Charles Dickens: A Life (58 page)

In town, we are taken into the shops and workrooms of lesser London trades: Mr Venus, the taxidermist in his shadowy cluttered rooms; Fanny Cleaver, the dolls’ dressmaker, so crippled she can hardly walk and her shoulders are uneven as she sits at her work bench where she cuts and glues fabrics, looking at first sight like ‘a child – a dwarf – a girl – a something –’ She calls herself Jenny Wren and she has a sharp tongue, a ‘queer but not ugly little face, with its bright grey eyes’ and a mass of golden hair.
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She is our old friend the child worker, already well established in her profession at twelve or thirteen. The dolls’ dressmaker upset some nineteenth-century readers who, like Podsnap, preferred not to acknowledge the existence of the deformed and disabled. Henry James, who gave
Our Mutual Friend
a ferociously bad review, particularly objected to Jenny as ‘a poor little dwarf’ put in to arouse ‘cheap merriment and very cheap pathos … Like all Dickens’s pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr Dickens’s novels.’
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James did not trouble himself to remember Jenny as Dickens actually wrote her – as a young woman who has made a trade for herself, works at it hard and imaginatively, maintains herself, looks after her drunken father and is a staunch friend. She may have sentimental ideas about angels who comfort her when she is in pain, but that is a small defect to set against her virtues. James probably disliked Sloppy too, the workhouse boy presumed to be an idiot because he is ungainly, has a small head to his long body and has never been taught anything. Dickens, who had seen enough to know that ugliness and ignorance don’t necessarily denote lack of intelligence, shows how Sloppy, given training, proper food and kindness, learns the trade of cabinet-maker.

Jenny is a girl who is wiser than her father, and another is her friend Lizzie Hexam, daughter of a Thames waterman who lives by robbing the corpses of the drowned. With a criminal father, no mother and no education, she manages to be intelligent and principled, brings up her younger brother, Charlie, and sends him away to be given an education that will allow him to live a respectable life. She is a needlewoman and has a job as keeper of the stockroom of a seamen’s outfitter, and we are shown that she is enterprising and brave as well as lovely to look at. Some of this may stretch our belief, and her inner life remains closed to us. Dickens can draw poor, ambitious young men like her brother and his schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, but he can’t get into the mind of Lizzie, and he gives her nothing but conventional ideas and feelings. He describes her beautifully, seen by her admirer through a small window, sitting on the floor by the brazier, ‘with her face leaning on her hand. There was a kind of film or flicker on her face, which at first he took to be the fitful fire-light, but on a second look he saw that she was weeping … It was a little window of but four pieces of glass, and was not curtained … he looked long and steadily at her. A deep rich piece of colour, with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair …’
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Lizzie is like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Eugene, the idle barrister who falls in love with her, is like a Du Maurier hero: interesting types, each with a wonderful surface, but we are not shown beyond the surface into the complex creature within. Their story culminates in a breaking of the class barriers that divide them, but only after he has been reduced to permanent invalidity, and she must become more nurse than lover.
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Dickens does better with Bella Wilfer, in spite of making her part of a plot that involves her in a series of unbelievable predicaments. We can believe that she longs to escape from poverty in suburban Holloway as much as the Ternan girls longed to escape from suburban Islington, but the crude course in moral improvement Bella is put through is feeble stuff. When she declares, ‘I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house,’
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we prick up our ears, as Ibsen did, so that it is a let-down to find her settling into life as a devoted married doll with her nose in the cookery book, a baby to keep her busy and never questioning the husband she has made into an idol. The best part of Bella is when she is shown with her father, letting her feelings and her behaviour rip. She is his favourite, he calls her ‘my pet’ and ‘the lovely woman’, and they keep up their flirtation throughout the book, enacting the ageing man’s dream of a young girl who devotes herself to making him happy. Bella is always hugging her father, arranging and rearranging his hair and smothering him with
her
hair. She ties his napkin on for him and pins him to the door, holding his ears while she kisses him all over his face. They go on secret expeditions together, one of them to Greenwich, which he calls ‘the happiest day he had ever known in his life’.
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She gives him money to buy new clothes, is in his confidence about his unsatisfactory relations with his wife – her mother – and offers him a quiet corner to escape to in her house when she is married. Contemporary critics, mostly middle-aged men, found Bella irresistibly charming. As you read the scenes between her and her father, it is tempting to see Dickens with Nelly, or with his daughter Katey, or with an amalgam of the two; only Reginald Wilfer is no stand-in for him, and it would have taken courage for either Nelly or Katey to smother the great Charles Dickens in her hair, or to take hold of his ears while she kissed him. His account of Bella suggests that he would have enjoyed it if they had.

