THE PERIOD while Dickens was writing David Copperfield was exceptionally productive even for him. At the end of 1849 he began to develop a new weekly periodical that came to be known as Household Words, “conducted by Charles Dickens.” The first issue appeared on March 30, 1850. From this time forward, for some twenty years, he edited, wrote for, and profited from either this weekly magazine or his next one, All the Year Round. His editorship was active and informed, as well as lucrative, since he owned half of the magazine (which had a circulation of about thirty-five thousand), was paid £500 a year for editing it, and was also paid for contributions. He estimated that in 1850 alone he read nine hundred manuscripts, of which he accepted only a handful. His target audience with the magazine was the reading middle class that formed his earliest core audience, not intellectuals or artists or reformers, but a general readership that liked to be entertained and informed. He gathered around him a group of writers, who contributed anonymously. The only ones we know today were Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and Elizabeth Gaskell, author of North and South and Mary Barton. Though not all of them liked the anonymity, one thing about working for Dickens appealed to all of them—he paid generously and quickly. He was also generous with editorial advice and even rewriting, which suited some authors more than others. But he had a particular vision—of informative articles and essays made more lively by his favorite mental activity, “fancy,” and he was resolute in his assertion of his vision. As with the plays he directed and stage-managed, he felt responsible for every aspect of the production, but he also brought imagination, insight, and charm to working with the other egos involved. The many extant letters that he wrote to his authors attest to these qualities. As with his earlier forays into journalism, he was still attracted to “theme” issues—he would propose a theme, such as Christmas, and then he would write the opening and closing pieces while others would contribute variations on the theme (this had been the original idea behind Master Humphrey’s Clock). In general, he worked to balance each issue, so essays taken out of context now can seem rather odd in tone, but as always, Dickens’s primary artistic goal was to produce a first-rate whole. In the case of Household Words, which came out every Wednesday, the parts were secondary. At first Dickens worked with the assistance of John Forster. For most of his career, Dickens consulted Forster about all aspects of his work, from artistic choices to business concerns, and all of the novels show the effects of Forster’s taste, which Dickens relied upon but in some cases overruled. Forster, who had an eighth share, and Dickens worked on Household Words together, apparently amicably at first, although they were beginning to disagree, because Forster’s life and politics were growing more conservative.
With Household Words, Dickens became, if possible, more central to English literary life, because he accepted and published work by younger writers, who, according to most authorities, cherished even his rejection letters, they were so kind and full of support. He knew, and they knew, too, that he was “the Master.” But he was by no means universally adored. Elizabeth Gaskell complained that Household Words was always “Dickensy.” Even so, there were plenty of periodicals now, and novels, too, that were not by Dickens, or “Dickensy.” We may say that he had built the mansion, but the mansion had come to have many rooms.
On August 16, Dickens’s third daughter and ninth child was born. Dickens was just at that point in David Copperfield where he had to decide the fate of David’s wife, Dora, and at around the same time that he decided she must die, he named his new baby Dora, which has caused some comment among biographers and, indeed, caused comment at the time. On the very afternoon of the birth, Dickens and the other children and Georgina Hogarth traveled from London to the family’s usual summer resort, at Broadstairs. Catherine and the baby stayed home.
The third great enterprise in Dickens’s life in the early 1850s was amateur play production. Dickens’s interest in acting was always dedicated and enthusiastic, and between 1833 and 1847, he acted in a dozen plays. As David Copperfield was winding up, Dickens joined with Edward Bulwer-Lytton (author of The Last Days of Pompeii and many other works) to put on Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour, and then one of Bulwer-Lytton’s own, a comedy called Not So Bad As We Seem. These collaborations led to the formation of the Guild of Literature and Art, an insurance and retirement fund for authors and artists, “to render such assistance to both as shall never compromise their independence.” As always, Dickens was eager to do good by having fun, and the two plays, plus a number of farces (including one where Dickens played six different characters), were performed off and on between May 1851 and September 1852.
Neither did Dickens stint his charitable work. He was still working with Angela Burdett-Coutts, helping her administer Urania Cottage. As with Household Words, he was a hands-on manager, directing everything, from 1847 until 1858, from staffing and organization to the management of daily crises. He continued to write about education and to promote schools for very poor children, and he took a strong interest in labor unrest and issues of sanitation and public hygiene. In other words, as his art was maturing and flowering, and as his financial footing was growing more and more secure, his other interests were finding greater, not lesser, expression. He was thirty-eight in 1850, and to all appearances, his stores of energy were vaster than ever, each enterprise stimulating the others, each calling forth just the right mix of principle, vision, dedication, hard work, and charm. Surely his treatment of his childhood, in David Copperfield, released him from old fears and enabled him to integrate all of his interests in an astonishing way. Commentators on Dickens’s activities often say the same thing—what he did in each endeavor would have been uncommon enough in an average citizen, but in the greatest literary artist of his day, such energy and administrative genius were unprecedented.
In these years, though, his personal life afforded him several shocks, beginning with the death, already mentioned, of his sister Fanny, in August 1848. In March 1851, Catherine Dickens’s long-standing complaints came to a crisis. Ackroyd quotes a letter she wrote to a friend detailing her symptoms: “I have been suffering for some time from a fullness in the head, which has lately increased so much, & caused me such violent headaches &c, that I have been ordered to go at once to Malvern and try what change of air and cold water will do for me.” Nine pregnancies in fifteen years had wrought a considerable change in Catherine Dickens. She had grown quite stout, for one thing, and was also subject to postpartum depression and anxiety. While acquaintances of the couple were often impressed by Catherine’s cordiality and even temper, comparing them favorably with Charles’s more unpredictable charms, Charles Dickens had been growing openly vocal about his dissatisfactions with his wife. The old balance between Catherine and Georgina, where each provided different sorts of companionship, had tipped in favor of Georgina, whom Dickens considered a close friend. He was kind and affectionate toward Catherine, but impatient with her clumsiness (which he had mocked in letters to Forster from America), her jealousy (which had upset him in Genoa, with the de la Rues), her general slowness, and her difficulties with pregnancy and childbirth. We may see that like many married couples, they had found their respective poles—his energetic, busy, irritable; hers placid, enervated, patient. Dickens had many bouts of ill health, but his response was to, if at all possible, work or run or walk it off. Hers was to succumb. Her characteristic modes of dealing with stress were increasingly irritating to him, proving not that she had her virtues, but that her virtues, in contrast with his, were not really virtues. Their incompatibility as a couple was evident to everyone, and would certainly have been evident to her, undoubtedly exacerbating her feelings of stress and his of dissatisfaction. Catherine went to Malvern, a spa, where the course of treatment would have involved cold baths, rest, fresh air, dietary changes, and possibly some exercise.
