Charles Dickens (7 page)

A Christmas Carol,
like
Martin Chuzzlewit,
concerns itself with the social ramifications of selfishness, but the characters
of young Martin and old Martin are combined in that of Ebenezer Scrooge, and his moral journey, which takes place in three acts in one night, has the force of revelation rather than the tedium of a lengthy trek by ox-drawn wagon. Some of the narrative had its origins in one of Dickens's own vivid dreams, and surely the idea of using dreams as a structural device had its origins there as well. The thirty-one-year-old Dickens was evidently in a state of considerable psychological turmoil. He was beset by money worries and family obligations at the same time that Catherine was pregnant with a fifth child. He had found his experience at the Field Lane School disturbing, and he must have recognized the vast insolubility of the larger task no matter what he and Miss Coutts were able to do with her funds. He was halfway through a serialization that no one considered a success, and he was in conflict with his father and mother as well as with his publishers. Just as every literary character is the author in some guise, just as Ralph Nickleby and Daniel Quilp were “Dickensian,” so Ebenezer Scrooge was Charles Dickens, a man for whom money itself offered the prospect of safety, a man for whom isolation from the obligations of human relationship might be a form of peace.

The story is familiar from countless renditions, takeoffs, and parodies. In fact, pirates began to appropriate Dickens's characters and ideas immediately upon publication. But what makes
A Christmas Carol
work—what makes it so appealing a novella that William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens's most self-conscious literary rival, called it “a national benefit”—is the lightness of Dickens's touch. Instead of hammering his
moral points home, as he does in
Martin Chuzzlewit,
he is content (or more content) to let his images speak for themselves. For example, when Scrooge returns home after business, he sees Jacob Marley's face in his door knocker: “Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” Subsequently, ascending his staircase, Scrooge sees a hearse in front of him, but he seeks no more light than that of his candle—“Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that: darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it.” After a further series of mysterious noises, which Scrooge declines to believe in, Marley himself appears, and Dickens's description of him is economical but perfectly apt: “Marley in his pig-tail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pig-tail, and his coatskirts, and the hair on his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent: so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.” Not only are these details both picturesque and thematically evocative, they are conveyed without any overbearing tone of self-display. Melodrama (which Dickens loved) always carries a lack of conviction, because the gestures of the characters and the tone of the author overstate rather than understate the emotions that are being conveyed. Here, Dickens's descriptions underscore Scrooge's resistance to the implications of the scene,
enhancing our sense of Scrooge's coldness, but also his bravery. Additionally, it enables the reader to see what is happening more clearly than if Scrooge's feelings cluttered the picture. Every line performs more than one literary function, something that is a hallmark of Dickens's best writing. When he is trying too hard, every line performs less than one function, simply because he elaborates until he is sure the reader gets it. Immediately in the next paragraph, Dickens goes for a laugh—“Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.” Scrooge's state of mind is believably mixed. He is observant, alert, frightened but incredulous, stubborn, ironic, and, most of all, interested. The scene is a masterpiece of narrative depiction, conveying simultaneously what is being seen, who is seeing it, and the narrator's attitude toward it, as only narrative can do.

