Dickens Read online

  A performance personality, Nicholas can act out on the theatrical stage or in life the emotional soundness and the moral strength of his self-definition. He can be defined and valued in terms of his presence. He is in his sense of his own value a member of the upper middle class. His status as a Victorian-bourgeois gentleman cannot be undermined. Appropriately, Nicholas’ father, an improvident man who, like John Dickens, leaves his family in want, is disposed of before the novel begins, freeing his son of paternal impositions. In Ralph Nickleby, the good father dead becomes the bad father alive whom Nicholas defeats in honorable battle. An aspect of Elizabeth Dickens becomes the totality of Nicholas’ mother, the vain, ineffectual, verbally comic Mrs. Nickleby, another fictional neutralization of the pain in his relationship with his own mother. Unlike Elizabeth Dickens, Mrs. Nickleby, whatever she is “keen” on, has no power over her son. Allied with other good hearts, bound together with fraternal passion, finding both the perfect sister in Kate Nickleby and the perfect sister-wife in Madeline Bray, Nicholas, like Dickens in 1839, ends his triumphant journey as “a rich and prosperous merchant” whose first act is “to buy his father’s old house” and surround himself with a “group of lovely children.” He is elevated by honor, truthfulness, and talent to the center stage of British Victorian culture.

  A more somber but beatific version of the pilgrim’s journey, of ceaseless travel toward transformation, is dramatized in the voyage of Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. Addicted to gambling, her improvident grandfather, who loves but cannot provide for his surrogate child, takes his place in Dickens’ vivid gallery of failed fathers. Without discipline, work values, or social responsibility, even the good heart of a well-intentioned father cannot provide security for his child. Little Nell becomes father to her grandfather, parent to an elderly child. The orphaned Little Nell must become both father and mother to herself. Like Mary Hogarth, echoing the inscription he composed for her tomb—“Young Beautiful And Good”—Little Nell is an “angel,” whose celestial destiny both affirms and alleviates the pain parents feel when children die.45 Aware of the strength of wickedness in the world, embodied in the character of the dwarf, Quilp, Dickens attempts to show the triumph of goodness over evil and assert the innate goodness of the human heart to solace those who have lost beautiful and young souls to death. The Old Curiosity Shop is a novel haunted by the inseparability of the pain and blessedness of death, which transforms living angels into ever-living or heavenly angels and provides the catharsis of tears for those who remain behind.

  Little Nell possessed his dreams, as Mary did, and the act of writing her demise had inherent within it the anguish of “slowly murdering” her. “When I think of this sad story … dear Mary died yesterday.… Nobody will miss” Little Nell “like I shall. It is such a very painful thing to me, that I really cannot express my sorrow. Old wounds bleed afresh.…”46 His initial intention had not been to kill his main character. That her death was inherent in her beginning and in her situation gradually became clear to him. When Forster suggested that her death would be the appropriate resolution to the novel, he realized that, instinctively, unconsciously, he had from the beginning made that resolution inevitable. He consciously faced that necessity, though, only when the plot and the themes demanded it be made explicit. Forster advised him to do only what he already knew had to be done. The “Pilgrim’s Progress” that is strongly on Nell’s mind, when she and her grandfather look back at the “Babel” of London, with “Saint Paul’s looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud … and glittering in the sun,” as they begin their travels, is a progress whose final moment must be a heavenly ascension.