Then, on March 31, John Dickens, Charles’s father, died. Dickens’s relationship with his father had not been an easy one from the day John and Elizabeth took their oldest boy out of school and sent him to work in the blacking factory. Dickens had unsuccessfully attempted to distance himself from his father’s improvident ways and had unsuccessfully attempted to employ his father in several of his editorial enterprises. He had spoken irritably of both his parents (and of his brothers, whose careers were more similar to John’s than to Charles’s), and Charles junior later reported that part of the reason the autobiographical fragment never made it into print was that Catherine had read it and considered the portrait of Dickens’s parents too harsh. But once again, the writing of David Copperfield had reconciled many of these issues in Dickens’s mind, and for the last years before his father’s death, Dickens had come to treat him and speak of him with more affection and forgiveness. John Dickens’s final illness came on rather suddenly. He was afflicted with bladder stones, and it was decided that an urgent operation to remove them was needed. When Dickens arrived after the operation (performed without anesthetic, of course) he said that his father’s room looked like “a slaughterhouse.” Though the elder man (John was sixty-six) was optimistic, the operation proved unsuccessful and he died six days later. Dickens was saddened and grieved by the death, and was also somewhat reconciled to his mother.
Shortly thereafter, on April 14, Dickens returned from a visit to Malvern to London to give a speech. At the end of the speech, Forster came up to him and told him that his infant daughter, Dora, only eight months old, had been suddenly taken ill with convulsions and had died that afternoon. The next morning, he wrote a note to Catherine, which Forster delivered, and he also postponed the evening’s performance of the Bulwer-Lytton play. Two days later, one of his daughters reported, he broke down completely under the weight of his grief, but it was clear to everyone, including him, that when there were arrangements to be made, he was the one who had to make them. The performances resumed, Household Words continued on schedule, Catherine and the other eight children were cared for. As always, the remedy for grief was activity, with restless walks through the streets of London the substitute for sleep.
Also overcome by grief, Catherine returned from Malvern. In May, Dickens bought a new house, a large mansion called Tavistock House, and commenced renovations. He and the family went to their usual summer residence in Kent. In October, he began to write Bleak House, and its first number was published around the same time that the family moved into Tavistock House.
Although this is generally considered to be a dark time in Dickens’s life, it is important to remember that Dickens was always capable of, and even eager for, fun. Ackroyd tells of the Twelfth Night party to which Dickens invited Thackeray and his daughters. As usual, there was a performance (Dickens had the new house fitted out with a small theater), which Dickens directed. At one point, five-year-old Henry came out and recited:
Now comes the conflabbergastation of the lovier
As Vilikins was valiking the garden around
He spied his dear Dinah laying dead upon the ground
And a cup of cold pison it lay by her side,
With a biller-dux a-stating ’twas by pison she died
Too ral lal, loo ral lal, too ral la.
“Thackeray,” notes Ackroyd, “actually fell off his seat laughing.”
In Bleak House, Dickens successfully integrated his social concerns with his narrative drive, rather than emphasizing the story, as he had done in David Copperfield. In so doing, he created a new sort of English novel, one that explores and questions the construction of English culture and society as a whole rather than merely certain institutions. Dickens locates the dilemmas and tragedies of his characters in institutions outside of their control and then analyzes how some characters fail while others manage to cope. In this, he departs somewhat from his earlier vision, in which the transformation of character and attitude allows for the transformation of the world. In Bleak House, the world is an impersonal and implacable machinelike place where all persons and things are in a state of constant devolution that can be halted or reversed only through the continuous exertion of taking responsibility and methodical hard work. There is no main character whose personal transformation or education is the central organizing principle of the work. Esther Summerson, who carries about half of the narrative, is defined at the beginning as self-effacing, orderly, and virtuous. Her real job is to serve as a witness to the moral educations of others, especially, but not only, of Richard Carstone and Caddy Jellyby.
The overarching metaphor of the novel is the ancient and costly Chancery suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, and the location of much of the action is the area of London around the Inns of Court. In the very first chapter of the novel, Dickens ramifies the influence of the court of Chancery throughout England:
. . . the court of Chancery . . . has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire . . . its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance.
Thereafter, the novel demonstrates the truth of this assertion—every character, no matter how highborn or lowborn, is connected to the suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. In some instances, the connections seem gratuitous but turn out to be essential. The suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is in fact an enormous family in which, try as any individual might, he or she cannot but experience his or her entangling relationship to the others. Against the background of the suit, individuals work out their fates by accepting their responsibilities, and their responsibilities are prescribed according to a familial model. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is like an ecosystem where some degree of scarcity prevails. Only by husbanding the limited resources can everyone work out his or her fate to advantage, but the natural entropy of the system always threatens to overwhelm individual energies. And no single character’s fate is of much greater interest than any other’s. The novel is written on a large pattern; the pattern works itself out. The reality of connection is foregrounded, rather than the significance of individuals. The court of Chancery was not the boldest institution Dickens might have satirized—reviewers at the time pointed out that criticism was common and reform of the system was already taking place—but artistically, the fact that Dickens began with the institution rather than with individuals allowed him to create a larger world and to coordinate its parts more successfully than he had ever done.
Reviewers noted the impersonality of the novel. Forster didn’t like it much, and Esther didn’t go over well with anyone. Critics since then have argued whether Esther is a failure or not, and certainly her voice can seem coy and insincere, especially when she is reporting, only to discount, praises of herself. In subsequent years, Georgina Hogarth was willing to admit that Esther’s character was based on hers (by contrast, she did not believe that Agnes Wickfield was based on her), and it must be the case that if Dickens was attempting to use someone he loved and honored as a model, he felt less free to depict her ironically, as he always felt free in depicting himself. The third-person narrative of Bleak House is exceptionally ironic in tone, even by Dickens’s standard, and so the contrast makes Esther’s narrative seem even stranger. And if Esther is Georgina, then John Jarndyce’s relationship to her makes him a representation of Dickens himself—the guardian who pays for everything and takes care of everyone, yet who needs Esther as an intermediary between himself and the objects of his benevolence.
The second overarching metaphor that works with the first to bolster connection is the metaphor of disease. The theme of public sanitation had been important to Dickens at least since he was writing Oliver Twist, when he frequented the impoverished neighborhoods of Saffron Hill that stood right beside the house in Doughty Street where he lived with his family while writing the novel. Coincidentally, as he was writing Bleak House, he was also having workmen refurbish Tavistock House, including the plumbing and the drains; so waste management was on his mind. The problems mentioned in chapter 2, of a large population in a limited urban area, had not been solved by Parliament or the City of London, and would not be almost until Dickens’s death. The figure of Jo embodied his old images of Ignorance and Want, always moving on, as Jo says of himself, but leaving behind a wake of death and destruction.