Dickens took easily to the form of the novella, understanding intuitively that in focus and scope it is similar to a play but offers a novelist the opportunity to explore a single idea in depth and, in a way, at leisure. He seems to have had no trouble controlling his natural expansiveness, which the serial form of publication both tested and encouraged. The musical model for the composition (not only are songs evoked in the title of the work, but each part is called a “stave”) gave him a sure sense of rhythm and symmetry. The style is free, but the freedom stays within the tight confines of the plot—the first bit, Scrooge in company, disdaining others, balances the last bit, Scrooge in company, welcoming others, while the three dreams, of course, fall into the utterly natural symmetry of past, present, and future—what Scrooge
has forgotten, what he is missing, and what might happen if he persists in his misanthropic ways. The philosophy and psychology of
A Christmas Carol
are so familiar to us now that we forget that in Dickens's own day, his views competed with much less sophisticated notions of the origins and effects of states of mind. Indeed, this idea—that shifts in objective conditions, such as wealth, social relationships, and class disparities, begin within the individual and are then manifested outwardly in material changes—runs counter to notions of materialism and determinism that were beginning to take hold among such political thinkers as Bentham, Marx, and Engels, who were at work in the same period. Karl Marx, in fact, seems to have been quite a fan of Dickens. But Dickens's Christmas stories (
A Christmas Carol, The Chimes,
and
The Haunted Man
in particular) are increasingly specific and pointed about where necessary social change must come from. It is not enough to seize power or to change where in society power lies. With power must come an inner sense of connection to others that, in Dickens's life and work, comes from the model of Jesus Christ as benevolent Savior. The truth of
A Christmas Carol
that Dickens understood perfectly and bodied forth successfully is that life is transformed by an inner shift that is then acted upon, not by a change in circumstances.

The conditions that so appalled Dickens constituted the major political and philosophical challenge of his era. The novel, like any other artistic form, makes an inherent philosophical assertion—that the mental life of the individual is worth anatomizing and that the disruptions that exist among
individuals and between individuals and groups are understandable and soluble through individual transformation and action. Dickens expanded and expanded his canvas because he intuited that the complexities of the social dilemmas he was interested in could not be convincingly portrayed in miniature. Other thinkers, not novelists, had other ideas about the significance of individuals and individualism, but Dickens's chosen form saddled him with a philosophical question he tried ardently to solve, both artistically and personally, for his entire life. The controversies that arise about Dickens's real political views, in my opinion, arise primarily from the fact that a novelist always, and increasingly, sees the trees rather than the forest, and is naturally unsympathetic to a collective solution, while always more or less in favor of a connective solution.

When the first six thousand copies of
A Christmas Carol
showed a very small profit, owing to the expenses of production, Dickens panicked. He wrote Forster, “Such a night as I have passed! I really believed that I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever” (meaning a serious, delirious illness), and added, “I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.” He became convinced that he needed to remove his household of wife, sister-in-law, and five children to continental Europe, where they could live more frugally and where Dickens could write more travel pieces. Ackroyd points out that Dickens was afraid of overexposure. He did not want to wear out his welcome with his audience and possibly thought that it was overexposure that accounted for the continuing poor sales of
Martin Chuzzlewit
.

Catherine's pregnancy with Francis, the fifth child of the family in seven years, seems to have marked a turning point in Dickens's attitude toward his wife. The agitation he betrayed in his money worries and his eagerness to go abroad met with great reluctance and depression on her part. He seems to have held against her both the inconvenience of the pregnancy and her inability to rally quickly after the birth. The stresses of their life together accentuated their temperamental differences. Where perhaps he had valued her placidity in the past, now he grew impatient with it and was willing to air his impatience to friends. Georgina Hogarth, too, was a continued contrast to Catherine—quicker, younger, perhaps able to share Dickens's mental life more readily than her sister. The balance among the three was shifting, and Dickens seems at this point to have begun to have brief infatuations with young women. The first of these was an eighteen-year-old girl he met while giving a speech in Liverpool, Christiana Weller, in whose album he wrote, “I love her dear name which has won me some fame / But Great Heaven how gladly I'd change it.” Some weeks later, a friend of his, T. J. Thompson, informed Dickens that he wished to marry Christiana, and Dickens asked him to save the dress Dickens had first seen her in, just as he had saved one of Mary Hogarth's dresses after she died.

When the family departed for the Continent at the end of June 1844, it is safe to say that every aspect of Dickens's life was in turmoil, including, again, his relationship with his publishers. With the end of
Martin Chuzzlewit,
he left Chapman and Hall for Bradbury and Evans, still smarting over the idea that fifteen months before, it had been suggested that he
repay part of his
Chuzzlewit
advance. Finance, family life, relations with his parents, the direction of his work, his emotional attachments, and, of course, his domiciliary arrangements, all were in flux. He was determined that these worries were to be resolved in Genoa, where the family settled in a large house in the suburbs overlooking the sea.

