Preface
It is essential to draw the real image of an author as faithfully as possible not only for the sake of the author himself but for the interpretation of his works. The biography of Charles Dickens has been written by many writers, but regrettably they all have overlooked the important fact that Dickens underwent ‘conversion’ in the sense of ‘a spiritual change from sinfulness, ungodliness, or worldliness to love of God and pursuit of holiness’ (OED) in 1860. Three years earlier Dickens employed the three professional actresses, Mrs. Thomas Lawless Ternan, her second daughter Maria and her third, Ellen, for the August performance of The Frozen Deep by his amateur theatricals. Soon he became infatuated with the 18-year-old Ellen, made her his mistress, and denied the fact to the public although some persons knew of his love affair. The hard changes in his circumstances ensued thereafter, and they caused the conversion within him, after which he suffered from his compunction and remorse, made efforts to improve himself, and died as a penitent Christian man. Without grasping this operation of his mind we could neither draw the real image of Charles Dickens himself nor could we understand his works from A Tale of Two Cities to The Mystery of Edwin Drood satisfactorily. In this book his spiritual operation in the last 13 years
i from 1857 to his death will be revealed by the four essays: ‘Dickens and Gad’s Hill Place,’ ‘Reading Dickens’s three novels: David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations,’ ‘Dickens Self-Denying,’ and ‘Dickens Cornered.’ The first of the four was published in The Japan Branch Bulletin of the Dickens Fellowship (No. 30, November 2007), and some revisions and addition have been made. The second was made public on 22 October 2009 on the website:
The following books, which are alphabetically arranged by writers’ surnames, are the biographies or biographical writings of Dickens which were roughly glanced over but are not listed in ‘Bibliography’ and ‘References’ in my four essays. G. K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens (1906; New York: Schocken 1965); W. Walter Crotch’s Charles Dickens, Social Reformer (London: Chapman, 1913), The Pageant of Dickens (London: Chapman, 1915) and The Touchstone of Dickens
ii (London: Chapman, 1920); A. E. Dyson’s The Inimitable Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1970); Martin Fido’s Charles Dickens, An Authentic Account of His Life & Times (London: Hamlyn, n.d.); K. J. Fielding’s Charles Dickens, A Critical Introduction (London: Longmans, 1958) and Charles Dickens (Harlow: Longmans, 1969); Percy Fitzgerald’s Memories of Charles Dickens (1913; New York: AMS, 1973); Robert Giddings’s The Changing World of Charles Dickens (London: Vision, 1983); George Gissing’s Charles Dickens (London: Gresham, 1903); John Greaves’s Dickens at Doughty Street (London: Elm, 1975); Christopher Hibbert’s The Making of Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); Humphry House’s The Dickens World (London: Oxford UP, 1941; rpt. 1950); Patricia Ingham’s Dickens, women & language (Toronto: U of Toronto, 1992); T. A. Jackson’s Charles Dickens, The Progress of a Radical (New York: Haskell, 1971); Edgar Johnson’s The Heart of Charles Dickens (New York: Duell, 1953); Fred Kaplan’s Dickens, A Biography (New York: Morrow, 1988); W. R. Kent’s Dickens and Religion (London: Watts, 1930); Frederic G. Kitton’s Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings, and Personality (London: Jack, 1902); Stephen Leacock’s Charles Dickens, His Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, 1933); J. W. T. Ley’s The Dickens Circle, A Narrative of the Novelist’s Friendships (London: Chapman, 1918); Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie’s Dickens, A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979); André Maurois’s Dickens (New York: Ungar, 1967); Charles H. McKenzie’s The Religious Sentiments of Charles Dickens, Collected from His Writings (New York: Haskell, 1973); Hillis
iii Miller’s Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958); Sylvère Monod’s Dickens the Novelist (Norman: U of Oklahoma, 1967); Hesketh Pearson’s Dickens, His Characters, Comedy, and Career (London: Methuen, 1949); Una Pope-Hennessy’s Charles Dickens (London: Chatto, 1945); J. B. Priestley’s Charles Dickens and his world (London: Thames, 1961, 1978) and Charles Dickens, a pictorial biography (London: Thames, 1961); Edwin Pugh’s The Charles Dickens Originals (New York: Scribner’s, 1912); W. Teignmouth Shore’s Charles Dickens and His Friends (London: Cassell, 1909); John H. Stonehouse’s Green Leaves, New Chapters in the Life of Charles Dickens (London: Piccadilly Fountain, 1931); Ralph Straus’s Dickens: A Portrait in Pencil (London: Gollancz, 1928); Geoffrey Thurley’s Dickens Myth, Its Genesis and Structure (London: Routledge, 1976); Dennis Walder’s Dickens and Religion (London: Allen, 1981); Adolphus W. Ward’s Dickens (1889; New York: AMS, 1968); Alan S. Watts’s Dickens at Gad’s Hill (Avon: Bath, 1989) and The Confessions of Charles Dickens (New York: Lang, 1991); Angus Wilson’s The World of Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
The following are references, which are arranged by year of publication. Lionel Stevenson’s Victorian Fiction, A Guide to Research (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966); George Watson’s The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature Vol. 3, 1800-1900 (London: Cambridge UP, 1969); James W. Lee’s
iv Studies in the Novel, Charles Dickens Number (Denton: UNT, 1969); Joseph Gold’s The Stature of Dickens, A centenary bibliography (Toronto: U of Toronto, 1971); A. E. Dyson’s The English Novel, Select Bibliographical Guides (London: Oxford UP, 1974); R. C. Churchill’s A Bibliography of Dickensian Criticism 1836-1975 (London: Macmillan, 1975); Frank T. Dunn’s A Cumulative Analytical Index to The Dickensian 1905-1974 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976); George H. Ford’s Victorian Fiction, A Second Guide to Research (New York: Modern Language, 1978); John J. Fenstermaker’s Charles Dickens, 1940-1975 (Boston: Hall, 1979); Alan M. Chon & K. K. Collins’s The Cumulated Dickens Checklist 1970-1979 (New York: Whitston, 1982); Joanne Shattock’s The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature Vol. 4, 1800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999); Duane DeVries’s General Studies of Charles Dickens and His Writings and Collected Editions of His Works: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: AMS, 2004); John Welford’s A Cumulative Analytical Index to The Dickensian 1975-2005 (Buckingham: U of Buckingham, 2010).
Note Thanks are due to my English teacher, Laura Thompson, who graduated from Yale University, and who is now a lawyer.
v Dickens and Gad’s Hill Place
Charles Dickens took two heavy traumas in his life; one was in his poor childhood, the other in the period of 1857-58. He raised his status in life by the first trauma, and purged his own spirit by the second, and at the core of the traumas there was Gad’s Hill Place. This will be revealed in the present paper.
1 The first trauma John Dickens, a clerk in the Royal Navy Pay Office, was very sloppy with money. He borrowed £200, though his salary rose to £441, during the period of 1817-22 when he was posted to Chatham Dockyard, Kent; he spent too much money on parties, social gatherings, the theater, and things like clothes, furnishing, food and drink for his growing family. It was at such a hard time that he often brought his eldest son Charles to the Gad’s Hill of Higham by Rochester, and he often said, looking up at the Place on the summit of the Hill, to Charles, ‘If you were to be very persevering, and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it’ (Forster 1: 4-5; Letters 8: 265-66 and nn; Dickens, Traveller Ch. VII). The Place had been built by a self-made man who rose from an ostler into a brewer of Rochester and into Mayor of Rochester (Letters 7: 531n; Letters 8: 265 and n). John, who was transferred back to London in 1822,
vi wasted more and more money, and, in debt for £40, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in February 1824; soon his wife Elizabeth with her four small children moved into his prison room. So Charles had to work at Warren’s Blacking warehouse, and on Sundays he and his elder sister Fanny would visit them in the Prison. At a certain time John broke down in tears in front of Charles, and so did Charles from his despair. In April 1824 John’s mother happened to die, and he inherited £450 through her Will, all of which he had to spend paying his creditors to be released in May 1824. In June, Charles was able to leave the warehouse to go into the Wellington House Academy, but in November 1826 his family’s financial difficulties grew worse, and John could pay neither rent nor schooling expenses for Fanny and Charles. In 1827 the family moved into a cheaper lodging at Somers Town, and Charles, fifteen years old, left the Academy to go out into the world. He could never forget these hard, dreadful days all his life: viz, it was a great trauma, in which Gad’s Hill Place occupied a great space, he later recalled it as ‘a dream of [his] childhood’ (Letters 7: 531).
2 Marriage Charles Dickens worked very hard following his father’s words; he, during the period of 1827-34, had jobs such as a clerk at solicitor’s office, a freelance reporter at Doctor's Commons, a reporter of Parliamentary proceedings, a
vii polling clerk for a Parliament member, a regular contributor to the Monthly Magazine, and a Parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle in 1834. At the Morning Chronicle he met George Hogarth (1783-1870), who was to be editor of the Evening Chronicle, and in those days Dickens earned £275 a year. Hogarth urged him to write sketches, and adopted his twenty sketches in the Evening Chronicle by September 1835, and often invited him to his home. It was thus that Dickens got engaged to his eldest daughter Catherine Thomson Hogarth at the age of 19, and married her in 1836. Dickens was proud of the Hogarth family; George Hogarth, when in Edinburgh, was not only the legal adviser of Sir Walter Scott, but also an amateur violoncellist and music critic. He had married in 1814 Georgina Thomson (1793-1863), whose father was George Thomson (1757-1851), a musician, publisher of collections of Scottish, Welsh and Irish songs, and friend of Robert Burns (Letters 1: 134n; Schlicke 270 and 507). In 1830 George Hogarth decided to be a journalist, wishing to extricate his big family from financial difficulties, and finally settled in 1834 in London to get a job as a music critic of the Liberal Morning Chronicle (Letters 1: 54-55n). Dickens, before the marriage, had begun to write Pickwick Papers, being continuously assisted in his career by George Hogarth, who, for instance, introduced him to the publisher Richard Bentley in 1836 (Letters 1: 54-55n). Within the year Dickens got the editorship of Bentley's
viii Miscellany for one year. In this way Hogarth was a benefactor in Dickens’s youth.
3 Becoming rich Dickens became highly popular as a very talented writer, getting rich rapidly, as we can know from his houses. He was a tenant of Furnival’s Inn in 1834-37, moved to 48 Doughty Street in 1837, and to 1 Devonshire Terrace in 1839 for which he paid £800 for a 14-year lease and £160 for rent per year. One of the works he wrote in Devonshire Terrace was Personal History of David Copperfield (1849-50), a rather autobiographical novel with a first-person narrator, in which he described the narrator David Copperfield as ‘The Eminent Author’ (Ch. LXIII). Then he moved in 1851 to Tavistock House for which he paid £1,542 for a 45-year lease.
4 Happy days He wrote Bleak House during the period of 1851-53 and Hard Times in 1854 in Tavistock House. He peacefully spent the new-year days of 1855 at his home, writing to his friend W. W. F. De Cerjat of Lausanne in Switzerland a letter dated 3 January 1855: ‘The whole nine [i.e., his nine children] are well and happy. Ditto Mrs. Dickens. Ditto Georgina.’ They were very busy with preparing for the fairy play of Fortunio and his Seven Gifted Servants by James Robinson Planché. The play was to come off five days later at the House, which was full of ‘spangles, gas, Jew theatrical
ix tailors, and Pantomime Carpenters’ (Letters 7: 497). In the Playbill were introduced actors and actresses like Charles Dickens, all his children including two-year-old Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, and 14-year-old Mark Lemon, Jr. and 10-year-old Betty Lemon. The Dickenses were all filled with happiness, joy and hope. Among the guests of the Performance of January 8th were James Robinson Planché, who had received an invitation from Dickens, and undoubtedly Mrs. Dickens, Georgina, and Mr. and Mrs. Mark Lemon, and the neighbors, too (Letters 5: 616n; Letters 7: ii, xxi, and 510 & nn; M. Dickens, CD 132). How blissful those days of the Dickens family!
5 Victory and release from trauma On February 1, 1855, the Rev. James Lynn (1776-1855), the then-owner of Gad’s Hill Place, died, and his daughter Miss Eliza Lynn (1822-98) decided to sell the Place, though it was rented those days to the Rev. Joseph Hindle, vicar of Higham (?1795-1874; vicar of Higham, 1829-74). Naturally, it was Dickens who bought the Place, which was ‘a dream of [his] childhood,’ for £1,790. He paid the money on Friday, 14 March 1856, which Dickens, born on Friday, himself believed to be a lucky day. The motive of his for the purchase was for an investment and for summer residence. The Rev. Joseph Hindle, who had abided there for 26 years, desired to stay until Lady Day the next year, i.e., March 25 (Letters 8: 53).
x With the coming of the year 1857 Dickens’s amateur theatricals performed Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House four times in January. His forty-fifth birthday came round on February 7, when he held a party at Tavistock House with guests like Thomas Beard and Wilkie Collins, and on February 13 Dickens at last did possess Gad’s Hill (Letters 8: xxiii and 292). How bright a smile he showed! On April 9, 1857 he was at Waite’s Hotel, Gravesend, with Mrs. Dickens, Georgina, and his two little boys, staying there until April 15; during which time he went out to watch the little repairs at Gad’s Hill carefully (Letters 8: 310-11). On May 12 he finished Little Dorrit, and on May 19, when it was Mrs. Dickens’s birthday and her first visit day to Gad’s Hill Place, he held a house-warming party there with guests like Thomas Beard, Wilkie Collins, and William Wills (Letters 8: 326-27; Page, Chronology 94). Dickens, who was ‘very persevering’ and ‘work[ed] hard,’ was now ‘the Inimitable Kentish Freeholder’ and a man of ‘Victory’ (Letters 8: 327). From June 1 to July 17 Dickens and his family enjoyed the summer holidays at Gad's Hill, during which he, it is likely, often got drunk not only on spirits but on the feeling of Victory, remembering the looks of his father who had died in 1851. During the holidays he frequently went over to London to prepare for the next performances of The Frozen Deep. On July 4 he played it before the Queen and Prince
xi Consort, and the King of Belgium at the Gallery of Illustration. The Queen, after the performance, begged Dickens to ‘go and see her and accept her thanks’ (Letters 8: 366), and further she recorded in her Journal, ‘The Play was admirably acted by Charles Dickens’, and Colonel Phipps in a letter, dated July 5th, 1857, to Dickens from Buckingham Palace for the Queen, wrote that ‘[…] the Queen and Prince Consort, and the whole of the Royal party were delighted with the rich dramatic treat of last night. I have hardly ever seen Her Majesty and HRH so much pleased’ (Letters 8: 366n). Another Victory to Dickens! Now he was admired not only as a novelist and editor of Household Words but as a stage director and actor; furthermore he was respected as a moralist and philanthropist, and was even called ‘a man of genius’ (Letters 8: 748). He, having got sufficient fortune, station and reputation, had been entirely disengaged from the trauma he had suffered in his poor childhood, though the trauma itself had been the source of his diligence, morals and faith.
6 Peripeteia and a second trauma There were performances of The Frozen Deep following on July 11, 18, 25, and August 8, bringing him more and more cheers and applause; for which he was made up over and over into the self-sacrificing hero, Richard Wardour, who threw out his life for the rival lover Frank Aldersley.
xii The last performances were to be played on August 21, 22, and 24 at the big Manchester Free Trade Hall, for which Dickens hired the three professional actresses, Mrs. Thomas Lawless Ternan (1803-73), her second daughter Maria Susannah Ternan (1837-1904), and her third, Ellen Lawless Ternan (1839-1914), instead of the amateur ones. It went without saying that the actresses brought him a great success. The Ternan family, made up of Mrs. Ternan and her three daughters, was rather poor; and Dickens, now a hero of self-sacrifice, assisted them as a matter of course; more than that, he, 45 years old, was flattered by Ellen Ternan who was 18 years old, the same age as his second daughter Kate, and made her a mistress secretly. For nearly a year he could not but struggle against his wife Catherine and the Hogarths, the problem having become a scandal by journalism; he persistently insisted on his innocence, sending a letter of 25 May 1858 to his intimate friend Arthur Smith, with a note giving his permission to show it to any one who wished to do him right:
Two wicked persons who should have spoken very differently of me, in consideration of earned respect and gratitude, have (as I am told, and indeed to my personal knowledge) coupled with this separation the name of a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name -- I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless
xiii creature than this young lady. I know her to be innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughters. Further, I am sure quite that Mrs. Dickens, having received this assurance from me, must now believe it, in the respect I know her to have for me, and in the perfect confidence I know her, in her better moments to repose in my truthfulness. (Letters 8: 741; emphases added)
The ‘young lady’ referred to above was none other than Ellen Ternan (Forster 2: 454, note 19; Wagenknecht 373), whom he was to hide for the rest of his life from the world. In June his relation with Ellen Ternan was known among the ‘literary and artistic circles’, as Reynolds's Weekly News reported on June 13:
The names of a female relative, and of a professional young lady, have both been, of late, so freely and intimately associated with that of Mr. Dickens, as to excite suspicion and surprise in the minds of those who had hitherto looked upon the popular novelist as a very Joseph in all that regards morality, chastity, and decorum. (Letters 8: 745n)
Catherine left Tavistock House around the middle of May with her eldest son Charley, who chose to live with her, to go to a new home (70 Gloucester Crescent, Regent’s Park), which was situated at a distance of more than a 30-minute
xiv walk from Tavistock House.✞ At that time Dickens was ‘like a madman’ (Storey 94) though he had blamed her cruelly in some letters. Catherine, who had borne him ten children plus two miscarriages, signed the Deed of Separation in June 1858. Dickens, 46 years old; Catherine 43. Dickens broke with his close friends Mark Lemon, editor of Punch, and Frederick Evans, a partner of Bradbury & Evans, because they, who both were Catherine’s trustees, refused to print the ‘Personal’ statement, which Dickens wrote to justify the separation, in Punch, whose owner was Bradbury & Evans. Dickens distinctly committed a great sin; he was one of those who ‘know not what they do.’ The problem was not finished yet; New York Tribune dated August 16 exposed the Letter to his friend Arthur Smith without Smith’s permission, and criticized Dickens severely. The Letter, which Dickens later called the ‘Violated Letter,’ was reprinted by English newspapers on 31 August (Letters 8: xxv). Dickens, in those days, was earnestly urging George Eliot, whose principal publisher was Blackwood's, to write for his new magazine All the Year Round. One of the examples of how Dickens was discussed behind his back can be found in a letter of 16 Nov 1859 to Joseph Munt Langford, Blackwood's London manager, by George Simpson, Blackwood's Edinburgh manager, who wrote: ‘I have no doubt the tempter is that fallen angel C.D.’ (Haight 310; Letters 6: 461n; Letters 9: 160-61n; emphasis added).
xv Thus Dickens, who might be said to have known nothing but praise, was exposed to the harshest criticism and the deepest disgrace he had never experienced, which could not but have caused a new trauma within him.
✞ The original ‘which was near from Tavistock House’ was revised thus, thanks to Dr. David Parker’s advice that ‘I don't think it really makes sense to say that Gloucester Crescent is close to Tavistock Square. It's a brisk walk of at least half an hour.’