Bleak House is the most unhopeful of Dickens’s novels. Characters such as Esther and Jarndyce at best succeed in holding off decay rather than transcending it or creating something from it. Every character is bound by his or her past, and the past cannot be escaped (as, for example, the Micawbers and Little Em’ly go off to Australia seeking a new life). Esther finds love and purpose in family life, but Allan Woodcourt is such a shadowy figure that their marriage is of no intrinsic interest. The comic side of Dickens’s sensibility, the part of him that intuitively envisions integration and social redemption through laughter, is largely missing—here are no figures like Miss Tox and Mr. Chick, in Dombey and Son, or Barkis, Traddles, or Mr. Dick, in Copperfield, who are simultaneously ridiculous and benevolent and serve to connect the main characters in incidental but important ways. Harold Skimpole is a good example of a character whose foibles might have been treated more forgivingly in an earlier novel, but who comes to appear almost vicious by the end of Bleak House.
The stylistic felicity that marked Dombey and David Copperfield from beginning to end is more problematic in Bleak House, in large part because of Esther’s narrative. David could easily narrate with Dickens’s vision and, of course, was intended to do so—Dickens found a comfortable authorial distance from which he could both enter into David’s mind and observe his growth—but Dickens cannot find a comfortable distance from Esther. Her voice is inconsistent—sometimes sharp-witted and sardonic, other times vapid. Finally, confining himself to her consciousness is difficult for the author. On the other hand, the third-person narrative suffers from too much irony—the famous first paragraph, about London fog, is telling but not subtle. Similarly to Martin Chuzzlewit, though to a lesser degree, Dickens has a point to make and wants to be sure the reader understands it clearly. During the 1850s, Dickens wrote to a correspondent that he did not write merely to entertain, but always with an improving object in mind, and this is evident in all of the works of that decade. Modern critics have rehabilitated Bleak House, admired its architecture and seriousness, as well as Dickens’s attempts to negotiate a new kind of novel. Some critics have even forgiven the experiment of Esther’s narrative on the grounds that she helps keep the extremely diverse story line under control.
One interesting feature of Bleak House is the character of Jo as analogous to the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Dickens is known to have read while he was writing Bleak House. Jo, like Topsy, is an unreared child, Jo the mysterious product of unknown parents, Topsy the product of a slave-breeding operation. Both know nothing of their origins or of any conventional bits of knowledge, including religion. What is notable is that both authors, one writing the most popular novel in England and the other writing the most popular novel in America, were highlighting the “domestic” issue of how children develop a conscience and a sense of themselves through connection to others. Both show models of the relationship between well-regulated domestic life and well-regulated public life, a key part of that model being orderly relationships between responsible men and women living in the same households. The contrast between the fate of Topsy and the fate of Jo is especially illuminating—whereas Jo connects only to destroy, by carrying disease into the Jarndyce household, and then himself dies, a warning to the complacent classes, Topsy is reclaimed through systematic training and love. To Dickens, what Jo means is his main role in the novel; to Stowe, how Topsy gains a moral life is the important question.
Dickens was very happy with the sales of Bleak House. It sold about thirty-four thousand copies every number, beginning with the first number, and he profited by some £11,000. Sales were higher than David Copperfield by about fourteen thousand copies, and though reviews were mixed, public reception was enthusiastic. Dickens was now a rich man, as the purchase of Tavistock House demonstrated, and his contracts were always favorable to his interests. When his agreement with Bradbury and Evans came to be renewed at the end of Bleak House, it was renewed without fuss. Nevertheless, completing the novel was extremely taxing, and not only because it was a huge, complicated project. Ackroyd details the speeches, dinners, editorial work, outings, travels, house refurbishings, domestic duties (Dickens discovered that one of his sons had a stutter and commenced to train him out of it with a session in his study every morning), and correspondence that interfered with the production of the monthly numbers, and it is no surprise that at the completion of the novel, Dickens decided not to start another for at least a year.
In February 1852, Dickens turned forty years old. A month later, his tenth child and seventh son, Edward, was born. In one decade, the hopeful young man who had set sail for America had been transformed, in some sense, beyond recognition. His work was complex, dark, mature. Acquaintances no longer commented upon his boyishness. While he was still energetic and restless, and still capable of laughing frequently and uproariously, the duties he had taken on in his family, in his editorial capacity, in his role as social critic, and in his charitable work had made him a serious and even intimidating presence in English life. Reviewers who took issue with various aspects of Bleak House did so in the context of Dickens’s mastery. His work was a known quantity; experimentation only reconfirmed that he always had something to say, always said it vastly and with vivid, melodramatic effects, with wit, invention, and “true and original genius” (as George Brimley noted in the Spectator). In spite of critics (even his friends Carlyle and Forster, for whom Dickens showed a great deal of respect, had reservations and suggestions) and in spite of the vagaries of commercial success, Dickens was always true, in larger matters and in details of character drawing and style, to his idiosyncratic conception of things. And his ideas and their development became public almost as soon as he had them.
A strongly marked feature of this phase of Dickens’s life, and one that would last until he died, was the craving for movement and escape, even a sort of hiding out. The ostensible reason for getting away was often frustration at the interference of business and social engagements in the completion of work, but his penchant for travel was so consistent that it is not always clear who or what he was trying to get away from. In an effort to get away from London and England, he took his family to Boulogne for the summer; in an effort to get away from his family, he took a long trip to France and Switzerland with friends in the fall; as soon as he settled in a place, he went on excursions to see the sights. Ackroyd points out that Dickens frequently took rooms where he could finish projects and find some privacy, and from those rooms he frequently took long walks. It is tempting, but risky, of course, to apply diagnoses, such as bipolar disorder, that are current in our time, to persons living in earlier times, and certainly Victorians as a group believed in effort and in making one’s way by dint of personal force, especially masculine personal force. But even his fellow Victorians were exhausted by Dickens’s restless productivity. Dickens himself was exhausted by it—in May 1853, as he was nearing the end of Bleak House, he came down with an agonizing kidney ailment, similar to ailments he had had as a boy and reminiscent of the problems that killed his father. In spite of the pain and the rudimentary medical care, he was back at work in six days. Whether we can diagnose Dickens or not, at least we may say, from the evidence of his activities, his letters, and his works, that he was not at peace, and that there are not even any images of peace to be found. A good life is a busy one; an idle life is both boring and morally suspect. Rest is something ever sought, never found, only occasionally imposed by illness. If every marriage is a belief system, and if one spouse usually dictates the terms of the belief system, then the evidence was growing stronger every day that Catherine was unable to maintain her part in the Dickens family mythology. The reserves of energy that Charles could call upon at will, even when ill, were not available to Catherine. But it must be said that sustaining ten pregnancies and several miscarriages in sixteen years, along with many house movings, social engagements, and long trips, is a task that few modern women would even consider, much less be able to manage.
