Titans of History (47 page)

1812–1870

In literary matters my dividing line is: do you like Dickens or do you not? If you do not, I am sorry for you, and that is the end of the matter
.

Stanley Baldwin

Charles Dickens was
the
English writer of his age. Rambunctious, touching, tragic and comic by turns, his novels captured the public's imagination like no others before or since. He transmuted the realities he saw into an enthralling and encyclopedic social panorama of hypnotic power. His works effectively constitute a world, such that even those who have read little of the author know what is meant by the term Dickensian.

The master storyteller wrote a canon of classics. His books weave together darkness and light, romance and melodrama, the terrifying and the tender; one moment they are gruesome and fantastical, the next tear-inducingly funny. From the debtors' prison of
Little Dorrit
(1855–7) to the workhouse and thieves' dens of
Oliver Twist
(1837–8), to the machinations of the Chancery Court in
Bleak House
(1852–3), Dickens created a vision of London as a pulsating, living organism, which even today dominates our conceptions of the Victorian metropolis. From the moment his first major work,
The Pickwick Papers
, was serialized (1836), and a print run of 400 mushroomed to 40,000, he was established as the writer who understood the English better than anyone else.

Dickens's rudimentary schooling was cut short at fifteen by the
profligacy of his father, an erstwhile naval clerk. The boy who had wanted since childhood to be an actor and who was remembered by his schoolfellows for his “animation and animal spirits” became instead a reluctant legal clerk. In spring of 1833 Dickens, by now a journalist (a more exciting but “wearily uncertain” career), got an audition at Covent Garden Theatre but failed to keep the appointment on account of illness. An accident of fate, perhaps, because that summer he began to write. By the following year, under the pen-name Boz, Dickens was winning in print the fame that he had previously hoped for on the stage. His love of the theater clearly influenced his work. Later he would adapt classics such as
A Christmas Carol
(1843) for the stage. But he never renewed his application to Covent Garden.

The colorful names of Dickens' characters were of paramount importance to him. He could not begin a new book until he had them right. He kept lists of those with special potential and scribbled down myriad variations. Martin Chuzzlewit was nearly Martin Sweezlewag. With age his work grew darker and more serious, but comedy was never far off. Frequently seized by hysterical mirth at the most inappropriate times, Dickens was always quick to see the ridiculous side of things.

Dickens researched carefully and many of his characters were based on fact, such as Fagin in
Oliver Twist
. In 1849 the journalist Henry Mayhew, founder of
Punch
magazine, began a series of articles for the
Morning Chronicle
. They would eventually become the mammoth four-volume
London Labour and the London Poor
, a work that shocked his middle-class readership with its unflinching picture of the realities of London's slums and which influenced radicals, reformers and writers, among them Charles Dickens.

Mayhew revealed the dark underside of the city, a world of crime, filth and depravity. Interviewing chimney sweeps and flower girls, beggars and street entertainers, pickpockets and prostitutes,
Mayhew depicted a world, as the writer Thackeray described it, “of terror and wonder.” He spoke of the “pure-finders,” who gathered dog feces to sell to tanners. He introduced his readers to the “mud-larks,” children who made their living scavenging around the banks of the cholera-infested, sewage-filled Thames for coins and wood or for coal dropped from the barges.

Mayhew let his subjects speak in their own words and reported his findings with a humanist's eye. He told of Jack, a West End crossing-sweep, “a good-looking lad with a pair of large, mild eyes”; of his friend Gander, who earned extra money with his acrobatic “catenwheeling.” He described their room in the lodging house that was as clean as it could be and the old woman who cared for them as well as she was able. He told the story of the drunken prostitute China Emma, the “shriveled and famine-stricken” woman lying in “a hole … more like a beast in his lair than a human being in her home.”

