WHEN DICKENS INVITED ME up to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas Day, suggesting in his note that I stay through New Year’s, I accepted at once. “The Butler and the Butler’s Mother shall understand,” he wrote in the same note, referring to Harriet (whom we called Carrie ever more frequently as she matured) and her mother, Caroline, in his usual bantering way. I am not sure Caroline and Carrie did fully understand or appreciate my absence that week, but that was of little concern to me.
As I took the short train ride to Chatham, I held the Christmas Issue of All the Year Round in my hands—the one I’d just contributed to and helped put out and the one that held Dickens’s Christmas story “Cheap Jack” in it—and I thought about the warp and woof of the Inimitable’s fiction these days.
Perhaps it takes a novelist (or some Future Literary Critic such as yourself, Dear Reader) to see what lies behind the words of another novelist’s fiction.
I shall start with Dickens’s most recent Christmas tale:
Cheap Jack, the eponymous hero of the Inimitable’s little fable and a common name in our time for the travelling salesman who moved from village to village with his inexpensive wares, was written about a man whose wife was no longer with him, whose child was dead, and who—for professional reasons—must hide his feelings from the world. Dickens’s character was “King of the Cheap Jacks” and happened to be taking a paternal interest in a young girl with “a pretty face and bright, dark hair.” Was this a twisted self-portrait by the author? Was the young girl Ellen Ternan?
Dickens being Dickens, of course, the girl with the pretty face and bright, dark hair also happens to be deaf and dumb. What would a Dickens Christmas tale be without pathos and bathos?
“See us on the footboard,” Cheap Jack tells us of his time in front of audiences, “and you’d give pretty well anything you possess to be us. See us off the footboard, and you’d add a trifle to be off your bargain.”
Is Charles Dickens telling us here about the great abyss between his gay public life and persona and his private sadnesses and bone-deep loneliness away from the public eye?
And then there was his huge novel Our Mutual Friend, completed (as was “Cheap Jack”) the previous September and which had just ended its full run of nineteen installments in our All the Year Round.
It might truly take another professional author to see just how complex and dangerous a book Our Mutual Friend actually was. I had read it in instalments in our magazine over the past year and a half; I had heard Dickens read parts of it aloud to small groups; I had read some of the book in manuscript form; and after the final instalment was published, I had read it all again. It was incredible. For the first time in my life, I believe I hated Charles Dickens out of sheer jealousy.
I cannot speak for your age, Dear Reader, but already in our nineteenth century just approaching the two-thirds mark, tragedy was replacing comedy in the eyes and hearts and analytical minds of “serious readers.” Shakespeare’s tragedies were to be found on the stage more frequently than his brilliant comedies and they received more serious reviews and discussions. The sustained and profound humour of, say, a Chaucer or Cervantes was being replaced in the short list of masterpieces by the more serious tragedies and histories of both the classics and our contemporaries. If this trend continues, Dear Reader, then by the time you read this manuscript a century and more hence, the art and appreciation of comedies will be all but lost.
But this was a matter of taste. For years—decades now—the fiction of Charles Dickens had grown darker and more serious, allowing themes to dictate the structure of his novels and causing his characters to fit neatly (too neatly) into the pigeonholes of the overall thematic structure much like library cards might be shuffled into the proper drawer. (This is not to say that even the most serious Dickens novels of recent years had been without humour; I do not believe that Dickens could write something totally devoid of humour, any more than he could be trusted to stay completely serious at a funeral. He was truly irrepressible in that regard. But his topics had been increasingly serious as he abandoned the largely unstructured Pickwickian celebrations of life that had made him the Inimitable Boz and as social critique and social satire—all-important to him personally—had moved more towards the centre of his work.
But in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had created a sustained comedic novel of more than eight hundred cramped pages without striking—as far as I could tell—a single false note.
This was incredible. It made my joints ache and my eyes burn with pain.
In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had abandoned the grand motifs of Little Dorrit and Bleak House and Great Expectations and almost completely subordinated his personal and social opinions into a masterful display of language and nuance that came very close to perfection. Very close. The complexity of his characters in this book far surpassed anything he had done before; indeed, Dickens seemed to have resurrected many of his earlier characters and reimagined them with the focus of a newly gained maturity and a newly found sense of forgiveness. Thus the evil lawyer Tulkinghorn from Bleak House reappears as the young lawyer Mortimer Lightwood, but redeems himself as Tulkinghorn never could have. The vile Ralphy Nickleby is reborn as the bounder Fledgeby, but does not escape punishment as had Nickleby. (Indeed, the severe caning of Fledgeby by the other bounder, Alfred Lammle, is one of the high points in all of Charles Dickens’s long list of fictions.) Similarly, Noddy Boffin turns into a Scrooge who avoids becoming a miser; the old Jew Mr Riah atones for the sins of Dickens’s sometimes-criticised (especially by Jews) Fagin by not being a heartless money-lender but only the conscience-stricken employee of a Christian heartless money-lender; and Podsnap is—besides being a devastating portrait of John Forster (devastating and so subtle that Forster never recognised himself in the character, although everyone else did)—Podsnap is… Podsnap. The quintessence of Podsnappery. Which may well be the quintessence of our age.
