Dickens Read online

  Dickens

  A Biography

  Fred Kaplan

  To Julia, Noah, and Ben, and to the memory of my father

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Preface, 1998

  CHAPTER ONE:

  Scenes of His Boyhood (1812–1822)

  CHAPTER TWO:

  The Hero of My Own Life (1822–1834)

  CHAPTER THREE:

  The First Coming (1834–1837)

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  Charley Is My Darling (1837–1841)

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  The Emperor of Cheerfulness (1842–1844)

  CHAPTER SIX:

  An Angelic Nature (1844–1846)

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  As My Father Would Observe (1846–1849)

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  No Need for Rest (1849–1853)

  CHAPTER NINE:

  The Sparkler of Albion (1853–1855)

  CHAPTER TEN:

  Superfluous Fierceness (1855–1857)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  My Own Wild Way (1857–1859)

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  A Splendid Excess (1860–1864)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

  The Sons of Toil (1864–1868)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  A Castle in the Other World (1867–1870)

  Notes

  Image Gallery

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. From an unsigned miniature, said to be the earliest portrait. Courtesy of the Dickens House Museum.

  2. John Dickens, from an oil painting by John Jackson

  3. John Dickens, c. 1845

  4. Elizabeth (Mrs. John) Dickens, c. 1845. Courtesy of the Dickens House Museum.

  5. Mrs. John Dickens, engraved by Edwin Roffe

  6. No. 18, St. Mary’s Place, Chatham, Dickens family residence, 1821–1823. From a photograph by Catherine Ward.

  7. Wellington House Academy, Hampstead Road, Dickens’ school, 1821–1823. From a photograph by Catherine Ward.

  8. Maria Beadnell, c. 1835

  9. Private Theatricals, Clari, etc., April 27, 1833

  10. Charles Dickens, 1835. From a miniature by Rose Emma Drummond.

  11. Catherine Hogarth (Mrs. Charles Dickens), shortly before her marriage, c. 1835. From a photograph by T. W. Tyrrell.

  12. Charles Dickens, 1838. From a drawing by Samuel Lawrence.

  13. Dickens, Catherine, and Mary Hogarth, c. 1835. From a sketch by Daniel Maclise. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  14. Dickens, Thackeray, Maclise, and Mahony, 1836. From a sketch by William Makepeace Thackeray.

  15. 48 Doughty Street, Dickens residence, 1837–1839. From a photograph by Catherine Ward.

  16. Arrival of the Great Western steamer at New York, April 23, 1836, with Mr. Pickwick and other characters from Pickwick Papers

  17. Charles Dickens, 1839. From a painting by Daniel Maclise.

  18. William Makepeace Thackeray. From a sketch by Daniel Maclise.

  19. George Cruikshank, c. 1840

  20. Richard Bentley, c. 1850. From an etching by T. Brown.

  21. William Harrison Ainsworth. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise.

  22. John Forster, 1830. From a portrait by Thomas Warrington and Daniel Maclise. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  23. John Forster reading, May 22, 1840. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  24. Daniel Maclise. From an engraving by J. Smith.

  25. William Charles Macready, c. 1835. From a painting by Briggs.

  26. T. N. Talfourd, c. 1845

  27. Clarkson Stanfield, c. 1835

  28. Catherine Dickens, 1842. From a painting by Daniel Maclise.

  29. The Dickens children, 1842. The painting the Dickenses took with them on their American trip. From a painting by Daniel Maclise.

  30. Charles Dickens, 1844. From a drawing by Charles Martin.

  31. No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, Dickens’ residence, 1839–1851. From a photograph by C. W.B. Ward.

  32. Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), c. 1845

  33. Edward Chapman, Dickens’ publishers

  34. Frederic Chapman, Dickens’ publishers

  35. William Bradbury, Dickens’ publishers

  36. F. M. Evans, Dickens’ publishers

  37. Dickens and his friends in Cornwall, 1842. From a sketch by William Makepeace Thackeray. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  38. Dickens reading The Chimes, December 2, 1844. From a sketch by Daniel Maclise.

