Charles Dickens (16 page)

Dickens's divorce put all of his friends and acquaintances to the test. Indeed, it puts his biographers to the test, too. His actions throughout were hasty, self-serving, frequently furious, and often cruel. He showed a consistent inability to understand or sympathize with anyone who opposed his wishes or his views. Of his own accord, he foolishly carried his private concerns into the public arena, gratuitously damaging his reputation without, it seems, even realizing he was doing so. His biographer, like his friends, is required to somehow account for his behavior, especially since kindness and
compassion had been two of his hallmark qualities throughout his career. His daughter later stated, “It brought out what was weakest in him,” indicating that his behavior during the divorce was an extreme and prolonged variation of modes of behavior that were already part of his character. Peter Ackroyd makes a consistent case in his biography that Dickens was always prickly, always ready to see himself as a victim, and habitually tempted to blame others when things went wrong. The sources of these behaviors Ackroyd finds in Dickens's characteristic hypersensitivity (to everything, not just to slights and injuries), combined with the various shames and embarrassments of his childhood. As always, he felt things with desperate intensity. Because he had suppressed his feelings for a long time, once he began to reveal them, he also revealed the profound resentment that accompanied their long suppression, which in turn compelled ever more open revelation of them.

We also see a pattern in his behavior that is more familiar in our divorce culture than it was in Dickens's time—a man filled with conflicting passions, resentments, and needs transfers his allegiance from one object to another. The situation with the new woman requires him to suppress his demands or resentments with her in order to court her, so he displaces his anger onto the former object, changing entirely from the protective, considerate husband he had once been into a thoughtless tyrant, completely unable to dissemble, as he had been doing when the probable continuation of the marriage required it. More and more anger requires more and more self-justification, until the man literally comes to seem either “mad” or “wicked,” which is what Dickens seemed to his
daughters. At the same time, the man himself repeatedly talks about how forgetting the whole situation is the primary goal, as Dickens asserted in his public letter, in the lines “It [the situation] is amicably composed, and its details have now but to be forgotten by those concerned in it.” But, of course, it was unlikely that anyone would soon forget it, and no one did. Catherine, though, maintained her loyalty to her husband for the rest of her life, going to productions of his work and keeping up with his publications. Ackroyd records no instances of anger or recrimination, either in public or in writing, on her part, but only a reluctant acceptance of the terms he proposed to her and a diminishing disruption of her relationship with her children as time went on (especially after Dickens's death). Charley, who was her designated protector, maintained good relations with Thackeray, Evans, and the others whom his father could not forgive, and he eventually married Evans's daughter against his father's wishes.

It is also true that the evidence of Dickens's vast canvas of characters, which includes Uriah Heep as well as David Copperfield, and Rigaud as well as Arthur Clennam, and Carker the manager and Joey Bagstock and the dwarf Quilp as well as John Jarndyce and Nicholas Nickleby and Sam Weller, indicates that Dickens was entirely at ease imagining anger, manipulation, and evil. Whatever the inspiration for any character, each receives life from the author's empathetic imagination, which is quickened through its sense of kinship with the idiosyncrasies of the character. Dickens's evil characters are often remarkable and riveting in their energy. They show that the powerful anger and longing Dickens expressed at the time of his divorce were not at all unknown or
unfamiliar to him. Their eruption into his normally well-conducted life was possibly to be deplored, but also to be expected. Some of his contemporary authors were horrified at how he was behaving and did not themselves behave with a similar lack of control or degree of passion, but neither do their works explore the negative passions so deeply or so repeatedly. Once again, Dickens did not fit in and showed himself both freer and broader in his passions than those around him. But it is this very freedom and breadth that causes us to mention Dickens and not, say, Thackeray or Eliot, along with Shakespeare.

 

When she met Charles Dickens, Ellen Ternan was eighteen years old, neither as self-confident in her career nor as accomplished as her older sisters. Those biographers who have acknowledged Ellen Ternan's presence in Dickens's life (Forster did not, though Dickens wrote to him about his feelings almost from the beginning, and Forster reproduced Dickens's will, in which he left Ellen Ternan £1,000, as an appendix to the biography) have consistently wondered what qualities she had that he found so attractive that he was willing to throw his life into public turmoil for her sake. In addition to the treatment she has received in biographies of Dickens, she has been the subject of many rumors and at least one full-length biography of her own. She was important in his life from this point to its end, in 1870, but no one can say for sure whether she was his mistress, whether she bore any children by him, even whether she returned his affections. The most any biographer has been able to do is extrapolate from the female characters in his late novels and from his evident fondness for
his sister Fanny, Mary Hogarth, and Georgina Hogarth (virginal figures) and his disenchantment with his wife and his mother (maternal figures). While the events are interesting, and would be even more so if we knew what they were, what is really interesting is how they brought out Dickens's secretiveness, something that was in part imposed upon him by both celebrity and the nature of Victorian society, where any taint upon a woman's reputation impaired her social position, but was also evident as a feature of his personality from the beginning, in the remoteness that alternated with his conviviality, in his love of disguise, in his solitary ramblings, in his attempts to send his parents out of the way to secluded spots, in the way in which he kept his early life to himself.