7 Dickens’s defeats and conversion Dickens’s third boy Frank, who was studying in Germany to be a doctor, came home at the latest by August 1859, giving up being a doctor because of his stammering. So Dickens was in deep affliction for him, writing in September to the Rev. Matthew Gibson, Frank’s teacher in France, ‘I am a little puzzled to know what to do with Frank’ (Letters 9: 120). His anguish was doubled by his beloved daughter Kate’s engagement, of which she told him by October 1859, to the sickly painter and writer Charles Allston Collins (1828-73), a younger brother of Wilkie Collins and eleven years older than she. It would perhaps be those days that she often spent days with boyfriends and was talked about as ‘a flirt’ or ‘the fast Miss Dickens’ (Hawksley 142). Annie Adam Fields, who was invited on May 6, 1860 with her husband to Tavistock House, wrote in her diary, ‘A shadow has fallen on that house, making Dickens seem
xvi rather the man of labor and of sorrowful thought than the soul of gaiety we find in all he writes’ (Curry 5). A month later, i.e., around on July 2, Dickens moved into Gad’s Hill Place, putting up Tavistock House, near which Catherine and the Ternan family lived, for sale, and on July 17 Kate married Charles Collins despite her father’s opposition, to escape from the ‘unhappy house’ (Storey 105). After the couple’s departing for a honeymoon, Dickens, who was in her bedroom, sobbed ‘with his head buried in Katie’s wedding-gown’, saying, ‘But for me, Katey would not have left home’ (Storey 106). He would have been obliged to gaze at his own inward ugliness, which he himself had often criticized in his works. Dickens suffered severe defeats, which would have made his second trauma much greater. On September 3 Dickens burnt ‘the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years’ in the field at Gad’s Hill, making (probably) Dickens’s ‘housekeeper’ Georgina Hogarth and his two sons Frank and Plorn help in the work (Letters 9: 304 and n; Storey 106-07; Adrian 127; Lewis 197-204; see McCarthy). Obviously, two big spiritual changes would have happened within him. One was a complete separation from Catherine, following Christ’s preaching: ‘No man can serve two masters’; the other was to purge his tainted, sinful, ungodly soul, through which he wished to regenerate himself. He expressed his will in A Tale of Two Cities through Sydney Carton, who had ‘deep wounds in’ his heart: ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in
xvii me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die’ (TC, 198). Dickens became clearly conscious of his sin and was converted. Tavistock House was sold on August 21, 1860, and the Dickens’s family transferred to Gad’s Hill completely in October. The serialization of Two Cities was concluded on November 26.
8 Improvement After the purchasing of Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens got to work on repairs, additions, alterations, and refurbishments, often superintending those renovations himself (Forster 2: 211). In relation to them he frequently used words like ‘improve’ or ‘improvement.’ According to his eldest daughter Mary, he was constantly making improvements to the House from 1860 until his death, as she wrote,
but in 1860 Tavistock House was sold, and all the pictures and ornaments, &c., were removed to Gad’s Hill, which now became the one permanent home. And from this time until his death Charles Dickens was constantly making some improvement to “the little freehold” he was so fond of […]. (M. Dickens, CD 140-41)
And as each was completed he showed it to Kate, who was a constant visitor. So Kate had to come down and ‘inspect’; he would say to her, ‘Now, Katie, you behold your
xviii parent’s latest and last achievement,’ and the ‘last improvements’ became quite a joke between them (M. Dickens, My Father 132). In fact he was pleased with ‘showing [her] the beauties of his “improvement”’ (M. Dickens, My Father 136). The truly last ‘improvement’ was the building of a conservatory, which was completed around on January 13, 1870 (Letters 12: 464-65), and the partitioning of the Vinery in the conservatory would have been finished around June 5. Dickens was very proud of the conservatory, and showed the beauties of it, on June 5, to Kate, who had visited the Place the day before, saying, ‘Well, Katey, now you see POSITIVELY the last improvement at Gadshill’ (Forster 2: 213; M. Dickens, CD 166; Storey 133). Here we should not overlook that it was to his own improvement or his self-improvement that he had tacitly referred through the ‘improvement.’ He had surely been doing his self-improvement, which we could perceive from a speech he made at the Birmingham Midland Institute on September 27, 1869, as President for the year:
To the students of your industrial classes generally, I have had it in my mind, first, to commend the short motto, in two words, ‘Courage, Persevere’. [Applause] This is the motto of a friend and worker. Not because [...]; nor because […]; not because […]; not because self-improvement is at all certain to lead to worldly success, but because it is good and right of itself [hear,
xix hear]; and because, being so, it does assuredly bring with it, its own resources and its own rewards. (Fielding 405; emphasis added)
His sixth son Henry (‘Harry’), who followed his father then, wrote, ‘he told his audience “that they should value self-improvement, not because it led to fortune, but because it was good and right in itself; […]”’ (H. Dickens, Memories 21; Recollections 59). The very speech could not have been made to the students unless he himself had practiced his self-improvement; he, it can be said, was improving himself by identifying the Place with himself. We might find some of his self-improvements in cases like the reconciliations with William Makepeace Thackeray in 1863 and with Mark Lemon in 1867, in the words ‘I don’t forget that this is Forster’s birthday—or that it is another anniversary [i.e., his own wedding one]!’ in a letter to Georgina of 2 April 1868 from Boston (Letters 12: 89 and n), and in a much politer letter of 5 November 1867 to Catherine than in the former two letters of 6 August 1863 and 11 June 1865:
To MRS CHARLES DICKENS, 6 August 1863 Dear Catherine When I went to America (or to Italy: I cannot positively say which, but I think on the former occasion) I gave your mother the paper which established the right in perpetuity to the grave at
xx Kensal Green. […] The Company's office used to be in Great Russell Street Bloomsbury. CHARLES DICKENS.
To MRS CHARLES DICKENS, 11 June 1865 Dear Catherine I thank you for your letter. I was in the carriage that did not go over the bridge, but which caught on one side and hung suspended over the ruined parapet. I am shaken, but not by that shock. Two or three hours work afterwards among the dead and dying surrounded by terrific sights, render my hand unsteady. Affectionately CHARLES DICKENS
To MRS CHARLES DICKENS, 5 November 1867 My Dear Catherine I am glad to receive your letter, and to accept and reciprocate your good wishes. Severely hard work lies before me; but that is not a new thing in my life, and I am content to go my way and do it. Affectionately Yours CHARLES DICKENS
(emphases added)
The last letter was too short, but he could not write more
xxi than what was needed because he was with Ellen following Christ’s words. One more instance may be added to prove his self-improvement by quoting a letter to his youngest son Edward of ‘?26 September 1868’:
Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to others, as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by our Saviour, than that you should.
Here we should read his sincere repentances for those insolent, cruel attitudes he had taken towards the Hogarths including Catherine, Mark Lemon and Frederick Evans, and for the treacherous attitude he took towards the world. The letter continues,
I put a New Testament among your books, for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child; because it is the best book that ever was or will be known in the world, and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be guided. As your brothers have gone
xxii away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this book, putting aside the interpretations and inventions of man. You will remember that you have never at home been wearied about religious observances or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it. Only one thing more on this head. The more we are in earnest as to feeling it, the less we are disposed to hold forth about it. Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it. (Letters 12: 187-88; emphasis added)
From this letter we could confirm that Dickens had been converted long before, asking Christ for salvation. The first of Edward’s brothers who had ‘gone away’ was Sydney, the seventh child and fifth son of Dickens’s, who, a midshipman or naval cadet, had left for America by Frigate Orlando in December 1861 (Letters 9: 309, 542-43 and 551). So we
xxiii might specify the time of Dickens’s decided conversion, as Mary had written ‘from this time [i.e., from 1860]’, as a period between July and September 1860 when he moved to Gad’s Hill, when Kate departed from his home by marriage, and when he burnt his letters and papers.
9 Dickens’s Reconciliation with Kate Kate visited Gad’s Hill on June 4, 1870, to get her father’s advice on whether she, whose husband was ill in bed, should go on the stage to earn some money or not. It was at about eleven o’clock in the evening of June 5 that they could talk each other about the question in the new conservatory, and he dissuaded her from going on the stage ‘[w]ith great earnestness’, saying ‘there are some who would make your hair stand on end’ (Storey 133). This very advice, we could be sure, came from his own irrevocable, remorseful experience. He went on to speak of many other things that ‘he had scarcely ever mentioned to [her] before. […]. He spoke as though his life were over and there was nothing left’ (Perugine 652), adding that he wished that he had been ‘a better father—a better man’ (Storey 134). It was because of his being not ‘a better father’ that she had escaped from his ‘unhappy house.’ She could never be happy by the marriage; her husband Collins remained sickly; now he had stomach ulcer, and was even suspected of
xxiv tuberculosis; besides he might have been impotent (Gasson 30). Dickens’s consciousness of sin had been made decisively clear by her; and then he would have resolved to improve himself or to purge his spirit, and he would have intimated his self-improvement and made her ‘inspect’ ‘the beauties’ of his own improvements indirectly when showing her the ‘the beauties’ of the improvements of the Gad’s Hill proudly. He, it seems, completed his ‘self-improvement’ by confessing his sin in the conservatory, which was ‘POSITIVELY the last improvement’, and at the very moment he would have been wholly freed from his second trauma. In the morning of July 6 Kate was waiting for the carriage in the porch to go home in London with her sister Mary, who was to spend a few days there, without saying good-bye to her father because he disliked the two words. But, suddenly seized with an irresistible impulse, she ran to him, who was writing Edwin Drood in the Châlet (Storey 134-35). He, seeing her, pushed his chair, and ‘opened his arms, and took her into them. …’ (Perugini 654). The blank Kate left there would probably have been thus: ‘Father …!’ ‘Katie, forgive me ….!’ He hugged Kate tightly, and they both would have shed all of the tears that would have been stored in their eyes for twelve years. He could be reconciled with her at last, though not with Catherine because he served Christ. But still we could imagine that Kate, who was the cordial sympathizer of her mother and continued to visit her, would have told her mother of her father’s words, ‘a
xxv better father—a better husband.’ From the context, situation and dash, we could suppose that ‘man’ must have been ‘husband’, whether by his word or in his mind, but Kate could not make Storey write so because there was Ellen. Only on her deathbed did Catherine protest against the cruel treatment she had got from Dickens; and Kate may have ‘succeeded’ in a way in softening her feelings by telling her mother her father’s words of ‘a better father …’ and what his last hug would have told Kate (Slater 158, 411). Two days later, on June 8, Dickens fell unconscious at dinner, and died on June 9, undoubtedly as a penitent Christian, as he had written in his Will, ‘I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament’, and also as a resurrectionist, as he had written ‘the Resurrection and the Life’ in Two Cities and in the chapter 23 of Edwin Drood, the chapter he wrote right before losing his consciousness. Dickens had written in his Will to ‘proceed to an immediate sale’ of all his ‘real and personal estate.’ The destiny of Gad’s Hill Place must have been done together with his; it was a symbol of his material desire in the first half of his life, and was the place for the purgation of his spirit in the latter by identifying the Place with himself. Dickens had two bad traumas in his life, and the first was dissolved by the Place; the second was healed by the Place; his life was with Gad’s Hill Place. Note
xxvi
This paper is a development of part of the one read at the General Meeting of the Japan Dickens Fellowship held at Yamaguchi University on June 10, 2006, and some of the matter mentioned in the above ‘8 Improvement’ and ‘9 Dickens’s Reconciliation with Kate’ was posted in a recapitulative form on 29 Nov. 2006 to the Dickens Forum edited by Professor Patrick McCarthy of University of California, Santa Barbara. Thanks are due to Laura Thompson (Tokyo) for improving the style of this paper, but all responsibility is the present writer’s.
Bibliography
Adrian, Arthur A. Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle. 1957. New York: Kraus, 1971 Bowen, William Henry. Charles Dickens and His Family. Cambridge: Heffer, 1956 Brannan, Robert Louis, ed. Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens, His Production of “The Frozen Deep”. New York: Cornell UP, 1966 Collins, Wilkie. The Frozen Deep and Other Stories. 1874. Boston: Media, rpt. of 1874, n.d. Curry, George. Charles Dickens and Annie Fields. Henry E. Huntington Library, 1988, rpt. from Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 51, Winter 1988 Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins--An Illustrated Guide--.
xxvii Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998 Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z. New York: Checkmark, 1998 Dexter, Walter, ed. Mr. & Mrs. Charles Dickens, His Letters to Her. London: Constable, 1935 Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982-2002 ---. CD-ROM edition. Charlottesville: Intelex, 1992 ---. A Tale of Two Cities. Apr 30 - Nov 26, 1859. London: Oxford UP, 1970 ---. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 1870. London: Oxford 1979 Dickens, Henry F. Memories of my Father. London: Gollancz, 1928 ---. The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens, K. C. London: Heinemann, 1934 Dickens, Mamie. My Father As I Recall Him. New York: Dutton, 1898 ---, or His Eldest Daughter. Charles Dickens. London: Cassell, 1911 Dickens on Disk. Wilmette: Hall, 2001 Fielding, K. J. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1988 Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman, n.d. (originally published in 3 vols., 1872-74) ---. 2 vols. Ed. A. J. Hoppé. London: Everyman’s, 1969 ---.
xxviii Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 Hawksley, Lucinda. Katey, The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter. London, etc.: Doubleday, 2006 Hughes, William R. A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-Land. London: Chapman, 1891 Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. London: Hamilton, 1952 Kaplan, Fred. Charles Dickens’ Book of Memoranda. New York: New York Public Library, 1981 Lewis, Paul. “Burning: The Evidence.” Dickensian. Vol. 100, Winter 2004, pp. 197-208 McCarthy, Patrick. “The Charles Dickens Forum,” an email bulletin board run by Patrick McCarthy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
xxix ---. A Dickens Chronology. London: Macmillan, 1988 Perugini, Kate. ‘“Edwin Drood,” and the Last Days of Charles Dickens.’ Pall Mall Magazine. Vol. XXXVII (June 1906): 642-54 Robinson, Kenneth. Wilkie Colllins, A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1952 Schlicke, Paul. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999 Slater, Michael. Dickens and Women. London: Dent, 1983 Storey, Gladys. Dickens and Daughter. New York: Haskell, 1939, 1971 Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman, The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. London: Penguin, 1991 Wagenknecht, Edward. “Dickens the Scandalmongers” College English. Vol. 11, No. 7 (Apr., 1950): 373-82 Wright, Thomas. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Jenkins, 1935 ---. Thomas Wright of Olney. London: Jenkins, 1936
Images: Lancton, Robert. The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens. London: Hutchinson, 1912. Facing page 1 Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman, n.d. (originally published in 3 vols., 1872-74). Vol. 2, page 266
Reading Dickens’s three novels: David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations
Charles Dickens became infatuated with Ellen Ternan after the performance of The Frozen Deep in August 1858, which gave rise to a quarrel between him and his wife Catherine that ended in their separation in May 1858. The separation came to be known to people accompanied by gossip and scandal about Dickens’s relation with a young girl and his sister-in-law Georgina; he not only denied the scandals resolutely, but also slandered Catherine callously. He, who had admitted himself to be a serious Anglican, committed not a little sin as a Christian. The gossip and scandal dwindled after September 1858 and soon disappeared. The one year was a peripetia to himself and his family. Through and after the separation he himself encountered disgraces and defeats, which incited him to a religious conversion in 1860. In this paper four things will be revealed; first, David Copperfield, the protagonist of his autobiographical novel, was flirtatious-natured, and the disposition was Dickens’s
xxxi own; second, in what form Dickens’s psychology was reflected in A Tale of Two Cities, the first novel after the separation; third, what caused him a religious conversion; fourth, in what form his conversion was reflected in Great Expectations, another novel, at its heart autobiographical, which was created immediately after his conversion.
The Personal History of David Copperfield 1 The germ and autobiographical character In February 1849 Dickens was ‘revolving a new work,’ i.e., The Personal History of David Copperfield, and began to write it by February 27. In March he was ‘much startled’ by Forster’s commenting that the initials of David Copperfield were his own reversed, but he did not alter them into others, protesting that it was ‘just in keeping with the fates and chances which were always befalling’ him. He wrote in April the first three chapters, i.e., the first installment in the monthly serial, published 30 April 1849, interweaving ‘truth and fiction’ very intricately and laying ‘something of the author’s life’ underneath the fiction (Butt 115; Letters 5: 569 and n; Forster 2: 78, 98). David Copperfield, surely, was Charles Dickens’s alter ego in whom some fiction was contained.
2 David’s flirtatious disposition David Copperfield, articled to the proctor’s office of Spenlow and Jorkins in London, fell in love with Mr. Francis Spenlow’s only daughter Dora at first sight, and got engaged
xxxii to her. He wrote to Agnes, the lawyer Mr. Wickfield’s only daughter and David’s ‘adopted sister’ in Canterbury (Ch. 39), a letter informing her that Dora was such a darling and he was very blest; but he, while writing so, remembered Agnes’s ‘clear calm eyes and gentle face’ (Ch. 34). He, it may be considered, is neither devoted to Dora nor single-minded in his affections. When David suddenly learned that his great-aunt Miss Betsy Trotwood, who was his guardian, was ruined, he told Dora that he was ‘a beggar,’ asking her if her heart was still his. ‘Oh, yes, it’s all yours,’ cried Dora, though in a childish way (Ch. 37). She, it could be said, was simple-hearted, generous and gentle. Mr. Spenlow, when told by David of his engagement with Dora, would never accept it; but he was to die soon. David visited Agnes and told her of his troubles, kissing her hand, which she had given him looking up ‘with such a Heavenly face!’ After discussing their worries, David said, ‘Much more than sister!’ and Agnes parted ‘by the name of Brother’ (Ch. 39). David and Agnes, it could be considered, trust each other affectionately. How would Dora feel, we wonder, if she looked on this sight? Dora, introduced by David to Agnes, found her ‘too clever’ and was ‘afraid of her.’ She asked David, ‘what relation is Agnes to you?’ ‘No blood-relation, but we were brought up together, like brother and sister,’ replied he. Dora said, ‘I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?’ (Ch. 42). Dora, surely, did know his flirtatious disposition and she could
xxxiii have left him forever, but she did not. As for David, he himself chose and married Dora, who was ‘a Fairy, a Sylph’ (Ch. 26), not Agnes, who had ‘a very placid and sweet expression’ and was her widower father’s ‘little housekeeper’ (Ch. 15). Soon David often quarreled with Dora over trifles. He said, ‘Dora, my darling!’ ‘No, I am not your darling. Because you must be sorry that you married me, or else you wouldn’t reason with me!’ returned she. Dora, it is clear, was seeing a shadow of Agnes behind him. However, after such altercations, Dora reflectively told him she would be ‘a wonderful housekeeper,’ polishing the tablets, pointing the pencil, buying an immense account-book, etc., though the figures would not add up. Now David was beginning to be known as a writer, and his ‘child-wife,’ as she asked him to call her, was trying to ‘be good’ (Ch. 44). It might be considered that at this moment David should have said, ‘Dora, my darling, I love you cordially and am very happy; even if you are not good at housekeeping and figures, you should not mind it at all because you are earnestly endeavoring to be good; as you know, I too am “a boyish husband as to years”’ (Ch. 44). David, without saying such things, tried to ‘form Dora’s mind,’ but in vain, remembering ‘the contented days with Agnes’ (Ch. 48), he even considered that his own heart was ‘undisciplined’ when it first loved Dora, and that there could be ‘no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind and
xxxiv purpose.’ His own heart, it can be suspected, was even now ‘undisciplined’ because he would have been attracted by Agnes’s ‘clear calm eyes and gentle face’ more than by Dora’s efforts to be good; he can be regarded as flirtatious, not as devoted. Such being the case, he was much happier in the second year, the year that Dora fell ill (Ch. 48). She, with ‘nothing left to wish for,’ wanted very much to see Agnes, not her two spinster aunts, adding that she always was ‘a silly little thing’ and ‘too young’ not merely ‘in years’ but ‘in experience, and thoughts, and everything,’ and that she had begun to think herself ‘not fit to be a wife’ to her ‘very clever’ husband. She died leaving Agnes ‘a last charge’ that only Agnes ‘would occupy this vacant place’ (Chs. 53 and 62). Was Dora ‘silly’ or ‘not fit to be a wife’? By no means! Though she might have been childish and poor at housekeeping and figures, she was blessed with many respectable and lovable virtues; for example, she did not abandon David as a beggar, nor desert him despite her father’s will and David’s suspicious relationship with Agnes. She tried earnestly to be a good wife, accepted Agnes’s and David’s cleverness without defying them, looked down humbly on herself as silly and immature, and left her husband with Agnes foreseeing her death. How serious, benign, gentle and sympathetic! On the other hand, David, even though ‘very clever,’ was obviously flirtatious, intolerant, and cold-hearted. He should not have introduced Dora to Agnes; far from it he
xxxv should have broken off his relation with Agnes in choosing Dora, should have expressed his gratitude to her for her not abandoning him and for her trying to be good, should have been generous to her faults as Dora had been to his. He should have known that he had much of the responsibility for her feelings of insecurity when she said, ‘I was too young’ and ‘you are very clever and I never was’ (Ch. 53). After Dora’s death, David set out to travel to Europe, and ‘mourned for [his] child-wife, taken from her blooming world, so young.’ He tried to be ‘a better man,’ thinking that he ‘might possibly hope to cancel the mistaken past, and to be so blessed as to marry’ Agnes (Ch. 58). Whether or not he marries her, it can be said, depends on him, but he would have to humble himself and repent, not merely ‘cancel,’ ‘the mistaken past’ or his flirtatious mind. He returned home after three years, and confided to Agnes, ‘I went away, dear Agnes, loving you. I stayed away, loving you. I returned home, loving you.’ How inconsistent! He had said that he ‘mourned’ for Dora when going away! As for Agnes, she replied, ‘I have loved you all my life’ (Ch. 62). How would Dora feel if she lived to hear the conversation? Dora, it may be considered, should have left David when she first met Agnes; it might have been because of Agnes’s covert love for him that Dora was afraid of her! Within a fortnight David married Agnes, after which she confided to him Dora’s ‘last request’ and ‘last charge’ as mentioned above, and they wept together but they would not
xxxvi imagine with what feelings Dora had died; also, David did not utter any words of remorse and repentance for having been unable to make Dora happy (Ch. 62). Ten years after the marriage, they had three children, and David had high income and renown as an eminent author. At this happy home, Dora was not talked of at all (Ch. 63). It can be concluded that David was a man of a flirtatious disposition for which reason he lacked complete devotion to Dora. As will be discussed, that very disposition was also Dickens’s at that time.