  39. Every Man in His Humour playbill, 1845, with drawings of Dickens and John Forster. Sketches by Daniel Maclise.

  40. Dickens in Every Man in His Humour, 1845. From a portrait by C. R. Leslie.

  41. Forster acting, c. 1845. From a sketch by Clarkson Stanfield.

  42. Mrs. Charles Dickens, 1846. From a painting by Daniel Maclise.

  43. Charles Dickens, 1848. From a drawing by Count D’Orsay.

  44. Georgina Hogarth, c. 1856.

  PREFACE, 1998

  WE LIVE IN A CULTURAL CLIMATE QUICK TO ACCEPT THE WORST, DENY the best. And we often have difficulty, unlike Dickens, in being sure about how to define moral indicators, especially in complicated human matters. To Dickens, that came easily. He unhesitatingly believed in absolute truths, both moral and cosmological, though, paradoxically, opposite absolutes often co-exist, as in “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When, in 1854, he learned of the allegation that the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the North Pole had in its final days resorted to cannibalism, he would not accept even the possibility that such a horror had happened. With Wilkie Collins, he soon collaborated on a play, The Frozen Deep, a main purpose of which was to affirm that Englishmen (and by extension Europeans and their American offspring) were not capable of such base behavior, even in extreme circumstances.

  Like culturally self-assured cannibals, we put Dickens into our particular contemporary pot, bring the water to a boil, and then help ourselves to those parts that entice our palates. Dickens the moral absolutist appeals to few modern readers, though there is still an audience, mainly of political and religious conservatives, who find this aspect of him attractive and even reassuring. Dickens biographers, from the beginning, have been aware that some of the facts of his life and personality may seem to some readers uncomfortably out of synch with the Christian and humanitarian messages of his novels. Still, since Edgar Johnson’s somewhat innocent but still brilliantly successful Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and His Triumph (1952), Dickens biographers have attemped to see Dickens “warts and all,” as Carlyle said about his effort to write a truthful biography of Cromwell. But the wart we are inclined to see, the meal we are predisposed to dine on, is the one that particularly suits our own late-twentieth-century interests. Even if Dickens has not been quite the tasty meal offered by more culturally scandalous or politically incorrect Victorian and modern lives, he nevertheless has provided for the modern biographer three appetizing areas that can be and have been readily highlighted. The first is his sense of himself as an abused child whose exploitative parents forced him to toil in a blacking factory when he should have been in school; the second, his relationships with and his treatment of women, particularly Georgina Hogarth Dickens and Ellen Ternan; and the third, his schizophrenic division of himself into a person with an open public life and a secret private one.

  Since this biography was first published in 1988, there have been many articles and books on Dickens’ childhood, none of which has added any significant evidence to our knowledge of those years and experiences in his life. His own and John Forster’s account of the blacking warehouse incident still stand as our primary sources. As in Peter Ackroyd’s
Dickens (1990), the only full-length biography since this one, and in Malcolm Andrews’ Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (1994), our contemporary attraction to the concept of the abused child and the particular language associated with it has, inevitably, been applied to Dickens. It has not been a bad thing to do, as long as it is done within reason and with an understanding of the differences between what Victorians thought and what our late-twentieth-century society thinks the appropriate amount of sympathy and understanding due the child.

