WILKIE COLLINS, Dickens’s friend and fellow writer, had written a play called The Frozen Deep. As always, Dickens was more than an adviser in its composition—almost a collaborator, though Collins’s name was listed as author. When the play went into production, at the end of 1856, for Twelfth Night performances at Tavistock House, Dickens became the director, star, stage manager, theater owner, and moving force. The play took its theme from an Arctic expedition of 1845, the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, in which all were lost, with some allegations of cannibalism. Dickens played the leader of the expedition, Richard Wardour, whom Collins had envisioned as the villain, but whom Dickens rewrote and played as an angry, complex, and self-sacrificing man “perpetually seeking and never finding true affection.” Dickens rehearsed, sometimes in company and sometimes alone, all through November and December 1856. According to Ackroyd, he kept his monologues to himself, no doubt knowing that he was about to create a sensation, and then, in January, he allowed reviewers to come to the performances along with the invited guests; they testified to the sensation he succeeded in creating. The entire audience was deeply affected; Collins reportedly said, “This is an awful thing!” One reviewer noted the “irrational” depths of Dickens’s performance (which we may interpret in a Freudian way as seeming to come from the id or the unconscious, or in a Jungian way as seeming to come from the collective unconscious, or in a more traditional way as seeming to carry a force beyond that of a single individual, as being “inspired,” a state Dickens was entirely familiar with). The requirements of the evening’s program meant that Dickens had to change almost at once for his part in the farce, “Uncle John,” but afterward, during the dancing, one of the ladies present reported that Dickens asked her to waltz and she “was whirled around almost to giddiness.” Dickens had found a way to express his feelings about his life in his own voice and with his own body, rather than through the medium of a character in a novel. The expression of his anger and his disappointment and his love for the woman Richard Wardour gives up to his rival in the play had the powerful effect of both arousing and relieving his generally repressed feelings about his marital situation.
The lives of novelists, and actors, too, are marked by bouts of emotion and changes of circumstances—love affairs, divorces, outbursts of all kinds—that supposedly contrast with the lives of citizens with more traditional employments. This flux is conventionally seen as evidence of instability on the part of artists and ascribed to wounds of childhood, or artistic temperament, or selfishness. But the true pattern, I think, is evident in Dickens’s relationship to his work and is most evident from the inception of David Copperfield, in 1849, to the end of his life. Every novelist brings some knowledge of dramatic states of mind to his writing. If he or she had no such knowledge, then he or she would have no business with, and no interest in, novels or drama, since both rely on the depiction of those states for narrative or dramatic interest. Audiences and readers want something to happen, and writers are ready to portray some of the things that can happen. Often this knowledge does have its root in the experience of the artist, though as frequently it has its origins in sensitive and eager observation (both of these were certainly true of Dickens). But the experience of writing about and depicting these dramatic incidents is at least as important as their origins, because the novelist bodies them forth, comments upon them, reacts to them; he learns from them and gives them both form and meaning, rather like, in a simpler way, expressing anger in words sometimes relieves feelings and sometimes exacerbates them. What might have remained inchoate becomes specific through making a narrative of it in a way that is analogous to psychotherapy. The novelist, unlike the patient, defines his story as fiction and therefore retains at least some distance from it, but he nevertheless learns to interpret it. Often it loses its power over him, as Dickens came to terms with his months in the blacking factory after giving them to David Copperfield. But he may also learn things about his true state of mind that might have remained shadowy had he not embodied them. In David Copperfield and every subsequent novel, Dickens created ideal heroines—Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, Sissy Jupe and Rachael (in Hard Times), and Amy Dorrit—who contrasted strongly with his perception of his wife. They were healthy, industrious, intelligent, companionable, slender, unselfish pre-mothers with the strength to withstand circumstances and enter into a kinship with flawed but loving men, several of whom were overt or covert stand-ins for Dickens himself. In every novel they were contrasted with other female characters—Dora, Flora, Lady Dedlock, Louisa—who were not rewarded with male companionship at the end of the novel. And with each novel, Dickens taught himself that he was missing what the characters he wrote about managed to achieve (and what several of the men around him also managed to achieve—his father, whose insolvency frequently aroused Dickens’s scorn, was evidently happily married to Dickens’s mother for more than forty years in a sort of “I will never leave Mr. Micawber”–type union). Art that has a revelatory effect upon the reader had its first revelatory effect upon the writer; the process of working out the plots and the relationships in an ambitious novel is always a learning process. In Dickens’s case, the fact that the novels were published as they were written and the fact that they were so long and multilayered meant that the challenge of maintaining the forward motion along with the integrity of the story and the characters was enormous. What the author knows at the end cannot possibly be the same as what he knew at the beginning, and what he knows has reference to every aspect of his emotional and symbolic life.
Additionally, he has only himself as his guide and judge. The leavening presence of, say, a psychotherapist is not there to mediate the continuous sense of revelation the novelist feels as he gives meaning to his conceptions and feelings. For Dickens, who lived so public a life, there was some index of how far in or out of the mainstream of conventional thinking he was through reviews, sales, and opinions of friends, therefore some potential therapistlike check upon his wildest thoughts, but the feedback was mixed. High sales bolstered his sense of being right; he never read reviews; he had come to discount the opinions of Forster and other close friends. His primary ambition, which was to arouse strong feelings of sympathy and pathos in his audience, was almost invariably realized—at some remove through the novels, with great immediacy through the performances of The Frozen Deep. This sympathy he must certainly have interpreted as support or approval, moving him along bit by bit toward acting upon the feelings he had been portraying for so long.