3 Dickens’s flirtatious disposition Dickens had been looked upon as ‘a very Joseph in all that regards morality, chastity, and decorum’ as Reynolds’s Weekly News wrote on 13 June 1858 (Letters 8: 745n). He had been accepted as such a man publicly but was rather flirtatious-minded in his private life; in this section it will be revealed how flirtatious Dickens was. Dickens was a serious Christian-minded man, but naturally he was ‘a man’ in the sense that ‘there is no man that sinneth not’ (1 Kings 8: 46; see also 2 Chron. 6: 36, Eccles. 7: 20 and John 8: 7, etc.). He was rather flirtatious; as he said, not so long after his marriage, to his wife Catherine, ‘if either of [us] fell in love with anybody else, [we] were to tell one another’ (Storey 96), and he did show ‘an archly flirtatious attitude towards congenial girls and women of his acquaintance’ (Slater, D & W 122).
xxxvii Six of the ‘girls and women’ are taken up below. First, there was Mrs. David Colden, daughter of a banker of New York, wife of a lawyer and philanthropist of New York, and fourteen years Dickens’s senior, with whom Dickens became acquainted during his first visit to America in 1842. He was ‘deeply in love with’ her, and wrote a love-letter to her (Slater, D & W 122; Letters 3: 30n, 160, and also 242 and n, 219-20). Second, there was Eleanor Emma Picken, a lithographer and a winner of the Society of Arts silver Isis medal in 1837, by whom Dickens was attracted. He flirted with her on the pier at Broadstairs on an evening in September 1841. Later she told,
Dickens seemed suddenly to be possessed with the demon of mischief; he threw his arm around me and ran me down the inclined plane to the end of the jetty till we reached the tall post. He put his other arm around this, and exclaimed in theatrical tones that he intended to hold me there […]. I implored him to let me go, and struggled hard to release myself. (Slater, D & W 115; Collins 1: 37; Letters 3: 328n)
Third, there was Christiana Jane Weller, a beautiful eighteen-year-old concert pianist in Liverpool, for whom Dickens conceived an ‘incredible feeling’ in 1844 (Slater, D & W 88-89; Letters 4: 53n, 55, etc.). Fourth, there was Madame Emile de la Rue, wife of a Swiss banker, resident in Genoa, whose nervous disorder
xxxviii Dickens began to treat with his mesmerism from 23 December 1844 with so much fascination as to make Catherine very unhappy. This continued for a period of years afterwards (Schlicke 375; Letters 4: 243 and n, 534n; Letters 5: 11n; Letters 7: 224 and n). Fifth, there was Miss Anne Romer, actress and singer. Dickens performed with her, on 20 July 1848, the farce of Used Up, in which Dickens played the bored hero Sir Charles Coldstream, and she played his lover Mary. In Act II, Sir Charles, who is in distress, asks her to say, ‘you love me.’ She replies, ‘Love you!’ Then he ‘seizes her in his arms, and kisses her’; they marry at the play’s end (Thomson 46-49; Letters 5: 362n). Two days after the play, Dickens wrote a letter to Mrs. Cowden Clarke, member of his Amateur Theatricals:
I have no energy whatever--I am very miserable. I loathe domestic hearths. I yearn to be a Vagabond [i.e. as Coldstream, disguised as a ploughboy, is called by Farmer Wurzel in Act II]. Why can't I marry Mary! [. . . . .] I am deeply miserable. A real house like this, is insupportable after that canvass farm wherein I was so happy [i.e. Wurzel’s farm]. What is a humdrum dinner at half past five, with nobody (but John [i.e. CD’s servant John Thompson]) to see me eat it, compared with that soup [i.e. the pea-soup that Coldstream is given by Mary in
xxxix Act II], and the hundreds of pairs of eyes that watched its disappearance! (Letters 5: 374 and n; emphases added)
In this quotation there can be read not only Dickens’s flirtatious mind but also his loathing for domesticity. In the letter of 13 January 1849 quoted below, he even shows his dislike for Catherine:
My Dear Mrs. Clarke. I am afraid that Young Gas [i.e. Dickens’s name as manager of the Amateur Theatricals Company in 1848] is forever dimmed, and that the breath of calumny will blow henceforth on his stage management, by reason of his enormous delay in returning you the two pounds non forwarded by Mrs. G. [i.e. Catherine]. The proposed deduction on account of which you sent it, was never made. --But had you seen him in "Used up", His eye so beaming and so clear, When on his stool he sat to sup The oxtail--little Romer near &c &c --you would have forgotten and forgiven all. (Letters 5: 476 and n; emphases added)
Sixth, there was Miss Mary Boyle, daughter of Vice-Admiral the Hon. Sir Courtenay Boyle, second son of
xl the 7th Earl of Cork and Orrery; she was a distant cousin of Mrs. Watson’s and a miscellaneous writer and renowned amateur actress, whom Dickens first met at the Watsons’ Rockingham Castle on 27 November 1849. On the 29th he and Boyle played, as part of the house-party entertainments in the Hall, Sir Peter Teazle and Lady Teazle from Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and also acted, from chapter 41 of Nicholas Nickleby, some scenes of the mad neighbour’s [i.e. Dickens’s] throwing a shower of vegetables to Mrs. Nickleby [i.e. Boyle] to display his affection (Letters 5: 662 and n; Boyle 231-32; Ackroyd 606). On November 30 Dickens wrote a letter to Mrs. Watson: ‘Plunged in the deepest gloom, I write these few words to let you know that, just now, when the bell was striking ten, I drank to H.E.R. [i.e., Mary Boyle]!’ adding a picture of a heart shot through by Cupid’s arrow (Letters 5: 663). Three days later he sent to Miss Mary Boyle a parody by him of Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, ‘inspired by Mary Boyle’s graces in the Rockingham Castle Amateur Theatricals’ (Letters 5: 665 and n, 708-09), part of which is as follows:
No more the host, as if he dealt at cards, Smiling deals lighted candles all about: No more the Fair (inclusive of the Bard's) Persist in blowing all the candles out. ______No more the Fair prolong the cheerful tread
xli Of dancing feet until the lights low burn: No more the host, when they are gone to bed, Quickly retreats, foreboding their return. (Letters 5: 708)
Mary Boyle joined in his theatricals on 15 January 1851 at Rockingham Castle, where she acted Mary, the lover of Sir Charles Coldstream, again played by Dickens in Used Up (Letters 6: 163n, 225 and n, 261n.; Slater, D & W 404). Dickens wrote a joking, flirtatious letter, based on the play in which he disguised himself as a ploughman, to her on 25 December 1852:
My own darling Mary. [...... ] you ant no cause to be jealous for all that I am certain beforehand as I shall a Door her O Mary wen you come to read the last chapter of the next number of Bleak House I think my ever dear as you will say as him what we knows on as done a pretty womanly thing as the sex will like and as will make a sweet pint for to turn the story on my heart alive for such you are …. (Letters 6: 835-36)
Dickens ended this letter with an ‘x’ which represented a kiss and the closing of ‘This is a Kiss my dear’ with the blot of a fingerprint between ‘Kiss’ and ‘my.’
xlii In a series of letters from Dickens to Boyle, Ada Nisbet finds ‘a gradual increase in intimacy from “My Dear Miss Boyle” (in 1850) to “Beloved Mary” (in 1856)’ and ‘something of Dickens’s restless dissatisfaction with the domestic hearth before he fell in love with Ellen’ (Nisbet 81; Fielding 323). One of the letters which he, with a cold, wrote to Mary on 15 March 1856, was somewhat like one to his wife: ‘Then it is my dear that I wish you were with me, occupying Tavistock House and forgetting mankind’ (Nisbet 82; Letters 8: 72). These instances illustrate Dickens’s flirtatious temperament sufficiently, so it may be deduced from them that David Copperfield’s flirtatious disposition was a reflection of Dickens’s own.
4 Dickens and Catherine in the years 1847-51 Dickens married Catherine in 1836 and separated from her in 1858; Catherine bore 10 children and had 2 miscarriages over 16 years [i.e. from 1836 to 1852]. She had a hard delivery of the seventh child Sydney in April 1847, followed by a miscarriage in a railway carriage in December, after which she was not well for over two weeks. She would be pregnant with the eighth son Henry around March 1848, and was not very well for some days of July and August. Dickens promised her that she should have Chloroform for her confinement, which was ‘almost as bad a one as its predecessor,’ though its use was rather opposed in London and Catherin’s doctors were ‘dead against it’; it ‘did
xliii wonders’ for the birth on 16 January 1849 (Letters 5: 486-87 and nn). Three days before that, i.e. on January 13, he had written the letter as quoted above, which makes us feel his dislike for Catherine; in fact, his wife’s younger sister Miss Georgina Hogarth might have been a more substantial housekeeper for him, as he wrote ‘my little housekeeper Miss Hogarth’ in a letter of 29 August 1850. In September 1849, while he was writing David Copperfield, Dickens was cementing his weekly periodical Household Words, whose first issue was published on 30 March 1850. The periodical made him, its ‘Conductor,’ very busy; he wrote ‘about a fourth’ of it, did ‘extensive’ editorial revision, and ‘condensed’ the material to make each number twenty-four pages (except for nineteen numbers with twenty pages) (Lohrle 14-15, 19). He was often overworking, ‘getting on like a house afire in point of health’ and ‘not being very well’ on 10 July 1849; he had ‘so many to write every day’ and his ‘state of mind’ was ‘not a wholesome one […] not a natural one’ on 1 February 1850; he worked ‘like a Steam Engine’ on March 14, and was ‘as busy as a bee’ between ‘Copperfield and Household Words’ on June 11. He was off with Daniel Maclise to Paris for ‘having again broken [his] head with hard labor’ and for undergoing ‘so much fatigue from work’ from June 23 to July 1. Catherine, who would have been pregnant around October 1849, bore, on 16 August 1850, the ninth child who was named ‘Dora’ after David Copperfield’s wife. Dickens
xliv wrote to Catherine on August 21, ‘I have still Dora to kill—I mean the Copperfield Dora.’ That Dora was killed in Ch. 53 of the monthly No. 17 (Chs. 51-53) which had been completed on August 22 or 23 (Butt 167-68). Dickens had been working ‘nine hours at a stretch’ on August 19, 1850 and did the same also on the 20th, and wrote on the 23rd about Catherine and the baby, ‘Kate, brilliant! Ditto, little Dora!’(Letters 6: 155). He had been working for ‘eight hours at a stretch’ and for ‘six hours and a half ’ on Ch. 55 of Copperfield on September 14 and 15 respectively, and had been in the ‘tremendous paroxysm of Copperfield’ from September 16 to 22 or 23. On September 20 he had ‘[his] eye on “Household Words”—[his] head on Copperfield—and [his] ear nowhere particularly.’ He finally finished writing Copperfield on October 23. Apart from this work, by September 3 he had begun preparations for the Dramatic Festival in Knebworth, and his amateur theatrical company played three performances in the Festival on November 18, 19 and 20 (rescheduled from the original plan of ‘the last week of October’). He had been ‘so very unwell’ since December 1 that he could hardly hold up his head during ‘a bilious attack’ on December 4. Still he performed three plays at Rockingham Castle on 15 January 1851; but on January 24 he was ‘still feeble, and liable to sudden outbursts of causeless rage, and demoniacal gloom’ (Letters 6: 266). His daughter Dora was ‘very ill’ on February 3; Catherine, being ‘very unwell’ and suffering from her ‘violent
xlv headaches’ for some time before March 11, was ordered to go to Malvern to treat a nervous illness on March 13 (Letters 6: 309n). Her illness is interpreted as ‘probably abnormally long-lasting attacks of migraine combined with post-natal depression’ (Letters 6: ix), but it would be probable that Dickens’s ‘attack’ and ‘liab[ility] to sudden outbursts’ as well as Dora’s illness had something to do with it.
5 Dickens’s home dissatisfactions Dickens’s loathing for domesticity and dislike for Catherine has already been touched on above; certainly, he entertained such feelings. He expressed it as ‘a vague unhappy loss or want of something’ in Copperfield (Chs 35, 44, 58). John Forster called it a ‘sad feeling’ for Dickens, and Forster associated it with the kind of ‘home dissatisfactions and misgivings’ that Dickens manifested in letters in 1854:
the so happy and yet so unhappy existence which […] finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual escape from the disappointment of heart around it. […]. I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself. If I could have managed it, I think possibly I might have gone to the Pyreenees […] for six mouths! (Forster 2: 196; Letters 7: 354, 428 and n, 523-24n)
xlvi Later in February 1855, Dickens alluded to some home dissatisfactions, relating David Copperfield’s sense of loss with his own in a letter to Forster:
You will hear of me in Paris, probably next Sunday, and I may go on to Bordeaux. Have general ideas of emigrating in the summer to the mountain-ground between France and Spain. Am altogether in a dishevelled state of mind--motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older growth threatening to close upon me. Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made? (Forster 2: 197; Letters 7: 523 and n)
Hence, it may be considered that David’s ‘unhappy loss or want of something’ was Dickens’s; furthermore, David’s view that ‘There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind and purpose’ (Ch. 48) would have been Dickens’s, too, as Dickens wrote in the letters of May 9 and May 25, 1858:
I believe my marriage has been for years and years as miserable a one as ever was made. I believe that no two people were ever created, with such an impossibility of interest, sympathy, confidence,
xlvii sentiment, tender union of any kind between them, as there is between my wife and me. (Letters 8: 558)
Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily together for many years. Hardly any one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are, in all respects of character and temperament, wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, ever were joined together, who had a greater difficulty in understanding one another, or who had less in common. (Letters 8: 740; Violated Letter)
Dickens would have imparted to Dora Spenlow some image of Catherine. Actually he might have regarded Catherine as a poor housekeeper as he wrote, ‘she has never attached one of them [her children] to herself’ (Letters 8: 559), and might have considered Georgina Hogarth as his ‘little housekeeper’ as he called her ‘the best, the most unselfish, and the most devoted of human Creatures’ in a letter of 1858 (Letters 8: 559-60). Though he had a ‘tender concern for his wife’ (Letters 6: ix), it is certain that Dickens had some home dissatisfactions.
6 Dickens’s frivolity On 14 April 1851, when Catherine was still at Malvern, Dora died suddenly, as if doomed by the letter in which Dickens wrote about having ‘Dora to kill.’ As his
xlviii carelessness with his daughter’s name reveals, he was frivolous as well as flirtatious. Indeed, he was frivolous also in his technique in creating David Copperfield; in which he should not have included an autobiographical element. Since David was an alter ego of Dickens, some readers would associate Dora with Catherine in such scenes as when David calls his wife ‘child-wife’ and says, ‘[t]here can be no disparity, like unsuitability of mind and purpose’ (Ch. 48), and Dora says, ‘I have begun to think I was not fit to be a wife’ and ‘you are very clever, and I never was’ (Ch. 53), and dies of illness, saying to Agnes, ‘only [you] would occupy this vacant place’ (Ch. 62). Could we suppose that this story failed to sadden Catherine? Catherine, it seems, shared Dora’s grief for years before the separation, as we know from a letter which Dickens wrote in 1858:
For some years past Mrs. Dickens has been in the habit of representing to me that it would be better for her to go away and live apart; that her always increasing estrangement made a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours -- more, that she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife and that she would be better far away. (Letters 8: 740)
In short, this novel was written ‘just in keeping with the fates and chances which were always befalling [Dickens].’
xlix 7 What advanced Dickens’s secularity Dickens, though a serious Christian man, was not perfect in morality. His Christianity would have been able to control his secularity in 1846 when he was so earnest an Anglican as to assert, ‘religion […] must be the basis of the whole system,’ and as to write a little version of the New Testament for his own children, the version which he himself called ‘the children’s New Testament’ (Letters 4: xii, 554, 573). But that control was clearly weakening in 1849 as David’s flirtatious disposition reflects. Probably one of the factors which advanced his secularity would be his amateur theatricals, which debuted in September 1845 and whose activity intensified in 1848, so enabling him to get familiar with young actresses during his sexual abstinence for the term of Catherine’s pregnancy (Letters 4: xxii; Forster 1: 376; Letters 5: xix-xx). Three more factors may be considered: the first is his overwork, which would have robbed him of his calm faculty of reason and self-control; the second is his rapidly increasing popularity and income, which would have made him tend to overconfidence, self-conceit and faithlessness. Last is the existence of scandalous, gossipy friends, who would have had an influence on his morality, like George Henry Lewes (who, along with his wife Agnes, liked free-love, but who separated from her for bearing her lover’s children and chose to live with Mary Anne Evans or George Eliot from 1855)(Haight 179), Wilkie Collins (who lived with a widow of Caroline Graves and her five-year-old
l daughter from 1856)(Letters 8: 105 & n, 651n; Clarke 109, 111), John Everett Millais (who married John Ruskin’s wife and Millais’s model Effie in 1855 after her marriage was annulled)(Letters 7: 517 & n), Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton (who separated legally from his wife Rosina in 1836 but was continually denounced by her)(DNB, ‘Bulwer-Lytton’), etc. Thus, Dickens tended to be flirtatious, frivolous, and deficient in his faithful sympathy for Catherine.