In January 1854, some six months after the completion of Bleak House, Dickens realized that the sales of Household Words had fallen precipitously. Bradbury and Evans asked him to compose another serial novel, and he at once began Hard Times. The first number appeared on April 1. The immediate inspiration for this shortest of Dickens’s novels seems to have been a twenty-three-week-old millworkers’ strike in Preston, where Dickens traveled for a look; he then wrote a long piece about the strike for Household Words at the beginning of February. Dickens had a long-standing interest in working conditions and workers’ protests—he had, of course, touched on lower-class unrest in Barnaby Rudge and had intended to write about factories in Nicholas Nickleby. He set out his principles clearly in his essay: “that into the relations between employers and employed, as into all the relations in this life, there must enter something of feeling and sentiment; something of mutual explanation, forbearance, and consideration . . . otherwise those relations are wrong and rotten to the core and will never bear sound fruit.” His general view of a just society as one marked by the recognition of the dignity and worth of every individual continued to express itself with regard to what seemed to be the purest economic issue, and indeed, the opinion he quotes in his essay from a Preston workers’ bill, that the employers “in times of good trade and general prosperity, wrung from their labour a California of gold, which is now being used to crush those who created it,” would in our century be read as an expression of the standard Marxist labor theory of value. Dickens’s further remarks show that he did not understand this but saw the issue entirely as a matter of relationship. And, indeed, when he novelizes his ideas in Hard Times, he can make of them only a depiction of a series of failed relationships between individuals. Mr. Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind, mill owner and educator, both fail in their responsibilities to their workers, wives, children, and students. They abuse their power, not out of intentional unkindness or natural evil, but out of ideology and ignorance. Those they are supposed to direct, and who turn to them for guidance, receive pat ideas, egocentric bluster, or dry theory. Tom Gradgrind and Louisa are provided with no moral compass or method for understanding their feelings. Stephen Blackpool is reduced step by step to hopelessness and drudgery. The overarching symbol for all of this is the pall of ugliness, smoke, and pollution cast over Coketown by the factories at the heart of the city.
Dickens was not Marx or Engels. Though he was perhaps as outraged as they were at conditions around him, he was by nature a novelist, not a philosopher or a political economist or a revolutionary. Novels privilege the idiosyncrasies of individuals and can demonstrate larger ideas only by having characters work them out through action and contemplation. The narrator may attempt to extrapolate the ideas symbolically, or even to address the reader about them, as Dickens does rather more often in Hard Times (rather like Mrs. Stowe, who does the same thing in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) than he had in previous novels, but the requirement of organizing the material by maintaining clear distinctions between characters means that groups never really come alive in novels—uniformity, crowds, and mass movements disintegrate in the linearity of prose. The novelist’s eye can never work successfully as a wide-angle lens but must always move precisely from particular to particular. A novel such as Hard Times, where the characters are acting as examples of ideas, always has the air of a cautionary tale or a parable and relies upon a set of beliefs shared between author and readers. The very brevity of Hard Times was a challenge to its commercial success because rather than developing his ideas incrementally, by a kind of stealthy inertia or narrative weight, the author expresses them openly. As it happened, Dickens’s ideas about education and the proper relations between Capital and Labor were not generally shared, the comic qualities of the novel were not widely appreciated, and Hard Times was a failure.
Nevertheless, the novel came to appeal far more to later critics and is perhaps better known as a representative example of Dickens’s work in our day than it was in his. As with Bleak House, modern readers have accepted social criticism as one of the proper uses of novelistic art; in addition, the darkness of Dickens’s vision of Coketown coincides more with our own opinions of the ecological and social destructiveness of the Industrial Revolution. Novels since Hard Times that have expanded upon and reiterated some of its ideas have helped modern readers share them enough so that they can fade into the background and the characters, who are actually quite entertaining, can emerge.
Dickens always showed an eagerness to contemplate his own situation by fictionalizing it and giving it to one of his characters, sometimes one who was like him (à la David Copperfield) and sometimes one who was quite unlike him (à la Mr. Dick, in the same novel, who is always writing assiduously, but is deeply frustrated that he can’t prevent King Charles’s head from intruding into his manuscript—perhaps the most perfect image in literature of how a writer comes back and back again to the same concerns in spite of, or because of, how hard he tries to avoid them). In Hard Times, Dickens endows the workman Stephen Blackpool, a man otherwise entirely unlike himself, with a burdensome marriage and a wish to divorce. Stephen consults Bounderby, whose answer indicates that Dickens has done some research on the subject: “Why, you’d have to go to Doctors’ Commons with a suit, and you’d have to go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you’d have to get an Act of Parliament to enable you to marry again, and it would cost you . . . I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound . . . perhaps twice the money.” Stephen, of course, earns only a few shillings per week. Hard Times, composed in weekly installments like TheOld Curiosity Shop, is open and revealing of Dickens’s state of mind in much the same way. His demons are no longer grotesque, and the fearsome world is no longer so mysterious and strange; rather, it is all too ugly and factual, peopled by those whose imaginations have been starved rather than perverted. But as with The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens is unable to embody a redemption for any of his characters. Both novels seem to assert that the world, whatever it is made of, cannot be lived in. The longer, more carefully composed novels are never quite this hopeless.
Torment is not uncommon in the lives of novelists and in the lives of nineteenth-century novelists seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. Thackeray’s wife was irredeemably insane; George Eliot lived out of wedlock with G. H. Lewes, whose wife continued to produce children with other men; Charlotte Brontë watched her sisters die of tuberculosis and her brother perish of alcoholism before herself dying in childbirth at forty-one; George Sand, Nikolai Gogol, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all lived lives that to us seem dramatic, strenuous, and even tragic, beset in some cases by debt, in others by illness, madness, loss, grief, political imprisonment. The onus was on them, nevertheless, to produce an art that was acceptable to the middle classes and, above all, respectable. With the passing of patronage and the broadening of an author’s audience, his or her social function (and therefore his or her source of income) shifted. Every novel seeks to entertain—beginning with the rise of the novel as a literary form, the fact that novels entertain was invoked as an essential criticism: young persons read novels rather than, say, sermons and thereby failed to improve their morals or their stock of knowledge—but the novel also has to enlighten, in order to attain and then maintain respectability. Novelists themselves, and Dickens was one of the first, understood at once the power of the form to reflect the world of the nineteenth century back to its citizens in a new and instructive way, but there were limits to what the middle classes were willing to ponder. Some novelists were more daring than others—Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, touches pretty firmly on marriage and sexuality, as well as upon slavery, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dickens’s attacks on the structure of English society were bolder than those of his contemporaries, who tended to focus on individuals. What novelists could not do, except by indirection, was reveal their personal torments in their art, especially if their personal torments were not quite respectable, and few torments are. For Dickens, whose purchase on his own middle-class life was always open to challenge, and whose expressed ideals of happiness and goodness were typical Victorian domestic ones, the contradiction between outward appearance and inner reality was especially dangerous.