I
N THE TWO YEARS
between the end of
Martin Chuzzlewit
and the beginning of
Dombey and Son,
Dickens tried several things that failed to come to fruition, each in a different way, and that were expressive of his unsettled mind and his anxiety about how he was to live with his well-populated family. The first of these, of course, was the move to Genoa, first to the Villa Bagnerello and then, at the approach of winter, to the Palazzo Peschiere, which was easier to heat. Over the course of his Italian sojourn, he wrote
Pictures from Italy
(to be published in 1846), and in October, eager to repeat the success of
A Christmas Carol,
he began to write
The Chimes,
which has a more explicit satirical purpose than the earlier work but is similar in theme. Trotty Veck—an impoverished ticket porter who carries messages and does small jobs—is accosted by a magistrate, a Benthamite, and another idle gentleman, who discuss his meal and his life in utilitarian terms. Afterward, he has a dream or a vision of his future: himself dead, his daughter worked to death, and her fiancé a drunkard. Once again, Dickens expresses his opinion that mental images create worldly conditions. To embrace the utilitarian view, or the puritanical view, or the Tory view, that poor people have no reason to live, or are inherently prone to evil, or are a burden on the rich, is to create a more than self-fulfilling
prophecy—not only do the individuals themselves live joyless, wasted lives, they are sundered from one another by suspicion and solipsism. Only connection, forgiveness, and hope can prevent such an outcome.
The Chimes
has not been nearly as popular as
A Christmas Carol,
and it was very controversial in its day, but it sold well and made Dickens a quick £1,000. As usual, it was faithful to his state of mind at the time he wrote it, so he was extremely pleased with it and went back to London for the publication, traveling alone by laborious stages.

Upon his return to Genoa, Dickens took up mesmerism. An Englishwoman, Madame de la Rue, had several long-standing complaints that Freud might have called hysterical and we might call schizophrenic. Dickens successfully hypnotized her over and over; during these sessions, he elicited background material and gave her instructions. The progress of her condition was in some ways alarming, but Dickens's confidence in his “treatment” never flagged, and he persisted, ultimately affording her considerable lasting relief from the conviction that she was being visited at night by a phantom. For Dickens, of course, this “relationship” had irresistible fascination. For one thing, he became intimate to an unusual degree with just the sort of mental pathology and extreme idiosyncrasy that he always found interesting, and for another, his “treatment” was working, which he admitted gave him a sense of power. For a third, the relationship was with a woman, therefore it could be intimate and platonic at the same time. We can only marvel at how, once again, something that turned up in Dickens's life, like his American celebrity, uncannily presaged a common feature of our time—the
therapeutic relationship. That Dickens should prefigure Freud makes wonderful sense, since Freud loved Dickens and since both Freud and Dickens were essentially highly observant storytellers who gave large meanings to very small details and actions, creating worlds of interlocking meaning out of, in particular, repetition, unconscious actions, and habitual interactions. But Dickens's pleasure and interest in his “treatment” of Madame de la Rue aroused a protest from Catherine, perhaps her first ever, and even though he was nettled by her reaction, he cooled the relationship. As with acting, perhaps, “therapy” was a great talent Dickens could have developed if circumstances had fallen differently.

While not exactly giving up his desire to live abroad, Dickens returned to England periodically and involved himself in yet another aborted scheme that redounded less well to his reputation, the founding of a daily newspaper. Dickens's new publishers, Bradbury and Evans, thought it a good time to start a newspaper to rival the
Times
and the
Morning Herald,
but with radical sympathies. Much of the money was railroad money, and the railroad was the transforming technological news of the day. Controversy surrounding
The Chimes
had proved both profitable and enlivening; how better to build upon it than to make the famous Charles Dickens editor of a paper that would institutionalize his liberal views? Dickens was equally enthusiastic and entered with fervor into the planning of the first editions. He hired the staff (including his father, John Dickens, as manager of the parliamentary reporters). There was a setback—one of the money men went bankrupt. Dickens resigned. But the investors reorganized and found more money, and the project went forward again.