  Half a year after completing The Old Curiosity Shop, he was again painfully reminded of the loss of Mary. Recently having had minor surgery, the removal, without anesthesia, of a fistula from his rectum, he was still in the postoperative recovery period and also struggling with the closing chapters of Barnaby when another Hogarth child died. Mary’s younger brother was twenty-one. Under pressure, his own good sense asserting itself against the force of his feelings, he agreed to relinquish the opportunity for himself and his “dear children” to be buried next to Mary’s grave “if it will be any comfort” to her mother. His rights to the gravesite were proprietary as well as emotional, since he had arranged and paid for it. He consoled Mrs. Hogarth with echoes of Little Nell, signifying that such pure angels wait for us to join them in heaven. Still, he had become obsessed with the inappropriate idea of being buried in the same grave with her. “It is a great trial to me,” he privately wrote to Forster, “to give up Mary’s grave; greater than I can possibly express. I thought of moving her to the catacombs, and saying nothing about it.… I cannot bear the thought of being excluded from her dust.… I ought to get the better of it, but it is very hard. I never contemplated this—and coming so suddenly, and after being ill, it disturbs me more than it ought. It seems like losing her a second time.” But he did get the better of it. Within days, he was absorbed in Barnaby. “In the midst of this trouble and pain, I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don’t invent it—really do not—but see it, and write it down.”47 Through the same autumn, he was making plans for further travel. He had decided to cross the Atlantic.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Emperor of Cheerfulness

  (1842–1844)

  TOSSED BY HEAVY ATLANTIC SEAS, EVEN THE BUOYANT DlCKENS feared drowning. Sparks, exploding from the funnel of the coal-burning steamship Britannia, “full of fire and people” and without lifeboats, fell onto the wooden deck. He could not help imagining that the ship would catch fire. It rolled “from side to side … now on the top of a mountain; now in the body of a deep valley … with her masts in the water at every plunge; and the lightning streamed through the skylight, awfully.” Optimism and cheerfulness, his surface response to challenges, were insufficient to calm his nerves on one of the stormiest midwinter crossings in recent memory. Like the other eighty-five passengers, including Catherine, he felt frequently nauseous and dizzy. During much of the voyage, high waves at right angles to the ship seemed to wall in the deck, eliminating the horizon. Their cabin seemed as small as a postage stamp. “I don’t know what to compare it with. A small box at a coffee room is much too big. So is a hackney coach.” The crossing took fifteen days. Finally, near Halifax, the pride of the Cunard fleet went aground in a shallow channel. Two days later, approaching Boston, Dickens strained his eyes for his first sight of “American soil.… A sharp keen wind blew dead against us; a hard frost prevailed on shore; and the cold was most severe.”1 Angry and frightened, partly because he believed the new technology unsafe, partly because he had underestimated the perils of a winter crossing, he vowed not to take a steamship back. For the next half year he did not tire of repeating how unsafe the voyage had been. He returned to England six months later, through balmy June weather, on an old-fashioned American sailing packet, the George Washington.

  When the Britannia had left Liverpool on January 3, 1842, Alfred and Fanny, representing the family, had waved him off. Forster had concluded his emotional embrace with a gift of a pocket Shakespeare, which he carried “constantly … an unspeakable source of delight,” like a green patch of England in an English-speaking but foreign world. The thirty-year-old Dickens was not a seasoned traveler except in his imagination. Other than brief visits to Wales, the Midlands, Yorkshire, Scotland, and Belgium, his experience had been limited to London and southern England. European languages and cultures had no special attraction for him. His fictional travelers, Pickwick, Nickleby, and Little Nell, find England sufficient for their wanderings. He does not seem to have daydreamed about following in the carriage tracks of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour or to have thought of Paris and Rome as a young Englishman’s finishing school. Unlike his older friends Landor and Rogers, he had had neither the learning nor the leisure to become a cultured European. Though the C
hannel was not as formidable a barrier as the Atlantic, his strong English commitment directed his imagination toward his own culture and its extensions.