August 1857 marked a turning point in Dickens's life. Previously, he lived a professional life and a domestic life that were more or less open to scrutiny; his private reservations and ambivalences were displaced through activity, novel writing, and performance. After he met Ellen Ternan, he lived two lives, dividing his time and activities between what could be, and had to be, public, his working life, and what could not in any way be public, his affectional life. The man who had as large a role as anyone in creating “Victorian Englishness,” that domestic ideal of comfort, coziness, business, and celebration, henceforth lived his life in direct contradiction to that very ideal. He was good at it. He made it so that his colleagues, his friends, his family, and his public were unaware of where and how he was spending at least some of his time. It was clear to everyone that his health and vitality were deteriorating almost from this point on, but everyone attributed the deterioration to the public readings he undertook
and the energy he poured into them. He kept his secret life so well hidden that no biographer can gauge with any authority what he gained or lost by it, how he viewed it or justified it to himself, how his feelings for Ellen Ternan evolved, whether she satisfied those yearnings for true intimacy that he had expressed to Forster and found unsatisfied in his wife, whether he found at least intermittent peace with Ellen or only continuing frustration. There is no telling what she was like. An acquaintance wrote some years later that as an older woman, she was “witty, warm, sympathetic, charming, cultured, and charitable,” that she “victimized” her husband and “made scenes,” and she was teasing, self-willed, and a “spitfire.” But there is no way of knowing which of these qualities, if any, were original, and attracted Dickens to her, and which were, perhaps, reactions to her relationship with a man almost thirty years her senior whose behavior toward her remains unknown.

The modern era of divorce has shown that individuals' modes of behavior in relationships sometimes change in interesting ways, depending upon what the person learns about himself or herself from previous relationships. Usually the man or woman is helped to these lessons by therapists or sympathetic friends or even books. The bête noire of modern life is “making the same mistakes over again” or, indeed, over and over again. If we speculate that, once again prefiguring modern life, Dickens entered into a remarriage of a sort without the benefit of the divorce culture that guides such things today, and that he “made the same mistakes over again,” then most likely his behavior continued to be of a piece, and he was with Ellen as he had been with the other women in his life—domineering, exacting, prickly, and sensitive to slights,
but also kind, affectionate, generous, and lively, as well as sexually passionate, though the mystery of whether Ellen Ternan ever bore his child reflects the mystery of whether the two ever became lovers. After ten children, many of whom were becoming troublesome as they neared adulthood, it is possible that Dickens decided that abstinence was the wiser course. Dickens succeeded in his secretiveness as he did in almost all of his endeavors, but the deterioration of his health showed that the price of the contradictions he had to live with was a high one. At the very least, he now had one more reason to travel constantly, to have several homes and sometimes even rooms that he rented, none of which could hold him for very long.

After 1859, for the next eleven years, Dickens lived so secret a life that Ellen Ternan's place in it did not emerge at all until 1934. The figure his family, friends, and audiences saw was of a man frantically using up his energy and his health giving strenuous and emotionally taxing public readings while editing a weekly periodical and writing three major novels—
A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations,
and
Our Mutual Friend
. Commentators have seen Ellen in the angelic figure of Lucie Manette, in the unattainable figure of Estella, in the playful, money-hungry figure of Bella Wilfer. It is, of course, always tempting to extrapolate from an author's work to his state of mind, and Dickens did have a history of explicitly depicting associates in his work—Leigh Hunt in
Bleak House,
Georgina Hogarth in
Bleak House,
Maria Beadnell Winter in
Little Dorrit
. But each time he communicated to someone, usually Forster, what he was doing and how he was modifying the original to make him or her, supposedly, less
recognizable. Dickens's daughter maintained after his death that he didn't understand women, but, in fact, the portraits of women in his last three completed novels are more complex and interesting than in earlier novels. Miss Pross, in
A Tale of Two Cities,
for example, is explicitly declared to have more than one layer: “Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the surface of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives.” Rather than starting out with a Flora Finching, who
is
her main characteristic at the beginning and gradually develops depth, he defines Miss Pross immediately, in the voice of the narrator, as complex. Unlike Flora and Miss Tox, she doesn't have to earn her way out of being ridiculous (and physically unappealing women are often portrayed as ridiculous in Dickens's works). The evidence, though slim, is that Dickens learned something about women from the crucible of his divorce and showed it in his work almost immediately.

 

In 1837, when Dickens himself was a young man and just married, Thomas Carlyle published
History of the French Revolution
. Dickens said later that he carried it everywhere with him, and he read it many times over the years. After 1840, when Dickens met Carlyle and his wife, Jane, at a party, they formed a friendship that was marked by reverence on Dickens's part. (He told Forster, “I would go . . . farther to see
Carlyle than any man alive.”) Carlyle's feelings were more mixed, partly because he did not respect novels or novelists (though his writing style and historiographic style were far more novelistic than would be considered objective or professional today). At any rate, by 1858, when Dickens began to think about
A Tale of Two Cities,
he was eminently familiar with Carlyle's
History
and his interpretation of the important features of the French Revolution. By this time, also, Dickens had been to France so often and with such pleasure that he considered himself more than a Francophile, almost a Frenchman in exile. He spoke fluent French and had, in fact, through Mr. Meagles in
Little Dorrit
lampooned Englishmen who insisted upon making themselves understood abroad only by raising their voices. He would later expand his satire on narrow-minded Englishness in the figure of Podsnap in
Our Mutual Friend
.

A Tale of Two Cities
was planned for the launch of
All the Year Round,
and Dickens seems to have begun writing in earnest in March, for publication at the end of April. Thereafter, the novel appeared in weekly installments until November. Commercially, it was a huge success. The first issue sold 120,000 copies (though, of course, some portion of the sale must have been due to the novelty appeal of the new magazine) and then settled down to about 100,000 copies. Sales of monthly parts were not as good, but in volume form it has always since been the steady bestseller of Dickens's oeuvre.