8 Conclusion David Copperfield was an alter ego of Charles Dickens, and the former’s flirtatious, frivolous dispositions were the latter’s. David’s character and the autobiographical element in the novel make us readers very uncomfortable; in this sense David Copperfield can not be recognized as a masterpiece. The novel gives off an odious smell foreboding Dickens’s later peripetia.
A Tale of Two Cities 1 Dickens in the year 1858 (a) Dickens’s ingratitude Dickens, through the separation, made an ungracious, unthankful breach with the Hogarths except Georgina Hogarth, and with friends like William Bradbury, Frederick Evans, Mark Lemon, William Thackeray, etc., and lost most
li of Miss Burdett Coutts’ confidence in him. Some details are as follows. George Hogarth, who met Dickens in summer 1834, ‘continued to help Charles Dickens in his career’ and frequently invited him to his house (Letters 1: 54-55n), through which Dickens got intimate with his eldest child Catherine, marrying her in April 1836. He was ‘proud of his in-laws’ connection with the highest cultural circles in Edinburgh’ (Schlicke 270). As to Catherine, she, who bore Dickens 10 children, no doubt played ‘a vital role in domestic and social existence’ for ‘upwards of seventeen years’ (Slater, D & W 162); it is quite natural that she should have said right before death, ‘he [Dickens] loved me once’ (Storey 164). Despite these facts, Dickens referred, in a letter to Miss Burdette Coutts dated 9 May 1858, to their ‘miserable’ married life ‘for years and years’ and to Catherine’s perfect want of ‘confidence’ from her children. Surely Dickens was much too cold to Catherine in those days, as seen in his absurd and insulting proposals to her like ‘going abroad to live alone, or to keeping her to her own apartment in his house in daily life, at the same time to appear at his parties still as mistress of the house, to do the honors’ (Letters 8: 558n, 746). Further it was in a letter of 25 May 1858 to Arthur Smith, which was to be disclosed later both in America and the United Kingdom, that he wrote of a large unsuitability in Catherine’s ‘character and temperament,’ ‘the peculiarity of her character’ and her ‘mental disorder,’ and he even denied
lii his connection with Ellen Ternan in the letter (Letters 8: 648n, 740-41, 746 and n). Bradbury and Evans, as mentioned above, had been Dickens’s publishers since 1844, and Mark Lemon was a prime member of Dickens’s Amateur Theatricals. Evans and several of his sons also joined the Theatricals and worked for Dickens (DNB, ‘Evans’ 697). As for Miss Burdett Coutts, she had been Dickens’s close friend since around the year 1838 and been working together with him for social improvements; she even helped his eldest son Charley’s education financially around 1845-52 and assisted Catherine concerning the separation (Letters 4: 373-74; Letters 6: 4 and n; Letters 7: 3 and n). Unthankfully and ungraciously Dickens broke relations, quite or almost completely, with these people along with his wife. (b) Dickens’s defeats Dickens seems to have considered the separation too lightly; according to Catherine’s belief, he ‘expressed a wish that we should meet in society, and be at least on friendly terms’ (Letters 8: 749). However, he had to suffer many miserable defeats for the breakup. Four of them are presented below. First, his relation to Ellen was leaked to the public on May 14, 1858, and so he was exposed to dreadfully disgraceful gossip and scandal; second, he was so much shocked as to be ‘like a madman’ when Catherine left him in May 1858 (Storey 94).
liii Third, he could not anticipate that Frederick Evans and Mark Lemon, who both served as Catherine’s co-trustees in the separation, would reject to print the ‘Personal’ statement he wrote to justify the separation in their weekly magazine Punch for June 16 despite his wish to get ‘their aid to the dissemination of my [Dickens’s] present words,’ although The Times had published it on June 7, 1858 (Letters 8: 608n). Fourth, he was very much ‘shocked and distressed’ to find that New York Tribune for August 16 disclosed his ‘private and personal’ letter to Arthur Smith mentioned above and that British newspapers for August 30 and 31 reprinted the article’ (Letters 8: xxv, 568n, 648 and n, 746n). The disgraces and defeats Dickens encountered would have worked to make him conscious of and regret his crime, and to lead him to recover his sincere Christian mind within him, since he was so serious a Christian as to have never abandoned his ‘own private prayers, night and morning’ (Letters 12: 188).
2 Reflections of Dickens’s mind in the novel It was at the scene of the grave of the protagonist Richard Wardour Dickens was playing in The Frozen Deep that the first notion of A Tale of Two Cities occurred to him (CD, TTC xiii; Letters 8: 510n). The notion is believed to have been ‘Representing London—or Paris, or any other great city—in the new light of being utterly unknown to all the people in the story,’ as he wrote down on the night of
liv Friday, September 4, 1857 in ‘a little book,’ viz. his Book of Memoranda (Letters 8: 432 and n; Kaplan 14). He touched on a vague idea of falling to work on ‘a new book’ in a letter of ?27 January 1858 to John Forster, and wrote to him about three days later that he decided to ‘get to work’ on a new story with the temporary title of One of These Days which might possibly be published ‘next October or November’ (Letters 8: 510-11 and nn). He asked him, on 15 March 1858, for advice on the title of the story presenting three new titles including The Thread of Gold, which was to be adopted as the title of Book II of TTC (Letters 8: 531 and n). Such being the case, most of the image of the story would have been formed in his mind, but he could not begin writing until Feb 1859 because there had happened in the meantime a peripetia in his life, i.e., the separation by which he was exposed to scandal and gossip. It was in a letter to Forster dated 11 March 1859 that he wrote that the name for the story was A Tale of Two Cities; and he placed the first installment in his newly-published weekly magazine All The Year Round for April 30. During the year’s postponement, the characterization of Sydney Carton, who was the successor to Richard Wardour, would have inevitably been influenced by the events of that year, the year when Dickens, though having a covert mistress in Ellen Ternan, denied the fact, when he was criticized by people for the event, and when he repeated ingratitude and had to endure his own defeats. He was a
lv serious Christian as he made a little version of the New Testament for his children and as he wrote in a letter of 1868, ‘I have never abandoned it [the practice of saying prayers at night and morning] myself, and I know the comfort of it’ (Letters 12: 188; see also Letters 12: 202). Through the prayer, in which there is included
‘I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. […] Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. […] And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us.’ he could not help evoking his consciousness of a crime or of the violation of two of Moses’ Ten Commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery’ and ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour’ (Exod. 20: 14, 16). Thus Carton, a barrister with ‘deep wounds’ in his heart, was created to take on a self-depreciative, remorseful, conversional, redemptive disposition. Below, these aspects of Carton’s disposition will be exemplified. Firstly, the self-depreciative disposition can be found in words like ‘wine’ (p. 77; page references are to CD, TTC), ‘drinking’ (79), ‘sensuality’ (144), ‘profligate’ (143), ‘dissolute’ (197), ‘degradation’ (144), ‘worthless’ (197), ‘my misdirected life’ (145), ‘he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it’ (198), ‘dog’ (197), ‘As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to it [i.e.,
lvi this terrestrial scheme]’ (77), etc. Secondly, the remorseful and conversional one can be represented by two examples: first, Sydney Carton, who saw ‘a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance’ before the morning blast, and who shed the tears of remorse on the bed of his own chamber, the remorse that he thought would never reproach him again and that could not help evoking a feeling of conversion within him (Bk. 2, Ch. 5). The ‘mirage’ Sydney Carton saw may be considered an allusion to ‘the wonders of an equinoctial dawn’ which Dickens saw in the ‘night so completely at odds with morning’ on a long walk from London to Gad’s Hill after turning out of his bed at two in the morning of October 15, 1857, the long walk Dickens recalled in ‘The Uncommercial Traveller (Ch. 13)’ of All the Year Round for 21 July 1860 and in Great Expectations, Ch. 44, published on 1 June 1861 (Letters 8: 466-67n, 489; Forster 2: 232; Storey 97, 229). The other of the two examples of remorse can be found in Carton’s own words, as follows:
“I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!” “No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What is to be expected of, or by, such profligates?” [...... ] Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that there were tears in his eyes.
lvii There were tears in his voice too, as he answered: “It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse.” He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The table trembled in the silence that followed. [...... ]. “I know you would say this to no one else. Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr. Carton?” He shook his head. “To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. […]. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever.” (Bk. 2, Ch. 13)
Lastly, as to Carton’s redemptive or conversional disposition, it may be detected in his three times-and-a half repetition of the teaching of Jesus Christ, Who ‘died for our sins’ (1 Cor. 15: 3; Matt. 20: 28, 26: 28; Gal. 1: 4, etc.): ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die’ (The Order for the Burial of the Dead in The Book of Common Prayer; John 11: 25-26). Carton, who had ‘deep wounds’ in his heart, had redemption on his mind, and the mind itself was Dickens’s own.
lviii Dickens, it is probable, suffered guilty, remorseful, conversional, and redemptive feelings, and sought salvation in Jesus Christ; he became a resurrectionist at that time, and passed away as a resurrectionist, as we can know from the fact that he had written down ‘the resurrectionist and the life’ in his last writing on 8 June 1870, i.e., Chapter 23 of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (cf. Schlicke 492). A Tale of Two Cities is the first novel Dickens wrote after committing a high sin. It is sure that, ironically, his sin worked to give a certain grave reality and tight tension to Sydney Carton’s guilty, remorseful, conversional, and redemptive disposition.
Great Expectations 1 Dickens in the years 1859-60 (a) Dickens’s defeats Dickens’s defeats continued in 1859 as well; first, he wrote in a letter of 1 February 1859, ‘My affairs domestic […] flow peacefully,’ and also touched on the education of all his sons proudly, but his third son Frank, who was at school in Germany to study ‘Medicine,’ gave it up at the end of May for his stammering and returned home by the end of August 1859; second, his second son Walter had a great debt in Calcutta, some of which his eldest son Charley refunded for him around October or November 1860 on his way back from China (Letters 9: 21 and n, 71, 120); third, Dickens’s second, beloved daughter Kate got engaged to Charles Allston
lix Collins, twelve years older and delicate, by October 1859, though she never loved him and Dickens objected to the betrothal. She married him on 17 July 1860, only to find ‘an escape from “an unhappy home”’ (Storey 105). After the couple left Gad’s Hill for France for their honeymoon, Dickens sobbed, ‘But for me, Katey would not have left home’ (Letters 9: 309; Storey 106). The case mentioned next has no direct relation with the separation, but it is no doubt that it gave a further blow to his damaged mind; that is, Dickens’s youngest brother Augustus, whom Dickens loved and cared for, calling him Bob, deserted his wife who had lost her eyesight after the marriage in 1848, emigrated to America with another woman in 1857, and offered a monetary support to Dickens through another brother’s wife in November 1859; which Dickens rejected by writing to her, ‘I despaired of his ever being right. […] I have no hope of him’ (Letters 9: 160). Incidentally, Alfred Dickens, the second of Dickens’s three living younger brothers and the most reliable of them, died of disease after lying in bed for only three weeks on July 27, which was ten days after Kate’s marriage.
(b) Dickens’s conversion Dickens made his own character Scrooge go through ‘conversion’ in A Christmas Carol (1843) (Letters 7: 704). He would not have supposed at all that the time would come when he himself must be converted. The time did come, soon after he sobbed for Kate’s marriage in 1860; he was
lx resolutely and wholeheartedly converted. Three grounds for the conclusion are provided below. First, he decided to sell the Tavistock House (in Tavistock Square), somewhat near which the Ternan family and Catherine lived (in Ampthill Square and Gloucester Crescent, respectively), on around 2 June 1860, and accepted ‘the Money’ from the purchaser on August 21 (Letters 9: 87, 286, 291). Secondly, he burned ‘the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years’ in the field at Gad's Hill on September 3, saying, ‘Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile’ (Letters 9: 304; Storey 106-07). Through which, he completely erased the ungodly past days, as he wrote in a letter of 12 February 1864 to Miss Burdett Coutts, ‘I say that I do not claim to have any thing to forgive--that if I had, I hope and believe I would forgive freely--but that a page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank’ (Letters 10: 356). On that day he would have gained a fresh start in life or performed his regeneration or new birth. Lastly, Dickens’s fifth son Sydney passed the examination as a Naval Cadet on 14 September 1860, and Dickens took ‘the Admiral’ down to Portsmouth to make him join HMS Britannia on September 24 (Letters 9: 315-16, 318, 320). It would be this time that Dickens urged him to keep the practice of saying a prayer night and morning and to follow the teachings of the New Testament not to go wrong. The proof can we get from his letter of ?28 May 1865 to his
lxi fourth son Alfred, in which he wrote ‘in parting from you, as in parting from Sydney & Frank I tell you that if you humbly try to guide yourself by the beautiful new testament, you can never go wrong: also that I hope you will never omit under any circumstances to say a prayer by yourself night & morning’ (Letters 11: 48; Letters 12: 734). The same directions did he give to his seventh son Edward and his sixth son Henry both in 1868, too (Letters 12: 188, 202). It is quite natural that we should not be able to detect the directions to his second son Walter Dickens, because he had left for India one month before the final performance of The Frozen Deep, namely on July 20, 1857.
2 A recasting of David Copperfield It was in a letter of 8 August 1860, viz. 22 days after Kate’s marriage, that Dickens referred to the germ of Great Expectations: ‘I am prowling about, meditating a new book.’ He wrote on October 4 to Forster, ‘Last week I got to work on the new story. […]. The name is GREAT EXPECTATIONS.’ In early October, he wrote again to him, ‘The book will be written in the first person throughout […]. I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe’ (Letters 9: 325). From this we should know, for one thing, that the original idea of Great Expectations occurred to Dickens immediately after his thorough conversion, and, for another, that the work was created as though it was a sequel or recasting of
lxii David Copperfield. If we take Great Expectations as the recasting, in what points would it have been recast? There may be counted three: first, the main faulty characters in Great Expectations accomplished deep conversion while no villains in David Copperfield went through it; in other words a non-conversional novel was replaced by a conversional one. Details are as follows. In David Copperfield, Edward Murdstone, who, along with his sister Miss Jane Murdstone, bereaved his wives of prosperity through marriages, remained a fraudulent person of religion (Ch. LIX); Steerforth, vicious seducer, was drowned after sinking in the sea with a wreck; Uriah Heep, fraud and conspirator, and Littimer, seducer and robber of his master’s money, were both arrested and put in a prison with the system of ‘making sincere and lasting converts and penitents,’ but they only pretended to be ‘penitents’ and remained ‘perfectly consistent and unchanged’ (Ch. LXI). In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham, who left the orphan Pip mistaken and fostered the orphan Estella into a revenger on all the male sex for her, in spite of her original intention to ‘save her [Estella] from misery like her [Havisham’s] own,’ was made aware of her fault by Pip and fell down upon the ground, crying over and over again, ‘What have I done! What have I done!’ ‘Take the pencil and write under my name, “I forgive her!”’ (Ch. XLIX). In short, she was praying, ‘Father, forgive me; I knew not what I did’ (Dickens, Life of Our Lord 102; Luke 23: 34).
lxiii Magwitch, who was transported for life to Australia for prison-breaking, succeeded in trades there and became Pip’s patron secretly. He came back to see Pip at the risk of death by the rope. Pip was shocked by his appearance, but he decided to save him who was blessed with a disinterested mind though still rough enough to carry pistol and knife. When he and Magwitch were about to take a foreign ship on the Thames, they were checked by the men of the Custom House on a galley. Magwitch, who found on the ship Compeyson, informer and the worst of scoundrels, jumped at and fought with him in the river. While Compeyson was drowned, Magwitch was rescued with severe injury and was removed to the infirmary for his serious illness. He, who was so much softened as to be ‘humble and contrite’ by Pip’s daily visit to read the Bible, said at the court, ‘My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours’ (Ch. LVI). Finally he died, though not by hanging, thanks to Pip’s writing out petitions, hearing of the existence of his daughter Estella from Pip; instantly Pip remembered a passage in the Bible they had read together: ‘two men who went up into the Temple to pray,’ and he prayed, ‘O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!’ (Ch. LVI; Luke 18: 10, 13). Both Miss Havisham and Magwitch died completely converted or repentant Christians (cf. Parker 292-93).
3 Pip’s ingratitude, defeats and penitence Pip, who may be regarded as the successor to David
lxiv Copperfield, is in a sense an alter ego of Charles Dickens’s. He goes, like Dickens, through ingratitude, defeats and penitence. Pip set his benefactor Joe down as coarse, common and ignorant, and felt ‘disgusted with’ Joe’s calling and life and ‘ashamed of ’ his home (Ch. XXXIX; Ch. XIV); he ‘deserted’ Joe as well as the clever orphan Biddy ungraciously under the ‘delusion’ that he could be a gentleman by marrying Estella and inheriting Miss Havisham’s fortune, though Joe and Biddy both expressed much wonder at his notion; Pip, in coming to the finger-post at the end of the ‘very peaceful and quiet’ village, broke into tears, being ‘more sorry, more aware of [his] own ingratitude’ than before (Ch. XIX). Afterwards he encountered many defeats: he had to accept the escaped convict Magwitch as his patron; his heart was broken by Miss Havisham and Estella; he was arrested in a severe illness for his debt after Magwitch’s death, and was helped out of prison by Joe’s clearing off the debt for him. Eventually Pip apologized to Joe, saying penitently, ‘Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. […] O God bless this gentle Christian man!’ (Ch. LVII). Still more defeats ensued; Joe left him after his recovery since Pip grew cold to him as he got stronger. Pip followed Joe and returned to him down and out like the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-31), to propose to Biddy, but she had just finished marrying Joe. Pip, in a great shock, congratulated them and apologized to them cordially for having been ‘thankless,’ ‘ungenerous and unjust,’ and he begged them to
lxv ‘pray tell me, both, that you forgive me!’ (Ch. LVIII). Pip was now a contrite Christian man.
4 What the two partings symbolize Pip left the village twice; at the first parting he broke into tears at the finger post, saying, ‘Good-bye, O my dear, dear friend!’ (Ch. XIX). The tears symbolize Dickens’s remorseful parting from the Hogarths including Catherine and his close friends, and also his uneasy, covert life he would have to spend with the young Ellen Ternan. At the second departure, Pip asked Joe and Biddy to go to the finger-post before saying ‘good-bye’ (Ch. LVIII), and the silent farewell there symbolizes Dickens’s fresh start in life, regeneration or new birth after obliterating the past days through the burning as related above.
5 Estella’s conversion Pip returned to Joe and Biddy after working in the East for eleven years, and walked over to the spot where Satis House had been, where he ran into Estella. She, who had been separated from her brutal husband Bentley Drummle, became so much softened and friendly as to ask him to repeat what he had said to her when she had broken his heart: ‘God bless you, God forgive you!’ (Chs. XLIV, LIX). In her we could find a well-converted Christian mind, too.
6 Reflections of Dickens and Catherine in the novel We could find in Bentley Drummle some image of Charles
lxvi Dickens, who treated Catherine cruelly as shown in the letters to Miss Coutts and Arthur Smith from him in 1858, and to Mrs. Stark from Miss Helen Thomson in 1858 (Letters 8: 559, 632, 740-41, 746, etc.). Analogously we could detect in Estella some image of Catherine, who could not have been perfect as a housekeeper as no woman is. One of her inconsiderate behaviours might be considered her acceptance of ‘an annual income of ￡600’ concerning the separation, by rejecting, after having once accepted, Dickens’s term of ‘￡400 p.a. and a brougham,’ the change of which Dickens was to accept with fury: ‘Whoever there may be among the living, whom I will never forgive alive or dead, I earnestly hope that all unkindness is over between you and me’ (Letters 8: 578), and with dissatisfaction: ‘as generous as if Mrs. Dickens were a lady of distinction, and I a man of fortune’ (Letters 8: 566n, 741). He referred to it as a burden later in his letter of 6 June 1867 and in his Last Will (Letters 11: 377; Letters 12: 732).
