Charles Dickens (4 page)

The Old Curiosity Shop
defines an outer boundary of one of Dickens's modes of imagining his world, and it is a world peopled by unrealistic, fairy-tale figures of ogres and princesses and fools. Dickens often told his friends that he had loved fairy tales as a child and that he still approved of them as an adult for their antidote to the dead, commercial, mechanical life that seemed to be taking over all around him. Among the many risks Dickens takes in
The Old Curiosity Shop
is setting the stark fairy-tale world of Nell and her grandfather right next to the somewhat more comic and realistic world of Dick Swiveller. Nell's life-and-death journey continually breaks into and overwhelms the much less desperate psychological journey that Dick takes, but they are meant to coexist and to comment on each other, mimicking the ways in which
different lives have different tonal and mythic qualities. That Dickens can't quite balance them at this point in his career is not especially surprising. In part we see the temptation and the pressure of improvisation—Dickens was writing in short weekly parts, and he was acutely aware of what the selling points of the serial were. The novel surely felt like a high-wire act that was succeeding magnificently, encouraging him to write from instinct even more than he had in the past. Nell's fate also certainly drew upon his still fresh sense of grief at the death of Mary Hogarth.

Dickens's own sense of pleasure and accomplishment at the completion of the novel indicates that its extremes felt right to him and that its sales proved to him that they were right in fact. The tone of the novel is almost a denial of the tone of
Nickleby,
with its broad and cheery qualities. Certain
Nickleby
figures return, especially the figure of the moneylender, but now the recognizably human Ralph Nickleby (who even has a few softer notions and second thoughts) has become Daniel Quilp, deformed and inhuman, a monster with a sense of wit and huge energy. Nell herself is similar to the young women in
Nickleby,
in that she must go into the world unprotected, but now her very purity forbids contact with it—there is no young man, like Nicholas, pure enough to protect her, and death is the only option.

Without engaging in excessive Freudian second-guessing of the author, it is interesting to accept the invitation offered by the quickness and ease of the novel's gestation, and ask what light it sheds upon Dickens's sense of himself and of his life's possibilities at this point, a time when to all appearances he was hugely successful. Clearly, he saw innocence itself as
something possessed in its purest form by certain presexual women. The ideal of domesticity that he had written about and attempted to live now came second, morally, and was good enough for the redeemed (Dick and Kit), but not for those who had never fallen (Nell). Nell's particular brand of innocence had specific qualities—endurance, forgiveness, martyrdom—that were to be seen in contrast with the dark, manic forces all around it. Quilp is not the only frenzied character—to a greater or lesser degree, the contrast between all of the other characters and Nell is in their greater expression of liveliness, or life. It is as if Nell must die because the energy of life is in itself tainted and destructive. Every novel is a logical argument—an assertion of the author's sense of what life is, embodied in characters, plots, and images. Some of these arguments have wide appeal, some don't; some have an appeal bolstered by intense emotional energy, some appeal essentially to reason and shared experience. The argument of
The Old Curiosity Shop
strikes many readers as a strange and unbelievable one.

On June 19, 1841, the Dickenses took a trip to Scotland. The high point, and a turning point in Dickens's sense of his own position in public life, came in Edinburgh on June 25, when the city threw for him a public dinner, a sort of occasion unfamiliar to us, but rather like a cross between the Academy Awards and getting the key to the city. Weekly serialization of
The Old Curiosity Shop
had given way, in the late winter, to weekly serialization of
Barnaby Rudge,
which was also quite popular. Walter, child number four and boy number two, had been born in February, the day after Dickens's twenty-ninth birthday. Dickens was used to fame, adulation,
and importance, but somehow this public dinner, with 250 male guests eating and 200 women coming in after dinner to listen to the speeches from galleries above, impressed upon him that he was more than famous and more than a literary man, but something on the order of a national treasure (if it is possible for someone to think of himself as such a thing). He had achieved not simply literary success, but something else, a separate status. His voice and his vision had become
beloved;
as Ackroyd puts it, he was “public property.” His first reaction was very typical of the public Dickens—when he stood to make his own speech, he was poised, articulate, modest, cool, and, most of all, charming. When he later wrote to Forster about it, the tone of his letter was exultant, pleased, and, at least to some degree, amazed. He seems to have been especially struck by the fact that he was so young and the men who came to celebrate him were old and established.

In his
Charles Dickens: A Literary Life,
Grahame Smith points out that in the twelve years between the publication of Sir Walter Scott's last book,
Redgauntlet,
and the publication of
The Pickwick Papers,
novel writing in England had been going through something of a lull. Publishing itself changed in those twelve years, as periodicals found their way to a more numerous and socially broader audience, taking their place beside the expensively bound three-volume novel, which cost just over a pound and a half, equivalent to something like $52 today. The Romantic period was long over, and the Victorian era had not begun. Interesting novels were being published in France by Balzac, Stendhal, and others, and in the United States by Washington Irving, but in England only Tennyson's
lyrics, De Quincey's memoirs, and Carlyle's
Sartor Resartus
were of any note. When Chapman and Hall began publishing the novels of Charles Dickens, the idea that a company would publish only books and profit from them, rather than printing books and newspapers and selling them along with stationery, was a very new one.

The new thing, in every way, was for an author to support himself or herself through sales of his or her work, and in this Dickens was pioneer and exemplar. The form of serial monthly or weekly publication not only helped him find a wide audience (every issue sold, it has been estimated, found fifteen readers), it also helped him keep that audience interested. The analogy, of course, is to weekly television or soap opera–type serials. Dickens's exquisite natural responsiveness, combined with his amazing inventiveness, meant that a form other authors found onerous was perfectly suited to him.

