Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (23 page)

By the early 1840s, Thackeray had made a reputation for himself as a savage and incorrigibly ‘cynical’ satirist, with works like the Hibernophobic
Barry Lyndon
(1844), the autobiography of an Irish bully and braggart (thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s film, now among the author’s best-known works). He had his first unequivocal success as a writer with
The Snobs of England
(1846–7), published in the congenial columns of the newly launched magazine
Punch
. At the same time he was having difficulty placing a more ambitious narrative, what he then called ‘A Novel without a Hero’. Eventually
Vanity Fair
, as it was brilliantly renamed, came out in Dickensian monthly parts, with
Punch
’s publisher, illustrated by the novelist himself. He was thirty-five, had published millions of words, but this was the first work to proclaim his name to the world. He was a scribbler no more.

After a slow start, the ‘Waterloo novel’ – following the intertwining careers of two young women, one wicked, one virtuous – was a huge hit. Thackeray only managed a fraction of Dickens’s sales but, at his zenith, his critical reputation stood higher. Success mellows a man and his worldview was markedly less cynical after
Vanity Fair
. It also accompanied changes in his domestic arrangements: he set up home in Kensington with his daughters and – while remaining a clubman – was also a paterfamilias and less the bohemian. Now at the ‘top of the tree’, as he crowed to his mother, and regarded as the literary heir to Fielding, he wrote a Victorian
Tom Jones
with his next monthly serial,
Pendennis
(1848–50). As in
Vanity Fair
, one of Thackeray’s projects (with characters like Dobbin and Warrington) was to ‘redefine the ideal of the gentleman’ for his age and for England’s dominant middle classes. Another was to raise ‘the dignity of literature’: to make it a gentlemanly occupation. Dickens, by contrast, was ‘low’.

Thackeray’s development as a novelist was impeded by his falling victim to the 1849 cholera epidemic, which swept its deadly way through London until put down by the redoubtable Dr John Snow, who realised the capital’s water supply was to blame. He survived – thanks to Dickens, who dispatched his personal physician – but Thackeray’s energies were never quite up to the literary tasks he set himself thereafter. None the less, he followed up with his most ‘careful’ novel,
The History of Henry Esmond
(1852). Published in the traditional ‘three-decker’ form, there was none of the earlier month-to-month helter-skelter with deadlines. The narrative – loosely modelled on Scott’s
Waverley
– is set in Thackeray’s favourite Queen Anne period. Like Macaulay, and other proponents of the Whig thesis, Thackeray saw the early eighteenth century as the moment when British parliamentary democracy, and its middle-class hegemony, came into being. The mood of
Esmond
, brilliant as its plot structure, political thematising and prose are, was darkened by the novelist’s falling in love, desperately and hopelessly, with his best friend’s wife. This imbroglio explains a famously unsatisfactory ending. As George Eliot sharply put it: ‘the hero is in love with the daughter all the way through and then marries the mother’.

Thackeray’s career, thereafter, was glorious but its products less good. None of his subsequent full-length fictions (
The Newcomes, The Virginians, The Adventures of Philip
) equals what went before. But as editor of the newly launched
Cornhill Magazine
, with the highest-ever stipend for such work, he could, in
The Roundabout Papers
, lay claim to being the best essayist in the language since Addison. No Victorian ‘prosed’ better. In his last three years, Thackeray was wealthy enough – thanks, in large part, to remunerative lecture tours in America – to design and build himself a Queen Anne-style mansion in Palace Green (it is now the Israeli Embassy in London, something that the casually anti-Semitic novelist would have found suitably ironic).
There were recurrent bust-ups with Dickens and his bohemian proxies – notably the ‘Garrick Club Affair’ in 1856. He always played the ‘gentleman’ card, which more often than not trumped his opponents. He died, prematurely, in 1863, before being able fully to relax into his fame, or his earning power, or to become what he always wanted to be – another Macaulay, or, failing that, an MP. The post-mortem revealed that his brain was preternaturally large: something that surprises no one who reads his fiction.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
Mr Micawber’s economics