  Even if a continental adventure had appealed to him, he needed to transform adventure into commerce. Little to no British market existed for European travel books. There was, though, a substantial reading audience for books about America. His restlessness, his need for refreshment, his desire to find stimulation among fresh scenes there, could be reconciled with his need to maintain his income. In July 1839, he had speculated about crossing the Atlantic in the profitable footsteps of Frances Trollope and Captain Frederick Marrayat, “to write from thence a series of papers descriptive of the places and people I see.…” The British book-buying public continued to be curious about its cousins in America. The American impressions of the most popular English novelist would most likely sell widely. The trip would be financed by an advance against royalties from Chapman and Hall. In Dickens’ mind, and in the general European consciousness, America was a newfound land of potential riches whose origin as a resource for the entrepreneur, as well as for the underemployed masses, could not be forgotten no matter how sophisticated the scheme. To the extent that it was marketable, English culture was a commodity. In response to Macready’s financial worries, Dickens had suggested a mineral that “isn’t to be found in England”—American gold.2

  Before departure, he had signed a contract with his publisher, who put into his account at Coutts and Company an advance of £800 against the security of three life insurance policies he had recently obtained. In total, his “honourable, manly, and generous” publisher had agreed to provide £1,800 against the earnings of the book that he would write about his American adventures and a new full-length novel on an English subject to be published in monthly numbers. American Notes would extend the breadth of his social observation, comparing American institutions to British. He did not intend “pressing the Americans” into his service in the novel. Throughout he denied that he planned to write any book at all about America, though he had had one in mind from the beginning and had signed a contract to write it. There was some rough justice in his deceit. Unlike Macready, who had been paid cash for his American performances in 1826–27, the hardworking Dickens had received and could expect to receive nothing from the immense sale of his novels in the United States. Beginning in 1834, pirated editions had sold widely to American buyers who had little incentive to become party to an international copyright agreement. The American readers who waited in anxious anticipation on the docks of Boston and New York to receive the installment of The Old Curiosity Shop that might break their hearts with the news of Little Nell’s death paid Dickens nothing for their tears. He bewailed, ironically, “the exquisite justice of never deriving sixpence from an enormous American sale of all my books.”3 Having already spoken up for increased copyright protection in Britain and for a British-American agreement, he had it in mind to advance a just cause from which he and others would benefit. Ignorant of the complications of copyright politics and of the recent severe depression, he crossed the Atlantic with the naïve expectation that in this republic of his imagination elemental notions of fairness would triumph over politics and power relationships, as if America were some elegant Utopia exempt from the rough-and-tumble vicissitudes of human nature and ordinary society.

  His American aspirations, though, were far from only commercial. From Sketches on, he had increasingly turned his literary eye toward social conditions. What he would see in America would qualify his belief that much of European misery had its roots in social, political, and economic exploitation embedded in the class structure and reflected in the attitudes of a corrupt ruling hierarchy that had not incorporated basic Christian principles into economics and government. With a sure sense of his feelings, the unsophisticated Dickens declared himself a “republican” who expected to find the realization of his humanistic dream in the United States. In April 1841, he had resumed a correspondence with Washington Irving, the warmth of whose fraternal hand he grasped “over the broad Atlantic.” He anticipated an American community of friends. By September 1841, “still haunted by visions of America,” he had decided to go, looking forward to walking on “the soil I have trodden in my day-dreams many times.” He relished all “the wonders that await us … in your mighty land.” He expected to find a model against which British failures could be measured and criticized, an experiment in democracy whose successes would strengthen his commitment to reform and his self-definition as a radical. His American hosts expected to give to a grateful recipient, an ambassador of goodwill, the homage of lionizing admiration, though British-American relations were severely strained by recent events. America had defaulted on foreign-owned state bonds, had aided Canadian rebels, and had become embroiled in an American-Canadian boundary dispute, which would be resolved by the Webster-Ashburton treaty that summer. Relations had been further exacerbated by British insistence on searching American ships suspected of engaging in the slave trade.4