In the meantime, Dickens wrote his third Christmas book,
A Cricket on the Hearth,
which had no social dimension at all but was the tale of a jealous elderly man and his young wife, perhaps, according to Ackroyd, a reworking of Dickens's own marriage with the genders reversed. There are two important things about
A Cricket on the Hearth
. One of them is that work on the newspaper affected the time and attention Dickens was able to devote to his narrative. The other is that it was a commercial success, selling twice as many copies as
The Chimes
. That the Christmas books established ever more clearly Dickens's direct relationship to his public was of great importance to him, and all the more important as the first issues of the
Daily News
began to take shape.

January 21, 1846, was the first day of publication, and it was not quite a success—there were typos and mistakes; Dickens was dissatisfied with his staff and his work arrangements. It quickly became clear that the project was not going to work as planned, and on February 9, Dickens resigned. In fact, his resignation was considered appropriate by most parties, since he was not exactly suited to the day-to-day detail work of an ambitious newspaper—there was too much of it, and he was constitutionally incapable of delegating editorial duties, as other experiences with weekly and monthly periodicals showed. Nevertheless, at first the transition seemed like a crisis—Dickens had formed the staff and the paper as much in his own image as possible, and there was some question about whether it could go on without him. But the crisis passed, and John Forster became the editor for about nine months. After that, the paper grew and established itself and
continued to publish into the twentieth century. The contradictions in Dickens's character—his impulsiveness, his energy, his resistance to being the least bit fettered, and his readiness to blame others—all emerged in this battle, and the partners complained both that he was not doing his job well and that he didn't want to do it any longer. Clearly, however, editing a daily newspaper, while it appealed to the commercial, social, and political sides of Dickens's character, did not appeal to his deeper need to make art.

Dickens decided to relocate to the Continent again, and this time he chose Lausanne, Switzerland. He and Catherine now had still another son, Alfred, born at the end of October 1845, the sixth child and fourth son. Dickens was thirty-four. In ten years, he had written six full-length novels and three novellas, not to mention any number of occasional pieces. He had fathered six children. He was still working with Angela Burdett-Coutts on charitable projects, most notably the home for reformed prostitutes, Urania Cottage. He was directing, producing, and performing in ambitious amateur plays (in 1845, Dickens and some friends did a production of Ben Jonson's play
Every Man in His Humour
). His energy, sociability, and liveliness still struck everyone, including, now, his children, who recalled later how much fun he had been in their early childhoods, playing with them, chatting with them, charming them, attending to them with particular affectionate concentration that caused them to adore him in return.

Lausanne was clean, quiet, and pretty. Shortly after arriving there, at the end of June 1846, Dickens went back to
his real work and began to write
Dombey and Son
. As with
Martin Chuzzlewit,
he had been planning the structure of
Dombey and Son
carefully and as a whole. He also, from the beginning, intended to introduce some autobiographical material and based the establishment of Paul's “caretaker,” Mrs. Pipchin, on a woman he had stayed with as a boy. But
Dombey
is different from earlier novels in that the protagonist, the character to be transformed, is an already mature man who bears some resemblance to Scrooge rather than to the many youthful heroes of earlier works. This choice immediately gives the novel more structural coherence—Dombey is an established man with a household, a mode of life, a set of acquaintances, and a very particular agenda. It is his certainty and pride that form the world of the other characters.