It was in this world that the model for
Oliver Twist
's Fagin lived. One of London's most notorious pawnbrokers and fences (receivers of stolen goods), Ikey Solomon became famous for his farcical escape from Newgate Prison. After he was arrested in 1827 for theft and receiving, the hired coach that was intended to carry him to jail was in fact driven by his father-in-law. As the coach took a detour through Petticoat Lane, a gang of Solomon's friends overpowered the guards and set Ikey free.

Solomon fled to New York, but, in lieu of the notorious criminal, the authorities transported his wife and children to Tasmania. “Determined to brave it all for the sake of my dear wife and children,” Solomon sailed to join them. For want of a warrant, it was a year before Tasmanian officials could arrest him and send him back to England.

Solomon's trial at the Old Bailey was one of the sensations of the day. But unlike Fagin, Solomon did not hang. Found guilty
on two counts of theft, he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation and promptly sent back to Tasmania. Solomon lived out the rest of his days there. The man said at one point to be worth £30,000 died in his sixties, estranged from his family and leaving an estate of just £70.

But as well as drawing on the accounts of other peoples' lives for inspiration, Dickens knew from his own experience how quickly a man could slide into degradation. At the same age at which Oliver Twist is confronted with the terrifying darkness of the world, Dickens had become a child laborer. His time in a blacking factory, necessitated by his father's bankruptcy, was brief. When the family's fortunes recovered some months later, Dickens returned to school. His parents never spoke of it again. He himself kept it a close secret, though the memory never left him. He wanted always, he said, “to present [the poor] in a favorable light to the rich.” His enduring fear of a return to poverty compelled him to work ever harder.

Dickens-mania gripped rich and poor alike. Installments of his works were read out to crowds of the urban poor, who had clubbed together to hire the latest episode from the circulating library. Dickens made the public laugh and he made them cry. His characters were as real to them as life. At New York Harbor, crowds pressed around disembarking passengers to ask about the fate of
The Old Curiosity Shop
's Little Nell. Her death inspired hysteria; the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell was allegedly so enraged that he threw the book out of a train carriage window.

“I have great faith in the poor,” Dickens wrote to a friend in 1844. “I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances … may admit.” In his fantastical exaggerations the radical philanthropist showed the bleakness that faced so many. For some readers, it was
an illustration of their lives; it made others realize how wretched such lives could be. One American reviewer considered Dickens' works a force for reform far more effective than anything the “open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism” could achieve.

Dickens was renowned for his wit and his marvelous talent for mimicry. He developed an extraordinarily successful second career giving public readings of his works. His mammoth tours across England and America sold out in every city. He turned his flock of offspring into an amateur theatrical troupe, performing plays in which he generally took the starring role. In the course of these ventures he met Ellen Ternan, the young actress who was the great love of his later life.

He had a reputation for oddity. He was obsessed with light, filling his brightly painted room with mirrors. When Dickens was a child, his father pointed out to him a house that, he said, would demonstrate a man's having made it in life. So in 1856 the adult Dickens bought it—Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. He was a demanding father, while his total repudiation of his wife Catherine after over twenty years of marriage was undeniably cruel.

Dickens' masterpiece was
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859). Set in the French Revolution, it ends with Sydney Carton, rogue-turned-savior, giving his life for that of a better man, saying “It is a far, far better thing that I do now, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

1815–98

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war
.

Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck, son of a Junker landowner, was the Iron Chancellor who united Germany, won three wars, created a hybrid authoritarian-democratic German empire and dominated European affairs for almost thirty years. A bundle of contradictions, he was both a militarist ultra-conservative and the bringer of a welfare state and universal suffrage to Germany, a modernizer whose German constitution left real power in the hands of emperor and army, a brutally ruthless and vindictive politician who was also a neurotic hypochondriac and near hysteric, an insomniac who could not stop eating, a Christian believer whose methods were utterly amoral. At home and abroad, he used the threat of democracy to force kings and princes to do his bidding and in the process he created a Germany that was the most dynamic power in Europe, but his creation was utterly flawed and unworkable, partly because he had designed it around himself as ruling chancellor.

