JUST AFTER Katey’s marriage, Dickens’s brother Alfred died, and Dickens brought his family to London (there were five children). He sold Tavistock House and gave most of the furniture to his sister, who was taking care of his mother, who seems to have been a victim of some form of senile dementia. From then on, Gad’s Hill Place was his home, though he also spent some time, at least, in rooms he rented and at a house he bought for Ellen Ternan in Houghton Place, in London (she sold the lease on the house in 1881). At the beginning of October 1860, he began work on Great Expectations.
Dickens had been thinking of ideas and seems to have first come up with the notion of Pip and Magwitch, his fairy godfather/convict, thinking the idea a funny one and a return to an old comic style. His first plan was to write a novel of the length and form of Little Dorrit—twenty monthly parts. He had found the weekly schedule of A Tale of Two Cities very exhausting and the format constricting. But the serial running in All the Year Round was driving down profits and circulation, even to the point of threatening the solvency of the magazine, so almost as soon as he began writing, he started publishing the novel to perk things up. In spite of bouts of depression and ill health, in spite of his griefs and frustrations, his inventive energy did not fail him. The thirty-six installments of the novel were completed without much trouble, and Dickens, as always, was pleased with them.
While Forster and others approved Dickens’s return to a more comic style, it is hard in some ways to see what they were talking about. The novel opens with Pip standing in the graveyard of the small village in the Kentish marshes where his parents and brothers are buried. Everyone around the boy (who seems to be about eight or nine) is either cruel or foolish, including Joe Gargery, his kindly brother-in-law, who is unable to protect Pip (or himself) from the unreasoning abusive treatment meted out by Pip’s sister. The glow of early acceptance and love present in David Copperfield,before it is poisoned by the Murdstones, is entirely absent in Great Expectations, and Pip’s world offers no alternative to harsh discipline and ridicule. When Pip’s companionship is solicited by Miss Havisham for some mysterious reason of her own, the world she and Estella inhabit is even stranger than the world of the village, and Miss Havisham is no less ready to abuse and ridicule Pip than his sister is. The loving companionship of Joe is less than effective in easing Pip’s condition, since any hint of collaboration between the two is met by the sister with even more resentment. These three women, plus Mrs. Pocket (entirely irresponsible and self-important) and Miss Havisham’s female relatives (parasites who hope only to get a piece of her estate upon her death), are hardly offset in their female monstrousness by Biddy, a girl of the village who seems to love Pip but is just another, and rather less well realized, of Dickens’s Esther Summerson types.
In addition, Pip is constantly beset by doubts about his own intentions and nature. Whereas David knows the injustices of the world for what they are, Pip has a strong sense of guilt, which renders his response to obvious injustices more ambivalent. He holds himself accountable (and Dickens seems to agree with him) for ignorance that to the reader he certainly cannot help. When Magwitch, in the first chapter, threatens him in order to get him to steal food from his sister’s larder, Pip goes on at some length about his sense of guilt at this, contradicting the reader’s feeling that surely a nine-year-old boy is not to be blamed for being coerced by a frightening escaped criminal. This is not to say that Pip’s psychology is unbelievable, only that it is not exactly comic. Comedy requires belief in innocence. Pip never believes in his own innocence, and much of the rhetoric of the novel is geared toward convincing the reader that Pip is not innocent—he might not be especially blameworthy at the beginning, but as he gets older and rises in his expectations, his sins of profligacy, ingratitude, and fecklessness become real. David Copperfield, by contrast, has much to learn, and his arc through the novel is the arc of his moral education—his flaw is to attach himself to morally flawed characters like Steerforth and to blind himself to their faults. Pip’s flaw is to have no discrimination at all, but to withhold himself from everyone, unsure at all times what value they have for him and what value he has for them. Once again, a portrait full of psychological truth, but far from comic. And Dickens knows this instinctively—although Pip is morally redeemed by the end, he cannot get all the way to satisfaction or happiness. Neither the original ending, where he and Estella meet and part, nor the second ending, recommended by Forster, where they meet with a hint that they do not part, but with no depiction of their life together, is in any way a comic ending. Of all the heroes of Dickens’s fiction, Pip is the only one too flawed, by self-hatred and shame, to find no reward other than mere survival. Like Louisa in Hard Times, Pip finds domestic satisfaction in witnessing the satisfaction of others—Joe and Biddy, Herbert and Clara. The redemptions of Miss Havisham and Magwitch do not benefit Pip, nor do they entirely lift the burden of guilt from the novel. Pip’s sense of himself as undeserving grows more sophisticated, but it remains. Dickens presses Pip’s sense of his own guilt a little too hard, and in this the moral argument of the novel seems slightly off.
In the version of Great Expectations we have, we can see the ghost of the version Dickens originally planned—more on the scale of Little Dorrit than A Tale of Two Cities. Shrinking his execution to fit the circumstances of All the Year Round streamlined the book but leaves fascinating themes and characters relatively unexplored. Great Expectations was a commercial and, with a couple of exceptions, a critical success. Forster liked it very much, and modern critics have adored it. It is totally Dickensy, yet shorter than the real Dickensy novels. Its shortness amounts to restraint. Its undeniable darkness is edged with light, in a kind of reverse of Dickens’s youthful work, where the lightness was edged with black. Angus Wilson maintains that it is the one novel of his oeuvre wherein Dickens meets the criteria set by Flaubert and James for the well-made novel, and is therefore more perfect (though not greater) than his others. This is an interesting argument, because it suggests that novelistic greatness lies in the author’s success in working out his vision most completely in his most characteristic manner. Dickens’s manner, then, would be naturally unrestrained, so “perfection” would be less characteristic of him than vastness and variety; therefore his most perfect novel would be less characteristic and therefore less great than his more imperfect novels.
After the completion of Great Expectations in June 1861, Dickens seems to have embarked upon a double life that was marked by increasing ill health, mysterious disappearances, successful and remunerative reading tours, and the deaths of friends and relatives. In October of that year, his tour manager died, as well as his brother-in-law. His mother died, at the age of seventy-four, in 1863. Her death was followed by that of his son Walter (in India), only twenty-two years old, and that of Thackeray, in December (Thackeray was younger than Dickens). The next year, another old friend died, and in 1866, Jane Carlyle, and Dickens’s brother Augustus, who had gotten as far as Chicago. In 1867, another old friend, Clarkson Stanfield, died in April, and in 1868, his brother Fred. In 1870, Daniel Maclise, the painter, died in the spring.
Other friends were thriving, though—notably the actor Charles Macready, who married a second wife thirty years his junior in 1861 and had a son with her at the age of sixty-eight, in 1862. Macready’s remarriage reminds us that Dickens’s choice to live two lives, one public and one secret, was, in spite of our conventional image of Victorian life, more in his own nature than in the social requirements of the time. Several of his friends, including Daniel Maclise and Wilkie Collins, as well as George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, managed to live openly in an irregular manner and were not especially ostracized for doing so. Given Dickens’s open attacks on “Society” in Dombey and Son and all subsequent novels, and his penchant for rewarding his heroes and heroines with retired lives of honest labor and benevolence, rather than wealth and social position, his own resistance to the option of claiming Ellen Ternan as his mistress and making a life with her requires at least some investigation and explanation—one would think that social ostracism would be right up his alley. But he pursued secrecy with inveterate energy.