Dombey and Son,
like several other nineteenth-century works (
Vanity Fair,
for example, which was published at the same time, and
A Doll's House,
and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) concerns the commodification of familial relationships. Dickens is explicit—of Dombey's estimation of his daughter Florence, he writes in the first chapter, “But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House's name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn't be invested—a bad boy—nothing more.” When Paul Dombey is born, as proud and pleased as his father is, the man gets no present enjoyment from his child but only anticipates their future business partnership. Impatient to get the necessary processes of childhood, like illnesses and education, out of the way, he hardly notices Paul's actual circumstances—delicacy and ill health—and is astounded to be informed of them. Nor does he experience the affection of his favorite
child, who is cared for by others and who rather shrinks in his father's presence. He looks upon the love between Paul and Florence with jealous impotence. The sight moves him to envy, and to spite toward Florence, but not to any form of self-doubt or introspection. What is especially interesting about Dombey is that the origins of his pride and remoteness are not at all investigated. His identification as a wealthy merchant serves to explain why as well as what he is. It is this sense of Dombey's character originating in his business life that differentiates him from Scrooge, for example, and makes
Dombey and Son
all the more pointed a critique of capitalist relationships.

Dickens was pleased with the first numbers of
Dombey and Son
but found the going difficult. He attributed this to being away from London. He wrote Forster, “A day in London sets me up and starts me. But the toil and labor of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!!” Nevertheless, theme, story, and, most important, style fell together seamlessly in the new novel. A great novel is, as much as anything else, an exercise of sustained stylistic felicity, and everyone—Dickens, Forster, other friends, the critics, and the public—recognized with the first number that Dickens had uncovered his sharpest, easiest, and most flexible voice. The first paragraphs draw us in effortlessly, wittily, and economically. The scene has a momentary stillness and intimacy, like a movie close-up. The father, sitting beside the fire, is connected to the newborn son, drawn up to the fire in his basket. Both are bald, red, and not quite beautiful; both are subject to the depredations of time. We are asked immediately to regard them not only as characters and agents of the
story, but as objects of contemplation. The invitation is graceful, almost homely—the son is likened to a muffin; his just born appearance is “somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet,” but out of the simplest of contrasts between the baby and the man, Dickens draws a beautifully evocative figure: “The countenance of Son was crossed and recrossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.”

Dickens's tonal and stylistic choices were always remarkable for their richness and variety. He could do low comedy, melodrama, farce, fairy tale, confession, sarcasm, lyricism, romance, extended analogy, dialect imitation. He had an ear for every sort of discourse, both written and oral. He did not always use an elevated literary style, something for which he was criticized in his time. He was not always considered to be in control of his material, but rather he was sometimes accused of being carried away, into sentimentality or tastelessness. Certainly, in
Martin Chuzzlewit,
extended use of personification and figurative language to little apparent purpose had tried his audience. But the control he shows throughout the nine hundred pages of
Dombey and Son
is exceptional, especially for a novelist publishing in serial parts. Certain critics have pointed out that the characters of the novel are particularly “Dickensian”—that is, they show vivid, repetitive, almost mechanically unchanging behaviors. Only the most extreme challenges can wrench them out of the habitual modes of expression and behavior. In part because the novel is a kind of tableau vivant, this “Dickensian” effect works better here
than in some of the other novels, but because the characters are very distinct, the author has to vary the tone and style of the narrative. The style of
Dombey
routinely accomplishes all of this. Chapter 29, for example, where Dombey's sister informs Miss Tox of Dombey's engagement to Edith, is a hilarious set piece, where the mutually exclusive viewpoints of the two women, the brother-in-law, the spying Major Bagstock, and Major Bagstock's Eastern servant all clash and contrast, only to be briefly but gracefully resolved in the last paragraph, with the narrator's own voice: “While poor excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and a toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one, and had ever borne a faithful friendship towards her impeacher, and had been truly absorbed and swallowed up in devotion to the magnificence of Mr. Dombey—while poor excommunicated Miss Tox watered her plants with her tears, and felt that it was winter in Princess's Place.”