Dickens considered himself a reliable witness to, and an authority upon, social conditions of his time. Not only did he expend a great deal of energy informing himself, he also was in the habit of expressing his opinion and acting upon it. But as his critique broadened and darkened, he became less and less capable of putting it over. His style, or “genius,” as everyone called it, which was the essential and unchangeable feature of his vision, never failed to remind readers of his peculiarity. The lightheartedness and humor of earlier works had made a comprehensible bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and he had successfully embodied redemption through love, friendship, celebration, plenty, laughter, forgiveness, pleasure, character improvement, and the punishment of evil. In the 1850s, however, he no longer believed in improvement. One factor was the Crimean War of 1854–1855, the conduct of which exposed the incompetence of the government so that Dickens wrote his friend Mrs. Watson, “I feel as if the world had been pushed back 500 years.” He strongly felt that every official was shirking responsibility, as he wrote in an essay in August 1856: “The power of Nobody is becoming so enormous in England. . . . The hand which this surprising person had in the late war is amazing to consider. It was he who left the tents behind, who left the baggage behind, who chose the worst possible ground for encampments, who provided no means of transport, who killed the horses, who paralyzed the commissariat, who knew nothing of the business he professed to know and monopolized, who decimated the English army.” After developing this theme for several pages, he concludes, “Nobody has done more harm in this single generation than Everybody can mend in ten generations.”
The war served only to confirm the contempt for Parliament he had felt first during his years reporting parliamentary speeches in the early 1830s. He always believed that the House of Commons was corrupted by self-interest, bribery, and collusion. He knew after twenty years of charitable endeavor that the alleviation of unsanitary public health conditions, for example, or the successful prosecution of a war was a public function, to be undertaken by the government in behalf of the citizens, but he saw no evidence that the British ruling class had any desire or will to do its duty.
But the form of redemption Dickens represented in the public mind, and certainly in his own mind, redemption in domestic companionship and happiness, no longer seemed real to the man himself. Though he treated Catherine with consideration and courtesy at this point, in January 1855, he wrote Forster, “Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life and one friend and companion I have never made?” He had given David Copperfield Agnes Wickfield, and he had given Allan Woodcourt Esther Summerson. He could imagine the sort of woman that a busy, benevolent, ambitious, energetic, and introspective man might love as a friend, companion, and wife, but he did not have that woman in his own life, and it is altogether possible that the authorial act of matching his alter ego, David, with Agnes exacerbated his sense of what he was missing. It was one thing for his fictional stand-in, John Jarndyce, to accept the role of kindly, detached guardian to his extended family; it was quite a different thing for the author himself, a man who fathered ten children in sixteen years. We may easily extrapolate Dickens’s ardor in every other area of his life to his sexual passions, although all the evidence is that however he felt, he had conducted himself up to this point with stern propriety. Nevertheless, within weeks of his confession to Forster, his longings were strangely answered through a letter from his first love, Maria Winter, née Beadnell.
By his own admission, Dickens had been in love with, and obsessed by, Maria Beadnell for some four years, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, while he was working as a law clerk and shorthand parliamentary reporter. She was the daughter of a banker, and it has remained unknown how he first made her acquaintance or came to be accepted, at least provisionally, as an admirer, of which Maria had several. They met and also exchanged letters, some of them in secret after her father disapproved of the connection. In May 1833, Dickens declared his passionate love one last time, but her response was cool, and he parted from her. He met George Hogarth in 1834 and Catherine sometime between September and December of that year. There seemed always to be the sense that his regard for Catherine did not carry the passion of his attachment to Maria Beadnell. At any rate, when Mrs. Winter, now forty-four, wrote him, he responded warmly and at length, recalling his earlier feelings with great freshness. In their renewed correspondence, to quote the narrator of Hard Times, with reference to Louisa and James Harthouse, “He . . . established a confidence with her from which her husband was excluded.” Not to mention his wife.
Dickens’s first letter to Mrs. Winter is worth quoting at length, if only to show how his mind worked:
As I was reading by the fire last night, a handful of notes was laid down on my table. I looked them over, and, recognizing the writing of no private friend, let them lie there and went back to my book. But I found my mind curiously disturbed, and wandering away through so many years to early times of my life, that I was quite perplexed to account for it. There was nothing in what I had been reading, or immediately thinking about to awaken such a train of thought, and at last it came into my head that it must have been suggested by something in the look of one of those letters. So I turned them over again—and suddenly the remembrance of your hand came upon me with an influence that I cannot express to you. Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when he was in love.
There was something so busy and so pleasant in your letter—so true and cheerful and frank and affectionate—that I read on with perfect delight until I came to your mention of your two little girls. In the unsettled state of my thoughts, the existence of these dear children appeared such a prodigious phenomenon, that I was included to suspect myself of being out of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps I had nine children of my own!
Dickens then goes on in a somewhat less personal vein, but six days later, he wrote her again from Paris:
There are things that I have locked up in my own breast and that I never thought to bring out any more. But when I find myself writing “all to yourself,” how can I forbear to let as much light in upon them as will shew you that they are there still! If the most innocent, the most ardent, and the most disinterested days of my life had you for their sun—as indeed they had—and if I know that the Dream I lived in did me good, refined my heart, and made me patient and persevering, and if the Dream were all of you—as God knows it was—how can I receive a confidence of you, and return it, and make a feint of blotting all this out.
Dickens’s remarkable grace as a correspondent combined with his eagerness clearly gave Mrs. Winter something to think about. We can guess what when we read in his next letter, dated from Tavistock House six days later, “When you say you are ‘toothless, fat, old and ugly’ (which I don’t believe), I fly away to the house in Lombard Street, which is pulled down . . . and see you in a sort of raspberry dress with a little black trimming at the top—black velvet it seems to be made of—cut in vandykes—an immense number of vandykes—with my boyish heart pinned like a captured butterfly on every one of them.” He goes on to discuss the arrangements for the meeting (which included Catherine and Mr. Winter) and to urge that he and Mrs. Winter might meet first alone because “I feel it, as it were, so necessary to our being at ease.”