Bella and her father lighten a book that in other parts is grim, dark and violent. It is also sometimes tedious. The weakness of the plotting is a serious fault, and there is far too much of the good Boffins who have inherited the dust heaps, and one-legged Silas Wegg, and of John Harmon’s fake identities.
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But the jealous agony and rage of the schoolteacher Bradley Headstone, tightly controlled and repressed until he is driven to murder, is powerfully done. As Edmund Wilson, a fairer American critic than Henry James, pointed out, Dickens for the first time drew a murderer with a complex character in Bradley, and one who was a respectable member of society.
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The scope of Dickens’s observation is prodigious, and his satirical bite as sharp as a fresh razor. And as well as the Veneerings’ horrible circle, he works some decent middle-class people into the story: those who run a hospital for children in the East End; and a hard-working clergyman, ‘expensively educated and wretchedly paid’, looking after a poor parish with the help of his intelligent wife ‘worn by anxiety’ and desperately overburdened with six children.
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Dickens said he was ‘sick of the church’, but he recognized plain goodness and selflessness, and what it exacted from those who practised it.
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You take away with you from
Our Mutual Friend
the river, tidal, dark and powerful, the cheerless townscapes of London, the skies, the clocks striking through the night, the littered streets and gritty London churchyards, a whole physical world. What is missing is the good new London, the works of the engineer Bazalgette that were started in the 1860s, the Thames Embankment ‘rising high and dry … on the Middlesex shore, from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars. A really fine work, and really getting on. Moreover, a great system of drainage. Another really fine work, and likewise really getting on.’
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This was how Dickens described the building of the Embankment and the construction of the sewers in a letter to his Swiss friend Cerjat, written shortly after he had completed the book, and it makes you regret that he did not work some of those great enterprises into it. The moral climate of his London is sour and nasty, redeemed here and there only by private courage and virtue.

Another noticeable feature of the novel is the large number of characters who experience bodily distress or difficulty – Jenny hardly able to walk, one-legged Wegg, Eugene nearly dead for months after Bradley’s attack, Betty Higden struggling to die in the open air, the wicked money-man Fledgeby whipped till he bleeds and then peppered. Their pains are a reminder that Dickens was often in pain himself, and that from February 1865 he was suffering intermittently from a foot so swollen he could not wear a normal boot, and so tender it often made it impossible for him to take the exercise on which he depended when he was working. It also gave him nights of ‘sleepless agony’, and he must have feared what it threatened for his future.
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‘If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish,’ he had told Forster more than a decade ago.
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Still, the book was finished on 2 September 1865, and Dickens took a few days in Paris and Boulogne: it seems unlikely that Nelly went with him, given their previous cross-Channel journey and perhaps too their sorrowful memories of France. He told Forster that he had to have a special boot made ‘on an Otranto scale’ for his sore foot, and that he could not bear anything on it after four or five in the afternoon, when he had to sit down with his leg up on another chair. While in Paris he also suffered from sunstroke, badly enough to take to his bed and call in a doctor, but in Boulogne he managed a little walking by the sea.
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On his return he wrote a Christmas piece for
All the Year Round
in the form of a monologue by a cheapjack, a tinker with a horse-drawn van. It was called ‘Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions’
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and, with its mixture of comical speech and pathos, was plainly written primarily for him to perform at his readings. Doctor Marigold describes the death of his beloved small daughter, his adoption of another little girl who is deaf and dumb, and how he teaches her to communicate and sends her to a school where she is well educated; she leaves him to marry and goes to China, but at the end he welcomes back her child, the third little girl in the story, who can hear and speak. It is skilfully constructed and deeply sentimental, Dickens hamming it up, and it went down well with audiences, and sold.