Another thing that made Dickens a national treasure, though, had nothing to do with publishing and everything to do with Dickens's class origins or, rather, the fluidity of his class origins. Carried upward and downward by the vagaries of his father's career and poor money management, and then by his own hard work and genius, Dickens found himself in a unique position to observe all facets of English society. He was unconstrained by a classical education, untrained, as it were, to look at English society in the traditional way. His first thirty years were, in a fashion that contrasted with that of almost everyone around him, a training in freedom—in forming his own opinions, in judging for himself, in observing the effects of one group upon another, one class upon another, of institutions upon individuals and individuals upon
institutions. He differed from all of his contemporaries in that he represented no group, therefore he came to represent all. His medium, the novel, enhanced his freedom, since the novel can never work except through freedom—the author is free to write, and the reader is free to read. Dickens understood as well as anyone ever that the reader can always close the cover, and his art always responded to the fact that the reader can choose to buy or not to buy the next number. The very oddities of both the man and his work further promoted his freedom, since his mind ranged freely over all sorts of characters, ideas, and settings. And he frequently took pains to speak out against abridgments of freedom, such as the closing of shops on Sunday, the only day when working people were able to buy, and other laws restricting the lives of the poor, as well as narrow and joyless religious and charitable institutions. By temperament, by training, and by intention, Dickens was a modern man, whose essential quality was the desire for freedom of thought and action.

The lull in the production of English novels between 1824 and 1836 marks the birth of modernity. Austen and Scott, whose novels are set in the countryside, give way to Dickens, a man of the city. The tissue of relationships and obligations that mark traditional society give way to the casual meetings and commercial connections that mark modern society. For me, the moment where literature enters the modern world is very particular. In Nikolai Gogol's story “The Nose,” published in
St. Petersburg Stories
in 1835, the protagonist searches all over St. Petersburg for his vagrant nose. He pauses in his search to look at an advertisement in a shop window for ladies' stockings. He is struck by the picture
of the woman's leg slipping into the stocking. He moves on, but he has just had a thoroughly modern moment—sex and graphics have combined to turn him into a potential customer. The other features of modernity—rapid transportation, industrial production, financial speculation, the wholesale dissemination of information, the rise of the middle class, the elevation of materialism, general education—all of these are still to come, but advertising is the singing canary, alerting us to what is in store. The power of advertising and its capacity to connect him to and enlarge his audience was something Dickens comprehended at once and completely. He was at home in his milieu.

Dickens in Edinburgh in the middle of his thirtieth year is an original without a progenitor. Most other great innovators owe something to someone—even Shakespeare was preceded by Christopher Marlowe, and he did not create the theaters in which his plays were performed or the companies that performed them. Dickens, however, spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped
this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness. That he did so in English at the very moment when England was establishing herself as a worldwide force is the root source of his importance. That he combined his artistic vision with social action in an outpouring of energy and hard work is the root source of his uniqueness.

 

Charles and Catherine returned to London from Scotland in mid-July, then went to Broadstairs in Kent for the rest of the summer. Dickens had begun to think of traveling to the United States, no doubt encouraged by a letter from Washington Irving, who promised, in the wake of the success of
The Old Curiosity Shop,
that a Dickens tour of America would be an unprecedented triumph—and certainly for Dickens this meant not only fame, but money. In addition, the themes of
Barnaby Rudge,
which takes place during the American Revolutionary era, had inflamed his desire to see the land of newness for himself. Notes and memoirs by European travelers to America abounded in the 1830s and 1840s—it was practically a cottage industry, and surely Dickens knew that he had something original to contribute. He broached the topic to his friend Forster in mid-September and had already made up his mind a week later. Unfortunately, Catherine, mother of four, including a seven-month-old baby, did not want to go. Ackroyd notes that she wept every time he mentioned his plans, but as usual, he was not to be denied, and
within weeks plans for the journey, to be made by steamship (and the first steamship had crossed the Atlantic only four years before), were in full swing. Of course, it was to be a lengthy journey, almost six months, and the children were to be left behind in the care of Dickens's brother Fred. Dickens was undaunted, as well, by an operation he elected to undergo in the autumn—the repair of a fistula in his rectal wall, without anesthetic, so painful in the retelling, according to his friend Macready, that Macready could hardly force himself to sit still to listen to Dickens's recounting it. Nevertheless, Dickens completed the last installments of
Barnaby Rudge
while recuperating.

On January 2, Charles and Catherine boarded the
Britannia
and set sail for America. The journey was not quite as it had been advertised—the couple's stateroom was so tiny that he likened stowing their trunks to forcing a giraffe into a flowerpot. But he took his usual lively interest in everything there was to see, writing later in
American Notes
that “one party of men were ‘taking in the milk,' or, in other words, getting the cow on board; and another were filling the ice-houses to the very throat with fresh provisions; with butcher's meat and garden stuff, pale sucking pigs, calves' heads in scores, beef, veal, and pork, and poultry out of all proportion. . . .” The captain later arrived in a small boat, and he was just what Dickens hoped for, “a well-made, tight-built, dapper little fellow; with a ruddy face, which is a letter of invitation to shake him by both hands at once, and a clear blue, honest eye that it does one good to see one's sparkling image in.” What boded well did not go well—the eighteen-day journey was an arduous labor of heavy seas, dazed seasickness, cold, and fear. Even
so, even though both Charles and Catherine were nearly overcome by anxiety, Dickens, as always, was able to enjoy certain things and to evoke them for his readers—after days at sea, he writes, “the captain (who never goes to bed and is never out of humor) turns up his coat collar for the deck again; shakes hands all around; and goes laughing out into the weather as merrily as to a birthday party.”