Almost no biographer has a good explanation for this, but Claire Tomalin, the author of a life of Ellen Ternan, speculates that vehement early assertions that his relations with Ellen were platonic and fatherly, and therefore that she was a virtuous young woman, like a daughter to him, gave him both a cover story and further motivation for secrecy. We already know from letters of 1858 that he created a version of his marriage that suited him—groundless jealousy on the part of Catherine, perfect virtue on the part of himself, Georgina, and the Ternans. Tomalin quotes a letter Dickens wrote to one of the Ternans’ cousins, in which he protests the perfect innocence of his liaison with the family, yet the style and the circumstances of the letter indicate an unusual degree of intimacy. Mrs. Ternan is known to have made a reputation for herself and her daughters in the theatrical world that was based on both artistic and personal respectability—the progress of her career demonstrates the transitional but still questionable social status of acting, and particularly of actresses, through the nineteenth century. While all actresses were no longer considered automatically to be prostitutes, as they had been, their social status continued to be tainted by the display of themselves and their talents for money.
As time went on and Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan evolved (at one point, he provided the funds for Ellen’s older sister to travel to Italy and study singing, chaperoned by her mother, leaving Ellen and her other sister unchaperoned in London), the habit of secrecy and the necessity of secrecy became inextricably entangled. Undoubtedly, the embarrassment he felt at the exposure of his family life during the months he was divorcing Catherine motivated him never to allow any sort of exposure again. Ackroyd makes the point that the worst part of Dickens’s employment in the blacking factory was having to stand in the window and paste labels while passersby watched him. He made a contest of it and became marvelously quick, but perhaps this was a pattern in his behavior—if he was required to reveal himself, then he would do so as a phenomenon, but his real preference was for privacy. By the time he was in his fifties, as often happens, contradictory elements in his personality had become almost irreconcilably extreme. He was used to, and enjoyed, being a phenomenon and a star, and he courted unprecedented stardom in every aspect of his public readings, from the material he chose to the dramatic manner in which he rendered it. But the yearning for concealment was no less strong, so he made romantic arrangements that required concealment and possibly gained preciousness from that very concealment. Orthodox family life, with a large household, one child after another, and marriage had been a failure. A hidden affair—“a circle of one,” as Dickens called it to one correspondent—possibly retained more piquancy and drama. And, at the very least, leading a double life gave Dickens’s lifelong restlessness a point. He was now on the train all the time, traveling all the time, moving from Gad’s Hill, to his bachelor flat above the offices of All the Year Round on Wellington Street, to the house in Houghton Place where Ellen lived, and later to the house in Slough, and later to the house in Peckham. It is also likely that Ellen and her mother lived for a couple of years in France, which would have been no problem for Dickens—rather an added pleasure, since he loved France and wrote more than once of his pleasure in setting out for French destinations.
Who was the audience for Dickens’s secret life? Undoubtedly himself. He had a strong need to feel himself virtuous, youthful, benevolent, and important at all times. The friends he broke off with after the divorce were precisely those whom Dickens had betrayed himself in front of. Thackeray remarked that he could see through Dickens now. The others, like Mark Lemon and Miss Coutts, did not have to actually challenge him in order for him to feel that what they had seen of him and the way in which they reflected him back to himself was intolerable. They had gained knowledge of a side of him that he himself did not want to know, so he broke off relations. As with later public men and celebrities, his importance and power had led him to believe that he could do as he wished until he discovered that fame in the larger world is at least as constricting as, say, small-town notoriety.
Dickens and his work had always been contradictory. He professed virtue, and acted virtuously in the world, but he was drawn to crime, criminals, prostitutes, detectives, social disruption, and the Victorian underworld of hypocrisy, cruelty, ignorance, sickness, and death. Every novel he wrote explored innocence, but his innocent characters are far less alive than the villains, ne’er-do-wells, social climbers, usurers, cheats, liars, fools, murderers, grotesques, and madmen who surround them.
Once again, as with Mary Hogarth and Catherine, then with Catherine and Georgina, Dickens tried to strike a balance between his contradictory desires (which he felt with desperate intensity), this time between the public life of the readings and the secret life of his heart. We may suppose that his secret life was at least occasionally frustrating or unsatisfying, or even painful and tragic, and that at least some of the energy that went into his readings came from the secrets that he kept about his other life, as when, in the character of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep, he was able to express feelings that he could not reveal in person in a manner that almost overwhelmed his audience. Dickens may have felt, in fact, that the way he had structured his life—compartmentalizing it into several rather distant locations, one the family location, one the love location, one the All the Year Round location, one the fame location, with occasional holiday locations—worked wonderfully well to externalize his inner compartmentalization. In each location he had a faithful companion—Georgina, Ellen Ternan, W. H. Wills, and, for the readings, George Dolby, who was happy to assist and care for him—but they didn’t have to get along with one another particularly often. Since he lived this way for thirteen years, the system must have worked well enough most of the time, but it was a taxing and delicate one and visibly told on his health (though one observer wrote in the summer of 1864, “I met Dickens . . . clad in spruce frockcoat, buttoned to show his good and still youthful figure; and with a brand-new hat airily cocked on one side, and stick poised in his hand”).
Of all the things that a novelist does, the first among them is to make repeated attempts to rationalize the world. Every time he or she writes a novel, he or she is systematizing what seems chaotic to others. In order for the product to satisfy the novelist, it has to have a certain rightness about it; order of some kind, comprehensibility of some kind, and truth of some kind are always present. As the novelist masters his or her materials and techniques, his or her novels approach more and more closely the novelist’s natural cast of mind, or most essential vision, and the logical or systematic qualities of the novel speak back to the novelist, confirming his or her power to make something real. It is thus a tremendous temptation for a novelist, especially a successful one, to attempt to transform the world itself so that it fits the novelist’s sense of the right sort of life. Dickens was always both active and energetic in his attempts to make the world fit his model; education, charitable works, social criticism and activism, aid to friends and their families, essays and articles and novels—all attest to his will to shape the world to a certain idea, as does his insistence on quiet, order, good dress, and excellent behavior on the part of his children. Certainly much of Dickens’s discomfort in his domestic life in the 1850s was due to an abiding feeling of wrongness—the wife and the children and the houses simply did not mesh, however strenuous his efforts, with what felt right, and vast expenditures of energy in changing this or that part of the picture had no effect. That the life that did finally mesh with his sense of rightness was unusual, marked by less and less resistance or opposition on the part of his associates, with its terms dictated by him, shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should it surprise us that it was a life he could not easily live. A novelist’s late, eccentric life is analogous to his late, eccentric novels. His ties to the mainstream have loosened. His primary job is no longer to be representative, as when he was a young writer looking for a publisher and an audience; it is to be still interesting. But it may be that those to whom he is still interesting are not his contemporaries, whose world he reflects, but his descendants, whose world he intuits and predicts. Long association has convinced his contemporaries that they know him; this will not necessarily be so for those who have a different historical perspective. As with the work, so with the life. In the last years of Dickens’s life, he seems to have embraced a freer, more individualistic pattern, no longer striving to fit in, but actively seeking the sorts of relationships that are primary in our century—one-to-one intimacies on the one hand, joined with star-to-audience performances on the other. The intermediate circle of family, friends, clubs, and associations that had been a prominent feature of his thirties and forties had largely dropped away.