Authors live in a dialogue with their work, and their work is their inner life made concrete. Were they not susceptible to the reality of art, they wouldn’t have become authors in the first place. They would naturally be at least as susceptible to the power of their own art as to the power of the art of others, and from the beginning of his career, Dickens’s letters attest to his enthusiasm for and belief in every novel he wrote. When he came to the end of Little Dorrit, in June 1857, he was ripe for a change. Such a term, however, misstates and slights the state of mind he was in, which was very vulnerable, though his vulnerability was cloaked in his usual wit and activity.
During the later spring of 1857, Hans Christian Andersen visited the Dickens family at Gad’s Hill Place. Expected to stay only briefly, Andersen made himself at home for five weeks (after he left, Dickens put a note in the room he had used that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES”) and noticed, it was said later, that Catherine was unhappy from time to time. The rest of the family did not make him feel especially welcome; the strain may have been caused by him, or he may have imposed himself upon a situation where strain was already being felt. On June 8, Dickens’s friend and fellow writer Douglas Jerrold died suddenly. They had known each other for many years; of the two of them, another writer wrote, “Jerrold flies at his enemy like a tiger, and never lets go while there is life in him; while Dickens contents himself by giving him a sound drubbing. Jerrold is most in earnest, but Dickens is more effective.” Jerrold left a wife and a daughter, and Dickens immediately began to arrange for some sort of performances or readings to benefit them. The goal was £2,000, a considerable sum that Dickens was confident he could raise. At the end of June, he read A Christmas Carol to a large crowd. On July 4, he and his fellow amateurs, who included Georgina Hogarth and his daughters Mamie and Katey in the women’s parts, gave a private performance of The Frozen Deep for Queen Victoria and her party that was also a great success. Other performances of Collins’s play followed, but when it appeared that the planned performances were not going to earn the expected sum (Dickens liked his productions to be both elaborate and perfect; often costs overran projections), Dickens agreed to put on a performance in a large hall in Manchester. When he went to have a look at it, he realized that Georgina and his daughters did not have the skills to project their lines in such a large space, and he asked a friend to recommend some professional actresses.
The Ternan family, who were hired to play the parts, consisted of the mother, Frances, and three daughters, Fanny, Maria, and Ellen. Frances had acted with Charles Macready in various Shakespearean productions and was a serious and respected actress; the father, Thomas, had managed several theaters and was also a specialist in serious theater. He had died not long before, possibly, according to Ackroyd, of the late-stage effects of syphilis. The two older daughters were accomplished actresses, and the addition of the family gave the production the energy it needed, in more ways than one.
Dickens wrote of the effect of the first night’s performance, “It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together in the palm of one’s hand . . . and to see the hardened Carpenters at the sides crying and trembling at it. . . .” Even Maria Ternan, experienced though she was, wept as she cradled the dying Richard Wardour (Dickens) in her arms, so that Dickens had to recall her to her professional obligations. Only two performances had been planned, but the play was such a sensation that a third was added. Of his own experiences at Manchester, Dickens later wrote to Collins, “I have never known a moment’s peace or content since the last night of ‘The Frozen Deep.’ ”
In September, the Ternans were appearing, during Doncaster race week, at a theater in Doncaster. Dickens arranged a trip with Wilkie Collins for the composition of a piece for Household Words to be titled “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.” Collins was younger than Dickens, unmarried, and likely to overlook any risky doings, since he himself had considerable experience of the seamier side of Victorian life. They traveled first to Scotland, where Dickens got them into trouble mountain climbing and had to carry the injured Collins down the hillside. Collins’s injury, a sprained ankle, did not prevent Dickens from taking him on to Doncaster. There, he was with the Ternans, and Ellen, several times, but what they did can only be inferred from Dickens’s letters and writings. All that is known is that Ellen had small parts in plays, that Dickens went out several times, that Dickens was seen at the theater and cheered by the audience, and that he left suddenly, writing in a letter afterward, “The Doncaster unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute.”
In October, as a result of a dispute, Dickens told Catherine’s maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that he could sleep separately from her. The origin of the dispute remains unclear (though Catherine had frequently expressed jealousy of his feelings for other women, going all the way back to Madame de la Rue, and with good reason), but its result was irrevocable—they never lived as man and wife again, and thenceforth, Dickens seems to have allowed his dislike of her to emerge more and more openly.
Dickens’s feelings about the women in his life were invariably strong. What he said of his love for Maria Beadnell, that it was a four-year obsession, applied in degree if not in kind to his feelings about every woman with whom he felt a connection. Sometimes the strong feelings were positive, as for Mary Hogarth, Georgina Hogarth, and his daughters; sometimes they were negative. Over the years he expressed contempt and dislike for his mother, for his wife, and for his wife’s mother. In some sense, it does not matter what these women were actually like or how others saw them. After Dickens had endowed them with a particular symbolic meaning, his feelings about them did not admit of contradiction. Everything they did or said just reconfirmed his opinions and intensified his feelings. His work showed that he had ideas about how a woman should be. The ideal women characters, like Esther Summerson and Agnes Wickfield, are balanced by portraits of many decidedly nonideal characters such as Mrs. Skewton and Mrs. Gradgrind. That he didn’t understand women is a modern truism that is no less applicable to other men of his time. That he didn’t admit the claims of particular women that he knew, once he had turned against them, to any sort of intelligence, justification, or respect is a greater sign of Dickens’s special idiosyncrasies of character. His relationships with men allowed gray areas and gradations of feeling. He had a falling-out with Douglas Jerrold but made friends again and exerted himself to benefit his wife and daughter; his friendship with Forster changed and he came to disapprove of several aspects of Forster’s personality, but he never turned away from him completely. He did not always get along with Thackeray, and was quite possibly aware of the intermittent animus and envy Thackeray expressed toward him, but he either accorded him respect or kept quiet (until Thackeray took Catherine’s part in Dickens’s divorce). While he was frequently angry with and contemptuous of his father, he was reconciled to him toward the end of his father’s life and treated him affectionately. But even Miss Coutts, his partner in charitable works, with whom he had what might be considered a more manly friendship, since it was based on common projects more than affectional feelings, never returned to a state of intimacy with him once he felt she betrayed him.