7 What Pip’s reconciliation with Estella symbolizes Pip responded to Estella’s asking, ‘God forgive you!’ with ‘We are friends.’ ‘And will continue friends apart’ was Estella’s reply. This reconciliation might be taken as Dickens’s message to Catherine; he, who clearly went through a complete conversion, would have been repeating in his mind, ‘Forgive me, …,’ as Miss Havisham did. So he could be reconciled with Catherine psychologically, but not physically, because he was with Ellen: ‘No man can serve two
lxvii masters.’ In association with this, we should remark that he referred to Catherine, in a letter of 11 Mar 1861 to W. H. Wills, as ‘my Angel Wife,’ in which we might feel consideration as well as irony, because he was already living as a penitent Christian, because at about the same time he mentioned Joe, who appeared to care for Pip under arrest for his debt (Ch. LVII, published in All the Year Round on 27 July 1861), as ‘Ministering Angel Joe’ in his Working Note (Stone 323), and because he was never behaved by her with hostility unlike Bulwer-Lytton, whose separated wife Rosina continued to hate him in public after the separation. Besides we should also notice that he never deserted Catherine, as we can know from the fact that he called her ‘my wife’ while he called Ellen Lawless Ternan ‘Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan’ in his ‘Last Will’ (Letters 12: 730, 732). We should not think little of this description, because there were near him persons who forsook their wives: Dickens’s youngest brother Augustus Dickens (1827-66) abandoned his wife around 1850 (Letters 5: 445n), and George Henry Lewes (1817-78) did his in July 1854 (Haight 127). Furthermore we should pay attention to the fact that Dickens repeated the idea of ‘never desert’ in Pip’s relation to Magwitch; namely, Pip, though having ‘once meant to desert’ Magwitch, eventually ‘never deserted’ him, only to be tied with him like a true parent and child (Ch. LVI) as Magwitch had once said to Pip, ‘I’m your second father. You’re my son’ (Ch. XXXIX). Hence we might gather that Dickens might have resolved
lxviii never to desert Catherine during his conversion, although he might have meant to desert her once. Thus Pip and Estella changed their ‘errant’ hearts into their ‘innocent’ ones by going through their wholehearted conversion; viz., they became penitent, contrite Christian men. The transition from the non-conversional novel of David Copperfield to the conversional one of Great Expectations could not be accomplished without Dickens’s own conversion; the greatest reason that Great Expectations may be specified as a masterpiece is that Dickens’s truth was woven superbly into it; as a result Great Expectations forms a great Bildungsroman.
Conclusion David Copperfield cannot be classified as a masterpiece due to David’s flirtatious, frivolous character and the autobiographical element of the work; his dispositions are suggestive enough to make us anticipate Dickens’s breakup in 1858. A Tale of Two Cities, the first work written after Dickens’s being exposed to gossips and scandals concerning the separation, had the protagonist Sydney Carton in whom Dickens’s self-depreciative, remorseful and redemptive mind was mirrored. The germ of Great Expectations occurred to Dickens soon after his wholehearted conversion around July 1860; the novel was created as if a recasting of David Copperfield; and all the main characters in the work went through a thorough conversion, growing into penitent, contrite Christian men, though no villains in DC were
lxix converted. Each novel evidently reflected Dickens’s reality or mentality at the times when it was written; therefore, all the novels are serious, deep in thought, and full of a sense of tension, and no one of them could be satisfactorily understood unless Dickens’s reality or mentality of the times was grasped; Great Expectations naturally forms a splendid Bildungsroman.
Note
This paper is a revised enlargement of the one read at the Spring Conference 2008 of the Japan Dickens Fellowship held at Edogawa University on 26 June 2008. Thanks are due to the six professors of the Fellowship for giving their criticism to this paper, to Professor Mitsuharu Matsuoka for offering me the website
References
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Mandarin, 1991 The Book of Common Prayer. Oxford: Oxford UP, n.d.
lxx Boyle, Sir Courtenay, ed. Mary Boyle Her Book. London: Murray, 1902 Butt, John and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. London: Methuen, 1957, 1982 Clarke, William. The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins. Stroud: Sutton, 2004 Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1981 Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z. New York: Checkmark, 1998 Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Eds. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-2002 ---. The Letters of Charles Dickens. CD-ROM edition. Charlottesville: Intelex, 1992 ---. David Copperfield. Ed. Nina Burgis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983 ---. A Tale of Two Cities. London: Oxford UP, 1970 ---. Great Expectations. London: Oxford UP, 1975 ---. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London: Oxford UP, 1979 ---. The Life of Our Lord, Written Expressly For His Children by Charles Dickens. London: Associated Newspapers, 1934 ---. All works and concordance (PC’s search function):
lxxi Dickensian. No. 464, Vol. 100 [Winter 2004], 197-208 Dictionary of National Biography. From the earliest times to the year 2004. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004
lxxii Nisbet, Ada. Dickens and Ellen Ternan. Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California, 1952 Parker, David. Christmas and Charles Dickens. New York: AMS, 2005 Sanders, Andrew. The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities. London: Hyman, 1988 Schlicke, Paul. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999 Slater, Michael. Dickens and Women. London: Dent, 1983 Slater, Michael and John Drew, ed. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism. Volume 4. ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ and Other Papers. London: Dent, 2000 Stone, Harry. Dickens’ Working Notes for His Novels. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987 Storey, Gladys. Dickens and Daughter. New York: Haskell, 1939, 1971 Thomson, Peter, ed. Plays by Dion Boucicault. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984
Dickens Self-Denying
Charles Dickens lived from 1812 to 1870. By 1857 he had been looked upon as ‘a very Joseph in all that regards
lxxiii morality, chastity, and decorum’ (Letters 8: 745), but for the subsequent 13 years he lived a very different life from the one he had done so far; he, though having Ellen Ternan as his mistress, denied the fact to the public: he lived a great sinner, and died without any public confession. Could he have taken no notice of his sin in life at all? That would be impossible, because he, who was essentially a Christian-minded man as he had written ‘the children’s New Testament’ in 1846, lost his Christian mind for a time but recovered it in 1860. In the present essay, it will be revealed that he was so severely afflicted with his sin that he denied his own existence himself, through a careful analysis of his behavior and letters and through the seven key words he was familiar with: ‘self-denial,’ ‘an obsession with death,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘self-improvement,’ ‘the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale,’ ‘in sackcloth and ashes,’ and ‘penance.’
1 The premises of the 7 key words The premises of the seven key words including the background of some of them will be presented in turn in this section. The compound word ‘self-denial’ appeared in the 17th century, but the concept of ‘denying oneself ’ is almost as old as the history of human beings, because a man, who is an imperfect being, is often required to deny and renew himself. Saul (or Paul) of Tarsus, for example, converted from a persecutor of the early Christian Church into an apostle of
lxxiv Christ Jesus after being hit by a light from heaven: Saul ultimately denied and regenerated himself (Letters 4: xii, 573 & n; Dickens, The Life … 121-23). Thomas à Kempis wrote The Imitation of Christ or De Imitatione Christi (c. 1418) in which he instructed ‘the Christian how to seek perfection by following Christ,’ emphasizing the idea of ‘denying oneself ’ particularly in Bk. 3, Chs. 32 and 56, and Bk. 4, Ch. 15 (Cross 692); the Imitation was first translated into English in 1503 (Kempis 25). The idea of ‘denying oneself ’ was expressed in the compound word ‘self-denial’ in the 17th century. OED finds the first example in 1642; in the 18th century John Wesley (1703-1791), who was ‘homo unius libri,’ i.e., ‘a man of one book’ to ‘study (comparatively) no book but the Bible,’ and who was also inspired by Kempis’s Imitation, preached ‘Self-Denial’ on the basis of Luke 9: 23 (Sugden, I, 21; Curnock V, 117; Sugden, I, 263; II, 147; Curnock I, 15; Sugden II, 280-95); his associate George Whitefield (1714-70), too, delivered ‘The Extent and Reasonableness of Self-Denial.’ Also in the 19th century the idea of self-denial was emphasized; John Henry Newman (1801-90), one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement during 1833-45, preached a sermon on ‘The Duty of Self-denial,’ and another leader, Edward B. Pusey (1800-82), discoursed on ‘the simplicity and self-denial of his daily life’ (Liddon, Vol. II, Ch. XXIII). Augustus W. N. Pugin (1812-52), who was ‘never a candidate for personal honour’ (DNB), was a man of self-denial; George
lxxv Eliot, who read Imitation in 1844, used the word ‘self-denial’ three times in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and had long excerpts from Imitation in Bk. 4, Ch. 3 of The Mill on the Floss (1860) (Haight 66; Karl 45; Kempis 130, 85-6, 168, 117, 91). In the Victorian era the idea of ‘self-denial,’ in fact, was familiar enough to be counted as one of the major social values, along with self-help, self-sacrifice, thrift, moral and intellectual improvement, and so on. The ultimate reach of the concept of ‘self-denial’ is death, and a fear of death was released by the New Testament: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not […] his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 15: 9), ‘For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain’ (Phil. 1: 21), ‘If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him’ and ‘we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren’ (I John 2: 15, 3: 16). So the followers of Jesus Christ were not afraid of death: Kempis, who sought Christian perfection, wrote in ‘A Meditation on Death’ in the Imitation, ‘Had you a good conscience, death would hold no terrors for you. […]. If it is dreadful to die, it is perhaps more dangerous to live long’ (Kempis 57-8), and John Wesley, who tried to spread scriptural holiness across the land, preached, ‘Now, “herein perceive we the love of God, in that He laid down His life for us” (I John iii. 16). “We ought,” then, as the Apostle justly infers, “to lay down our lives for the brethren”’ (Sugden, I, 293). In the Victorian age people had an obsession with death,
lxxvi and writers often made mention of it. Thomas Carlyle wrote in Chartism (1839), ‘Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right’ (Carlyle, Selected .. 177), and in Past and Present (1843), ‘Il faut payer de sa vie. Why was our life given us, if not that we should manfully give it?’ (Carlyle, Past .. 174). Alfred Tennyson wrote poems like Mariana (1830), A Farewell (?1837) and In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850). Christina Rossetti created a poem called ‘After Death’ (1849). John Everett Millais painted the drowned woman ‘Ophelia’ (1852), inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. John Ruskin wrote, ‘The Soldier's profession is to defend it. The Pastor's to teach it. The Physician's to keep it in health. […]. And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it’ in Unto This Last (1860) (Ruskin 128). As stated above, Victorians showed a disposition for ‘self-denial’ and ‘an obsession with death.’ † Charles Dickens was one of them; his interest in the idea of ‘self-denial’ can be known from the fact that he made frequent use of the word both in his works and letters: Prof. Matsuoka’s hyper-concordance gives 37 hits for ‘self-denial’ (try ‘dickens-all’) and the CD-Rom edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens 25 hits. As for ‘an obsession with death,’ we can intuit this in Dickens from his letters of 1848 and 1856: ‘as I have quite made up my mind never to grow old myself’ and ‘I have always felt of myself that I must, please God, die in harness […]. As to repose-for some men there's no such thing in this life’ (Letters 5: 239; Letters 8: 89;
lxxvii Forster 2: 197-98; M. Dickens, CD 164). Regarding ‘conversion,’ it was one of the themes which many Victorian men of arts treated, as discussed in my brochure Revivalism and Conversion Literature; and the Oxford Movement was in a way a conversion movement, as symbolized by John Henry Newman’s conversion in 1845 from Anglican to Catholic. Dickens, too, described conversion through Mr. Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843): ‘I converted Mr. Scrooge by teaching him that a Christian heart can not be shut up in itself, but must live in the Past, The Present, and the Future’ (Letters 6: 828); and he also depicted it through Saul (or Paul) of Tarsus in ‘the children’s New Testament’ in 1846, now known as The Life of Our Lord published in 1934 (Letters 4: xii, 573 & n; Letters 9: 557 & n; Dickens, The Life … 121-23; Acts 9: 1-19). Related to ‘self-improvement,’ it was one of the values which particularly Samuel Smiles advocated in his Self-Help (1859): ‘Sir Walter Scott found opportunities for self-improvement in every pursuit’ (Smiles 125). Dickens himself began to work on his individual self-improvement from around 1860, as mentioned in my essay ‘Dickens and Gad’s Hill Place,’ and he made a speech at the Birmingham Midland Institute on September 27, 1869, ‘not because self-improvement is at all certain to lead to worldly success, but because it is good and right of itself [hear, hear]’ (Fielding 405). Also, he created the irresponsible, indolent barrister Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), and let him say, ‘I am doing all I can towards
lxxviii self-improvement’ (Bk. 2, Ch. 6). Concerning ‘the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale,’ a protagonist of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), who died right after making a shocking public confession on the pillory, Dickens knew him through a reading in 1851 (Letters 6: 453; McCarthy, see my posting of 30 April 2009). As to ‘in sackcloth and ashes,’ it means ‘clothed in sackcloth and having ashes sprinkled on the head as a sign of lamentation or abject penitence’ (OED), coming from the Hebrew custom: ‘he […] covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes’ (Jon. 3: 6) and ‘they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes’ (Matt. 11: 21). Dickens himself wrote, ‘while her daughter--not exactly with ashes on her head, or sackcloth on her back’ (The Old Curiosity Shop, Ch. 49; published 1840-41) and ‘He attended on us, as I may say, in sackcloth and ashes’ (David Copperfield, Ch. 20; published 1849-50). Related to ‘penance,’ it is the condition that leads to being ‘in sackcloth and ashes,’ so both often appear simultaneously in a sentence like ‘As Coketown cast ashes not only on its own head but on the neighbourhood's too-after the manner of those pious persons who do penance for their own sins by putting other people into sackcloth’ (Hard Times, Bk. 3, Ch. 6; published 1854), and ‘A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole’ (Great Expectations, Ch. 21; published 1860-61).
lxxix Thus, these seven words had been firmly settled in Dickens’s mind, and those ideas had had only conceptual senses prior to 1857; but after being furiously criticized for a high sin which he committed between August 1857 and August 1858, as will be taken up in what follows, they came to have actual, real, serious meanings within him year by year, and he ended up choosing death himself as a result of his own thorough self-denial. This theme will be pursued chronologically below.
† ① Material regarding ‘Victorians and self-denial’: 1 ‘The Victorians were expected to have self-denial.’ The source of which is
lxxx
② Material regarding ‘Victorians and death’: 1 ‘Victorian Poetry About Death.’ The source of which is
2 When Ellen Ternan became Dickens’s mistress Dickens opened the performance of The Frozen Deep by his amateur theatricals on 6 January 1857, and he engaged three professional actresses, Mrs. Thomas Lawless Ternan, her second daughter Maria and her third, Ellen, instead of amateur ones, in preparation for the performances in Manchester Free Trade Hall; he referred to ‘the professional ladies’ for the first time in a letter of 17 August 1857 (Letters 8: 412 & n). For the following three days he rehearsed with them at Tavistock House, and played on 21, 22 and 24,
lxxxi August in the Hall (Letters 8: xii, xxiv, 412 & n; W. H. Bowen 117; Tomalin 78). Dickens was soon infatuated with the two sisters Maria and Ellen, particularly with the latter. As early as ‘?3 September’ he referred to a quarrel between him and Catherine in his letter: ‘Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it’ (Letters 8: 423 and n, 433 and nn, 430). On 29 April 1858 he began his paid public readings, despite John Forster’s persistent opposition, mainly in order to cover the many expenses which his forthcoming separation would cause. He and Catherine eventually agreed to live apart on 21 May (Letters 8: 566n, 739), and Catherine left Tavistock House to move into a house in Gloucester Crescent, Regents Park, on 29 April or on around 22 May (Storey 229; Page 98). The Deed of Separation for the two, which included an annual allowance of £600 for Catherine, was completed on 4 June (Letters 8:568n, 578-79 & nn); Catherine signed it on the same day; Dickens on 10 June (Letters 8: 578 and nn). In a letter of 16 July Dickens asked the Countess Gigliucci for advice on where in Italy and under whose master Ellen’s eldest sister Fanny Ternan should ‘complete her musical Education’ (Letters 8: 606). It was on 16 August that Dickens’s private letter of 25 May 1858, which he had written to justify his separation and had consigned to Arthur Smith, was disclosed by the New York Tribune correspondent in London without Smith’s
lxxxii sanction, for which he called it ‘Violated Letter’ (Letters 8:568 & nn, 648nn, 740-42; Forster 2: 206). The news was soon reprinted both in English and American newspapers (Letters 8: 568n, 648 and n, 746n). It was not till 5 September that Dickens, who had gone to Ireland for his readings, knew the news; needless to say, he was very much troubled about it. But, luckily for him, the gossip and scandal gradually faded away after the disclosure. Dickens wrote three letters of recommendation for Fanny Ternan in September 1858; one dated the 20th to the Marchioness of Normanby, another dated the 20th to his friend the woman novelist Mrs. Frances Trollope in Florence, and the other probably on the same day to his friend the Swiss banker Emile De La Rue in Genova (Letters 8: 666-67 & nn). Fanny Ternan departed for Italy carrying the letters with her, attended by her mother Mrs. Ternan to help her settle there, at the end of September 1858, all by Dickens’s payment (Letters 8: 687n); Fanny was accepted by Mrs. Frances Trollope and her eldest son Thomas (Tom) Adolphus Trollope as companion-governess to Tom’s five-year-old daughter Beatrice (Bice) (Letters 8: 687n). On the other hand, Dickens advised Fanny’s two younger sisters Maria and Ellen, and also, ‘strongly,’ their mother to move from a little house in an ‘unwholesome’ suburb, Islington, into a milliner’s lodgings in Berners Street, Oxford Street, where they lived as a temporary abode by 25 October 1858 (Letters 8: xvi, 433n, 666, 668 and n, 687 and
lxxxiii n; Tomalin 79). In March 1859 the elder two sisters, Fanny and Maria, though Fanny remained in Florence, bought the 84-year lease of a handsome, four-storied terraced house, 2 Houghton Place near Tavistock House, for probably between £1,000 and £1,500 and almost certainly by Dickens’s payment. The lease was transferred by the two sisters to Ellen on her 21st birthday, 3 March 1860; Mrs. Ternan was listed as owner of the place from 1860, and she paid the ground rent from 25 Mar 1860 to 1901, though she died in 1873 (Letters 9: xiin, 11n; Tomalin 121, 294). The family engaged two female servants (Carlton 85), and Dickens made ‘irregular payments’ from £3.10s to £100 to Houghton Place and Ellen from 23 May 1859 onwards. To this Place Dickens’s intimate friend Francesco Berger, composer and musician, came to play games of cards with the Ternan family and Dickens on Sunday evenings, followed after supper by Ellen and Dickens singing duets to his accompaniment (Ternant 87-8). Hence we could specify that it would be at the latest by August 1858 that Dickens made Ellen a mistress; if he had been innocent until then he could have quitted her. So from then to his time of death he lived as a Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, anguishing secretly over his guilt.
3 Dickens’s conversion in 1860—a result of self-denial It was already mentioned elsewhere that Dickens went through ‘conversion’ in the sense of ‘a spiritual change from
lxxxiv sinfulness, ungodliness, or worldliness to love of God and pursuit of holiness’ (OED) not publicly but privately by September 1860, so in this essay it will be enough to say that the reaction in his mind was a result of his recurrent self-denial originating in his earnest introspection, and that he got to work on his ‘self-improvement’ right after the ‘conversion,’ as touched on in my essay ‘Dickens and Gad’s Hill Place.’