Dickens’s reading tour in 1861 took him to twenty and more cities in two and a half months. He had earned £500 for six readings in the summer, so the work was profitable—the duration of the tour was short in comparison with the longer task of writing even one of his shorter novels (thirty to thirty-six weekly installments), not to mention a longer one (twenty installments over nineteen months). But Dickens was never one to stint on preparation. He rewrote, edited, and rehearsed each selection and came to feel that two hundred rehearsals was the minimum before the introduction of new material. His technique was not quite acting, but far more than reading aloud. He was especially good at modulating the nuances of every sentence, narrative as well as dialogue, in order to bring out its proper effect. Not a word was wasted—words and phrases and sentences that did well enough on the page were changed if they were a little flat in performance. His stage set was simple—a desk, a lamp, a few decorations. He strove to give the feeling of intimacy in even the largest halls and was a master at developing a sense of individual communication between himself and members of the audience, in part by not maintaining an impassive distance from them, but by reacting to what he was reading as they did. The original inspirations of his public readings were private readings of the Christmas books to groups of friends, and he saw no reason to change a successful model. Ellen Ternan and other friends were often in the audience. As his health declined, they could judge whether the readings were too strenuous, but he didn’t always follow their advice. The winter reading series concluded at the end of January 1862.
English literary life was now full and varied. George Eliot followed Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede with The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). Tennyson published Idylls of the King (1859); George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859); Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860). Samuel Smiles, J. S. Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Ruskin were all active, in these years publishing their most famous works. In Russia, Turgenev was publishing Fathers and Sons, Dostoevsky was publishing Notes from Underground, and Tolstoy was at work on War and Peace, to be published in 1865. In France, Victor Hugo was publishing Les Misérables, Flaubert was publishing Salammbô. Dickens was not much older than most of these writers (and younger than Mill and Darwin), but he was their ancestor as well as their contemporary. The thread of English fiction that led back to Scott came directly through Dickens. In his essay “Epic and Novel,” the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin points out that of all the literary genres, only the novel does not predate Aristotle, and only the novel is not defined by Aristotelian poetics: “The novel is not merely one genre among other genres. Among genres already completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore, it is deeply akin to that era.” A genre doesn’t develop of itself, of course. It develops because its practitioners have ideas and talents that enlarge the form to encompass phenomena that are new or have not been portrayed successfully before. If we take Jane Austen, for example, it is often observed that the servant classes, the colonial plantations, and the naval establishment that supported the lives of her characters are never alluded to or depicted in her novels. The reasons for this are no doubt a combination of habits of mind, considerations of artistic form, and convention, but the basic fact is that Austen didn’t consider it necessary to broaden her canvas or her language. Dickens, about a generation younger than Austen and a descendant on his mother’s side of one of those serving families who do not appear in any of Austen’s work, found a way to satisfy his own urgent need to depict almost everyone in his English world who did not appear in Austen’s work, and a way to communicate with them as well. His natural predilections for exploration, investigation, mimicry, and drama, combined with his natural flair for figurative language and his access to nonrational states of mind, meant that he could not help expanding the possibilities of the novel and almost by himself creating the literary world that surrounded him in the early 1860s. But he was, in some sense, now outmoded. Having read his works, his contemporaries saw their flaws—his native deficiencies in tightness of construction and complexity of characterization—and learned from them. Their works were more subtle and nuanced, more private and less convivial, you might say, more focused on the inner life as lived rather than as projected outward. Even so, they existed inside the gates of the very broad world that Dickens had shown over and over was the appropriate home of the novel.
Dickens’s public readings, in addition to being a scheme for making money and for performing and for getting a feeling of connection to his audience and fans, were also the next step in the idea of the novel, a step into a territory where other novelists were not able to follow (except in a pale sense that novelists today go on book tours and read more or less skillfully from their own work). If the novel by nature seeks to communicate more and more about a world that contains more and more material worthy of communication, then Dickens, with his rehearsals and his rewritings and his careful projection of his words, was attempting to make every single word count. The ideal would be that every word would be both clear and evocative of many overlapping meanings—that is, the natural complexity of the novel, both overall and sentence by sentence, would be taken to its limit. For Dickens, “meaning” included both large quantities of ideas and large quantities of emotion, so the proper audience reaction would be both emotional and intellectual (a reaction he found in France and in Scotland most frequently). In addition, the mutually subjective writer/reader experience, wherein the reader feels his or her mind is in direct communication with a single other mind, the author’s, would also be fulfilled by the staged intimacy of the setting. Nor could the novels be acted out—the author/narrator was essential to the public reading as a novel-like enterprise rather than a more impersonal drama-like enterprise. So even when his contemporary novelists were in some sense disdaining Dickens for déclassé self-promotion, he was testing the boundaries of the novelistic enterprise—that is, the boundaries of how a narrative can be communicated. It is thus no coincidence that his work has some affinity with film, a narrative form that portrays some aspects of modern life more effectively than the novel does.
Between January 1862 and April 1866, Dickens did no reading tours; he did not begin his next novel, Our Mutual Friend, until November 1863 (though he thought of several ideas and names that later appeared in it). There is no record of where Ellen Ternan lived at this time, only that she and her mother did not attend Maria Ternan’s wedding in the summer of 1863 (though there is no evidence of a breach between them). Dickens worked on All the Year Round and traveled back and forth to France, sometimes for only a few days at a time. He even went during the summer of 1862, when Georgina Hogarth was seriously ill. Most commentators believe that Ellen and her mother were in France, supported by Dickens, though no scholarly investigations have uncovered where they were living. Some believe that Ellen had a baby in these years; Dickens’s daughter Kate told a friend of hers many years later that there had been a son who died (a story corroborated by Dickens’s most successful son, Henry). At any rate, Dickens was depressed, he reported to Forster, and the evidence of Pip and the later character of Jasper, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, show that Dickens was exploring the idea of guilt in his novels. There is no reason to believe that Dickens’s feelings toward Ellen, about his situation, and about himself didn’t fluctuate over the years. It is not uncommon for a man or a woman to act in accordance with his or her desires, only to find that the accomplished goal doesn’t have the imagined results but must be accommodated anyway. Dickens didn’t have much experience with being satisfied or at peace. Even if he was able to arrange things as he liked, that may not have worked to settle him.
In the absence of all evidence as to the terms of Dickens’s relationship with the Ternans, there is only speculation about the probable effect upon Ellen’s life and reputation were she to become Dickens’s acknowledged mistress and bear his child, even in France. Those who think she did become his mistress and those who don’t all agree that her prospects would be clouded—her career would court scandal (and she had not shown much talent for the stage anyway), and her ability to make a respectable and prosperous marriage would be compromised. Her most marriageable years were passing—she turned twenty in 1860, thirty in 1870. Rationally, she was wasting her prospects, and according to their biographers, both she and Dickens would understand this. Was Dickens thoughtful and foresighted enough to restrain his ardor and remain a loving but avuncular figure in her life, as Ackroyd maintains? Or was he willing to risk her well-being for love, his or theirs, as Tomalin maintains? And what was her mother, famously respectable and very much in the picture, willing to risk, and for what?
