dickens himself might have said: “To the young this is a world for action, and not for moping and droning in.” The point is that David feels uncared for. It is not that he must make his way, but that no one cares whether and how he makes his way. Even the Micawbers are so wrapped up in their own affairs that David’s ups and downs are of little moment to them. Certainly this is a true reflection of how Dickens experienced his parents when they were having difficulties—however pleasant and agreeable they were upon occasion, they were capable of no real understanding of or sympathy with him; it was as if he were simply their lodger.
David Copperfield evokes Dickens’s life without relating it. The fiction frees him to contemplate not only his boyhood and young manhood, but boyhood and young manhood in general. David’s task is simultaneously a moral one and an emotional one—to find true companionship but also to assume responsibility for one’s choices and their consequences. Through observing those around him and also weighing his own actions and choices, David attains responsible manhood: at the end of the novel, he has a respectable career, good friends, and a soul mate in Agnes, who is often criticized for being dull and one-dimensional but is an interesting evocation of a quiet, self-contained, and responsible feminine presence. David succeeds fully where Dickens himself succeeded only partially—he was beginning to confide in Forster that he despaired of ever finding true intimate companionship.
The tenor of David Copperfield is comic, but because its great subject is David’s moral education, the happy ending does not quite balance out the costs of getting there. David and Agnes find each other, David’s other loved ones live in prosperity and amity, Em’ly, Martha, and the Micawbers leave the scenes of their defeats to find new opportunities elsewhere. But Steerforth is lost, the Peggottys’ lives are destroyed, and even Heep’s defeat has a sour taste about it. The natural tendency of individuals to live in isolation through selfishness, greed, addiction, despair, and self-delusion is not generally mitigated—it is mitigated only in David’s case, at least partly because he is lucky enough to find Agnes. There is no suggestion that he deserves Agnes, except insofar as he has learned enough to value her.
Both Dombey and Son and David Copperfield are great novels, but they succeed in part because they have backed away from larger social issues and allowed their protagonists to resolve problems that are representative of large social forces and dilemmas only as individuals. For a novel, such an individual solution is the only believable one, the only “realistic” one. At the same time, though, Dombey and David come to seem Cinderella-like—the form of the comic novel itself chooses them to prevail while all around them others succumb. The solution that Dickens bodies forth in each of his Christmas books, that of a change in a character’s inner life creating outward change, works better as a parable than it does as a novel, because a novel needs more action to carry it than a single miraculous inner shift. As characters in a novel act upon one another and make their way in the world, the vivid sense of a single inner life is overwhelmed by the varied and multifarious strands of the narrative. Novels are both too short and too long. They are too short to reproduce, in rigorous depth, the moral development of more than a handful of characters, and too long to meditate upon philosophical issues without plenty of action to give those issues some narrative liveliness. Nevertheless, Dickens persisted in attempting to broaden and deepen the social meaning of his work, and of the novel itself, as subsequent works show.
David Copperfield ran from May 1849 to November 1850. Dickens was famously affected by its completion. He wrote in the preface, “An author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever.” Reviews were at first mixed, and sales of the numbers not as good as those of Dombey and Son, but sales in volume form were good, and readers came around more and more to Dickens’s own love for the novel. It has since become the quintessential Dickens novel, the easiest, the most appealing, the most frequently known for itself rather than through stage productions or movies. Between them, we may say, Dombey and Son and David Copperfield relieved Dickens of two of his profoundest anxieties—financial worries and residual fears from his youth. Both reconfirmed his continuing importance among contemporary novelists. In the next phase of his career, his relationships to everyone around him would shift as he built upon what Dombey and Copperfield had taught him.