4 Ellen Ternan in France—1862-1864 Tomalin guessed that Dickens sent Ellen Ternan to France with her mother Mrs. Ternan in around mid-1862, probably due to her pregnancy, and the mother and daughter lived either near Paris or Boulogne, or, according to Bowen, near the Belgian border around Calais or the French-Flemish Country, for three years (Tomalin 135-49; Letters 10: xii, 191 & n, 445n; J. Bowen 206). The kernel of Tomalin’s conjecture could be justified by the fact of Dickens’s frequent comings and goings between London and France during these years, and also by his own letters in which his uneasiness was reflected: ‘I have found come back in the never-to-be-forgotten misery of this later time’ (June 62), ‘some rather miserable anxieties’ (20 Sep. 62), ‘all this unsettled fluctuating distress in my mind’ (5 Oct. 62), ‘a sick friend concerning whom I am anxious’ (6 Jan. 63), ‘I have not been able to sleep. Some unstringing of the nerves […] holds steep from me’ (18 Jan. 63), and ‘some rather anxious business I have on hand’ (17 Mar. 63) (Letters
lxxxv 10: xii, 129, 134, 191 & n, 445n, etc.). It is no doubt that Ellen Ternan bore him a ‘son’ and he ‘died in infancy’ in 1862 or 1863, because Dickens’s daughter Mrs. Kate Perugini and his sixth son Sir Henry accepted it as a fact in 1923 and 1928 respectively (Storey 94, 142-43; Tomalin 135-49, 152).
5 In 1865— the opening of Dickens’s grave afflictions The year 1865 was the opening of Dickens’s grave afflictions; he was come over by four serious troubles: one, the outbreak of his foot disease in February; two, that of his heart disease in June; three, Ellen’s return to London in June; four, Ellen and her dearest sister Fanny Ternan were on good terms with Thomas (Tom) Adolphus Trollope and his younger brother Anthony Trollope. The details are as follows. It was on 21 February 1865 that Dickens’s ‘formidable illness’ of the foot broke out, on account of which he was ‘not able for a time to see any visitors.’ He wrote on 21 March, ‘I suffered tortures all last night, and never closed my eyes.’ He also ‘suffered severely’ in April and May (Forster 2: 293; Letters 11: 19). In May, Fanny Ternan had renewed an intimacy with Tom Trollope and his daughter Bice through Tom’s younger brother Anthony Trollope while the former, who lived in Italy, visited the latter in England (Tomalin 153-54), the intimacy which was to bring the marriage of Tom and Fanny later in October 1866.
lxxxvi In June, Ellen, whom Dickens had sent out to France in mid-1862, was to return to London, although Dickens must have wished her to settle down there forever, the way he sent his sons to migrate to India and Australia. Dickens saw off his fourth son Alfred, who was to migrate to Australia, on 29 May. On the same day or within the next few days, he started for France to meet Ellen and her mother Mrs. Ternan. Shortly before the departure, he had written a despairing letter to Forster: ‘Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down. No one knows as I know to-day how near to it I have been’ (Letters 11: 48). This letter intimates that Ellen was a heavy burden to him. Ellen’s return would irritate Dickens, because she would be placed in public notice though having already been acquainted with some persons before leaving for France (Letters 8: 745; Nisbet 26). If his private life came out, he would be an object of insult and contempt; or if Ellen was pregnant in future he might be an Arthur Donnithorne in Adam Bede, which he had read in 1859, or a Faust in Charles François Gounod's new opera Faust, which he had seen in Paris on 31 January 1863 (Letters 10: xiii & n, 205 & n, 215 & n, 261 & n). Such concerns and anxieties were to obsess Dickens more seriously from June 1865 onwards. On 9 June, Dickens, Ellen and her mother all were on their way from France to London, which should have been a secret travel; they took a packet at Boulogne and a tidal train at Folkestone. When the train came near Staplehurst
lxxxvii it fell into the river Beult, which caused ten passengers’ death. The Times reported it on 10 June with graphic details of the eight carriages and articles like ‘Mr. Charles Dickens had a narrow escape’ (Letters 11: 50n); Dickens wrote to the head station master of Charing Cross on 12 June, ‘A lady who was in the carriage with me […] lost […] a gold seal engraved “Ellen”’; he referred to ‘[t]wo ladies’ who were his ‘fellow-passengers’ in his letters of 13 June to his widowed sister Lætitia and his earliest close friend Thomas Mitton; he directed his man-servant Thompson on 25 June to take ‘Miss Ellen […] a little basket of fresh fruit,’ etc.; the Penny Illustrated Paper for 24 June carried an engraved illustration, ‘CD Relieving the Sufferers […].’ (Letters 11: 49n); Mrs. Julia Clara Byrne (1819–1894), author, saw Dickens as she wrote, ‘Charles Dickens was once by chance my fellow traveller on the Boulogne packet; travelling with him was a lady who was not his wife, nor his sister-in-law’ (Carlton 84; Nisbet 22). Those records, as Carlton pointed out, were to give later biographers a proof of his return with Ellen and her mother from France (Carlton 84); to be short, Dickens and Ellen’s travel was not a secret one as a result. Mrs. Byrne’s description enables us to suppose that she, who was very familiar with both Catherine and Georgina, might have identified the lady with the one in the gossip about him. And the newspaper reports of the accident might have stirred some imagination about his relation with Ellen among some persons: it was the Anthony Trollopes, as
lxxxviii mentioned below, who invited Ellen through Fanny Ternan to their Christmas ball this year (Tomalin 155); any privacy or secrecy was not to be kept and retained. After the accident Dickens came to feel an abnormal heart condition, writing to his family doctor Frank Beard on 21 June: ‘The medicine, I think, has done me good. My pulse is still feeble and I am unfit for noise and worry.’ So he, while travelling from London to Higham, often and suddenly fell into ‘a paroxysm of fear,’ trembled ‘all over,’ clutched ‘the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face,’ and suffered ‘agonies of terror’ (M. Dickens, CD 158, My Father 129-30). Dickens had been visited again by the illness of his foot ‘more or less throughout the autumn’ (Forster 2: 250), and he, when in Paris in September, had his first stroke, which he described wrongly as a ‘slight sun-stroke’ in his letter, and which foreshadowed the second one in Chester in April 1869 (Letters 11: 91; Letters 12: xviii). The third removal of Ellen came in October; she moved together with Mrs. Ternan and Fanny Ternan, from Houghton Place, Ampthill Sq. to nearby Lidlington Place, Harrington Sq. (Letters 11: 122n). The Anthony Trollopes invited Fanny Ternan, and Ellen too through Fanny, to their Christmas ball at which the sisters would have attracted public notice, both being ‘dressed quite alike in pale green silk’ with ‘scarlet geranium & white heath in [their] hair’ (Letters 11: 260n). Ellen, aged 26, and Fanny, 30; Dickens could not possibly conceal
lxxxix Ellen completely from the public. As for Anthony Trollope, he was George Henry Lewes’s dearest friend, who both were Dickens’s tough, acute and severe friends. Thus, the year 1865 was the beginning of Dickens’s great afflictions: his dreadful diseases of foot and heart and the great unrest and fear that his private affairs might be exposed at any moment never afterwards entirely left him. Also, he had to hide Ellen from society: he would make her move to Elizabeth Cottage, Slough, in January 1866, and then to Windsor Lodge, Surrey, in June 1867 (Letters 11: 122n, 229n; Letters 12: 161n; Aylmer 44-45, 93-95; Tomalin 156-58, 178). Incidentally it may be added that there had been in February a desolate event concerning Dickens; he resigned from the Garrick Club, where rumours about him and Ellen had spread in 1858, with Wilkie Collins on the 25th, being infuriated at the blackball at the Club of his sub-editor and business right hand, William Wills (Letters 9: 160; Letters 11: viii, xvii, 20 & n, 26-8 & nn). He was being cornered into a fix.
6 In 1866—Dickens’s failing health, Fanny’s marriage, and … There came in 1866 four great occurrences to Dickens: one, the Charles Collinses’ illness; two, Dickens’s own deterioration of health; three, his resumption of his public readings; four, Fanny Ternan’s marriage with Tom Trollope. The Charles Collinses had been ill for this whole year.
xc On 2 February Dickens wrote to his friend that his son-in-law Charley would ‘never be strong’ and Kate was ‘rather delicate—about the chest and heart’ (Letters 11: 150); in December she was ‘a bad subject for illness, having long been in an unsatisfactory and declining state’ (Letters 11: 281); Charley, who stayed at Gad’s Hill with Kate still in March 1867, was trying to recover from his illness, and for the couple Georgina was keeping house (Letters 11: 308, 323, 325). As for Dickens, he himself had been afflicted with ‘a decided change’ in his health for some time in 1866; he wrote on 9 February, ‘I have got a prescription of iron, quinine and digitalis’ for ‘degeneration of some functions of the heart’ (Letters 11: 155). He had been ‘really unwell’ with ‘great irritability of the heart’ around on 23 February, and was enjoined to take rest by his doctor, but he didn’t (Letters 11: 162-63). Still in March he had ‘[w]ant of muscular power in the heart,’ and had been ‘unwell’ enough that on 7 March his doctor gave him ‘the strict injunction’ to cancel his engagements of the 12th and the 15th, but he would not, stating, ‘I wouldn’t mind him!’ (Letters 11: 168-69). Related to rest he had written in 1856, ‘It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. As to repose-for some men there's no such thing in this life’; he was to repeat the view in 1868: ‘I shall never rest much while my faculties last, and (if I know myself) have a certain something in me that would still be active in rusting and corroding me, if I flattered myself that it was in repose’ (Letters 8: 89; Letters
xci 11: 377). He would not stop wasting himself. Though under such condition he had to earn money; he had written on 11 March 1861, ‘I am […] chained in life, by the enormous drags upon me which are already added to the charges of my own large family’; as of 1866 his payments were made, besides his family, to his late brother Alfred’s family, his sister Letitia, the Charles Collinses, Catherine, and Ellen Ternan; his ‘expenses’ were really ‘so enormous’ (Letters 11: 366). He had the idea of selling himself out and out to ‘some Demon of the Mitchell circle’ on 2 February, ‘sold’ himself eventually on 8 March to ‘the Powers of Evil,’ viz., Chappell & Co., for 30 readings at £50 a night (Letters 11: 168-71; Dolby 2). It was in this way that he, who had stopped public readings since the London series of 1863, resumed the first provincial Chappell tour of readings, knowing that the Demon would consume his body. One day before starting for the tour, he wrote about his hard work to come:
Today, I am obliged to go 20 miles from town. Tomorrow, I come back, and read at St. James's Hall (for the first time) a very difficult reading. On Wednesday morning early, I go to Liverpool, to read there the same night. Then, to Manchester. Then, back to Liverpool. Then, on to Edinburgh and Glasgow. I have just sold myself (rather in the Faust way!) for 30 readings, and these rapid movements are the result.
xcii (Letters 11: 181-82) He launched the first of the readings on 10 April in London, being scheduled to return to London basically every Tuesday to read his works, to edit All The Year Round, and probably to visit Ellen Ternan, etc. As early as 13 April he was ‘tired,’ stuck to his ‘tonic,’ and could ‘not sleep’; and was ‘very tired’ on the 27th (Letters 11: 183-84, 193). He wrote about his work and health on 11 May,
It has been very heavy work getting up at half-past 6 each morning after a heavy night, and I am not at all well to day. […]. I have so severe a pain in the ball of my left eye that it makes it hard for me to do any thing after 100 miles shaking since breakfast. My cold is no better, nor my hand either. (Letters 11: 199, 200)
On the same day Wills wrote, ‘he suffers now headache and brow neuralgia, sure signs of excess of nervous power wasted over-night’ (Letters 11: 199n). On 17 May he was attacked by a severe cold, and could get through the readings only with difficulty at Glasgow on the 18th (Dolby 37). This was the first George Dolby referred to his disease; so Dolby, it could be said, did not always grasp his health. Georgina, who heard rumours about his American tour on around 24 May, had a ‘fear’ about it for his bad health (Letters 11: 204 & n.; Adrian, Georgina .. 97).
xciii On 12 June he managed to finish the Chappell tour, earning £1,500 (Letters 9: 50, etc.; Letters 11: viii, xviii, 533; Dolby 7). In summer he was so much in good form that he would often return to Gad’s Hill to be present at a cricket match (Dolby 62). On 6 September he wrote to his doctor, ‘I have been bothered for weeks -- months -- at intervals with distention and flatulency, and disagreeable pains in the pit of the stomach and chest,’ and saw him on the 30th (Letters 11: 242, 249; cf. W. H. Bowen 138-40). Next came Fanny Ternan’s marriage: she, who had been employed as Bice’s governess in April 1866, married Tom Trollope in October. This marriage meant to change Dickens’s situation to a large extent; he was to be driven more into a fix because she was among people severe to Dickens like Anthony Trollope, the Leweses, persons around them, etc. It was in a letter dated 4 July 1867 as stated later that he was to write the unreserved mistrust and dislike of the Tom Trollopes. Thus in 1866, he sold himself to the Demon; Fanny’s marriage was working as his source of trouble; Kate’s unhappiness was a heavy burden on him, because she had disliked and left his dismal home by her marriage in 1860. Another burden was her eldest daughter Mary’s singleness: he had objected to her match with a boyfriend in 1860 (Storey 104; Adrian, Georgina .. 67); it was later on 4 Jan 1869 that he wrote: ‘I often think that if Mary were to marry
xciv (which she won't), I should sell it [i.e., Gad’s Hill], and go genteelly vagabondizing over the face of the earth’ (Letters 12: 268). His daughters’ unhappiness, it is sure, stimulated his compunction and remorse. He could find no hope in future. Incidentally, Kate’s husband Charley was to die in 1873; Mary in 1896 remaining single; Dickens could never make either his daughters or Catherine, Ellen and Georgina happy during his life.
7 In 1867—‘farewell’ to this world The year 1867 saw an effect of his selling himself to the Demon and his more hopeless future. Dickens began the second provincial Chappell tour of 52 readings at St. James Hall, London, on 15 January, and on the afternoon of the 16th he started for Liverpool for 3-day readings (Letters 11: xvii, 297 & n, 533); at St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, on the night of the 18th, he was taken so faint that he had to be laid on a sofa for half an hour. He attributed this fit to his inability to sleep at night (Letters 11: 301). On the 24th he wrote, ‘Last night I was again heavily beaten. […] it was as much as I could do to hold out the journey [i.e., a ride of forty minutes]’ (Letters 11: 304; Adrian, Georgina .. 99). He was due to come to London basically once in every two weeks on Tuesday or Monday for the editing of All The Year Round, etc. (Letters 12: 249, 254, 326, etc.) It was on 26 January that he, who was going from Leicester to London by
xcv train, was obliged to get off it at Bedford, being unable to endure ‘[t]he reckless fury of the driving and the violent rocking of the carriage’ (Letters 11: 307). On 29 January he was ‘very tired,’ could ‘not sleep,’ and had been ‘severely shaken on an atrocious railway,’ but still he had to read in London at the night, and then to go to Leeds on the 30th to read on the 31st and 1 February, and to Manchester on 2 February (Letters 11: 308, 310). He returned to London on the night of the 3rd; he had been ‘so shaken by railway’ the previous night that he could ‘hardly write’ a letter on the 4th; indeed, he was never released from the railway shaking (Letters 11: 310, 313, 314). He, who ‘travelled hard’ from Manchester to Glasgow by express trains on 17 February and felt ‘much fatigued,’ took ‘one of Brinton’s pills,’ i.e., the leading physician William Brinton’s medicine on the 18th and besides, in the morning he was ‘so unwell’ with ‘a considerable quantity of blood’ of piles (Dolby 67; Letters 11: 316-17; cf. W. H. Bowen 150-51). It was after these travels that he, who kept constantly mentioning the Staplehurst rail crash, decided to take slow trains as often as possible in future travel (Dolby 67). From 19 February on, however, he had generally been quite well although having been constantly ‘here, there, everywhere, and nowhere.’ To maintain the good condition he made efforts to observe his rule of ‘always living with [his] secretary’ at a hotel in strict privacy between his readings (Letters 11: 299, 318, 323, 348, etc.). On the night of 9 May he ‘could hardly undress for bed’
xcvi for being ‘so tired’; though under such a serious condition, he began to think of an American tour because his ‘expenses’ were ‘so enormous’ including the financial support of the Charles Collinses (Letters 11: 366 & n; cf. Letters 9: 391; Letters 12: 732). As for the tour, it had been proposed by his American friend James Thomas Fields far back in the spring of 1858 with ‘a guarantee of £10,000,’ but he could not have gone ahead with the tour for long for several ‘strong reasons’ (Letters 8: 589 & nn; Letters 9: 17& n, 81 & n, 83n, 91 & n, 106 & n; Letters 10: 132, 190; Letters 11: 369, 375; Curry 4-5; cf. Nisbet 54). Dickens, after concluding the second Chappell tour with earnings of £2,500 on 13 May, made Ellen Ternan (‘Nelly’) move to her fourth house, Windsor Lodge, Surrey, on 26 June (Aylmer 40-41, 47; Letters 11: 229n; Letters 12: xxiii, 161-62n; Tomalin 178, 200). Tomalin says, based on Dickens’s pocket diary of from 1 Jan to 7 Nov, 1867, ‘he spent one third of his time with, or near, Nelly; one third at Gad’s Hill; and one third serving his other love, the public’ (Tomalin 168). Dickens was aged 55, Ellen 28. He, who had been in very delicate health since 1865 and in chronic strain, might have had a moment to foresee some limit as a man. On 4 July Dickens wrote a surprising letter to Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, in which he professed a dislike for Mrs. Thomas Adolphus Trollope or Ellen’s mother Mrs. Thomas Ternan, expressed the ‘fears of the Trollopes’s objections’ to his relation with Ellen, described Mrs. Trollope as ‘infinitely
xcvii sharper than the Serpent's Tooth,’ and refused Mrs. Elliot’s request for introduction to Ellen (Letters 11: 389-90 & n; Slater, Dickens .. 424-25). Mrs. Gilbert Elliot was an acquaintance of both the Tom Trollopes and the Anthony Trollopes (Letters 8: xxiv, 361, 412n; Letters 11: 218n; Tomalin 177); she and her husband, astonishingly enough, were to be visited by the Tom Trollopes at Farley Hill Court, Berkshire, later in August 1867 (Tomalin 178; Letters 10: 399 & n; Letters 11: 386 & n, 387, 426 & n). So the Gilbert Elliots could have known Dickens’s privacy in detail. Privacy or secret, generally speaking, is not to be kept. Dickens was being driven psychologically into a fix like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale. At the beginning of August he could not get a boot on, nor wear a slipper on his left foot, and saw, on 5 August, the distinguished surgeon Dr. Henry Thompson, who insisted on his taking absolute repose; Dickens, throughout the night, was in tortures on the sofa. He saw the doctor again on 10 August, and had been under the doctor’s care for his foot at the end of August and was only just able to walk for an hour after getting a boot on; but on 11 September he was lame and could get on no left boot or shoe (Letters 11: 406-08, 412, 414, 415, 424). Certainly, Dickens saw doctors, but in vain; he had no intention of obeying their directions. Dickens fought off Forster and Wills, who both had opposed his American tour due to his declining health, and sent the telegram of ‘Go ahead’ to Boston on 30 September (Letters 11: xix, 375 & n, 437-41 & nn; Dolby 137-39, etc).
xcviii In addition to the tour, he also began to negotiate with the Chappells on ‘Farewell Nights in England’ on 9 October (Letters 11: 451). ‘Farewell!’ To what? To this world. Because he meant to earn no more after the readings in spite of the necessity of enormous expenses. At around this time his obsession with death, we could suppose, had already become a reality within him, so it seems that he had set down the American and Farewell reading tours as his last earnings in this life. On 14 October he wrote to Beard, ‘I got the medicine,’ and saw him two days later (Letters 11: 453). He sailed for America on 9 November, and wrote to Forster on the 18th from Halifax, Nova Scotia, ‘I told the Chappells that when I got back to England, I would have a series of farewell readings in town and country; and then read No More’ (Letters 11: 479; emphases added). He contracted ‘£80 a night, 100 series,’ probably gazing at his own future death (Letters 11: 484). He fell into discomfort and uneasiness upon arriving in Boston on 19 November 1867, because ‘American newspapers had dredged up the story of the separation of a decade earlier and the role in it of a young mistress’ (Schlicke 18). So he sent, on the 22nd, to Wills a code of ‘safe and sound,’ which meant that Ellen Ternan should not come (Nisbet 54; Letters 11: xix, 487 & n). He had no calm place in this world; he knew the reason well; his conversion in 1860 was only in private not in public, so he had to be tortured by deep compunction all the more
xcix because he had recovered his earnest Christian mind. His self-denial and wish for death was becoming serious.