At the end of 1863, Dickens began to write Our Mutual Friend. The gestation of the novel was prolonged and difficult, and Dickens was especially concerned that he would get behind the publication schedule—his sense of his powers had diminished since he sat down three years before to begin Great Expectations because his magazine needed a serial. He hadn’t filled one of his large canvases since Little Dorrit, begun in 1855, and for the first time in his life, he was daunted by the prospect. During the writing of David Copperfield, he had told Forster rather gaily of entering a stationery store to buy paper, and overhearing a woman ask for the next number of the novel, knowing that he hadn’t even written it yet—that was the only time, apparently, he was ever intimidated by his chosen publishing format. While he was working up Our Mutual Friend, he complained several times to Forster that he didn’t quite know what he was getting at. The ideas he had pivoted upon character (for example, the idea of a man and a woman both scheming to marry for money, only to discover after the wedding that neither had any) rather than theme (by contrast, his first thoughts about Little Dorrit concerned the social problems implicit in the phrase “Nobody’s Fault,” the first title of the novel). One aspect of English life that still annoyed him was narrow-minded John Bullishness—portrayed in Our Mutual Friend in the person of Podsnap. Tradition has it that Podsnap was based on none other than John Forster, as Harold Skimpole had been based on Leigh Hunt, and once again Dickens managed to betray a friend and portray a characteristic at the same time, though tradition also has it that he got away with it and that Forster never revealed whether or not he realized what Dickens had done.
Once he started, the writing was slower than usual—he was working hard but felt he was no longer as quick and inventive as he had been. One number came up two and a half pages short—a flaw that had to be corrected and seems to have indicated to Dickens that he was losing his professional edge. All in all, the composition of Our Mutual Friend did not give him the pleasure that others had (though much of the information about Dickens’s views on Our Mutual Friend is not available, because the final volumes of his letters have not yet been published).
Yet the novel is a delight. The opening two chapters set the theme—in the first chapter, Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam are out upon the Thames, engaged in Gaffer’s line of work, which is salvaging from the river. They find a corpse. In chapter 2, gossip about a strange will comes up at the high society dinner table of Mr. and Mrs. Veneering; at the end of the meal, a young lawyer, Mortimer Lightwood, is handed a message. The beneficiary of the will has been found drowned. Gossip neatly defines the circle of the novel—the highest are linked with the lowest, not by an institution (the court of Chancery) or a system (capitalism), but by the much more casual and yet permanent human inclinations to tell a good story and to investigate a secret. As the characters come into relationships with one another, they do so voluntarily, because they conceive an interest in one another. Their relationships proliferate; desired connections lead to undesired connections as well as other desired ones, until everyone is connected, much of London is explored, and the plot works itself out clearly, logically, and with pleasure for the reader. Throughout, the novel is driven by character and style rather than by theme.
If we compare Our Mutual Friend with Bleak House and Little Dorrit, for example, we see that the imputation, in the earlier books, that characters’ views and actions are determined by their circumstances is no longer present. All the characters in Our Mutual Friend act in accordance with their sense of who they are morally, or who they would like to be; even Rogue Riderhood has a motto—he “makes his living by the sweat of his brow.” The good characters, of whom Mr. Boffin is an example, are able to retain a sense of right and wrong in spite of circumstances. Much of the novel turns upon the moral education of Bella Wilfer, in whom those who love her see an inherent sense of compassion and integrity, but who acts in a mercenary and spoiled fashion. Mr. Boffin intends his ruse of miserliness to uncover the real Bella, not to change her from one sort of girl to another. Dickens is careful, in the beginning, to show Bella’s true affection for her father—the question is how she will reveal her naturally good nature, not whether she will. Eugene Wrayburn undergoes a similar testing—when he finds Lizzie in her hiding place and has a last interview with her, his motives are still dishonorable—although he is strongly drawn to her, he cannot bring himself to cross the social gulf between them and ask her to marry him. Even after she rescues him and cares for him, he is hesitant and wonders if his moral weakness is, or should be, fatal. But the experience of marriage (as with Bella) and friendship and connection bolsters his resolve, and the novel closes with Eugene at last attaining a moral vision. Instead of the last note of Little Dorrit, which has Clennam and Amy subsumed into the “usual uproar,” at the end of Our Mutual Friend, the principal characters have made themselves a small society of friendship (and prosperity) that is a refuge from the shallowness represented by Lady Tippins, the snobbishness represented by Lord Snigsworth, the blind pomposity represented by Podsnap, and the passion, greed, and criminality represented by Headstone, Wegg, and Riderhood. In short, Dickens has returned to a comic vision of the world, in which choice and agency determine fate, connection is possible, and individuals are able (and indeed required) to understand their true situations and act on them.
Also in contrast with every novel after David Copperfield, Dickens explores the postmarital relationships of his characters, developing images of domestic connection. The weddings are not the end. Bella continues to be tested after hers. Her husband tempts her greed, her trust, her dedication to household management, her relations with her mother and sister. These chapters not only allow Bella to win wealth and integrity together, they allow Dickens to expatiate upon his ideas of a good marriage, which he has hardly ever done before. The foundation of this ideal marital relationship is romantic love combined with gratitude; its goal is some sort of substantial “improving object”; it is lived out among a community of like-minded friends rather than familial kin. Eugene and Lizzie’s marriage reflects the same ideals, except that enlightenment and strength flow not from the man to the woman, as with John and Bella, but from the woman to the man. What is important here is that in contrast with, say, Pip and Sydney Carton, the reformed characters of Our Mutual Friend are allowed to reap the rewards of salvation; their feelings of guilt and shame do not prohibit them from intimate connection. In addition, that salvation takes place in the world rather than in the afterlife.
Dickens has stepped back from his wholesale critique of English society and, in so doing, allows his characters to assert their freedom within what he continues to portray as a corrupt structure. Corruption, he is saying, is a fact of life, but not the determiner of the individual’s moral direction. The average man or woman (not just the exceptional Amy Dorrit type) can understand right and wrong. Twemlow, Lightwood, Jenny Wren, Riah, Mrs. Lammle, and Georgiana Podsnap are all required to assume a moral stance against one sort of pressure or another, and all do, and thus a right-minded community is formed within the larger community of fools and knaves.
In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens doesn’t seem to be pressing grand themes and motifs, as he had in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, or even Great Expectations, and as a result, critics have not always taken this last completed novel as seriously as earlier ones. But in fact, Dickens’s style and character portrayal in Our Mutual Friend show that his political and social opinions have been successfully and gracefully dissolved into his use of language. At 820 pages, Our Mutual Friend is certainly one of the greatest examples of sustained perfection of style in the English language. Examples of felicitous phrasings abound on every page, from the satiric (“A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap’s mind which he called ‘the young person’ may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter”) to the comic (“ ‘Who is it?’ said Mrs. Wilfer, in her Act-of-Parliament manner. ‘Enter!’ ”) to the violent (“In an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked, flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the sky”) to the lyrical (“Up came the sun, streaming all over London, and in its glorious impartiality even condescending to make prismatic sparkles in the whiskers of Mr. Alfred Lammle as he sat at breakfast”). But grace of style meshes with delicacy and complexity of character drawing. Dickens’s typical florid repetitiveness, which sometimes works in earlier novels (Mrs. Gamp, Flora Finching, Miss Tox, Josiah Bounderby, Carker the manager) and sometimes does not (Esther Summerson, Miss Wade, the Frenchman Rigaud), has given way to something much more subtle in Our Mutual Friend. In allowing for the possibility of transformation in almost all the characters of the novel, Dickens has changed his mind about human nature—he revisits old character types and sees them anew: the Reverend Frank Milvey, clergyman, is a forgiven Chadband. Eugene is a forgiven James Harthouse. Lightwood the lawyer is a forgiven Tulkinghorn. Boffin the miser is a forgiven Scrooge. Fledgeby is Ralph Nickleby brought low, given a drubbing, and peppered into the bargain. Lammle has certain Murdstone characteristics, but when he canes Fledgeby, the reader has to acknowledge that he has his uses. Bella is not unlike Dora. Lizzie is Agnes with strength and initiative. While I don’t want to make too much of these similarities, I do want to stress that Dickens’s comic vision in Our MutualFriend is partially retrospective—the greatness of the novel comes from a new vision of the world that more successfully integrates the conscious mind with the subconscious and the individual with the group, and at the same time more successfully integrates all the various parts of a novel—plot, character, style, setting, and theme.