Dickens felt that he paid a price for the intensity of his imagination. In September, he wrote to Forster, “I am always deeply sensible of the wonderful exercise I have of life and its highest sensations, and I have said to myself for years, and have honestly and truly felt, this is a drawback to such a career [of writing novels] and is not to be complained of.” But things had changed. He continued, “But the years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that something might be done.” A few days later, he wrote to Forster again, reconfirming his resolve to act by countering Forster’s arguments, “She [Catherine] is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us . . . and if I were sick or disabled tomorrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, even since the days you remember when Mary was born. . . .” Mary was now nineteen years old.
What was happening to Dickens is all too recognizable to those of us living in the divorce culture—as long as he was committed to the marriage, the situation seemed endurable, if not desirable, but the appearance of an alternative retrospectively transformed not only his entire experience of the marriage, but his view of his wife’s experience. There is actually no evidence at this point, or later, except what Dickens himself reported, that Catherine ceased to love Dickens or that she would not have chosen to remain in the marriage. Even Dickens admits that she continued “amiable and complying,” but he steadily recasts their life together in order to justify its coming end. In October, he wrote to Forster, “Too late to say, put the curb on, and don’t rush at hills—the wrong man to say it to.”
Also in October, the Ternan family returned from Doncaster and took rooms in London. Ellen got an acting job at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and worked there for most of the next two years. Dickens seems to have been instrumental in getting her the job and wrote a note thanking the theater manager for the favor in mid-October. But if he expected immediate gratification in his new relationship, he seems to have been disappointed. He remained in a restless and anxious state of flux, unable to begin a new novel or to bring his family situation to closure. In fact, as his marriage moved toward open rupture and divorce, he encountered the most disagreeable side to his life as a public man; he was brewing up a scandal in which he was required to play the villain’s role, and for at least the next year he played it, willy-nilly, to the hilt.
At the same time, he was moving toward giving public readings for money. Before Christmas, he gave two benefit readings of A Christmas Carol. In the late winter, he gave a fund-raising speech for the Hospital for Sick Children, which was still struggling to establish itself. The speech was so eloquent that it raised £3,000 (roughly comparable to $100,000 today) in one night. And Ackroyd reports an incident in which Dickens went with Forster to a playwright’s reading of his own play and demonstrated afterward how the playwright should have read his own work. A bystander reported that, by contrast to the playwright’s rendition, “the characters seemed to stand out and almost walk about the room.” Queen Victoria let it be known that she wanted to hear A Christmas Carol at a private reading, but Dickens was reluctant, feeling that he needed an audience to create the best effect. Then he did another benefit reading in a large hall in Edinburgh, now consciously preparing himself and his material for his new moneymaking project. The reading was a tremendous success, confirming Dickens in his decision to go on with the idea, and in April he gave his first paid public reading. Many tickets were sold, the audience was receptive from the beginning, and Dickens asserted from the platform that his primary justification for what was considered by some to be an unorthodox and even undignified activity was that “whatever brings a public man and his public face to face, on terms of mutual confidence and respect, is a good thing.” To his friends he confided two other motives—his unsettled personal life made him especially restless, and he wanted to make a lot of money in a short time.
Knowing as we do the great success of Dickens’s new endeavor, and the great passion and talent that he brought to it, giving public performances of his work seems in retrospect to have been a natural flowering and integration of several of his signal talents. It is hard to understand quite what had been holding him back without remembering the social taint that surrounded both public performance and the appearance of working for money. Forster disapproved in part because he had gotten a little stuffy in the 1850s, but also because Dickens himself had worked over the years to make novel writing a respectable endeavor. Forster worried that the public readings would endanger Dickens’s respectability and the respectability of the novel. But, in fact, Dickens was not respectable; he had just finished attacking “respectability” in Little Dorrit, and he still did not fit into English middle-class life. He still acted on his deep-seated urge for freedom, although the consequences of doing so were often painful. He began to have new associates, younger and more like Wilkie Collins than Forster; some of his former associates, for example the middle-class Hogarths, whom he had once been pleased to join, he now detested. Thus it is instructive to look upon this juncture in Dickens’s life in terms of its expression of his relationship to English class structure. He had realized his parents’ ambition to be taken as stable members of the middle class and raised his own children to live in the middle class without any real alternative. But for himself he had reserved, with increasing difficulty and inner turmoil, the freedom to witness, criticize, and eventually break out of the middle class, at first through his art and then through his actions. The public readings were a gamble that could have more than a monetary payoff. When they worked as quality performances that were also popular and remunerative, they confirmed that Dickens was beyond class, that he was, as he called himself, “the Inimitable,” a unique, entirely national treasure. Thus, again, he prefigures the modern period, where celebrities are required to throw off their allegiances to specific places or backgrounds and to exercise the freedom to be claimed by every paying customer. The professional Dickens, like the professional Rita Hayworth or the professional Paul Newman, inherently asserts the human kinship that goes beyond class. It is assumed that nuances of style or characterization or performance or insight can be comprehended by all members of the audience, whatever their class and educational background. Dickens had asserted this before, in writing to be read aloud, in writing for monthly and weekly serials, in writing of the triumphs and tribulations of working-class characters, in criticizing English society and culture. But now, in taking up public readings and being exquisitely responsive to his audience (he always wanted them to laugh and cry openly, preferably in quick succession), he asserted it again and more strongly.