There have been some eighty ‘lives’ of Dickens. Yet posterity knows little more of that life, or at least, its inner compartments, than his intimate friend John Forster grudgingly divulged in the biography published while Dickens’s body was practically still warm. Dickens was born at Portsea, the son of an £80-a-year clerk in the Naval Pay Office. His mother was the daughter of another clerk who had been disgraced as an embezzler. There were ten Dickens children, five of whom survived, leaving Charles the eldest son. His early childhood was massively unsettled. The family moved to London in 1816, back to Chatham in 1817, and back yet again to London in 1822 to settle in a seedy quarter of Camden Town (immortalised in the Staggs’s Gardens chapters in
Dombey and Son
).

John Dickens’s salary of £350 a year should have been more than adequate but, like Mr Micawber, he lived beyond his means. The home atmosphere was friendly but lacked the intense love that young ‘Boz’ (a corruption of his family nickname, ‘Moses’) craved. By 1824 the family finances were in ruins, and at the age of twelve, Charles was sent off to work in a shoe-blacking factory on the bank of the Thames for a measly few shillings a week. Although this menial labour lasted only a few months, the ‘secret agony of my soul’ scarred him for the rest of his days. His parents, he bitterly recalled, could not have been happier than if he’d gone off to Cambridge University. The relevant chapters in
David Copperfield
are poignant. But
John Dickens, imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, may be thought to have had it harder, if more deservedly. Dickens is unforgiving in his depiction of his father as ‘the father of the Marshalsea’ in his 1857 novel
Little Dorrit.
Time softened neither his hurt nor his resentment. Fathers have a hard time of it in his novels.

A windfall legacy helped the Dickenses out of their plight, as it does the Dorrits, and afforded Charles some belated schooling. Cambridge, however, was never in prospect. In 1827 the family finances were again rocky and he articled himself as a solicitor’s clerk in Gray’s Inn, at a pound a week. He hated law, he decided, and drifted to nearby Fleet Street, where he found journalism very much to his taste. He taught himself shorthand and, at the age of seventeen, was an in-demand parliamentary reporter for the London press. He was also beginning to write the newspaper pieces which would eventually be gathered as
Sketches by Boz
– vivid snapshots of London (all but one of his later novels would be set in the city: he never stopped sketching it).

He was now on £5 a week and had hopes of marrying a banker’s daughter – but her family frustrated the match. In 1835, work for the
Evening Chronicle
led to his engagement to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the co-editor of the paper. This time he was not obstructed and they married and set up home with Kate’s younger sister, Mary. Dickens had the tenderest feelings for his sister-in-law and her sudden death, in May 1837, was another lasting wound. He kept articles of her clothing, as treasured relics, until his death. There is considerable speculation as to what, precisely, his inner feelings were towards Mary Hogarth – as, indeed, there were scurrilous allegations of an incestuous interest in his other sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, twenty years later. The speculation leads to no worthwhile conclusion. Forster knew; we never shall.

Another death proved useful to him in the mid-1830s – that of his senior partner on the new monthly serial for which he was contracted by Chapman and Hall. The illustrator Robert Seymour’s suicide (arguably partly inspired by the aggressive energy of his young collaborator) left Dickens in charge of the project.
The Pickwick Papers
, which began publishing in April 1836, started poorly but by the end of its run, in November 1837, it was selling an unprecedented 40,000 an instalment and was the talk of England. Dickens was at the top of the tree. A rival publisher, Richard Bentley, offered the young star editorship of his new
Miscellany
. Dickens accepted and contributed
Oliver Twist
(brilliantly illustrated by George Cruikshank) to its pages. The story of the parish boy who asked for more was gloomier by far than the gallivantings of Mr Pickwick and established a new genre of ‘social problem’ fiction.