As I have pointed out before, the form of the novel carries several inherent philosophical ideas—that the individual is worthy of investigation; that his or her relationship to the group is always more or less vexed, but that he or she exists only as part of a group; that reality is always subjectively experienced; that the world is so abundant and disorderly that it can be described only in prose; and that stories can be narrated sequentially and understood. A great novel may work against these inherent philosophical ideas, but a perfect novel must work with them—a perfect novel realizes the implications of the form and communicates the author’s idiosyncratic vision simultaneously, in an outpouring of language that seems brand-new and just right at the same time. For me, Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line.
Even so, Our Mutual Friend was not a tremendous success. The first number sold very well—a new Dickens after two and a half years—but sales dwindled thereafter, and the last number sold only nineteen thousand copies. Dickens made about £7,000 overall (roughly equivalent to some $250,000), but Chapman and Hall lost money. Reviewers seemed to love it or hate it—one of the haters was Henry James, aged twenty-two, who panned it in The Nation. Modern critics have been divided also, no doubt owing to its differences from those novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—that they have most fervently admired. But the modern era has not, in general, been receptive to the comic novel, or the comic view of life, and has also tended to devalue Shakespeare’s comedies relative to his tragedies. It takes exceptional grace of style and a steady comic vision to make a comic novel work without allowing it to slip into sentimentality, while at the same time preventing its satirical tone from darkening into cynicism. Some critics have recognized the accomplishment of Our Mutual Friend, but others have looked for something that was no longer there—Dickens’s former global critique of English society.
On June 9, 1865, when Dickens was returning from France with Ellen and Frances Ternan, the train in which they were riding went off the tracks as it was crossing a bridge near Staplehurst, Kent. Men working on the tracks had failed to post a warning guard far enough away for the train to have time to halt, and seven first-class carriages went over the bridge into the river below. Dickens’s carriage dangled over the bridge, held by its coupling to the baggage car behind it. Dickens and the Ternans were thrown into the downward corner of the carriage, but Dickens managed to climb out the window and then procure a key and get the two women out. At this point, he saw the chaos below. He took his brandy flask and his top hat and went down among the dead and injured; he filled his top hat with water from the river and went around, succoring where he could. Some people died as he was helping them; others he helped, only to return and discover that they had died. Dickens was not especially well at this time, but he wrote to a friend, “I have a—I don’t know what to call it—constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least flustered at the time.” He persuaded one young man to get himself out from under the wreckage; he helped another confront the death of his bride. As usual, he did not stint himself or shrink from the horror. When it was time to be taken away by an evacuation train, he climbed into the dangling carriage and found his manuscript.
Although he acted in every way calmly and even heroically during the crash, he began within a day or two to suffer from what we would call post-traumatic stress—he wrote little about it in his letters, but to one friend, he said that thinking about it gave him “the shake,” and although he continued to travel by rail and of course hansom cab in order to visit Ellen and to do business and give readings, his children recalled later that any sort of unexpected jolt on the train panicked him, and he hated a cab or a carriage to go too fast. He did not advertise his presence on the train or his heroism. He used influence with the railway company to avoid appearing at the inquest, knowing the identity of his companions would be revealed. He did, however, maintain an interest in at least one of the people he rescued, with whom he corresponded for several years.
It is possible that Ellen was injured in the crash, since Dickens referred to her in his letters as “the patient” for some time afterward, and in later life she was said to have an old injury in her upper left arm. Dickens, as always, went on with business—writing his novel, editing and publishing All the Year Round. In September, when the novel was complete, he went to France to do some business, returning over the same route as the accident, perhaps a conscious attempt to overcome anxieties that were growing rather than diminishing. His health was not improving, either. In France he had some sort of “sunstroke,” which was probably an actual stroke; his many long walks were taken in spite of the fact that one of his feet was painfully swollen.
In the fall, Dickens leased several houses. One, near Hyde Park, was for himself and his daughter Mamie. Two others, in the village of Slough, he took under the name of “Tringham,” one for himself and one for Ellen and Frances Ternan. Letters written by contemporaries to other contemporaries about the Dickenses’ social lives that fall indicate that they were the subject of at least some disparaging gossip—Dickens’s daughters, after all, were allied not only to him, about whom there were stories, but also to Wilkie Collins, Katey’s brother-in-law, who lived openly with his mistress. Dickens’s apparently successful secrecy about where Ellen Ternan was and what precisely their relations were did not inhibit society, his old enemy, from inferring and disapproving.
In 1866, Dickens embarked upon another reading tour, this time giving thirty readings for £50 each, and he hired a new manager, George Dolby, who became a good friend and ally as well as a trusted business associate. When Dickens had rehearsed with his usual industry and given a few test readings to friends, they were once again amazed—he was even better than he had been, in spite of ill health, post-traumatic stress, and living a double life. He began his tour in March 1866 and ended it in June. The reading series earned £5,000, though Dickens took only his £1,500—he had proved his point about how profitable such a series could be, and the company that had put on the series was eager to do it again. But the success of the series could not make up for the fact that Dickens spent the summer in worse health than before, bothered by pains and anxieties. Kate became ill later on in the year too. In January 1867, he began again, this time a longer tour, taking him also to Ireland. The traveling exhausted him very quickly, but the reading itself and the audience enthusiasm seem to have energized him enough to go on. The great paradox of the readings was that they gave him something that they also took away. Forster claimed that the net cost was more than he could bear, but without any detailed knowledge of what was going on with Ellen Ternan, it is impossible locate the real cause of Dickens’s complaints. We may infer that the ups and downs of his relationship with her affected him from the fact that he had been so sensitive to the unhappiness of his marriage and to Catherine’s illnesses and depressions. There is no evidence that he was ever able to reserve his emotions or assume a cool attitude toward his loved ones. If, as Claire Tomalin asserts, Ellen Ternan bore a child or even two who died, and if, as Ellen later told her clergyman, Canon Benham, she came to regret and dislike her intimacy with Dickens during his lifetime, then there must have been some emotional turmoil between them; but no letters to her or from her survive. The readings Dickens gave were more than a success, they were a success without the ambiguities of personal intercourse. The admiration of his audiences, the money he made, and his own sense of accomplishment in doing a consistently professional job in spite of obstacles carried him through exhaustion and the gathering symptoms of mortality.
