Charles Dickens (15 page)

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.