After the first reading in London, he continued to read systematically, in London for three months and then in the rest of England, Scotland, and Ireland for another three months. In the meantime, he and his friends were fashioning his divorce from Catherine. The catalyst for the open breach seems to have been Catherine’s discovery that Dickens had given a piece of jewelry to Ellen Ternan, followed by jealousy, followed by some sort of demand on Dickens’s part that Catherine visit or apologize to the Ternans. Possibly, having been found out enraged Dickens; he announced to Catherine that they would be separated (there is no record of the actual events, only several versions supplied by several sources). He proposed successive plans, ranging from the public appearance of harmony covering the actuality of separation through various forms of living apart, including the idea of Catherine moving, alone, to France, while Dickens and Georgina maintained the household and the children. Catherine, who had always been slow, compliant, and well-meaning, was no doubt appalled by what was happening to her and turned to her family, particularly her mother and younger sister. After that, the conflict became truly acrimonious, with accusations and rumors of an astounding nature, principally that Dickens had committed incest with Georgina and that Georgina was actually the mother of the Dickens children. Georgina was then examined by a doctor and discovered to be a virgin, at which point that particular accusation was dropped. From this, though, Dickens developed a sense of himself as the injured party that stuck with him for the rest of his life and fueled a strong hatred for the Hogarths and for almost everyone who took Catherine’s side in the dispute. Even Miss Coutts was not, in the end, forgiven.
Dickens’s bad behavior in the divorce extended to an attempt to alienate the children from their mother, which he justified by declaring that she had always been a bad mother and that the children, especially his daughters, did not care for her (which they later contradicted). One of them considered this behavior on their father’s part “wicked,” and the other considered it “mad,” but no one could prevail on Dickens not to see it through, no matter what the implications or the consequences. Once he had identified himself as the Hogarths’ victim, he proceeded to repudiate all relationships with anyone who had relationships with them. While the children were allowed to visit their mother, they were instructed to leave at once if Mrs. Hogarth or Catherine’s sister happened to be there.
Not only did Dickens act out of fury, he also expressed his fury in public, though he disguised it as self-justification. On May 25, he wrote a letter to his readings manager, with a cover note asking him to show it around. The letter, which came to be known as the “violated” letter, asserted that the separation had long been Catherine’s idea, because she was not suited to life with him; that she had never taken care of the children because of some “peculiarity of her character,” but instead had them brought up by Georgina. Of Georgina, he also says, “Nothing has, on many occasions, stood between us and a separation but Mrs. Dickens’ sister.” He goes on to state that he is acting only in the interests of others, and that he and his children are in full agreement on every aspect of the conflict. Needless to say, others’ accounts differed from Dickens’s own, and the actions of such principals as Dickens’s son Charley, now twenty-one, and Catherine herself did not fit in logically with Dickens’s version. But once he had written it down, it became the truth for him, and he adhered to the idea that everything he did, including making Catherine a generous allowance, “as if Mrs. Dickens were a lady of distinction and I a man of fortune,” had been misconstrued by enemies who unforgivably betrayed him.
Much of the letter is about the innocent purity of Georgina. In the last paragraph, he alludes to “the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard.” The beginning of the paragraph, a reference to “two wicked persons,” who are probably Mrs. Hogarth and her youngest daughter, would indicate that he was referring to Georgina, but another incident shows that he was very sensitive to other rumors. Thackeray, going into a club where Dickens was also a member, was told that Dickens was sleeping with his sister-in-law, and he replied, “No, it’s an actress.” When his reply got back to Dickens, Dickens was enraged.
The letter, going about, did not have the justifying effect that Dickens had counted on, but rather fanned the rumors and the general disapproval. Dickens had not reckoned with the impossibility of proving a negative, and he had no press agent to muzzle him. He then went on to an even larger public mistake.
He decided that a public statement was necessary to counteract the rumors that were going about, so in early June he composed another letter, which he sent to various organs of the media and also published in Household Words. A hundred fifty years later, it is still an embarrassment to read, an aggressive floundering in the mire of public infamy that asserts that the situation is unimportant and not a problem for the participants, except for the “misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel . . . and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like unwholesome air.” This letter did not have the desired effect either, mostly because far fewer readers than Dickens thought were privy to his troubles, so it caused rumors to proliferate rather than otherwise, as, of course, new speculations were added to old ones. Dickens wished the letter to appear in several publications, and many declined, most notably Punch, which was published by Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of Household Words. The Punch group included Thackeray and several others, with whom Dickens was never intimate again after his divorce.
In the course of legal negotiations concerning the settlement, which took place during May, trustees had to be appointed for both parties; and Frederick Evans, Dickens’s publisher, was appointed as one trustee for Catherine, along with Dickens’s friend and the editor of Punch, Mark Lemon. They apparently took up her cause with some reluctance. Evans, in particular, became her protector (she later moved to a house not far from him). With absolutely no understanding that the situation required her trustees to negotiate for her in good faith, Dickens subsequently broke off relations with both of them, consigning them to the ranks of the unforgivable. Since one of them was his publisher, that meant that all of his publishing enterprises, including Household Words, had to be renegotiated. At first, Dickens tried to buy out the quarter interest in the magazine belonging to Bradbury and Evans, but they wouldn’t sell, so Dickens announced in November that he was folding the magazine. In February 1859, he began work on another magazine of the same type, which he named All the Year Round and which he and his subeditor, W. H. Wills, owned 75 percent/25 percent and published themselves. As for his novels, he returned to Chapman and Hall for book publication. Edward Chapman, his old publisher, with whom he had broken when Chapman suggested that he pay back part of the advance for Martin Chuzzlewit, had since been bought out by a cousin, Frederic Chapman, who had a larger and more commercial business plan.