8 In 1868—‘Oh God, that I were dead!’ Dickens cancelled a reading tour of February 1868 to the West of America; one of the reasons was that the Chicago papers were eager to publish stories on the topic of Dickens’s separation, including gossip about his youngest brother Augustus’s misbehavior. Augustus had married Harriet Lovell in 1848, but he had deserted her after her having gone blind in 1850, had decamped to Amboy, IL, USA, in 1857 with Bertha Phillips, had lived as ‘Mr & Mrs Dickens,’ then had moved with her to Chicago, IL, and had died there in 1866. Actually, Bertha Phillips lived in Chicago in 1868 with her children (three of whom survived), and was to die on Christmas Day 1868 from an overdose of morphine taken for neuralgia. Against these circumstances, the Chicago Tribune reprinted the ‘Violated Letter’ on 19 February 1868 (Letters 5: 445n; Letters 9: 159 & n; Letters 11: 484n; Letters 12: 62 & nn, 274n; Schlicke 18). At last Dickens could barely finish the American Readings, earning the net of nearly £20,000, which was a recompense for not only the reading work but also the American catarrh, swollen feet, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and great fatigue; he left New York on 22 April 1868 (Letters 11: 525, 528; Letters 12: ix, xi, 12, 84, 105, etc.). Strange to say, he was ‘greatly better’ on the ship,
c arriving at Liverpool on 1 May; at his fine recovery George Dolby was indeed surprised (Dolby 330). Back in March during his absence, his sub-editor William Wills had been laid up after taking a bad fall while hunting, so Dickens had to ‘have [his] hands pretty full—for a resting man’; he performed ‘all the business and money details of All The Year Round,’ to fetch up the past ‘six months lee-way,’ and to prepare for ‘a final series of Farewell Readings’ (Letters 12: xxiii, 89, 115, 130, 164). One day in summer as he walked from his office to dine at Forster’s he noticed a visual trouble. He could ‘read only the halves of the letters over the shop doors that were on his right as he looked,’ and the trouble that was to recur later on 21 March 1870 (Forster 2: 357, 411). He attributed it to ‘medicine’ (Forster 2: 357); this suggests that he was making regular use of some medicine, say, for his foot or heart, or for both. Even in September he was not always well, writing on the 13th, ‘The “American Catarrh” comes and goes oddly.’ Edward Dickens (“Plorn”), his tenth and youngest child, sailed on 2 October (Letters 12:172n. and 194n.) to Australia to be an emigrant, and his ninth child Henry went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in October. Now, Dickens’s duty and responsibility to all his sons had been accomplished; in fact, ‘duty and responsibility’ was one of his values; he, concerning ‘duty,’ had written in the letter he handed over to Edward right before his departure, ‘You cannot show your affection for him [Dickens] so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty’ (Letters 12: 188).
ci The time came when he could devote himself to the Farewell Readings, the first of which he began in London on 6 October, and he went on his provincial tour, what he called a ‘heavy spell of work,’ on the 9th, planning to come back to London on every alternate Tuesday for his readings, for his editorial work of All The Year Round, etc. (Letters 12: 249, 254). As early as 11 October he ‘felt sick and loose’ after Beard’s prescription (Letters 12: 196, 197). In around mid-October he started to think of a reading of the Sikes and Nancy murder scene from Oliver Twist (Letters 12: 203), the reading in which he had felt ‘something so horrible’ when trying alone back in 1863 (Letters 10: 250), and the reading about which his eldest son Charley, who found him rehearsing in the meadow of Gad’s Hill, said to him, caring about his failing health, ‘The finest thing I have ever heard, but don’t do it’ (CD, Jr., ‘Reminiscences’ 28-29; Adrian, Georgina .. 120; Storey 126). Dickens took exhaustion and fatigue far from rest despite doctors’ directions. He wrote on 25 October that he was heavily tired out ‘like Mariana’ (Letters 12: 208). It was back in 1842 that he had become familiar with the short poem ‘Mariana’ by Alfred Tennyson, and back in 1843 that he echoed it in the description of the deserted schoolhouse in Stave II of A Christmas Carol (Letters 3: 306-07 & nn, 460-61n). The first six stanzas of the poem ends with ‘I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead!’ and the last with ‘I am aweary, aweary, / Oh God, that I were dead!’ Those days Dickens, it
cii seems, shared Mariana’s desire, remembering the poem and staring at his own future death. On 14 November he did a trial reading of Sikes and Nancy before nearly a hundred friends, turning their faces ‘horror-stricken’; ninety of them urged him to include it in his repertoire, but some like Forster, Dolby and his eldest son Charley tried to dissuade him from it; particularly Dolby knew the pains of Dickens’s right, not left, foot had begun to return (Dolby 345; Letters 12: 247; Kent 253-262; Collins, CD The Public .. 465-67). After reading in London on 1 December he was away to Scotland in the early morning of the 5th for 8 days of readings; he performed the last reading at Edinburgh on the 19th, and did the year-end reading in London on the 22nd. He was wasting and wasting himself in 1868.
9 In 1869—‘suicidal’ He started the readings in London on 5 January; one of them was Sikes and Nancy, by which he froze the spectators, then made them come to life, and raised them to boiling-point with the ending. Thenceforth he made the reading his key performance, which he was to give 28 times in all (Collins, CD The Public .. 468-70; Letters 12: xiv and n, 274-75; Andrews 287-90). On the night of the 6th he embarked for Ireland to give 5 performances in Belfast and Dublin. Back to London on the 17th, he read on the 19th, and went on to read Sikes and Nancy at Clifton on the 20th, causing ‘a contagion of
ciii fainting’ and a ‘stiff and rigid’ state among nearly 20 ladies (Letters 12: xiv, 283). It might be considered that he was satisfied with the result, but it would be more probable that he was wishing to ‘die in harness.’ On 15 February his foot ‘ha[d] turned lame again’ (Forster 2: 360; Letters 12: 293 & n). On the 16th two doctors Sir Henry Thompson and Frank Beard drew up for him the certificate: ‘Mr. C. D. is suffering from inflammation of the foot (caused by over-exertion), and that we have forbidden his appearance on the platform this evening’ (Letters 12: 293; Dolby 382). On the 19th he could ‘not stand,’ but got off, though not yet well, to Edinburgh on the 20th for the reading at Glasgow on the 22nd (Letters 12: 294-95 & n). Back to Edinburgh on the 23rd, he consulted Dr. James Syme, who warned him against over-fatigue in the readings and denounced ‘Thompson’s diagnosis of gout’ (Letters 12: 296, 301). Dickens read there on the 24th, and was back at Glasgow on the 25th for the night’s reading. Within the day, back again at Edinburgh, he wrote to W. H. Wills, ‘“Business” here is tremendous!’ At night ‘[b]oth feet were tired […] and ached in bed’ (Letters 12: 298). Shortly before the reading of the 26th, he wrote to Alexander Russel, editor of the Scotsman, ‘the Oliver Twist murder driving all the breath out of my body’ (Letters 12: 300), and he, after finishing one of the night’s two readings, went to his retiring-room ‘with difficulty,’ being ‘forced to lie on the sofa’ to ‘regain strength sufficient to utter a word’ (Dolby 385;
civ Letters 12: 298n). The supper of February 26 he took at the Edinburgh hotel with Dolby; then and there he was fixing the remaining reading tour with Dolby, making ‘Murder’ take precedence of everything else; it was when Dolby suggested not to give the ‘Murder’ so often that Dickens bounded up, threw his knife and fork on his plate, smashing it to atoms, and exclaimed, ‘Dolby! your infernal caution will be your ruin one of these days!’ He, saying so, was crying, and sobbing, ‘Forgive me, Dolby! [….] I know you are right’ (Dolby 386-88; Letters 12: 300n). He really ‘would listen to no remonstrance in respect of ’ the murder reading (Dolby 344); he was sure to resent ‘any suggestion from anybody else that his health was falling, or that he was undertaking anything beyond his strength’; in short, ‘nothing could stop him’ (CD, Jr., ‘Reminiscences’ 28-30). It is probable that he was, though in a figurative sense, ‘in sackcloth and ashes,’ wore ‘next his skin sackcloth covered with dirt and vermin,’ and ‘flogged his back to punish himself ’ in Thomas a Becket’s manner of life, as he had written in Ch. 12 of A Child’s History of England in 1851-53. The reading of the murder scene, Wilkie Collins saw, ‘did more to kill Dickens than all his other work put together’ (Robinson 243; Collins, CD The Public .. 470-71). Philip Collins thought of the efforts he made for the reading as ‘foolish’ and ‘even suicidal’ (Collins, Dickens: The Critical 471). Dolby was certain that ‘he [i.e., Dickens] was fully
cv aware of the terrible malady by which he was threatened’; Dickens himself did know that the Murder Reading he had performed was ‘madness’ or ‘worse than madness’ (Dolby 416, 442). True, Dickens’s wish was to ‘die in harness’; on 30 March, though after performing 12 readings in London and the province from 2 to 30 March, he got ready for his death: he made a ‘great burning of papers’ and destroyed ‘everything not wanted’ (Letters 12: 321). He gave 8 readings from 31 March to 13 April, and on the morning of the 15th he wrote at Leeds, ‘The foot was bad all the way, and was exceedingly inflamed and swollen when we arrived, and still is.’ On 17 and 18 April he had been ‘extremely giddy, extremely uncertain of [his] footing.’ On 21 April he wrote, ‘My weakness and deadness are all on the left side, and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don't know where it is.’ On 22 April his doctor Beard rushed to Preston, forced him to cancel his readings of the day, which was the 73rd performance, and took him back to London within the day (Letters 12: xv, 336, 338-41 & nn, 710-11; Forster 2: 363; Dolby 407-09; McManus 99). This was a natural effect of his selling himself to the Demon which he could expect. On 25 April Dickens wrote to his solicitor Ouvry that his sudden lying by from work was ‘a precautionary measure on the part of the doctors, and not a remedial one.’ But the editor of the Letters of CD noted that it was written ‘in a shaky hand, obviously affected by his illness; rest of letter firm and clear; probably, therefore not written at same time.’
cvi The ‘rest of letter’ was a rewriting of his will: ‘I want a new draft of a will (as short as possible) thus’ (Letters 12: 344 & n). His obsession with death was quite a reality. On 26 April the leading physician Thomas Watson and Dickens’s doctor Beard published a certificate:
Mr. Charles Dickens has been seriously unwell, through great exhaustion and fatigue of body and mind, consequent upon his public Readings and long and frequent railway journeys. In our judgement, Mr. Dickens will not be able with safety to himself to resume his Readings for several months to come. (Letters 12: 341n; Dolby 413)
On the same day, Georgina wrote that he was ‘still hoping that he might be allowed to go through with the London Readings’ though the two doctors said ‘NO!’ adding that he ‘would hear of no compromise (quite wisely--I think). Nothing but an entire cessation of work and that AT ONCE!’ (Letters 12: 345n). Clearly he had no wish to live; his spirit was occupied by a feeling of self-denial. Dickens described himself on 28 April and 3 May respectively: ‘in a quite brilliant condition already’ and ‘I am in a brilliant condition, thank God. Rest and a little care immediately unshook the railway shaking’ (Letters 12: 345, 348). On 12 May he made up his ‘last Will and Testament’ by revoking all his former Wills and Codicils, to which another
cvii date of ‘2 June 1870’ was to be added later. He was steadily walking towards his own death. Around the end of May he expressed his wish for Dr. Thomas Watson’s sanction to fulfill some of the reading engagements, and got his consent for twelve Readings in London the next year (Forster 2: 363-64; Dolby 416). At the beginning of June, amazingly enough, ‘all traces of his illness had disappeared’ from him, so he entertained Mr. and Mrs. James Thomas Fields and two others at Gad’s Hill Place for a week (Dolby 421). In mid-July he got ‘the idea of a story,’ viz., the germ of Edwin Drood; about which he wrote in a letter of 6 August, ‘I […] have a very curious and new idea for my new story’ (Letters 12: 377 and n, 389-90). On 8 August he, who himself had had ‘some distressing indications’ that he was not yet as well as he had hoped he had been, was reminded of the caution given ‘by the Doctors to add nothing, this summer and autumn, to the pressure of [his] own affairs’ (Letters 12: 391). On 20 August he began to consult with Frederic Chapman about the agreement for Edwin Drood, was getting to work on ‘a new book’ at around the end of September, and completed, on 27 November, Chs. 6-9, which was only a product of ‘a severe labour’ or an accumulation of ‘a hard day’s work’ (Letters 12: xii, 398 and n, 416, 422, 425, 445 and n; Dolby 436). On 18 December he was ‘really very hard pressed,’ so he declined to attend a meeting in Birmingham (Letters 12:
cviii 453). On the 22nd he rehearsed the readings for the final twelve, though tied up with ‘Writings, Editings, Birmingham correspondence, and other botherations’ (Letters 12: 454-55, 457). On the 24th he was home to Gad’s Hill Place to spend Christmas holidays, being ‘not well’ and ‘confined to his bed’ for the whole of Christmas day due to the pain in his left foot; he, however, managed to appear at dinner (Adrian, Georgina .. 129; Storey 129; Dolby 441). On the 27th he was getting up his Readings (Letters 12: 457). The New York Times reprinted the ‘Violated Letter’ under the heading ‘Why Charles Dickens Separated from His Wife—His Own Statement’ on 28 September 1869 as a reproduction from the Boston Folio, although it is unclear why they reprinted it at that time and whether Dickens caught it. What matters is that he was never disengaged from the ‘Letter’ nor from that kind of gossip or scandal. Thus in 1869 he was resolutely stepping forward to self-denial.
10 In 1870—‘Yes, on the ground’ He went to the Birmingham and Midland Institute to give a speech at the prize-giving as its President on 6 January. There, he became so severely shaken that he saw his doctor Beard. Beard was afraid that Dickens might ‘die’ of the Readings (CD, Jr., ‘Reminiscences’ 30), so he decided to attend him at the Readings with his eldest son Charley (Letters 12: xxiv, 453, 462; Dolby 443). On the night of 11 January when his twelve Farewell
cix Readings started, his pulse was a normal 72, rising to more than 100 on the later nights, and to 112 when he read the Sikes and Nancy scenes on the 21st. By the 23rd he had had his left hand, which had been sporadically swollen and painful the previous December, in a sling (Letters 12: 340; Forster 2: 409, 411; McManus 101). Just before the third reading of the murder scene on 15 February, he whispered to Charles Kent, ‘I shall tear myself to pieces’; really his pulse got higher to 124 by the end of the reading, so he had to be supported to his retiring room and laid on a sofa for fully ten minutes before being able to say something rational (Kent 87; Dolby 444; Collins, Dickens: The Critical 470-71; Fitzsimons 176-77). Throughout February his hand pain did not leave (Forster 2: 411; McManus 101). On 1 March his pulse rose to 124 after Copperfield; and to 120 in his fourth and last reading of the murder scene on the 8th (Forster 2: 410). At one night of the final readings, Dickens, being unable to pronounce ‘Pickwick’ correctly, did ‘Pickwick,’ ‘Picksnick, and Picnic, and Peckwicks and all sorts of names except the right’ (CD, Jr., ‘Reminiscences’ 30). He could barely accomplish the final readings, with his pulse rising to 110 on 15 March, when he gave the address: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,--[…]; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell’ (Dolby 449; Forster 2: 410; emphases added). There could be read in the address some implication that ‘I would work or live no more.’
cx After the final reading he came home with his family to Gad’s Hill, where he, under his temporary improvement, worked on Edwin Drood (M. Dickens, My father 120). On 21 March he could read only the right-hand half of the letters over the shop doors, which was a recurrence of what he had experienced in the summer of 1865 in Paris. Here again he ascribed the visual trouble to ‘a medicine he had been taking’ (Forster 2: 357, 411). On 29 March he was attacked by ‘a sudden violent rush’ of his ‘uneasiness and hemorrhage’ (Letters 12: 502). During April he had been well; he did ‘a very hard work’ on Edwin Drood whose No. 1 had been published on 31 March. He presided at the newsvendors on 5 April; and spoke at the Royal Academy banquet on 30 April, paying tribute to his late close friend Daniel Maclise, who had died just five days earlier (Letters 12: xxiv, 512; Forster 2: 411; Page 138). At the beginning of May he was seized by ‘a sharp attack’ in his foot, and was troubled during the month by ‘a mere bag of pain which refuse[d] to be carried about’; so he cancelled many engagements. On 23 May he dined with the Lehmanns and John Forster in Hyde Park Place, and spoke of Mark Lemon, who had just died a sudden death some time before 8 o’clock in the morning of the same day at age 60 (McCarthy, see Patrick Leary’s posting of 18 Oct 2009; DNB, ‘Mark Lemon’ 334; Adrian, Mark .. 204, 206; cf., Forster 2: 413 and Acroyd 1132); he also talked of the other friends who had died in the
cxi past few years, saying, ‘And none beyond his sixtieth year; very few even fifty.’ It was no good, Forster suggested, to talk of it, but Dickens, aged 58, replied, ‘We shall not think of it the less’ (Forster 2: 413). Dickens had been perfectly obsessed with death; his daughter Kate ‘always’ said to Storey that he ‘would not have desired to live and grow old’ (Storey 137-38). Among Dickens’s friends who had died during the past several years were William Thackeray (d. 1863, at age 52), Nathaniel Hawthorne (d. 1864 at 60), Elizabeth Gaskell (d. 1865 at 55), Clarkson Stanfield (d. 1867 at 74), William Bradbury (d. 1869 at 69), Daniel Maclise (d. 25 April 1870 at 64), and so forth. As for Frederick Evans, who had been broken with on 22 July 1858 by Dickens and had become Dickens’s son Charley’s father-in-law on 19 November 1861, he was to die on 25 June 1870 at 63, viz., 16 days after Dickens’s death. A few days later or ‘about a fortnight before his death’ Dickens was invited to a very large dinner party at the Prince of Wales’s wish to meet him; he, though suffering from his foot again and having been in downright bodily agony, went to his hosts the Houghtons’ house, attended by his daughter Mary. But he could not ascend the stairs without being assisted by her to go to the drawing-room, where he dined with the Prince and the King of the Belgians ‘show[ing] no distress’ (Letters 12: xvii, 533 & n; Forster 2: 392; Dolby 460; M. Dickens, My father 135; Acroyd 1132). He, who was at Gad’s Hill by 30 May, was ‘hard at work
cxii on Edwin Drood’ with ‘an appearance of fatigue and weariness about him very unlike his usual air’ (M. Dickens, My father 135). On around May 2 and someday between May 31 and June 2, it appears, he visited Ellen Ternan (Letters 12: 517 & n; Tomalin 194). The visits, however, would have had no meaning but duty, responsibility and compunction. On 2 June he made a last revision of his last will and codicil. On the 3rd he ordered a patent electric chain band across his right foot to relieve the pain, and was to receive it on the 8th (Letters 12: 541 and n, 543, 548). On 4 June Kate visited Gad’s Hill Place to get his advice about whether to go on the stage or not, and found him wearied and much changed. He, on the following night, took her to inspect the newly completed conservatory, and said, ‘It is positively the last improvement’ of Gad’s Hill Place. He began to talk of his own affairs, of how he stood in the world, and of how he hoped that Edwin Drood might prove a success, saying, ‘if, please God, I live to finish it. […]. I say if, because you know, my dear child, I have not been strong lately.’ She was ‘startled by his grave voice.’ He went on saying ‘many things that he had scarcely ever mentioned’ to her before, and ‘troubled’ her a great deal by ‘the manner in which he dwelt upon those years that were gone by, and never, beyond the one mention of “Edwin Drood,” looked to the future. He spoke as though his life were over and there was nothing left,’ adding that he wished that ‘he had been “a better father—a better man”’ (all
cxiii emphases added; Storey 132-34; Perugini 652). To Dickens, who had been improving himself together with the improvement of Gad’s Hill Place, the very ‘last improvement’ of the Place meant the last of his own ‘improvements’: he concluded all his improvements by the confession of his sins which would have been included in the ‘many things’ he spoke as if he were the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale on the pillory, wishing that he had been ‘a better father—a better man’; he was a wholly contrite Christian man within himself. All the preparation for his death had been finished. He was found ‘re-enacting the murder of Nancy’ in the grounds at Gad’s Hill ‘a day or two before his death’ (Collins, Dickens: The Critical 471). On 8 June at six he joined Georgina for dinner with his eyes full of tears, alarmed her with ‘his colour and a change in his expression,’ and replied to her concerned words with ‘Yes, very ill for the last hour,’ to her calling the doctor with ‘No,’ and to her ‘Come and lie down’ with ‘Yes-on the ground’; and then he suffered a stroke and lost consciousness (Adrian, Georgina .. 136; emphases added). He, without regaining consciousness, died at almost the same time after a whole day, five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash or to the day when Ellen returned from France to London. The words which he uttered at his last moment definitely show that he wished not for life but death: he actualized his obsession with death and denied his own existence himself.