Yet even while the tone and structure of Our Mutual Friend is one of flawless satiric comedy that would have honoured Cervantes, the underlying chiaroscuric background of the novel is dark to the point of despair. London has become a barren and stony desert, “cheaper as it quadrupled in wealth; less imperial as its empire widened.” It is “a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” The tones are sombre to the point of funereal, with even the sky being darkened by the inescapable fog from yellow and brown to an underlying creeping blackness—“a heap of vapour charged with muffled sounds of wheels and enfolding a muffled catarrh.” The city so beloved by Dickens is portrayed as either grey or dusty or dark or muddy or cold or windy or rain-swept or drowned in its own refuse and filth. Most commonly in Our Mutual Friend, it is revealed to be all these things at once.
But within this horror of a landscape—and within great surges of distrust, vicious scheming, incipient dishonesty, ubiquitous greed, and murderous jealousy—the characters manage to find love and support not within families, as had been the example so used by Dickens and other writers of our era before this, but within small circles of friends and beloved, trusted individuals that make up ad hoc families which shield those characters we care about from the storm of poverty and social injustice. And it is these same circles of love which punish those whom we despise.
Dickens had created a masterpiece.
The public did not recognise this. The first number in All the Year Round had sold very well (it was, after all, the first new Dickens novel in two and a half years), but sales quickly fell off and the last number sold only 19,000 copies. I knew that this was a bitter disappointment to Dickens, and although he had personally profited (I learned from Katey’s comments to my brother, Charley) to the tune of about £7,000, the publishers Chapman and Hall actually lost money on the book.
The critics either loved or hated the book without reservation and laboured over either verdict with their usual cock-sure hyperbole, but the general critical trend was one of disappointment. Those in the intellectual sphere had expected ano
ther thematic novel with social criticism front and centre, again in the mould of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations, but all they received was a… mere comedy.
But, as I say, it took another professional author such as myself to see that Dickens had achieved the nearly impossible in sustaining such a gentle satirical tone at such length, and with such perfection, to see that the satire never slipped into cynicism, that the comic vision did not slide into mere caricature, nor the relentless critique of society devolve into mere rant.
It took me, in other words, to see that Our Mutual Friend was a masterpiece.
I hated him. As a competing writer, I wished at that moment—as the train left London for his home in Gad’s Hill—that Charles Dickens had died in the Staplehurst accident. Why had he not? So many others had. As he so insufferably wrote and bragged to me and to so many other of his friends, his was the only first-class carriage that had not been thrown to the riverbed below and smashed to flinders.
But all that aside, it was the personal revelation in Our Mutual Friend that I found most revealing and relevant to the current situation we all found ourselves in.
To my trained writer’s eye and experienced reader’s ear, signs and echoes of Dickens’s disastrous culmination of his long relationship with his wife and the commencement of his dangerous liaison with Ellen Ternan were to be found everywhere in this book.
Most novelists create the occasional character—often a villain—who leads a double life, but Dickens’s fiction now seemed saturated with such dualities. In Our Mutual Friend the hero, young John Harmon (heir to the Harmon dust heap fortunes), who appears to be drowned under suspicious circumstances while returning to London after many years at sea, immediately visits the decomposing body (dressed in his clothes and thus presumed to be him) at the police station. Harmon then changes his identity to Julius Handford and then later to John Rokesmith so that he can act as secretary to the Boffins, lowly servants who have, by default, inherited the fortune and dust heaps that should have been John Harmon’s.
The villains in Our Mutual Friend—Gaffer Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle (grifters who have deceived each other into a loveless and moneyless marriage and who join hands now only in deceiving and using others), peg-legged Silas Wegg, and especially the murderous headmaster Bradley Headstone—may pretend to be someone or something else, but are allowed to remain their sincere selves at heart. Only the positive protagonists in the novel suffer from dual or multiple identities amounting to an actual confusion of self.
And that tragic confusion is inevitably brought about by one form of energy—love. Misplaced, displaced, lost, or concealed romantic love is the engine that drives all the secrecy, machinations, and violence in Dickens’s single most energetic (and terrible) comedy. Our Mutual Friend, I realised to my own pain and horror, was a title and tale worthy of Shakespeare.
John Rokesmith/Harmon hides his identity from his beloved, Bella, until long after they are married and even after they have a child, all the better to manipulate and test and educate her—away from love of money towards love for love’s sake. Mr Boffin becomes an ill-tempered miser to all appearances, driving the Boffins’ ward, Bella, out of the house and back to her impoverished roots, but it is all a charade—another means of testing the true mettle of Bella Wilfer. Even the wastrel lawyer Eugene Wrayburn—one of the strongest (if most confused) personalities in all of Dickens’s fiction—reaches, because of his illogical love for low-born Lizzie Hexam, a point where he taps his head and breast in confusion, speaks his own name, and cries out—“. . . perhaps you can’t tell me what this may be?—No, upon my life I can’t. I give it up!”