Dickens’s divorce put all of his friends and acquaintances to the test. Indeed, it puts his biographers to the test, too. His actions throughout were hasty, self-serving, frequently furious, and often cruel. He showed a consistent inability to understand or sympathize with anyone who opposed his wishes or his views. Of his own accord, he foolishly carried his private concerns into the public arena, gratuitously damaging his reputation without, it seems, even realizing he was doing so. His biographer, like his friends, is required to somehow account for his behavior, especially since kindness and compassion had been two of his hallmark qualities throughout his career. His daughter later stated, “It brought out what was weakest in him,” indicating that his behavior during the divorce was an extreme and prolonged variation of modes of behavior that were already part of his character. Peter Ackroyd makes a consistent case in his biography that Dickens was always prickly, always ready to see himself as a victim, and habitually tempted to blame others when things went wrong. The sources of these behaviors Ackroyd finds in Dickens’s characteristic hypersensitivity (to everything, not just to slights and injuries), combined with the various shames and embarrassments of his childhood. As always, he felt things with desperate intensity. Because he had suppressed his feelings for a long time, once he began to reveal them, he also revealed the profound resentment that accompanied their long suppression, which in turn compelled ever more open revelation of them.
We also see a pattern in his behavior that is more familiar in our divorce culture than it was in Dickens’s time—a man filled with conflicting passions, resentments, and needs transfers his allegiance from one object to another. The situation with the new woman requires him to suppress his demands or resentments with her in order to court her, so he displaces his anger onto the former object, changing entirely from the protective, considerate husband he had once been into a thoughtless tyrant, completely unable to dissemble, as he had been doing when the probable continuation of the marriage required it. More and more anger requires more and more self-justification, until the man literally comes to seem either “mad” or “wicked,” which is what Dickens seemed to his daughters. At the same time, the man himself repeatedly talks about how forgetting the whole situation is the primary goal, as Dickens asserted in his public letter, in the lines “It [the situation] is amicably composed, and its details have now but to be forgotten by those concerned in it.” But, of course, it was unlikely that anyone would soon forget it, and no one did. Catherine, though, maintained her loyalty to her husband for the rest of her life, going to productions of his work and keeping up with his publications. Ackroyd records no instances of anger or recrimination, either in public or in writing, on her part, but only a reluctant acceptance of the terms he proposed to her and a diminishing disruption of her relationship with her children as time went on (especially after Dickens’s death). Charley, who was her designated protector, maintained good relations with Thackeray, Evans, and the others whom his father could not forgive, and he eventually married Evans’s daughter against his father’s wishes.
It is also true that the evidence of Dickens’s vast canvas of characters, which includes Uriah Heep as well as David Copperfield, and Rigaud as well as Arthur Clennam, and Carker the manager and Joey Bagstock and the dwarf Quilp as well as John Jarndyce and Nicholas Nickleby and Sam Weller, indicates that Dickens was entirely at ease imagining anger, manipulation, and evil. Whatever the inspiration for any character, each receives life from the author’s empathetic imagination, which is quickened through its sense of kinship with the idiosyncrasies of the character. Dickens’s evil characters are often remarkable and riveting in their energy. They show that the powerful anger and longing Dickens expressed at the time of his divorce were not at all unknown or unfamiliar to him. Their eruption into his normally well-conducted life was possibly to be deplored, but also to be expected. Some of his contemporary authors were horrified at how he was behaving and did not themselves behave with a similar lack of control or degree of passion, but neither do their works explore the negative passions so deeply or so repeatedly. Once again, Dickens did not fit in and showed himself both freer and broader in his passions than those around him. But it is this very freedom and breadth that causes us to mention Dickens and not, say, Thackeray or Eliot, along with Shakespeare.
When she met Charles Dickens, Ellen Ternan was eighteen years old, neither as self-confident in her career nor as accomplished as her older sisters. Those biographers who have acknowledged Ellen Ternan’s presence in Dickens’s life (Forster did not, though Dickens wrote to him about his feelings almost from the beginning, and Forster reproduced Dickens’s will, in which he left Ellen Ternan £1,000, as an appendix to the biography) have consistently wondered what qualities she had that he found so attractive that he was willing to throw his life into public turmoil for her sake. In addition to the treatment she has received in biographies of Dickens, she has been the subject of many rumors and at least one full-length biography of her own. She was important in his life from this point to its end, in 1870, but no one can say for sure whether she was his mistress, whether she bore any children by him, even whether she returned his affections. The most any biographer has been able to do is extrapolate from the female characters in his late novels and from his evident fondness for his sister Fanny, Mary Hogarth, and Georgina Hogarth (virginal figures) and his disenchantment with his wife and his mother (maternal figures). While the events are interesting, and would be even more so if we knew what they were, what is really interesting is how they brought out Dickens’s secretiveness, something that was in part imposed upon him by both celebrity and the nature of Victorian society, where any taint upon a woman’s reputation impaired her social position, but was also evident as a feature of his personality from the beginning, in the remoteness that alternated with his conviviality, in his love of disguise, in his solitary ramblings, in his attempts to send his parents out of the way to secluded spots, in the way in which he kept his early life to himself.
August 1857 marked a turning point in Dickens’s life. Previously, he lived a professional life and a domestic life that were more or less open to scrutiny; his private reservations and ambivalences were displaced through activity, novel writing, and performance. After he met Ellen Ternan, he lived two lives, dividing his time and activities between what could be, and had to be, public, his working life, and what could not in any way be public, his affectional life. The man who had as large a role as anyone in creating “Victorian Englishness,” that domestic ideal of comfort, coziness, business, and celebration, henceforth lived his life in direct contradiction to that very ideal. He was good at it. He made it so that his colleagues, his friends, his family, and his public were unaware of where and how he was spending at least some of his time. It was clear to everyone that his health and vitality were deteriorating almost from this point on, but everyone attributed the deterioration to the public readings he undertook and the energy he poured into them. He kept his secret life so well hidden that no biographer can gauge with any authority what he gained or lost by it, how he viewed it or justified it to himself, how his feelings for Ellen Ternan evolved, whether she satisfied those yearnings for true intimacy that he had expressed to Forster and found unsatisfied in his wife, whether he found at least intermittent peace with Ellen or only continuing frustration. There is no telling what she was like. An acquaintance wrote some years later that as an older woman, she was “witty, warm, sympathetic, charming, cultured, and charitable,” that she “victimized” her husband and “made scenes,” and she was teasing, self-willed, and a “spitfire.” But there is no way of knowing which of these qualities, if any, were original, and attracted Dickens to her, and which were, perhaps, reactions to her relationship with a man almost thirty years her senior whose behavior toward her remains unknown.