The temptation was to go on to America, and Dickens began to explore it as soon as his 1867 tour ended in May. He decided to send George Dolby to America to canvas the possibilities, and Dolby left in August, accompanied to the boat by Dickens, who was using a cane. Another temptation of the American trip was that Ellen might go with him (though it’s hard to believe that he actually considered this realistic after his former experience of the United States, where he had been forced to give up almost every vestige of privacy). No doubt the strength of his desire dictated the fantasy. When Dolby returned at the end of September, he assured Dickens that there was plenty of money to be made, and although Dickens consulted several friends (Forster was strongly opposed to the trip), he had already decided to go. The households he had to support and the fact that his sons were not making their way in the world meant that earning a fortune seemed a better alternative than not earning a fortune.
Dickens began to plan his trip and persistently held on to the idea that Ellen might accompany him, all through the fall and even until he arrived in the United States in mid-November. Their plan together is somewhat confusing, as if a fair amount of subterfuge was involved. Ellen left England for a visit to her sister in Florence at the end of October. Dickens’s plan was to get to America and reconnoiter (he had two weeks before the first reading). If Ellen’s companionship looked possible, she was to travel back to England and take the boat from Liverpool on December 11. A coded message, passed to her from W. H. Wills, was to tell her what to do. But it did not look possible—once again, Dickens was beset with appearances and engagements. Ellen, who was staying with her sister, the wife of Anthony Trollope’s older brother, made no apparent effort to leave. Possibly she did not agree with his plan to begin with. At any rate, Ellen Ternan stayed in Italy, and Dickens made his American tour alone; his notes to W. H. Wills from America (many of them cover notes for letters to Ellen that have since been lost or destroyed) reveal his yearning for her. Her responses are not on record.
Dickens’s second American journey was not the disaster the first had been—Dickens was neither so offended by the Americans nor so offensive in return. For one thing, his public readings were a great success, starting with the first one, in Boston. He read every day or so, traveling from one city to another, mostly between Boston and Baltimore, as far west as Syracuse, but not any farther (the loop to Chicago, Canada, and the West was canceled). But the weather was northern winter weather, with snow and sleet and frigid cold; Dickens suffered from colds, flu, and general respiratory malaise the whole time. From time to time, he lost his voice. His left leg and foot gave him trouble, so that he had to use a cane and sometimes prop his foot up during appearances. The sheer immensity of his appeal was wearing—thousands of tickets were sold, he was continually stared at and greeted in the street, prominent Americans, including President Andrew Johnson, wanted to meet and talk with him.
He had many experiences that entertained and amused him, especially encounters with children and friendly strangers. He made friends and renewed old friendships. His postscript to his earlier volume, American Notes, shows a sense of forgiveness. He comments that the United States is a decidedly more settled and refined place than it had been in the 1840s, and that he, perhaps, had also learned something. He writes, “I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here, and the state of my health.”
The state of his health seemed to revive temporarily with his return to England at the end of April. He went first to Peckham, to see Ellen and Frances Ternan, who had returned from Florence only a day or so before. He stayed there for a few days, then went to Gad’s Hill, where, he said, his doctor greeted him with, “Good Lord! Seven years younger!” But there was no real rest—W. H. Wills suffered a concussion from a fall from his horse, and Dickens had to assume his partner’s share of the work on All the Year Round. Family troubles continued. Katey’s husband, Wilkie Collins’s brother, was ill with stomach cancer; Dickens’s unsympathetic attitude estranged him from his longtime friend. Dickens’s son Charley went through bankruptcy proceedings, ended up owing £1,000, and went to work at the magazine (he was married to the daughter of Dickens’s enemy Richard Evans, and they had five children). Ellen and her mother moved away from the house in Peckham, possibly evidence that Frances Ternan no longer countenanced the relationship or that the relationship had changed to something less compromising and intimate (this according to Ackroyd). Unable to start another novel, Dickens decided to do another tour, his final tour. This time, he thought, he would do a hundred readings for £8,000, and this time, he also thought, he would do something that all his friends and relations subsequently agreed contributed directly to his death, which was to introduce into his performance the murder scene from Oliver Twist.
He practiced during the summer of 1868. One day, according to Ackroyd, his son Charley was working in the house when he heard the sounds of two people fighting. He ran out and discovered his father “striding up and down, gesticulating wildly, and, in the character of Mr. Sikes, murdering Nancy, with every circumstance of the most aggravated brutality.” The result, on stage, was by every account electrifying and even terrifying (which, according to extant scripts, was Dickens’s goal). One male friend testified to a tremendous desire to scream out, and another, a doctor, warned Dickens that one screaming woman would lead to mass female hysteria. It was a sensation unprecedented on the stage, according to one celebrated actress Dickens consulted, in at least fifty years. But how well we recognize it, and the impulse to do it—surely Dickens’s acting out of Sikes’s murder of Nancy is the direct ancestor of every horrible mass murder, dismemberment, explosion, and gratuitously violent act that we see in the movies and on stage. Audiences couldn’t resist it; the author/reader/actor/impresario couldn’t resist it. Once again, Dickens was the first, or nearly the first, to try something that, over 130 years later, is almost routine and yet still discussed in much the same terms that people discussed it at the time—is it necessary, is it healthy, is it too much, is it enough, is it true, and if it is true, isn’t it still unsafe for public consumption?
He tried it out among friends in November. Most were horrified. He tried it out onstage in January 1869. It was a great success and became his favorite part of the performance. He did it several times a week, in spite of the reservations of everyone around him, just as he had always done outrageous things in spite of the reservations of everyone around him. He would assert his freedom to the end. In Edinburgh, as the tour progressed, George Dolby expressed reservations. Dickens responded angrily, “Have you finished?” Dolby then replied, “I have said what I feel on that matter.” Dickens leapt from his chair and “smashed” his plate with his knife and fork. At the end of their disagreement, Dickens burst into tears. But he did not stop reading Sikes and Nancy. As the reading series went on, things went more and more badly—he was giddy, he fell and cut himself, he was dazed and tired, his left leg and foot plagued him, he was confused from time to time. His doctor and another both advised him to stop the readings, and, finally, some weeks before scheduled to do so, he did, returning to Gad’s Hill Place and attempting to rest.
If Ackroyd is correct in suggesting that there had been a shift in Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan, this shift would now be about a year old. In the summer of 1869, Dickens began to think about a new novel; it was far darker in theme than Our Mutual Friend and concerned not only a man, John Jasper, who was living a double life (respectable cathedral organist and secret opium addict), but also an affianced couple, Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud, who agreed to end their engagement. It is possible to infer some shadowy outlines of Dickens’s thirteen years with Ellen Ternan from hints that both of them dropped, as well as from some of the themes Dickens explored in his last four works. In A Tale of Two Cities, Lucie Manette seems physically like Ellen Ternan, but she is still one of Dickens’s idealized young woman figures, who functions in the novel mostly to support, comfort, and inspire the men around her—her father, her husband, and Sydney Carton. She has no distinct personality of her own, even less, in fact, than Esther Summerson or Amy Dorrit. This is the sort of young woman all of Dickens’s letters during his divorce show that he was eager for Ellen to be seen as, and his ideal relationship toward her, as shown by his role in The Frozen Deep as well as the portrayal of Sydney Carton, was a noble, self-sacrificing one. It seems as though, at least at first, Frances Ternan and Ellen’s sisters went along with this idea—Dickens as mentor, helper, and protector of the whole family, whose interest in Ellen was marked but avuncular.