In 1837 the first of Dickens’s ten children was born – he was a fond but continuously distracted father. The distractions were gratifying in the extreme, however: well before his thirtieth birthday, he was the country’s favourite and best-paid
author. Novels such as
Nicholas Nickleby
earned him thousands and sold by the tens of thousands. He rashly took on so many contracts at this stage of his life that there was fear of his ‘busting the boiler’. And he was increasingly vexed at the ‘brigandage’ of publishers – specifically Bentley. He hated other people’s hands on his work.

In 1842, a first trip to America – where his novels were all the rage – produced the sharply observed
American Notes
and supplied the American chapters in
Martin Chuzzlewit
. The failure of that novel to maintain his sky-high sales led to a break with Chapman and Hall. Dickens transferred his fiction to Bradbury and Evans, who were printers. Publishers interfered too much: he did not need them. As innovative as he was energetic, he invented the seasonal gift book market with
A Christmas Carol
(1843). At the same period he took time out to travel in Europe and rethink the whole basis of his narrative art. The result was
Dombey and Son
, a palpably darker work, organised by his new narrative planning systems (the famous ‘worksheets’). Dickens experimented with autobiographical narration (and some discreet introspection) in
David Copperfield
(1850). His attack on the iniquities of the English legal system,
Bleak House
(1852), continued the experiment and contained his most pointed social criticism to date. Among all else, Dickens was enlarging the sphere and seriousness of English fiction. It could now be a weapon in the novelist’s hand.

He drew on his fame to enter public life. With the bank heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts, he set up a rehabilitation home for London prostitutes called, rather unhappily, Urania Cottage. With Edward Bulwer-Lytton he established the Guild of Literature and Art for indigent writers and artists. In 1850 he started a 2d weekly magazine of his own,
Household Words,
which became the vehicle for his ruminations on current events. His hard-hitting novel on the great Preston strike of mill workers,
Hard Times
(1854), was published in the paper, alongside his journalistic articles on the topic.

In one major respect, Forster does not supply the information for which one must turn to later biographers – namely Dickens’s ‘Invisible Woman’. The shilling-life facts about Ellen Ternan are well known – but little else is. She was born twenty-eight years later than Dickens, into an acting family. An ‘infant phenomenon’, she was appearing on the stage almost as soon as she could walk, aged three. Ellen’s subsequent career was anything but phenomenal. Fifteen years later, she was a for-hire actress, available to add some professional class to the amateur theatricals which were all the rage at the time. In the late 1850s, Dickens had embarked on a series of such performances to raise money for authors unluckier than himself.

The eighteen-year-old Nelly was contracted to appear in
The Frozen Deep
, a melodrama written by Dickens himself and Wilkie Collins, and the forty-five-year-old novelist fell in love with her. He promptly removed his wife, Kate, the mother of his
many children, with the (wholly Dickensian) explanation that she was ‘dull’. After 1859 Charles was a bachelor again. As for his love life – not dull, we may deduce. But we can deduce little more. It is a matter of record that Dickens gave substantial sums of money to the Ternan family and left ‘Nelly’ £1,000 in his will. She gave up the stage in 1860, shortly after the couple’s first encounter and must have been supported by someone. She may have lived in France, in a ‘mistress’s villa’ he paid for. In June 1865, in the terrible Staplehurst train crash, Dickens, Nelly and her mother were travelling together on the ‘boat train’ from Calais. Dickens went to furious lengths to keep the identity of his companions out of the press reports of the accident and himself out of the coroner’s court looking into the disaster.

Was Mrs Ternan a chaperone, protecting her daughter’s virtue? Or a genteel bawd, profiting from her daughter’s being the kept woman of the most famous man in England? A child, still-born in France, has been fantasised about. At a later period Nelly was placed, under a false name, in houses at Slough and at Nunhead, where one of the few surviving Dickens diaries logs visits to her. Nelly took the secrets of her relationship with Dickens to the grave. She shares that grave with the clergyman she later married; most of her later life was given over to ostentatiously good works. In short, the Dickens relationship with Nelly is a black hole. It sucks in speculation, and returns not the slightest glimmer of light.