But the meeting was not a success. Mrs. Winter was as she described herself and, in addition, extremely talkative. Dickens quickly disembarrassed himself of further intimacy, but his April letter to her, making excuses for missing an engagement, is revealing. By this time, Dickens was in the throes of planning Little Dorrit:
You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to care about it, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. “It is only half an hour”—“It is only an afternoon”—“It is only an evening”—people say to me over and over again—but they don’t know that it is impossible to command oneself to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes, or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a day away. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.
Dickens embarrassed himself with Mrs. Winter and then compounded his embarrassment by writing her into Little Dorrit as the foolish and garrulous but kindhearted Flora. He exposed himself to his friends, but also to himself. Later in the year he wrote to Forster rather defensively, “I don’t quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling, and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is . . . that it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years . . . and that I went at it with a determination to overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men’s heads . . . nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood amazed at myself ever since!”
Bleak House sold well, and Hard Times raised the circulation and profits of Household Words, but after a visit to England in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked, “Dickens is evidently not liked nor thought well of by his literary brethren—at least, the most eminent of them, whose reputation might interfere with his. Thackeray is much more to their tastes.” Bad reviews abounded of both books, though Dickens said that he never read reviews. In this, Dickens’s life and work continued to be of a piece and continued to express his unique place in English society. He simply did not fit in. In the first place, he was too imposing and had been around too long—predating almost every other serious author of his own age by years or decades. His worldview formed part of the raw material from which they made their own and which they were required to differ from in order to establish their authorial identities. His well-known generosity and helpfulness had two sides—he encouraged and promoted the work of others, in so doing promoting the respectability of authorship itself, which was important to him, but he also had very particular views about what was good and entertaining and what the role of authors in society should be. Unsurprisingly, he was his own best example of the right sort of thing: socially engaged, entertaining, lively, and fanciful. He often called himself “the Inimitable,” and indeed he was exactly that. But for that very reason, he didn’t fit in.
Additionally, as Dickens grew more radical in his political views (and more idiosyncratic—we should not interpret him as the sort of left liberal we know today—he was racist, imperialist, sometimes anti-Semitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions), he divided himself more and more from his fellow novelists. How do we make sense of this? It is important to note, to begin with, that the literary world of Victorian England was small and personal. Writers and editors knew each other, often socialized and worked together, and published each other’s works to a degree that simply no longer obtains even in England, where the literary world is significantly more interconnected than that of the United States. Obviously, however, no one had any power to restrict the publication of Dickens’s work. He was his own editor, and virtually his own publisher, and his relationship to his audience continued unimpeded.
All they could really do was complain. Charlotte Brontë complained that she disliked Dickens’s “extravagance” (but neither was Jane Eyre to his taste). George Eliot, whose first two books Dickens praised in very kind letters, considered his work shallow and melodramatic. Thackeray, Dickens’s sometime friend, admired several of Dickens’s works, especially Dombey and Son and A Christmas Carol, but felt a strong rivalry toward Dickens, which, it must have been irritating for Thackeray to sense, Dickens hardly noticed. (Dickens judged Thackeray on how he conducted himself as an author, not, it appears, on what he wrote.) Trollope called Dickens “Mr. Popular Sentiment.” In fact, it appears that Dickens considered his own literary tastes to be private ones. He may have liked or disliked certain books, but he always supported the social role of authorship and the success of authors in general. They had to denigrate him, but he did not have to denigrate them and, indeed, seems to have understood that his power to promote or denigrate the work of any individual was enormous and should be used with caution. He did not, for example, review books. As an editor, he made work available. As a famous author, he did not make his judgments, especially negative ones, well known.
These most famous authors were not the only ones. There were many working writers and critics whose work has no modern currency, and they, too, all had their opinions of Dickens and his set. Generally that opinion was negative, based partly on the sorts of things published in Household Words and partly on the class origins and personal habits of the writers. Dickens had always preferred to surround himself with self-made men from backgrounds similar to his, to dress loudly, to go out to all sorts of theatrical entertainments. He didn’t fit in.
He made fun. He made fun of the Civil Service, he made fun of the courts of Chancery, he made fun of the aristocracy and the factory owners and the bankers and the managerial class. He made fun of educators and moneylenders and women who married for money. He made fun of Parliament. He made fun of selfishness and self-interest of all kinds. He made fun of all sorts of religious types, but especially Evangelicals. He made fun of feckless young men and libidinous old men and government officials like beadles. But more important, his mind did not work by means of analytical sifting of premises and data, or through a refined analysis of motive and moral reckoning, as, say, George Eliot’s mind worked. Dickens’s mind worked symbolically. He apprehended the world through figures that were endowed with meaning. Objects come alive, and people become mechanical. His style invariably expresses a worldview that seems almost unmediated by normal reasonable discourse, as if there is no objective reality, only a subjective reality in which meanings present themselves in terms of vivid figures, come into conflict with one another, and shift. Eliot, whose art depends on the notion of characters living in an objective world that they must come to understand through experience and reasoning, whose mysteries are hidden in gradations of motive and action, would of course not appreciate the terror and joy of Dickens’s highly distinct subjectivity. But Dickens appeals to that part of the reader that recognizes that much is left undiscussed by reasonable discourse, that people and institutions often do populate our inner lives not as who they are but as what they mean to us, and that we often do not see them whole and complex, but simple and strange. This view, of course, has an affinity with childhood, as Dickens had an affinity with childhood, but it also has an affinity with many states of consciousness throughout life, including madness or obsession and exalted states of love or spiritual transcendence. That Dickens submerged into his style many good, useful, and humane ideas is a testament to the fact that his vision did not prevent him from living and working in the world, but simply intensified his experience of it. As he said to Forster, “Only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is.”
Hard Times was published in August 1854, and Dickens once again took a short break from writing novels, though he continued to write for Household Words. Amateur theatricals were consuming more of his time, and in December, as a charity fund-raiser, he tried a new thing, reading A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth aloud to an audience in Birmingham for the cause of workingmen’s education. He had plenty of experience reading the Christmas books aloud; each of them had been introduced to his friends in this way, and all of them had gone over well—when he read The Chimes aloud, he reported William Macready “undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa,” and his painter friend, Daniel Maclise (who did a sketch of the occasion), said, “There was not a dry eye in the house.” Dickens read three nights in Birmingham, the third night to an audience of two thousand workingmen and -women who each paid sixpence for tickets. When he came home, thrilled with both the experience and his reception, he told his editor at Household Words, W. H. Wills, according to Wills, “If they will have him he will do it.” The idea was not to make money by it, as yet. There was still a sense of impropriety attached to the idea of an author performing in public, but with his love of and talent for the stage, Dickens certainly was drawn to the idea if only, for now, as a mode of raising money for good causes.