When Pip and Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, discuss love in terms of “unquestioning self-humiliation” and irresistible attraction, where the loved one is projected into every scene and facet of the lover’s perception and existence (very new terms for Dickens in his depiction of love, which he had always previously shown as a form of devoted, active companionship), we don’t have to make Estella precisely into Ellen Ternan in order to infer that Dickens’s ardor was seeking a new form of expression with Ellen, which resulted in her removal to France and possibly the birth of a child. That this was followed by a period of domestic contentment, reflected in the congeniality and generous spirit of Our Mutual Friend, does not require much of a leap, and toward the end of the composition of this novel, the group decided to return to England. But in the meantime, Ellen’s sister Fanny had married into the Trollope family. There is evidence of bad relations between Dickens and Fanny Ternan Trollope in several letters written in 1867, before Dickens embarked for America, and also of self-consciousness on Ellen’s part about her status. Bad relations might easily have grown out of Fanny’s desire for untainted respectability in her new situation. While Dickens was in America, Ellen lived among the Trollopes in Florence. Though Dickens hoped Ellen would join him, there is no evidence that she ever planned to. When he came back in April, she preceded him by only a day or two, which meant that she had been with her sister for six months, plenty of time for her family and Fanny’s in-laws to convince her that, at twenty-eight, her own secret life was harming her rather than helping her. She and her mother moved out of the Peckham house not long after her return from Florence. Although she then saw Dickens frequently, his sadness, her later remarks to her clergyman, and the theme of parted lovers in The Mystery of Edwin Drood would indicate that they were attempting friendship. Possibly, too, her compassion for his failing health as well as gratitude for his love prevented a total breach between them.
Every novelist understands that a novel is a conceit, that making up stories gives the novelist the opportunity to try out emotions, ideas, images, relationships, causes, and effects. A novelist might drop Leigh Hunt into a narrative, but he is not taking Leigh Hunt’s actual life and circumstances and depicting them as they are—they would not in that way fit into the other fictional parts of the novel. The purpose of the game changes from novel to novel and novelist to novelist, but in general it is to make sense of the ongoing chaos. We don’t have to make Ellen into Lucie, Estella, Bella, and Rosa in order to see Dickens’s contemplation of her changing role in his life. The fact is that in his last novels, Dickens’s views of women deepened and grew more complex. This must certainly be owing to some sort of ongoing interaction with not only Ellen, but also her mother, her sisters, and his own growing daughters.
When his American friends James and Annie Fields visited England in the late spring and summer of 1869, Dickens went all out to entertain them both in London, where he took rooms at a hotel, and at Gad’s Hill, where he planned picnics and outings for them. Mrs. Fields was a dedicated diarist and astute observer. She noted that while he was charming, convivial, and even playful, there was a constant undercurrent of depression—“he is a sad man,” she wrote. When they departed from the train station near Gad’s Hill, she wrote, about their last moments together on the platform, “he in his cheery way making us look and think of other things until the signal came. A crowd had collected to see him by the time we started but he did not seem to see it and the blood rushed all over his face as the tears came to ours. . . .” This is the eternal Dickens, jolly and kind, quick to feel, possessing quantities of natural social grace. But also in July, he wrote a review of Forster’s life of Walter Savage Landor (the original of Boythorn in Bleak House) in which he said, “The life of almost any man possessing great gifts would be a sad book to himself. . . .” Always, with Dickens, sadness and even despair went hand in hand with laughter, ready wit, and an appreciation of absurdity.
Dickens began writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood in October. He complained about the composition and in fact had to rewrite and reshuffle the first two numbers at the last minute because each was six pages too short, but the extant text shows few other changes. It may not have been easy, but it does seem to have come out as he wanted it. He was pleased with it, too. The plan was no longer for twenty monthly parts to be published in nineteen numbers—Dickens and his publishers felt that the era of such long serials was past (perhaps this was the lesson of the low sales of the last numbers of Our Mutual Friend)—but, rather, for twelve monthly parts and a shorter, more concentrated story. The contract provided for the death of the author, too. The first number of Dickens’s last, uncompleted novel was not published until almost six months after he began writing. No longer could Dickens sit down, as he had with Great Expectations, and produce prodigally at will.
Dickens had always been drawn, by what he called “the attraction of repulsion,” to murders and stories of murder. Now, partly through the work of Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s friend, the murder mystery had gotten rather more formalized, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood was planned along those lines. The tone of Drood is darker than that of Our Mutual Friend, and the storytelling is far less expansive, much more plot based than character based. Instead of allowing his characters to embroider freely upon the theme of their personalities, he moves the plot forward rather quickly, pausing to expatiate more on setting and atmosphere than on motivation. Cloisterham has an intentionally gothic feel—Dickens is always referring to the dead in their crypts and in the churchyard. One character carves headstones and also explores the various secret chambers of the cathedral. Even so, Drood is not traditionally gothic or horrible. For one thing, images of death are counterpointed by strong images of youth and vitality and wholesomeness. For another, it is not the restful dead who are threatening, but the restless and dissatisfied John Jasper. Dickens, certainly aware of death because of his various illnesses, portrays it as a kind of circumambient stillness and coldness, a natural winteriness, not light, but not horrible, either. True horror is reserved for Jasper’s aggression—he says to Rosa, “I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.” The danger is not that a ghost will walk, but that an ungovernable man will commit rape.
Rosa flees to her guardian, where she is almost at once surrounded by three men and two women. It seems that if Dickens had not died, he would have at this point focused upon the ensnaring of Jasper.
Critics have praised the restrained, somber style of Drood rather as they have elevated Great Expectations for similar reasons, of being Dickensy enough, but not too Dickensy. It is clear from Jasper’s machinations that he is the killer and that Rosa suspects him almost as much as the reader does. The only mystery concerns the whereabouts of Edwin’s body. Rosa’s protectors are all strong, resourceful men. It is hard to see how Dickens could believably deliver her to true jeopardy. Some of Dickens’s familiar plotlines—the moral education of a young man, for example—could obtain with Neville Landless, but by the end of the first half of the story, Neville is still a minor character. The disillusionment of Mr. Crisparkle and the comeuppance of Honeythunder the philanthropist, as well as the exposure of Mr. Sapsea, the pompous mayor, are also tried-and-true Dickens themes, but at this point in Drood, they are not especially well developed. Heavily plotted novels are by nature difficult to engineer without careful planning and the opportunity to rewrite and rethink in order to tie up threads and bolster implausibilities. Although I admire much of the writing of Drood, I don’t think the form of the murder mystery is congenial to serial composition, and I think even a novelist of Dickens’s inventiveness and genius would have been hampered by the shortness of the rest of the projected story and by the fact that as he would be composing the climax and denouement, the earlier developments of the plot would already be written in stone.