This autumn three of Dickens’s sons were far away, Frank in India, Alfred in Australia and Sydney at sea. Charley was in London, trying to run his paper business with small success, and Henry and Plorn were still boys and based at home. Dickens now decided that sixteen-year-old Henry, who was doing well at school in Wimbledon, should be entered for the Indian civil service examination, but Henry had other ideas and in September he told his father he had no desire to become a civil servant and wanted to try for Cambridge. Dickens responded by writing to his headmaster to say he could not afford to send a son to university unless there was a real hope of his doing well there, and asking what he thought of Henry’s abilities. The headmaster’s opinion was favourable, and Henry was allowed to stay on at school for another three years, and given extra coaching in various subjects, mathematics and fencing, among others. His father taught him shorthand, though not very successfully, because the dictations he improvised for him to take down were so funny they both fell about laughing. Henry was an ambitious and intelligent boy; he worked hard and in 1868 was accepted by Trinity Hall, a Cambridge law college, and went on to win an exhibition. Dickens was almost as incredulous at the success of this aberrant son as he was proud of his achievement; and Henry went on to become a conventionally successful and distinguished member of English society.

The Christmas of 1865 was celebrated with a house party at Gad’s Hill. Georgina and Mamie were in charge of the domestic arrangements, and Henry and Plorn were at home. Dickens arrived from London on 23 December and stayed for five days. Of the family, Katey and Charles Collins were there, and Charley, now forgiven for his marriage, with his wife Bessie and their babies, including ‘Master Charles Dickens, Junior’. Monsieur and Madame Fechter were also invited, with their son Paul. Henry Chorley, a bibulous bachelor, old friend of the family, contributor to
All the Year Round
and critic – he had reviewed
Our Mutual Friend
favourably in October – was there.
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Also Dickens’s protégé and current illustrator, Marcus Stone, whose father Frank had been dear to Dickens. A surprise guest was seventeen-year-old Edward Dickenson, whose life Dickens had saved at Staplehurst: Dickens had pulled him out of a heap of broken metal where he was jammed upside down, then taken him to Charing Cross Hospital, where he had visited him during the five weeks he was there. Henry kept everyone busy with billiard contests, there were walks for the energetic, and the usual games – Dumb Crambo, Proverbs, Forfeits, whist, pool. The food was lavish, with cigars for the men, champagne and other wines, and Dickens’s specially prepared gin punch. On Christmas Day Higham neighbours were invited, a Mr and Mrs Malleson with their daughter, and there was an unexpected arrival, Will Morgan, son of an American sea captain, another of Dickens’s old friends. The great Christmas dinner culminated as usual in a flaming pudding, after which he proposed the toast in the words of Tiny Tim, ‘God bless us every one’. After this there was dancing from nine until two in the morning.
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Henry’s account of the festivities does not say whether his father was able to dance this year, and on 29 December he was back at the office making up the next number of
All the Year Round
and proposing to visit Wills, who was ill, in his house in Regent’s Park Terrace, Camden Town – a little too close to Catherine’s house round the corner to be perfectly comfortable for Dickens.

On the other side of London, at Waltham Cross in Essex, another novelist, Anthony Trollope, gave a Christmas ball at his country house, and among the guests were Fanny and Nelly Ternan, who could now count two famous novelists among their friends. However delicate the state of Nelly’s health, or her sadness, she was ready to make a good appearance at the Trollopes’ ball in a girlish dress of pale green silk with an overskirt of matching tarlatan, a fine muslin, trimmed with white lace and dewdrops, and with scarlet geraniums and white heather in her hair.
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Nelly’s invitation to the Trollopes’ ball had come through Fanny, who had been taken on in the spring of 1865 to give music lessons to their thirteen-year-old niece, Bice, daughter of Anthony’s brother Thomas.
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The Thomas Trollopes lived in Florence, where Bice’s mother had died, and her uncle Anthony had travelled out to bring the child back to stay at Waltham House with him and his wife Rose and their boys: they were good-hearted people. Throughout the summer of 1865, while Nelly was leaving France and recovering from the rail accident, Fanny had travelled to Waltham every other weekend to teach Bice. She cheered Bice up so well and made such a friend of her that when Thomas Trollope came to fetch her back to Italy in the autumn she and Fanny agreed to write to one another. Thomas Trollope had met Fanny seven years before when she was in Florence to study singing, armed with an introduction from Dickens; and now she made herself well liked by all the Trollopes, who appreciated her for what she was, a gifted, agreeable and lively woman.