  What it was in the young Charles that made him for all his adult life relive emotionally and imaginatively that childhood experience, no biographer has been able to satisfactorily elucidate. To a great extent it was class humiliation, something harder for us to grasp today than it was for Dickens’ contemporaries. When Elizabeth and John Dickens sent their son to the blacking warehouse to help with exigent family finances, they believed they were doing something socially reasonable and morally defensible. Indeed, British and American Victorian culture abused children even beyond our contemporary abusive depradations. But Dickens’ parents (and most Victorians) would not have thought of young Charles’s treatment as abuse. Dickens’ powerful dramatizations of such children in his fiction and his sense of his own “neglect” (the word he preferred) are attractive to modern readers primarily because they hit so strongly on a preoccupation of ours, in a culture in which sensitivity to the issue has been ratcheted up and the definition of abuse made more extensive and inclusive. It is an emphasis that from the beginning Dickens biographers have not underplayed. It has been an easy or at least a comfortable crux in Dickens biography, primarily because he has seemed especially contemporary in this regard.

  Dickens’ treatment of women in his life and fiction has not been as sympathetic to modern taste, and on this matter we have all been cultural cannibals, attempting to come to terms, more or less, with what for many modern readers has become a crucial moral crux. That Dickens associated the pain of the blacking house humiliation almost exclusively with his mother’s indifference to his plight and hardly at all with his father’s bankruptcy has made it inevitable that biographers will find important traces of this in his treatment of his wife as well as in the women of his fiction. One prominent review of this biography found serious fault with its treatment of Elizabeth Dickens. The charge was that I had been unfair to her. Probably I was, in that critic’s sense, though my effort to present Elizabeth Dickens mostly through the lens of her son’s feelings, as far as those could be determined, seemed to me entirely separate from the issue of objective fairness. The little that we know about Elizabeth Dickens we know through the record that her son created. Undoubtedly, he could no more provide an objective view of her than I can provide an objective view of him, let alone of my own mother. All such portraits are part fact, part interpretation, and no amount of special pleading or political correctness can gainsay that our interest in any of the women in Dickens’ life resides primarily in what our attention to them can teach us about Dickens. Victorian Studies in general and the Victorian novel in particular have benefited from and been distorted by feminist studies. The benefit has been considerable, the distortion usually only minor. In regard to Dickens, the two major biographical studies of the women in his life, Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women (1983), and Claire Tomalin’s pursuit of Ellen Ternan in The Invisible Woman (1990), have brought together available material to give some special emphasis to a modern interest. Slater and Tomalin both owe a debt, as do all modern Dickens biographers, to Ada Nisbet’s pioneering study, Dickens and Ellen Ternan (1952). Tomalin’s biography of Ternan adds some details about Ternan’s life and gives us the fullest portrait of her days. But even a full-length study of Ellen Ternan exists because of our interest in Dickens rather than in Ternan. As fate and the record require, she still remains largely a shadow lady whom Dickens (and Ternan) preferred to have us know as little about as possible.

  That she and Dickens were lovers almost every modern biographer believes. Only Ackroyd quixotically but unconvincingly resists the substantial circumstantial evidence. Whatever his motive for doing so, it seems an instance of special pleading. He somehow sees the sexual relationship as some unwarranted avoirdupois grafted onto Dickens by modern biographical cannibals, the better to dine on him. No biographer has been able to demonstrate with even barely credible circumstantial evidence the more radical claim that Dickens and Ellen Ternan had a child. But it certainly could have happened—if one believes they were lovers. There is room in the known chronology of both their lives, especially in the first hah of the 1860s, for the event to have taken place. Still, without credible evidence, it remains speculation, and, oddly enough, we have not been treated to the spectacle of putative offspring coming forward to claim a heretofore hidden lineage. Dickens’ secret life, though it may not have included a child with Ellen, still remains mostly secret, resistant to our probes.