Although The Mystery of Edwin Drood is one of Dickens’s minor works, it sheds important light on his state of mind at the end of his life, especially with regard to lifelong concerns. Primary among these, of course, is love. Jasper is similar to Pip and to Bradley Headstone in the power of his passion, but his is far more unscrupulous. In Great Expectations and in Our Mutual Friend, the beloved woman remains a distant and inviolable object. Eugene is a little like Jasper—he pursues Lizzie, but his own ennui, his conscience, and his desire bring him to an impasse. He asks himself whether he should marry Lizzie, but he never asks himself whether he should force himself upon her—Dickens doesn’t allow that thought to rise to consciousness. Jasper’s desire, on the other hand, is aggressive. In the first six parts, there is no countervailing idea of love—Edwin’s love for Rosa is compromised and dissatisfied, Mr. Crisparkle is almost virginal in his outlook, and Neville’s infatuation with Rosa has elements of aggression in it, too.
It is tempting to link Jasper with some elements of Dickens’s own psyche. He is an accomplished artist leading a double life driven by passion. He is no less a part of Dickens than Quilp or Carker or all the other villains. It is also tempting to see Edwin as another version of one of Dickens’s autobiographical young men, ripe for the painful passage from shallow boyhood to rueful manhood. Dickens and Ellen Ternan seem to have changed their relations in the spring of 1868 from an intimacy to a friendship; perhaps this is reflected in the Edwin/Rosa plot. And then there is Crisparkle, a physical culturist of perfect charity and innocence, also not unlike his creator. It is as if, once again, Dickens is asking himself what a man is, and is looking within to embody contradictory impulses as narrative figures. What is clearly true is that Dickens’s experience of Ellen Ternan and his passion for her continued to the end of his life to feed his imagination. At his death he was still working out what a man was, what a woman was, and what their proper relations might look like.
Dickens’s works are often seen to be all of a piece—he did a certain sort of thing, or he employed a certain sort of technique, from the beginning to the end of his career. He was Dickensy. In fact, though, Dickens’s novels, stories, plays, and letters show that his ideas and his worldview were dynamic, not static. There were things he came back to again and again—for example, the figure of the innocent girl or the callow youth, the figure of the boorish philanthropist or the termagant wife, the large ideas of comic integration or tragic isolation—but he came back to them with fresh experiences and fresh ideas. His novels propose different solutions to the dilemma of incompatibility while his analysis of the dilemma gets more and more complex and refined. The solution in Our Mutual Friend is patience, forgiveness, and communication. Unfortunately, the solution in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is forever lost to us. Dickens did not “work out” a static Weltanschauung that he carried with him from childhood. His vigorous engagement with his world gave him a perennially evolving worldview that was dissolved into and transformed by the richness and idiosyncrasy of his writing style.
By winter 1869, Dickens was unmistakably ailing. At Christmas, he couldn’t come down from his room until the evening, and his left leg and foot, very swollen, were giving him constant pain. His left hand swelled and his left eye began to trouble him, too. Nevertheless, after New Year’s 1870, he became enthusiastic about doing a last series of farewell readings in London. On January 11, he gave the first of the readings. The performances grew increasingly taxing, steadily driving up his blood pressure until by the end his pulse was 124. On March 9, he had an audience with Queen Victoria. They spoke of mundane matters; Dickens, of course, was required to stand throughout, a hardship. On March 15, he gave the last reading. The huge audience cheered his entrance. He read beautifully and effortlessly (or so it appeared), and the audience cheered and applauded until he began to weep. For the man and his audience, Dickens’s readings from his work were, from first to last, an unmitigated success.
Dickens was as active as he could be to the end. He visited Ellen, he dined out, he read parts of his new novel to friends, he planned improvements at Gad’s Hill, he continued his mystery, he wrote and directed an amateur play, he went to the offices of All the Year Round. The infirm Dickens kept up a round of activities that would have exhausted a healthier, younger man. It left him exhausted, too, which almost everyone he encountered noticed, but the habits of industry and restlessness could not be broken.
There are two stories of Dickens’s death. The standard one, related by most biographers, has him at Gad’s Hill with Katey, Mamie, and Georgina on the evening of Monday, June 6, after a day’s writing. He and Katey stayed up late discussing her career plans. On Tuesday morning he got up at the usual early hour and wrote. Later that day, he was well enough to take a walk with Georgina. On Wednesday, he got up early and went straight to his writing. Katey and Mamie had returned to London. He worked all day, then complained to Georgina of feeling ill at dinner. Before she could react, he began to talk unintelligibly, and when she got to him, he asked to be laid upon the ground. He became unconscious. His doctors and daughters, and Ellen, were sent for by telegram. He was placed on the sofa, never regained consciousness, and died the next day, June 9.
The second story, appended to Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ellen Ternan, has Dickens leaving Gad’s Hill on Wednesday about midday and going to Ellen in Peckham, where she still sometimes met him. There he collapsed, speaking his last words to Ellen, not Georgina. She then found a carriage to take him back to Gad’s Hill and went with him. They arrived there that evening; then the two women carried Dickens to the sofa, and Georgina and Ellen agreed on a more seemly story for relatives and friends. There are only a few bits of evidence for this possibility. One is a story in the family of the caretaker of the Peckham house, that he (the caretaker) carried the unconscious Dickens out of the house. The other is that Dickens cashed a check on June 8 for £22 (equivalent currently to some $700) and was found to have £6.6 in his pocket when he died. He had not given the money to Georgina, because she soon had to request money for housekeeping expenses from Dickens’s lawyer. Tomalin suggests that he took the money to Peckham for Ellen Ternan’s household expenses and gave it to her there.
At any rate, Dickens was dead, and his death was the occasion of astonishment to those around him. Forster said, “The duties of life remain while life remains, but for me the joy of it is gone forever.” Charles Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey on June 14.
AFTERWORD
CHARLES DICKENS was a phenomenon by any standard. His stature as a novelist—as the paradigmatic “great novelist,” whose work is both popular and important—has only grown since his death. But in addition, his very public life—as an editor, democratic gadfly, theorist of capitalism and modernity, doer and promoter of the common good, champion of both the overlooked classes and eccentric individuals—makes him unique among novelists as a wholly productive and dedicated citizen. And on top of that, his strange habit of prefiguring twentieth-century life gives him unusual interest for us. The consequences of his celebrity—his public divorce and his secret life and his obligation to live out his inner life under the gaze of the world—are fascinating enough. But even more so is his readiness to do such things as hypnotize his friend Madame de la Rue and “cure” her mental distress, or to bring Sikes and Nancy to the stage, for the shocking entertainment of all. Dickens’s works and his life show the same thing—a vast intuitive grasp of the possibilities of urban capitalist life. His works explore and touch upon almost every facet of modern life (public sanitation, education of the masses, proliferating litigation, social tensions brought about by class fluidity, waste management, high-speed transportation, dislocation of traditional neighborhoods, divorce, the alliance of religion and economic exploitation, governmental incompetence and corruption, the commodification of family and social relationships, even addiction and colonialism). In the same way, his life expresses social mobility, fame, and freedom of action and of thought generally supposed to be more characteristic of our time than of his. His prescience about the nature and workings of established capitalism is like the prescience of Alexis de Tocqueville about the nature of the United States. Other philosophers and novelists and political theorists have come and gone, but Dickens is still with us, reminding us always that the individual and the group are both present simultaneously, never to be dissolved into each other, but never to be separated, either.
Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Sussex and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel—to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way.