The modern era of divorce has shown that individuals’ modes of behavior in relationships sometimes change in interesting ways, depending upon what the person learns about himself or herself from previous relationships. Usually the man or woman is helped to these lessons by therapists or sympathetic friends or even books. The bête noire of modern life is “making the same mistakes over again” or, indeed, over and over again. If we speculate that, once again prefiguring modern life, Dickens entered into a remarriage of a sort without the benefit of the divorce culture that guides such things today, and that he “made the same mistakes over again,” then most likely his behavior continued to be of a piece, and he was with Ellen as he had been with the other women in his life—domineering, exacting, prickly, and sensitive to slights, but also kind, affectionate, generous, and lively, as well as sexually passionate, though the mystery of whether Ellen Ternan ever bore his child reflects the mystery of whether the two ever became lovers. After ten children, many of whom were becoming troublesome as they neared adulthood, it is possible that Dickens decided that abstinence was the wiser course. Dickens succeeded in his secretiveness as he did in almost all of his endeavors, but the deterioration of his health showed that the price of the contradictions he had to live with was a high one. At the very least, he now had one more reason to travel constantly, to have several homes and sometimes even rooms that he rented, none of which could hold him for very long.
After 1859, for the next eleven years, Dickens lived so secret a life that Ellen Ternan’s place in it did not emerge at all until 1934. The figure his family, friends, and audiences saw was of a man frantically using up his energy and his health giving strenuous and emotionally taxing public readings while editing a weekly periodical and writing three major novels—A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Commentators have seen Ellen in the angelic figure of Lucie Manette, in the unattainable figure of Estella, in the playful, money-hungry figure of Bella Wilfer. It is, of course, always tempting to extrapolate from an author’s work to his state of mind, and Dickens did have a history of explicitly depicting associates in his work—Leigh Hunt in Bleak House, Georgina Hogarth in Bleak House, Maria Beadnell Winter in Little Dorrit. But each time he communicated to someone, usually Forster, what he was doing and how he was modifying the original to make him or her, supposedly, less recognizable. Dickens’s daughter maintained after his death that he didn’t understand women, but, in fact, the portraits of women in his last three completed novels are more complex and interesting than in earlier novels. Miss Pross, in A Tale of Two Cities, for example, is explicitly declared to have more than one layer: “Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the surface of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives.” Rather than starting out with a Flora Finching, who is her main characteristic at the beginning and gradually develops depth, he defines Miss Pross immediately, in the voice of the narrator, as complex. Unlike Flora and Miss Tox, she doesn’t have to earn her way out of being ridiculous (and physically unappealing women are often portrayed as ridiculous in Dickens’s works). The evidence, though slim, is that Dickens learned something about women from the crucible of his divorce and showed it in his work almost immediately.
In 1837, when Dickens himself was a young man and just married, Thomas Carlyle published History of the French Revolution. Dickens said later that he carried it everywhere with him, and he read it many times over the years. After 1840, when Dickens met Carlyle and his wife, Jane, at a party, they formed a friendship that was marked by reverence on Dickens’s part. (He told Forster, “I would go . . . farther to see Carlyle than any man alive.”) Carlyle’s feelings were more mixed, partly because he did not respect novels or novelists (though his writing style and historiographic style were far more novelistic than would be considered objective or professional today). At any rate, by 1858, when Dickens began to think about A Tale of Two Cities, he was eminently familiar with Carlyle’s History and his interpretation of the important features of the French Revolution. By this time, also, Dickens had been to France so often and with such pleasure that he considered himself more than a Francophile, almost a Frenchman in exile. He spoke fluent French and had, in fact, through Mr. Meagles in Little Dorrit lampooned Englishmen who insisted upon making themselves understood abroad only by raising their voices. He would later expand his satire on narrow-minded Englishness in the figure of Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend.
A Tale of Two Cities was planned for the launch of All the Year Round, and Dickens seems to have begun writing in earnest in March, for publication at the end of April. Thereafter, the novel appeared in weekly installments until November. Commercially, it was a huge success. The first issue sold 120,000 copies (though, of course, some portion of the sale must have been due to the novelty appeal of the new magazine) and then settled down to about 100,000 copies. Sales of monthly parts were not as good, but in volume form it has always since been the steady bestseller of Dickens’s oeuvre.
Dickens planned to try a few new things with the novel, and whether they succeeded or not in the view of friends and critics, he did produce a novel that is in some ways not as “Dickensy” as his other works. He had a stronger grasp of the requirements (and perhaps the impossibilities) of the historical novel than he had had with Barnaby Rudge, and he was able to consciously subdue some of his own habits of imagination in order to represent as truly as possible the nonrepresentable—that is, a historical period that the author had not personally experienced.