  Though I would be happy at some time in the near future to wipe the egg off my face, I do not believe that we will ever know more than we do now about the facts of Dickens’ life, except in the most marginal ways. In this regard, Dickens’ recent biographers owe more to the on-going Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens (Vols. 1–8, 1965–1995) than to any other source. Dickens was good, perhaps brilliant, at covering his tracks. The letters reveal the scattered footprints, the barely identifiable traces, some possibilties to add to the certainties that we have. We know enough to know that in his last decade he led a double life: his public life as a world-famous writer and host at Gad’s Hill Place, his private life with Ellen Ternan at a cottage he set up for her in England, and often on long holidays with her in France. Not even the clever Dickens could completely conceal the traces of this. Barring the discovery of some long-lost revelatory document, the rest is and will be mostly untenable guesswork. But his psychological and fictional preoccupation with double lives precedes Ellen Ternan as a Dickensian phenomenon. Perhaps it, too, goes back to the blacking warehouse experience, a shameful secret that he concealed from everyone but Forster until his death. For biographers, this aspect of Dickens seems more and more to be the key to whatever all there is, a kind of tongue-in-cheek Dickensian “That’s-all-Folks!”

  Dickens’ … steady practicality withal; the singularly solid business talent he continually had; and, deeper than all, if one has the eye to see deep enough, dark, fateful silent elements, tragical to look upon; and hiding amid dazzling radiances as of the sun, the elements of death itself.…

  —THOMAS CARLYLE TO JOHN FORSTER

  Constituted to do the work that is in me, I am a man full of passion and energy, and my own wild way that I must go is often—at the best—wild enough.

  —CHARLES DICKENS TO MARY BOYLE, 12/9/1858

  Freud … in accepting the Goethe Prize in 1930, said … the goal of biography [is] to bring a grand figure nearer to us. “It is unavoidable … that if we learn more about a great man’s life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.”

  —DANIEL GOLDMAN, “New Insights into Freud, from

  ‘Letters to a Friend,’” The New York Times Magazine, 3/17/1986, p. 92

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scenes of His Boyhood

  (1812–1822)

  ON AN EXQUISITE SEPTEMBER DAY IN 1860, CHARLES DICKENS burned “the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years.” The flames rose into the sunlight in the field behind the house at Gad’s Hill. Every letter he owned not absolutely on a business matter went up into fire and ashes, letters from friends and family, from the obscure and the famous, from Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson, William Harrison Ainsworth, John Forster, Wilkie Collins, Leigh Hunt, letters from his mother, father, brothers, and sisters, letters from his wife, letters from Ellen Ternan. He was mercilessly indiscriminate, absolutely insistent. Henry and Plorn, his two youngest sons, gleefully carried one basketful after another from his study to the bonfire
. They soon “roasted onions on the ashes of the great.” His daughter Mamie begged her father to save some of the letters. She held them in her hands momentarily, recognizing the handwritings and the signatures. Letters were ephemeral, he responded, “written in the heat of the moment.” As the fire destroyed decades of correspondence, he remarked, “‘Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile.’” The articulate smoke rose into the sky “like the Genie when he got out of the casket on the sea-shore.” With the disintegration of the last letters, the sky darkened and it began to rain “very heavily.… I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.”1

  Fearing that they would be published to an audience that had no business with them, he could, and now did, destroy every private letter he received.2 Aware that fame generated its own detractors, that the exposure of secrets had as much excitement within public discourse as within fiction, he feared the Victorian equivalent of his phone being tapped. He had no belief in or commitment to the idea of a public record about private matters. His books would speak for him. All other voices should be silenced. His art, not his life, was public property. But no amount of discretion could gainsay that he earned his living as a public man, a writer and an entertainer reading from his own works. The incessant traveling during the readings made his presence in his novels a real voice heard and an actual face seen in innumerable high streets, hotels, and railway stations. Only between 1862 and 1865, when he withdrew temporarily from the reading stage, were his public appearances interludes in an essentially private life. His face, though, was always prominently displayed in bookshop windows across the country. The success of his journal All the Year Round, “Conducted by Charles Dickens” emblazoned in bold print on the cover, kept his name before the public with weekly persistence. One could hardly turn one’s head toward a newsstand or a bookstore or a reading table without seeing it. The more famous he became, the more certain it was that his letters would eventually be published. The Heavens would send back some of the smoke.