  Imitating his hero from pantomime, the buoyant Dickens bounced onto the American stage with one of Grimaldi’s favorite tag lines, “Here we are!” He seemed to the young Boston publisher James T. Fields “the Emperor of Cheerfulness on a cruise of pleasure.” Though he came to America as a private traveler, he could not resist stepping onto the public platform that his American hosts assumed was his natural place. As the Britannia pulled into Boston Harbor, a dozen newspaper editors “came leaping on board at the peril of their lives” to interview the international celebrity.5 Every town in America wanted the honor of entertaining him publicly, as if to authenticate its cultural status. Every newspaper wanted interviews, quotations, anecdotes, exclusives, publicity. Wined, dined, toasted, interviewed, and celebrated in Boston, where he stayed for a month, and then Worcester, Hartford, New Haven, and New York, he could neither gauge nor appreciate the public nature of American life in which the “Inimitable Boz,” as if hoisted on the petard of his own celebrity, was defined as a personality who belonged to his audience, the captured British lion on display. Used to English reticence, to tight boundaries between public reputation and personal privacy, he immediately learned that such distinctions meant little to Americans.

  At the Boz Ball in New York, on February 14, repeated two nights later (he was prevented from attending the reprise because of a sore throat) and sensationalized in The Extra Boz Herald, three thousand people in full dress danced quadrilles around Dickens, who danced quadrilles until he was “no longer able even to stand.” The ballroom was decorated with Dickens medallions. At one end were tableaux vivants of scenes from his novels. Torn between vanity and disgust, he thought it was “the most splendid, gorgeous, brilliant affair.”

  When not on public display, he was denied privacy by the curious who came to enforce their right as Americans not only to be equal to anyone else but to have sight of and talk to their famous visitor. He soon began to feel overexposed, even abused. Uninhibited by libel laws, in an early stage of developing the techniques of sensationalistic journalism, the newspapers raucously, aggressively, treated him the way they would any glamorous public figure. Soon he felt “so beset, waylaid, hustled, set upon, beaten about, trampled down, mashed, bruised, and pounded, by crowds, that I never knew less of myself in all my life, or had less time for those confidential Interviews with myself whereby I earn my bread.…” A sober young man in Worcester expressed some of the cross-cultural puzzlement from the American perspective. “His external appearance did not answer to our puritanical notions of a literary man: his dress was that of a genteel rowdy in this country and no one, who did not know, could have supposed him to be ‘the immortal Boz.’ A stout Prince Albert frock coat, a flashy red vest with a lark figured scarf about his neck, fastened with a pin to which was attached any quantity of gold chain and his long flowing hair gave him the air of a fashionable young man.…” But “when introduced to him he gave you a cordial shake of the hand which instantly made you feel at ease. Fr
om his dress his character is not to be judged: in his countenance there is a field for deep study, it is capable of a greater variety of expression than I recollect to have seen. In conversation his eye sparkles and lights up his whole face.”6

  Only a literary lion, Dickens walked into the political and economic den of public pressure groups like an ignorant Daniel. At a dinner in his honor in Boston, at the beginning of February 1842, he urged the merits of an international copyright agreement. A week later, in Hartford, he enforced his argument with the announcement that he had “made a kind of compact with myself that I never will, while I remain in America, omit an opportunity of referring to a topic in which I and all others of my class on both sides of the water are equally interested.… I would beg leave to whisper in your ear two words, International Copyright.”7 He argued that literature was property to be protected by rules of equity and that a native American literature could flourish best in circumstances that encouraged American publishers to pay American authors rather than have foreign authors free. The opposition maintained that literature, like all imaginative creations, should not be regulated by law and commerce, that undercapitalized nations, without public libraries, needed inexpensive access to ideas and entertainment that they could not generate themselves or afford to purchase at high rates, and that the free availability to publishers of an author’s works did more to advance his reputation and long-term earnings than the restricted circulation created by the higher price of books on which a copyright royalty was paid. American opinion, across every interest group, including authors, was divided, though most book, magazine, and newspaper publishers were opposed. But the notion of entering into an agreement that would send capital abroad at a time when national growth was struggling against economic depression had little appeal even to those not in the book trade.