When December 1855 came around, Dickens set up several more charitable readings, one in Reading, one in Sherborne, and one in Bradford that attracted 3,700 people, followed by another in London. He read A Christmas Carol each time and used the story and the time of year and the occasions to promote the sort of openhearted generosity that had always been important to him. But the moneymaking possibilities were obvious and the temptation to exploit them growing stronger. As important, though, was Dickens’s palpable sense of his own popularity and power. It was one thing to act in a play or a farce, in character and often speaking the words of another author. It was quite different to say his own words, passing through the personae of characters he himself had created, giving voice and action to his own inner life. His daughter Mamie once reported having an illness as a child and spending the day in his study while he was working: “He suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward but evidently not seeing me, he began talking in a low voice.”
Dickens’s children were now eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, fourteen, eleven, nine, eight, six, and nearly three, seven boys and two girls. He was a strict and orderly father, who insisted upon neatness and quiet, especially while he was working, but who also had a knack for talking to young children and eliciting confidences in return. Music, dancing, and performing were a significant part of the Dickens family life. It seems clear that he did not want his children to repeat any of his early experiences of poverty, family instability, or street life; they were educated and prepared for a typical English middle-class adulthood. He did complain that they weren’t especially ambitious or hardworking, at least in comparison with the energy he had brought to making his way at their age. They were not raised on tales of their father’s youth; during a Christmas game toward the end of his life, when most of his children were in their twenties and thirties, Dickens said, “Warren’s Blacking, Thirty Strand,” and none of the children had any idea what he meant. Now, in 1855, it was getting to be the time when the older children would need to be provided with careers, and Charley, whom Miss Coutts had sent for a while to Eton, seemed particularly unsettled. He went to Germany for two years, to study banking, but Dickens wrote apologetically to Miss Coutts that Charley had “less fixed purpose and energy than [I] could have supposed in a child of mine.” Thackeray’s daughters were friends of Dickens’s daughters, and Thackeray commented on their elaborate style of dress. Catherine remarked to a friend that Dickens always liked the children best when they were babies and toddlers. At any rate, his restlessness seems to have been partly a result of his populous household. He often traveled alone or with male friends, both for work and for sightseeing, and 1855 was no exception. He spent two weeks in Paris with Wilkie Collins in February, then took the family to Folkestone in July. In November, he moved the family to Paris, where they stayed until May 1856, although Dickens himself returned to England from time to time. From June through August, Dickens summered with his family in Boulogne.
He was now writing Little Dorrit, though it was not going at all well, and his letters to Forster were full of frustration and anxiety. His initial ideas were thematic ones—building upon his success with Bleak House and his views of the conduct of the Crimean War, he wanted to explore the notion of “Nobody’s Fault,” which was the original title of the novel. But it was evidently not productive, because though he began thinking in January and expected by May to start publishing in November, in August and September he was still contemplating starting over. The novel begins with Rigaud and Cavaletto in jail in Marseilles, Dickens’s first depiction of non-English characters in a setting quite distant in both geography and ambience from London. It is distinctly not what Mrs. Gaskell would have called “Dickensy,” and when the English characters enter in chapter 2, they are not very Dickensy, either. In particular, Arthur Clennam is almost a blank—quiet, colorless, already resigned, and even beaten down by his upbringing and his life in the Far East (which is not evoked at all). A few other minor characters are introduced, but the novel doesn’t really gain any energy until chapter 6, when the scene moves to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, where the eponymous Little Dorrit lives with her father, brother, and sister. Dickens’s purpose from the beginning, one that he mentioned to Forster, was to depict ever-tightening connections and relationships among a large cast of characters who at first seem to bump up against each other randomly, like travelers passing together through the same scenes, only to part and bump into one another again later.
Dickens returns to some of the themes he explored in Dombey and Son, but now the sources of money are more various than they were in Dombey. The essential source is productive creativity. Property and rents and trade have a more problematic moral character; how they are managed dictates what good they are. Banking requires prudence, exactness, and benevolence but is not inherently corrupt. Investment or speculation is inherently corrupt. Dickens also explores the uses money is put to and finds them generally bad. In Little Dorrit, prosperity itself is almost a guarantee that wealth will be put to bad use. The primary example of this is that when poor and in debt, the members of the Dorrit family live generally in kindly intimacy with one another, but when raised to sudden wealth, kindness, service, and even expressions of love are considered humiliating. Who pays, who is supported, and whether these arrangements are legitimate is a constant concern of the novel.
Love circulates like money but is mostly powerless against the wholesale commodification of social and domestic relationships. In Little Dorrit, Dickens shows a world made up of debtors and cheats, among whom one or two decent, hardworking, self-effacing figures move silently, often dishonored, rarely regarded, and only at the last minute, when almost all hope is gone, rewarded.
Dickens’s vision in Little Dorrit is not only an exceptionally dark view of human nature, it is specifically a dark view of British society and of the effects of British social and economic structure upon British citizens. The Circumlocution Office and the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings who inhabit it are pervasive in both government and society, making sure that no business that might promote the common good is ever done, while all relationships are rendered false. The Circumlocution principle is shown to be more powerful and important even than the Chancery court, in Bleak House,because while Chancery court touches upon all aspects of British society, it does not define them, as the Circumlocution Office does in Little Dorrit. There are only two refuges from it, exile and prison.
The plot of Little Dorrit is overelaborate and creaky. The two halves, the first of which follows the Dorrits in their poverty and the second of which follows them in their wealth, have a profound simplicity that makes William and Fanny two of Dickens’s most complex and ruthlessly drawn characters. But their effect is undermined by the convolutions of the Clennam plot, which involves Arthur’s long-lost unknown mother, who died mad, a twin for Jeremiah Flintwinch, the melodramatic recuperation of Mrs. Clennam, and the literal collapse of her house. Rigaud/Blandois is simultaneously overdrawn and uninteresting—too ubiquitous and without even the most minimal complexity or fun. Even Bounderby, the villain of Hard Times, is fun. Even Uriah Heep is a little fun. Rigaud/Blandois tempts the reader to skip his parts from the beginning to the end.