The paradox of the historical novel is that it purports to give life and spirit to the past in a way that historical accounts themselves, with their emphasis on interpretation and fidelity to facts, cannot. Of course, some historical periods are extremely dramatic, and imaginatively entering into them is quite tempting. In addition, an author like Dickens, who was interested in the workings of large social systems, is always curious about how the present system came to be, and so has a natural interest in history. And when the novel is first published, it may seem to be a true and faithful rendering of the life of the time it is looking back to, but almost every historical novel dates very quickly and soon comes to epitomize its own period more than the period in which it is set. A historical novel can be compromised by the simplest discovery of new material, but even if nothing new turns up, the style that the author has chosen to mimic the earlier period may no longer seem to do so. For all the research that goes into it, and for all the weight it seems to have, the historical novel is one of the most ephemeral genres and reveals most clearly an author’s intellectual and imaginative limitations.
When Dickens sat down to research the novel, the Carlyles had an enormous box of books sent to him from the London Library. He intended not to contradict Carlyle’s interpretation, but to give it the life of a dramatic tale. The period of the French Revolution was less than a hundred years in the past, as retrievable for him as World War I would be for us, the era of his grandparents. Forster later said, and the evidence of Dickens’s letters supports the idea, that Dickens wanted the incidents, the history, and the plot to drive the characters, rather than his usual fashion of having the plot grow out of the characters and their situations. Specifically, he wanted them to develop through action rather than through dialogue. The novel did what Dickens intended—the characters do seem either dimmer or more normal, depending on the reader’s taste. Forster didn’t like the novel, and Dickens did have to defend it from time to time, but Dickens liked it and said, as he often did, that he thought it was the best thing he had written. It has not been as popular with scholars and critics as it has with readers, but there is a lot to be said for it.
For one thing, it is an exciting novel. Unlike the plot of Little Dorrit, that of A Tale of Two Cities is tight and clear, almost fairy tale–like. Dickens seems to have conceived of Sidney Carton and Dr. Manette first, intrigued by the idea of self-sacrifice, as with The Frozen Deep, and also with the idea of prolonged imprisonment. To our eyes, the tightness of the plot seems not very literary—a little Hollywood—and indeed, a couple of famous movies of A Tale of Two Cities were made. But the fact that everyone is related to everyone else, aside from reiterating Dickens’s perennial theme of relationship, also pointedly asserts the moral complexity of political injury and revenge.
Dickens never goes easy on the pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy. As a group (represented by “Monseigneur,” who requires four men to prepare and serve his chocolate), they are presented as repressive and cruel, locked in a world of unreality that they have created for themselves. Two nobles rape the daughter of a tenant, murder her brother, commit manslaughter of a child, impoverish and starve their tenants, and promote fear and intimidation as the proper mode of rule. If the sections of the novel about life in pre-Revolutionary France were excerpted and strung together, they would read like a call to revolution. Dickens shows that he perfectly understands what daily shapes the rage and zeal of the republicans—their undying hatred for their former rulers is the inevitable and perfect crop that the rulers themselves have sown.
In the context of this large historical movement, there seems to be some, though not much, room for personal choice. Hero Charles Darnay chooses not to profit from the exploitation of the peasantry and to work for an honest living in England, but he is sensitive to the moral confusion of his position when he hears from the family’s former agent in prison: “He knew very well, that in his love for Lucie, his renunciation of his social place . . . had been hurried and incomplete. He knew that he ought to have systematically worked it out and supervised it, and that he had meant to do it, and that it had never been done.” In addition, he is tempted. He is curious. He wonders if he might still have some influence for good. The Revolution has become for him, as Dickens calls it, “the Loadstone [sic] Rock”—“Everything that arose in his mind drifted him on, faster and faster, more and more steadily, to the terrible attraction.” This is a masterstroke of motivation, finessing the improbability of Darnay’s return to France as well as revealing Dickens’s own recent experience of the psychological process of giving in to the temptation of change and chaos. The plot turns on Darnay’s unlikely choice, and it is utterly convincing.
In fact, a major theme of the book is this very temptation—the temptation of the unknown, especially when it is embodied in violent action. To give in to the temptation, as the republicans do when they dance the carmagnole, as the Evremonde brothers do when they rape and murder, as Madame Defarge does when she sets out to find Lucie and her child in order to denounce them, is to set in motion one’s own destruction. The novel urges a proto-Freudian analysis of human nature—the harshness and unreality of the superego is finally overthrown by the id, unleashing a vast, destructive, natural force (the mobs are often represented by images of fire and flood), leaving no rational middle ground for the operation of the ego, which is defined by moral connections of right and wrong, responsibility and choice among individuals. The horrors committed by the id—that is, the republicans—do not have quite the same moral perversity of those committed by the superego, because the ego (reason) has not been falsely enlisted to justify inhumanity. The republicans know they are killing other people, but the nobles consider the peasants to be animals. The republicans know, as well, that they are numbed by death. In one interesting passage, Lucie appeals to Madame Defarge for mercy, “as a wife and mother.” Madame Defarge responds, “ ‘All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds.’
“ ‘We have seen nothing else,’ returned The Vengeance [Madame Defarge’s friend].
“ ‘We have borne this a long time,’ said Madame Defarge. ‘Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?’ ”
Like the characters of Little Dorrit, those of A Tale of Two Cities are trapped by the past. Revolution offers an interesting collective answer—destroy the institutions and relationships and citizens and thought patterns of the past. In this sense, the Terror is Dickens’s next step after the final image of the earlier novel. Rather than allowing individuals to be swallowed up in the “usual uproar,” clear away the usual uproar and see what happens. But the outcome is even worse—the usual uproar gives way to an unusual and far more destructive uproar.
Only Sydney Carton elects not to be trapped by his past, and the solution Dickens gives him is specific—he understands that his physical life is of no importance compared with his spiritual life. When he changes places with Darnay and goes to his execution, he is connected to another human being (the little seamstress whom he comforts) and fully aware that his being will continue in the memories and relationships of those who love him. More important, at the very moment of Carton’s death, Dickens writes, “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth in me shall never die.” In a world where the superego, the id, and the ego have all failed, only the spirit succeeds. Carton asserts several times that he doesn’t feel his death to be a sacrifice. Modern critics have taken issue with him, but Dickens asserts as strongly as he can at the end that the death of the body can and should be seen as a transfiguration, not as a sacrifice or a capitulation.