John Harmon, lost amidst all his disguises and manipulative strategies, reaches a similar loss of identity and cries, “But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.”
The weak and jealous headmaster Bradley Headstone seems to confess to all of Charles Dickens’s own hidden passions and jealousies when he tells the much-in-demand Lizzie Hexam—
“You draw me to you. If I were shut up in a strong prison, you would draw me out. I should break through the wall to come to you. If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up—to stagger to your feet and fall there.” And later—“You are the ruin of me… Yes! You are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you.”
Compare this to what Charles Dickens had written in a private letter not so long after he had met Ellen Ternan for the first time—“I have never known a moment’s peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit.” And—“Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!”
Charles Dickens’s passion for Ellen Ternan, much less the destruction to his sense of self, family, and sanity that this passion was causing, cried out to me from behind the mask of every character and violent event in Our Mutual Friend.
In the terrifying scene where Bradley Headstone confronts the cowering Lizzie Hexam with his passion—set, I thought, quite appropriately in a foggy burial ground, since the schoolmaster’s love is doomed and one-sided and short-lived even before it dies from jealousy and resurrects itself as murder—the deranged schoolmaster seems to cry out in a voice echoing Charles Dickens’s silent screams of agony that year—
No man knows until the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea has been heaved up ever since.… I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This, and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.
And all the time Bradley Headstone is shouting these things, he is wrenching at the stone of the graveyard wall until powdered mortar spills and dribbles onto pavement and until, finally, “bringing his clenched hand down upon the stone with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bleeding.”
Charles Dickens had never before written so clearly and painfully and forcefully about the terrible twinned power of love and jealousy. He was never to do so again.
As with Bradley Headstone, could the confusion of identities and loss of control over his own life, casualties of erotic and romantic obsession, lead Charles Dickens to madness in daylight and murder in the night? It sounded absurd, but it sounded possible.
I set aside the magazine as the train rolled into the station and shifted in my seat to look out into the cold, grey, shadowless Christmas Day. This promised to be an interesting visit.
A YEAR EARLIER—before Staplehurst—Dickens’s comparatively desultory Christmas gathering for 1864 had been composed of my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey, the artist Fechter and his wife (and Fechter’s amazing gift of the Swiss chalet), Marcus Stone, and Henry Chorley. This year I was mildly surprised to find another bachelor, Percy Fitzgerald, a guest for several days, not surprised at all to see Charley and Katey back at the Dickens hearth, pleased to find the other Gad’s Hill residents Mamie and Georgina in relatively good spirits, and totally surprised—despite the fact that the young Staplehurst survivor had mentioned Dickens’s invitation to me the previous summer—to find young Edmond Dickenson installed at Gad’s Hill for the week. That made three bachelors at the table, if one did not count Dickens himself as such.
And that morning, Dickens promised me another gratifying surprise by dinnertime. “My dear Wilk
ie, you shall love our surprise guests tonight. I promise you that. They shall be a delight to us, as always.”
If it had not been for the plural, I might have mockingly asked the Inimitable if Mr Drood were making an appearance at our Christmas table. Or perhaps I might not have; despite his enthusiasm about the mystery guests, Charles Dickens seemed very tired and haggard this Christmas Day. I enquired about his health and he admitted to having been plagued with pains and mysterious weaknesses during the late autumn and early winter. Evidently our mutual friend and physician, Frank Beard, had been consulted frequently, although Dickens rarely followed Beard’s advice. It seems that Beard had diagnosed “a want of muscular powers in the heart,” but Dickens seemed certain that the injured heart in question lay more in the realm of emotions than in his chest cavity.
“It’s these accursed muggy days this winter which prey upon the mind, Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Then, after three or four days of unusually warm humidity, these constant cold snaps batter one’s morale like a mace. But—have you noticed?—it never snows. I would give anything for the simple, cold, snowy Christmases of my childhood.”
It was true that there was no snow on the ground in London or at Gad’s Hill this particular Christmas. But we were in one of the cold snaps he had described and our afternoon walk that Christmas Day—Percy Fitzgerald came along, as did young Dickenson and Dickens’s real son Charley, but my brother Charles stayed in the house—resembled more a waddling procession of insensate and multiple-layered bundles of wool than it did a gentlemen’s outing. Even Dickens, who usually seemed oblivious to the rain or heat or cold, had added a thicker topcoat than he usually wore on walks and a second wool muffler, red, wound about his collar and lower face.
Besides the five of us men, there were five dogs with us on that outing: Linda, the lumbering Saint Bernard; Mary’s little Pomeranian, living up to her name of Mrs Bouncer; Don, the black Newfoundland; the great mastiff named Turk; and Sultan.