Dickens was frequently criticized in his own time for not portraying his characters with much complexity or depth. George Eliot, for example, wrote in 1856 that “he failed to give us their psychological character.” But many Dickens characters are beautifully layered. Almost invariably, though, these, like Dora or Flora Finching or William Dorrit, are his voluble ones, and they reveal themselves through their own dialogue or monologue. Flora Finching is a particularly appropriate example of several aspects of Dickens’s working style. For one thing, she was based on Mrs. Winter, whose talkativeness Dickens had found so offputting in the spring of 1856. At first, the portrayal of her seems cruel, and must have seemed so to Mrs. Winter herself, who, Dickens was well aware, read all of his work attentively. She is not only fat, she is flirtatious and foolish. Arthur finds her repugnant and his former feeling unaccountable. She drinks. But Dickens gives free rein to her tongue, and many of her idea associations are funny and smart; she also shows considerable self-knowledge. She is kindhearted. By the end of the novel, she is one of the most endearing characters, perhaps the only truly endearing character, who clearly understands her failures, her father’s faults, and the difficulties of Mr. F.’s aunt, but on the whole chooses to make the best of things in a world where most of the characters choose quite the opposite. Dickens understood intuitively that speech is a form of narrative, wherein the speaker narrates his or her own life to others as well as to him-or herself. He anticipates in this not only Freud, but also Bakhtin and other theorists of the novel who maintain that the uniqueness of the novel as an art form derives from the clash and the complementarity of many voices. Dickens was also wonderful at the sort of indirect discourse where the author in the narrative voice appropriates various languages that occur in the general discourse, sometimes for whole paragraphs and sometimes for only a phrase. In chapter 24, when Amy takes dinner at Flora’s, Mr. F.’s aunt is not at the table. She “was, for the time, laid up in ordinary in her chamber,” that is, like a noncommissioned ship that is still afloat. Often Dickens goes on at some length in this manner. When the Plornishes visit Arthur in prison, the narrator notes, “Mr. Plornish amiably growled, in his philosophical but not quite lucid manner, that there was ups, you see, and there was downs. It was in vain to ask why ups, why downs; there they was, you know.” This form of discourse often functions metaphorically, but its main effect is to widen the world of the novel, to refer to and incorporate a huge variety of colloquial forms of speech, and to reinforce the idea that the novel mimics life. That appropriating, mimicking, and delighting in the plentiful varieties of English speech was one of Dickens’s signal traits, all of his acquaintances agreed upon, and he was perfectly alive to how speech and characteristic action revealed character.
The other side of this trait, though, is that he was often drawn to portray his positive characters as quiet, repressed, or self-effacing, in contrast with the parading egos of morally neutral or negative characters. Dickens’s final image of Arthur and Amy swallowed up in the roar of the city not only portrays their unique fate, it also encapsulates the effect of their portrayals throughout the novel. The clamor of the surrounding personalities has served as a continual distraction from the blanks where their personalities should be. If we give Dickens credit for intentionally delineating them as he does, then at this point in his career, his art is asserting that personality is a form of ego, and, as with The Old Curiosity Shop, there is no way to exist expressively in the world without partaking of its egomania. What Eliot often did well that Dickens did not do was anatomize her quiet characters, such as Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch. Understanding layers of intention and desire beneath a quiet exterior was one of Eliot’s interests and a strength of her writing—her characters are often portrayed in solitude, where they are free to reveal (or the author is free to reveal for them) their true natures. Dickens’s characters reveal their true natures through social intercourse. He has not got much access to them if they hold themselves apart from others.
Little Dorrit achieved excellent sales. The first numbers sold around forty thousand copies each, and though by the last numbers sales had declined to just over thirty thousand, still that was much higher than David Copperfield and nearly as high as Bleak House. Some critics liked it (George Bernard Shaw said “it was a more seditious book than Das Kapital,” a definite compliment), others were offended, others found it too drawn out. Forster did not like it, faulting its failures of invention and its labored quality. It ran from the end of 1855 through mid-1857 and was published in volume form in June.
In 1856, during the writing of Little Dorrit, John Forster, who was the same age as Dickens, forty-four, married a wealthy widow, certainly to the surprise and somewhat to the dismay of his friends, including Dickens. Forster and his new wife immediately set up rather elaborate housekeeping in the heart of the very society that Dickens was busily excoriating in his novel; Dickens was a bit disapproving. Forster had grown more politically conservative since 1850, precisely during the time when Dickens was growing more radical. Dickens still wrote openly to Forster of his most important concerns, but Forster was not as supportive as he had been. As a result, Dickens’s letters took on a note of defensive explanation that makes them especially informative. Forster had his own opinions about marriage, now that he was married, and his opinions grew out of just that sort of compatibility of abilities and views that Dickens missed in his own—he may have disapproved of what marriage into society had done to the old Forster, but he would certainly have noticed that Forster had achieved something, through luck or good judgment, that he himself missed very much.
Also during the writing of Little Dorrit, Dickens had realized yet another dream, which was to buy Gad’s Hill Place, a large house near Chatham, in Kent, the very house that he and his father had often admired when Dickens was a boy. Dickens wrote of its purchase to a friend, “I happened to be walking past . . . with my sub-editor of Household Words when I said to him: ‘You see that house? It has always a curious interest for me, because when I was a small boy down in these parts I thought it the most beautiful house (I suppose because of its famous old cedar trees) ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to be a clever man perhaps I might own that house or another such house . . .’ We came back to town and my friend went out to dinner. Next morning he came in great excitement, and said, ‘It is written that you were to have that house at Gad’s Hill Place. The lady I had allotted to me to take down to dinner yesterday began to speak of that neighborhood, ‘You know it?’ I said, ‘I have been there today.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I know it very well, I was a child there, in the house they call Gad’s Hill Place. My father was the rector, and lived there many years. He has just died, has left it to me, and I want to sell it.’ ” Dickens, of course, could not resist. The house had associations not only with his childhood, but also with Shakespeare—Falstaff has a famous scene in Henry IV that takes place at Gad’s Hill.
Dickens’s restlessness infected every facet of his life. In the two years between June 1855 and June 1857, he had bought two new houses, lived at Folkestone, Paris, Boulogne, and London, and traveled besides for speeches and business. His level of activity, with writing, editing, reading in public, and managing the lives of his children, was higher than ever. His enthusiasm for amateur acting and play production was immense; he supervised the production of, and took roles in, six plays and farces, all of which were put on in the small theater at Tavistock House. The evidence of his writings, his frenzy of activities, and his letters about both personal and political subjects show that he was approaching a crisis and that he himself had identified the crisis as a domestic one. Dickens’s life continued to look strangely modern, ruled by a need for freedom of all kinds and increasingly impatient with the typical patterns of his Victorian world.