Dickens’s religious beliefs are often the subject of debate, partly because he ridiculed Evangelicalism relentlessly, in figures like Dr. Chadband in Bleak House and Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, but he was never backward in offering an alternative faith. For him the figure of Jesus Christ was a consistent image of salvation. Love, kindness, forgiveness, benevolence, celebration, mercy, joy, charity, and innocence all had their source, for Dickens, in Christ and Christmas. That these concepts had been crusted over by organized religion, not only Evangelicalism, but the corrupt and unresponsive religion of the Church of England and of the Catholic Church, did not mean that they had no existence or reality, only that their existence and reality were available solely within and among individuals.
Of course, it is not surprising that, given the recent chaos of his life and the violence of his feelings, Dickens should choose the most violent possible subject matter for his novel and that he should depict it with vivid relish. Authors often choose subjects that are analogues to their states of mind and extrapolate successfully from individual turmoil to social or even universal turmoil. Seeing these analogues and making them understandable and believable is one of a novelist’s social roles. What is especially interesting about Dickens is that he unerringly engaged with almost every aspect of modern culture, hardly missing a single one. To read A Tale of Two Cities after the close of the violent and ideological twentieth century is to be struck over and over by the prophetic nature of his insights—the inability of the new regime to draw a line before “extermination,” as Madame Defarge puts it; the inability of the old regime to understand what it has done wrong; the submersion of the individual into the collective; the suspiciousness of the collective toward any individual, no matter how respectable his “revolutionary credentials,” who expresses doubt (as Defarge does); the elevation of ideology over relationship; the destruction of love (as between the Defarges); the moral tangle of denunciation. Dickens himself said that he did not add new insights to those of Carlyle, but he clearly and systematically made them live through character and plot, and in the process included revolution as yet another aspect of his analysis of modernity.
Every novel is a chance for the author to get at the insoluble conundrum of the novel in a new way. It is no coincidence that the disordered and tortured plot of Little Dorrit (which requires an explanation at the end to make the connections clear) was followed by the clear and compelling plot of A Tale of Two Cities. It is also no coincidence that the earlier novel is held in greater esteem by critics, while the later novel is more popular. The primacy of action in the latter work produces suspense; the primacy of character in the former work produces contemplation and analysis. But A Tale of Two Cities is no less wise than the previous novel, no less insightful, no less bleak, for that matter, since it doesn’t even make an effort to resolve the conflict between the superego and the id, except through death, redemption, and the passage of time.
Dickens wrote most of A Tale of Two Cities at Gad’s Hill Place, where he lived with Georgina and the children. His old convivial life was more or less behind him now. He no longer spoke to some of his former companions, and he was both depressed and unwell. A Boston publisher came to visit and tried to persuade Dickens to undertake an American reading tour. Dickens was agreeable; negotiations with various impresarios continued into the next year, but the Civil War broke out before anything certain could be arranged. Meanwhile, in October, he toured the provinces, as always with a huge response from his audiences—weeping, laughter, applause. Undeniably, his life was more orderly now, and he managed his restlessness somewhat better, with long country walks. He worked on All the Year Round, sent another letter to George Eliot, and went to dinner with her and G. H. Lewes, who lived together unmarried (although he addressed her as “Mrs. Lewes” anyway). He invited her to write for his magazine. She was unable to find the time. He made speeches for various charitable organizations. He went about fourteen months between the end of A Tale of Two Cities and the beginning of Great Expectations without writing another novel, but he did begin a series of pieces in All the Year Round that were later collected in The Uncommercial Traveller.
In July, his second daughter, Katey, married Wilkie Collins’s brother, Charles. Katey was twenty, a vivacious girl anxious to leave home. She had loved one of Dickens’s friends, but he was unresponsive, so she married Collins, she said later, just to get away from “an unhappy home.” To all appearances, the July 17 wedding was a bright, celebratory occasion, but when Mamie, the older daughter, went up to Katey’s room at the end of the day, she “beheld her father on his knees with his head buried in Katey’s wedding gown, sobbing.” He said, “But for me, Katey would not have left home.” Dickens’s children were all in their teens and early twenties at the time of the divorce. It is safe to say that of the nine living children, only one, Henry, made a successful career. All the rest of the boys were irresponsible and profligate with money, like Dickens’s father and two of his brothers. Mamie never married, and Kate’s marriage was not a happy one. Dickens himself found his sons’ inability to settle on their careers or to get ahead unaccountable, evidence not of his failure as a parent but of something wrong in them. He compared their fecklessness with his own youthful ambition and energy and found them wanting. His novels abound with feckless young men—James Harthouse in Hard Times, for example, and, in Our Mutual Friend, Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, whose easy manners are so galling to the ambitious, Dickens-like characters Bradley Headstone and Charlie Hexam. Once again, the plight of his children seems more understandable to us than it did to him: a bad marriage; a bitter divorce during their most vulnerable years; a secretive, demanding, capricious father, who was apart from them much of the time, who moved them frequently from place to place, and who was himself changeable—often charming and attentive, but also often remote and angry; a caretaker (Georgina) who, whatever her good qualities, was not much older than the older children when she took over their care; the stresses of their father’s extreme celebrity. It is hard not to read into some of the disorganized large families he depicts, such as the Pockets in Great Expectations or the Jellybys in Bleak House, some aspects of his own household. Even though in these depictions he puts all the blame upon the mothers, we might say that the family system of the Dickens household was not one in which the children were likely to thrive, and they didn’t.