As a flamboyantly ambitious and eccentric student, he paid court to two English girls but then fell in love with a graceful and fascinating girl called Marie von Thadden who had recently married one of his friends. Under her influence he embraced the fashionable pietist evangelical Lutheranism, though this never restrained his political intrigues. Ultimately he married the plain,
humorless and religious Joanna von Puttkamer with whom he had a successful but probably boring and unhappy marriage blessed with many children.

During the 1848 Revolutions, Bismarck was outraged at the liberal rebellion and planned to lead his peasants to Berlin to back the king. He projected himself as a diehard authoritarian praising the divine right of kings in a series of provocative speeches designed to win him attention. His regular memoranda of advice to the regent and later king of Prussia, the conservative Wilhelm I, a bluff if emotional Prussian soldier, made clear that he wanted to serve as chief minister but would demand total control over foreign affairs. Instead he was appointed ambassador to the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt, then to St. Petersburg and lastly to Paris. During these postings and a visit to London, he met the statesmen of the time, including Napoleon III of France and Benjamin Disraeli. He openly and with astonishing foresight told Disraeli exactly how he would manipulate the German princes, France and Austria, using war and the threat of democracy to reunite Germany. Within a few years he had precisely fulfilled his promises.

In 1862, King Wilhelm's crisis over the Prussian military budget led him to appoint Bismarck minister-president and foreign minister of Prussia. Bismarck almost ruined his job at once with an unwise and notorious speech that threatened blood and iron—war—as the only way for Prussia to find its destiny in Europe. Nonetheless in partnership with War Minister Roon and Chief of Staff von Moltke, Bismarck set about doing exactly that. Prussia's rival for leadership of the many German kingdoms was the Halsburg empire of Austria–Hungary ruled by Emperor FranzJoseph. First Bismarck exploited the crisis of the succession of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein to defeat the hapless king of Denmark and then exclude Austria from German affairs.

Then in 1866 he manipulated Austria into a war in which Emperor Franz-Josef was defeated at the Battle of Königgrätz, ending once and for all Austrian pretensions to a role in Germany. Prussia was able to then annex several German kingdoms, including Hanover.

Bismarck was raised to count. Throughout all this, he depended solely on the king of Prussia for his power—in effect he had no party, but Wilhelm had in turn become dependent on Bismarck. Crises were solved by Bismarck's weeping, hypochondria or threats of resignation, but he took enormous trouble to retain royal support, despite being hated by Queen Augusta as well as Crown Prince Frederick and his wife Vicky, Queen Victoria's liberal daughter. “It is not easy to be king under Bismarck,” said King Wilhelm.

In 1869, when Spain offered its throne to a Hohenzollern prince, a kinsman of the king of Prussia, Napoleon III insisted that the offer be refused—quite reasonably—since the French feared Prussian power on both sides of their borders. But French arrogance played into Bismarck's hands: he doctored the text of a French telegram to make it insulting to King Wilhelm, who was outraged. The French declared war but were totally defeated at the Battle of Sedan by the Prussians. Emperor Napoleon III abdicated, a prisoner.

Bismarck's victory allowed him to unite Germany into a new Empire with Wilhelm I as emperor (
Kaiser
in German) and himself as chancellor. He was made a prince. The Germany he combined a façade of universal suffrage, parliamentary democracy, and a modern industrial economy, with the reality of secretive authoritarian military rule by the kaiser, Junker-aristocratic army officers and of course Bismarck himself. Real power remained with the kaiser, but it was a complex system that only Bismarck with his unique prestige and political genius could manage and control.

He ruled for almost two more decades after creating the German empire, running a cultural campaign to attack Catholic power, at times allying with socialists, at others pushing conservative policies, creating a welfare state, promoting foreign alliances with Austria and Russia while aiming to keep the balance of power in Europe.