cxiv 11 A hypothesis concerning Dickens’s death As stated above, Dickens chose death himself, about which a hypothesis may be suggested. In the Victorian era opium and laudanum were popular as a sedative or pain-killer; opium is a ‘drug made from juice of the opium poppy and smoked or eaten or used in medicines as sedative’ (POD), and laudanum a ‘tincture of opium’ (POD). The bottle of laudanum had a label of ‘Poison’ warning owing to causing death by its overdose. Dickens displayed a large interest in opium and laudanum, which he often described in works like Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Little Dorit, Our Mutual Friend, Edwin Drood, etc. He described a laudanum bottle, too, like the ‘bottle’ in ‘she [i.e., Stephen’s drunk wife] laid her insensate grasp upon the bottle that had swift and certain death in it’ (Hard Times; Bk. 1, Ch. 13); the ‘bottle’ was clearly ‘a laudanum bottle’ because Dickens referred to it as ‘Poison bottle’ in his ‘Working Plans’ (CD, Hard Times 69, 230). Wilkie Collins, Dickens’s close friend and Kate Collins’s brother-in-law, who was a sufferer from rheumatic gout, ‘took large quantities of opium a day, and consumed sufficient laudanum at night to kill six men’ (Clarke 121-23; Storey 214); to his habitual use of it Dickens referred in his letters (Letters 7: 158n; Letters 10: 5, 142 & n; Letters 12: 187n, 211). Laudanum was used for suicide as well; Dickens wrote in 1849, ‘I don't know whether he [i.e., Thomas Powell] took
cxv Laudanum enough to kill himself ’ (Letters 5: 631 & n; see also Letters 4: 575nn); Mr. Merdle, one of the characters in Little Dorrit (1855-57), committed suicide with laudanum and a penknife (Bk. 2, Ch. 25); Magdalen in Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) was to buy, for her own contemplated suicide, the ‘Laudanum bottle’ labelled ‘POISON,’ which Dickens mentioned in his letter to Collins (Letters 10: 140 & n); Obenreizer, in the dramatic version of No Thoroughfare by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in 1867, put ‘the phial of laudanum’ in his breast-pocket, and committed suicide by the laudanum at the denouement. 1 Dickens created characters like John Jasper and the Princess Puffer in his final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood; the former, a secret opium addict, says, ‘I have been taking opium for a pain—an agony—that sometimes overcomes me’ (Ch. II); the latter, a keeper of a London opium den, takes ‘opium’ as a ‘medicine’ for her ‘weakly’ lungs (Ch. XXIII). Dickens himself had been a gout patient since February 1865, although he persistently denied it (Storey 126-27; W. H. Bowen 141, 144, 145; Letters 12: xvii). He too took laudanum: he, before going on the American tour in November 1867, ordered the pharmaceutical chemist Thomas Hills ‘Laudanum’ (Letters 11: 448 & n), and he, when in Portland, America, had ‘some laudanum’ on the night of 28 March 1868 to escape from the affliction of American catarrh, insomnia, no appetite and no taste, with good effect; he also got a good night's rest by laudanum when
cxvi in the pain of ‘a Neuralgic foot’ on the night of 11 May 1870, though attended by the side effect that it hung about him ‘very heavily’ on the next day (Letters 12: 85, 524). Frank Beard was Dickens’s doctor from 1859 and Wilkie Collins’s from 1861 (Letters 1: 40n; Clarke 2; Gasson 15); Beard ‘prescribed laudanum’ for Collins’s gout, so it is probable that he prescribed it for Dickens; the distinguished physician John Elliotson disapproved of Beard’s opium treatment (Gasson 15; Letters 10: 231n). Dickens passed all day in the Chalet on 8 June 1870 to write the unfinished novel of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and finished writing Chapter XXIII ‘The Dawn Again,’ near the end of which he inserted the words ‘the Resurrection and the Life,’ the prayer of Sydney Carton, who had had no fear of death on the scaffold (TTC, Bk. 3, Ch. 15). And on the same day, he was ‘in excellent spirits and was very eager to finish the novel’ in coming to Georgina perhaps for lunch (Storey 135; Forster 2: 414-15), returning afterwards to his desk ‘much against his usual custom’ (Forster 2: 414-15); before dinner he wrote at least four letters, one of which he addressed to Mr. Charles Kent, writing, ‘I hope I may be ready for you at 3 o’clock’ in London next day, adding the enigmatic words, ‘If I can’t be—why, then I shan’t be.’ And he, who was ‘late in leaving’ the Chalet, joined Georgina for dinner at six with his eyes ‘full of tears,’ saying, ‘Yes, very ill for the last hour,’ and he, declining to call a doctor, collapsed on his left side (Forster 2: 367, 415; Adrian, Georgina .. 136). The fact is that he asked for no doctor either ‘for the last
cxvii hour’ or at the dinner time. He, who had ‘Neuralgic’ foot, ‘weakly’ heart, and a deep wound in his heart like Sydney Carton, might have been a secret opium (or laudanum) addict like John Jasper, who had been ‘taking opium for an agony,’ and might have been using ‘opium’ as a ‘medicine’ for his ‘weakly’ heart like the Princess Puffer; if so, it could be explained that his sudden recovery of strength at the beginning of June 1869, as touched on above, was due to it. The cause of his death was announced ‘apoplexy’ officially by Beard, who had regarded ‘an attack of paralysis of his left side’ on 19 April 1869 as ‘possibly of apoplexy’ (Forster 2: 363); of Georgina, Forster, Charley, Mary, Kate, Henry and Dolby, none of them did refer to the diagnosis. 2 If he had died of apoplexy, he would have suffered a sudden loss of consciousness. 3 If so, could he have uttered, immediately before his falling heavily, some clear words like ‘Yes—on the ground’? Dickens might have taken too much laudanum an hour before the dinner, wishing to be released forever from his remorse and compunction. If it should have been so, it would not have been announced for the sake of Dickens’s honour, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall’s suicide in 1862 by laudanum was ruled accidental by the coroner as ‘under the law at the time suicide was both illegal and immoral and would have brought a scandal on the family as well,’ and as ‘suicide would bar Siddal from a Christian
cxviii burial’. 4
Notes 1 See _correct_first_ed.html>. 2 The archive of The Guardian 10 June 1870 says: ‘Mr Frank Beard, Mr Dickens's regular medical attendant, was at once telegraphed for, and arrived the same evening at Gadshill. He saw at once that Mr Dickens had been seized with apoplexy, and that the case was hopeless.’ See cxix of sudden loss of consciousness immediately preceding death and not a verified disease process. Sudden cardiac deaths, ruptured cerebral aneurysms, certain ruptured aortic aneurysms, and even heart attacks may have been referred to as apoplexy in the past.’ 4 See Conclusion Charles Dickens tried to be an earnest Christian man, but he committed a high sin by denying to the public the fact that he made Ellen Ternan his mistress, although some people were aware of it. The affair began in August 1857, and by August 1858 he made her his mistress. Since that time, he had been placed under the unrest and fear that his lies might be publicly disclosed at any time. After the love-affair he encountered many unexpected defeats; things incited his inner feeling of self-denial, and at last led him to undergo his spiritual conversion by September 1860, and to set about his individual ‘self-improvement.’ In around mid-1862 he sent Ellen to France due to her pregnancy, after which he, it seems, was disengaged from his uneasiness to some degree. The year 1865 changed his situation greatly; his diseases of foot and heart began, and Ellen returned to London where she would be easily noticed; besides, Fanny Ternan met Tom Trollope again, and she and Ellen were invited by his younger brother Anthony Trollope. Dickens resumed his public readings under bad condition cxx to cover his enormous expenses in April 1866; in the same month Fanny Ternan was employed as governess of Tom Trollope’s daughter Bice, marrying him in October 1866. The marriage, too, deteriorated Dickens’s situation much more: Fanny Ternan entered among friends severe to him like the Leweses, Anthony Trollope, etc.; Mrs. Fanny Trollope, and her husband as well, did turn hard and difficult to Dickens, and his privacy was more easily leaked out; certainly, the Gilbert Elliots could have grasped its detail through the Tom Trollopes in August 1867. Things could not help stimulating his compunction and feeling of self-denial; he, however exhausted, almost always took no rest despite doctors’ directions and friends’ advice, and wasted and wearied himself. He began to negotiate his Farewell readings in October 1867; by ‘Farewell’ he meant ‘Farewell to this life’: his obsession with death had changed into a reality inside him. He went on an American tour in November regardless of his poor health to get one of his last two earnings. Back in England in May 1868, he launched the Farewell Readings in October, and soon thought of the very wearing reading of the Sikes and Nancy murder scene in around mid-October. He would have shared Mariana’s desire for death at the end of October. He did not stop exhausting and wasting himself more by adding the murder scene to his repertoire from January 1869 on: he, who had recovered a sober Christian mind, had thought, it appears, of being ‘in sackcloth and ashes’ and of Thomas a Becket’s manner of life, cxxi ‘flogging him to punish himself ’ by February 1869. He was forced to stop his reading tour in April 1869 by his doctor; at the latest by then he had almost finished the preparation for his own death by rewriting his will. He began the twelve Farewell Readings in January 1870; his doctor was afraid that he might die of them. He wasted and wasted his failing body as if trying to realize his own feeling of self-denial. He could barely finish the Farewell Readings in March, saying Farewell to the public with gratitude. He wished to die in harness, but he couldn’t; his consistent behavior makes us believe so. He made a last revision of his last will and codicil on 2 June, and finished his ‘self-improvement’ by confessing all his sins, almost certainly, to Kate like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale on the pillory in the conservatory, an object of ‘positively the last improvement’ of Gad’s Hill Place, on the midnight of 5 June. Dickens fell unconscious wishing not for life but for death on 8 June 1870, and died without regaining his consciousness the next day: he, too much troubled by his remorse, denied his own existence himself. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Margaret Brown for giving me a great deal of accurate information on The Letters of Charles cxxii Dickens and to Laura Thompson (Tokyo) for improving the style of this paper though all responsibility belongs to me. References Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Minerva, 1991 Adrian, Arthur A. Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle. 1957. New York: Kraus, 1971 ---. Mark Lemon: First Editor of Punch. London: Oxford UP, 1966 Andrews, Malcolm. Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006 Aylmer, Felix. Dickens Incognito. London: Hart-Davis, 1959 Bowen, John. ‘Bebelle and “His Boots”: Dickens, Ellen Ternan and the Christmas Stories.’ Dickensian. Vol. 96, Winter 2000, pp. 197-208 Bowen, William Henry. Charles Dickens and His Family. Cambridge: Heffer, 1956 Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Victorian Temper. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981 Carlton, William J. ‘Dickens’s Forgotten Retreat in France,’ Dickensian. Vol. 62, May 1966, pp. 69-86 Carlyle, Thomas. Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 ---. Past and Present. London: Everyman, 1970 Clarke, William. The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins. Stroud: Sutton, 2004 cxxiii Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971 ---. Charles Dickens, The Public Readings. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975 Cross, F. L. and E. A. Livingstone, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985 Curnock, Nehemiah, ed. The Journal of The Rev. John Wesley, A.M. 8 vols. London: Epworth, 1938 Curry, George. Charles Dickens and Annie Fields. Henry E. Huntington Library, 1988 Rpt. the Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 51, Winter 1988 Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. London: Oxford UP, 1971 ---. Oliver Twist. New York: Norton, 1993 ---. The Old Curiosity Shop. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987 ---. The Christmas Stories. Ed. Glancy and Slater. London: Dent, 1996 ---. David Copperfield. Ed. Nina Burgis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983 ---. Bleak House. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ---. A Child’s History of England. London: Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d. ---. Hard Times. New York: Norton, 1966 ---. Little Dorrit. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ---. A Tale of Two Cities. London: Oxford UP, 1970 ---. Great Expectations. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975 ---. Our Mutual Friend. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 cxxiv ---. No Thoroughfare. Dramatic version: cxxv Hempstead: Harvester, 1988 Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman, n.d. (originally published in 3 vols., 1872-74) ---. Ed. J. W. T. Ley. London: Palmer 1928 ---. 2 vols. Ed. A. J. Hoppé. London: Everyman’s, 1969 ---. cxxvi n_of_christ.htm> Kent, Charles. Charles Dickens As A Reader. London: Chapman, 1872 Liddon, Henry Parry, D.D. Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey. London: Longmans, 1894 < http://anglicanhistory.org/pusey/liddon/> djvu.txt> Matsuoka, Mitsuharu. Hyper-Concordance: cxxvii Macmillan, 1988 Perugini, Kate. “‘‘Edwin Drood,’ and the Last Days of Charles Dickens.” Pall Mall Magazine. London: Routledge, Vol. XXXVII (June 1906): 642-54 POD, or The Pocket Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978 Robinson, Kenneth. Wilkie Collins. New York: Macmillan, 1952 Ruskin, John. Unto This Last. London: Everyman, 1968 Saito, Kuichi. “Trollope, Ellen Ternan, and Dickens.” OTSUKA REVIEW 39 (2003) cxxviii Ternant, Andrew De. “Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan.” Notes and Queries. CLXV, August 5, 1933, 87-88 Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman, The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. London: Penguin, 1991 Whitefield, George. Sermons of the Reverend George Whitefield: reformed.org/documents/Whitefield.html>. Wright, Thomas. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Jenkins, 1935 ---. Thomas Wright of Olney. London: Jenkins, 1936 Sources of images: Dickens Cornered Charles Dickens became infatuated with the 18-year-old actress Ellen Lawless Ternan through their performances of The Frozen Deep in August 1857; he made her his mistress, denying the fact to the public. He was separated from his wife Catherine, who blamed his flirtatiousness, in June 1858 cxxix after slandering her. These were serious sins. Some persons were aware of his mistress’s existence, among whom were George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Thomas (Tom) and Anthony Trollope; all these persons were cornering Dickens into a fix as a result, which will be revealed in the present paper. George Henry Lewes 1 Lewes’s severity—the first shock George Henry Lewes (1817-78), five years younger than Dickens, was one of Dickens’s old friends. Their first meeting dated back to December 1837, when Lewes, who had appreciated his works Pickwick Papers and Sketches, was invited to his home in Doughty Street (Ashton 24-5; Letters 1: 402-03n); since then they had been so friendly that Lewes joined Dickens’s Amateur Company in 1847 (Letters 5: xix, 696-97; Ashton 7). Their friendship, however, was broken off after a controversy over spontaneous combustion in 1853: Dickens killed off Krook, a drunken rag-and-bottle, by spontaneous combustion in Chapter XXXII (No. X, issued 1 Dec 1852) of the monthly published novel Bleak House. The combustion Lewes criticized openly in the Leader of 11 December 1852: ‘it is a fault in Art, and a fault in Literature […]. Spontaneous Combustion is not only a scientific error, […], but is absolutely impossible […].’ Dickens accused him in the next Chapter XXXIII (No. XI, 1 Jan 1853) by citing ‘authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such cxxx deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions.’ Lewes replied by refutation in the Leader, 15 January, 5 and 12 February (Letters 7: 22nn, 28nn; Ashton 144-45; Collins 274-75). This open criticism by Lewes was the first shock he gave to Dickens. Thus, Lewes rose publicly against Dickens without compromise in what he believed to be right; Lewes was indeed acute and severe, as Anthony Trollope, who counted Lewes one of his ‘dearest friends,’ regarded him as ‘the acutest critic I know,--and the severest’ (A. Trollope, Autobiography 130). After some exchanges of their private letters a temporary break ensued (cf. Letters 7: 28-33). 2 Lewes and Marian Evans Lewes, who was himself an illegitimate son, began a free-love marriage with Agnes Jervis in 1841 (Haight, GE 129). Yet he tired of the life when she had borne his friend Thornton Hunt three children by 1854 (Ashton 9, 55-56, 99, 330, 357-64; Haight, GE 131-32); he determined to separate from her in July 1854, and departed for Germany on 20 July with his friend Marian (Mary Ann) Evans, whom he had first met in October 1851 (Ashton 118, 147, 334; Haight, GE 127, 147-48; Letters 7: 399n). The news Dickens learned as early as 19 August 1854, and wrote, ‘I am perfectly astounded by the Lewes story, and have been immensely hot upon it’ (Letters 7: 399). In March 1855 Lewes returned to London with her; he, after cancelling his marriage with his wife, had a new home cxxxi with Evans first in Bayswater, London, on 18 April, and then in Clarence Row, East Sheen, Richmond, Surrey, on 2 May, openly bearing the name of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Lewes’ though exposed by gossip and sneer (Haight, GE 175-76, 179-81; Ashton 161, 172; Letters 7: 586n). Marian Evans was unreservedly satisfied with the ‘marriage,’ writing to her brother on 26 May 1857, ‘I have changed my name […]. My husband has been known to me for several years,’ and also to her family solicitor Holbeche on 13 June 1857, ‘Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond. [...] I have been his wife and have borne his name for nearly three years’ (Haight, GE 228, 232). 3 George Eliot—her contact with Dickens Marian Evans, being persuaded by Lewes to write a novel, began work on the first of three parts, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ on 23 September 1856, and she serialized the whole three parts in the monthly Maga, i.e., Blackwood’s Magazine in Jan-Nov, 1857 under the name of George Eliot (Haight, GE 206-07, 210, 607; Letters 8: 317n, 506n). The three parts were reprinted by John Blackwood with the title of Scenes of Clerical Life in two volumes on 5 January 1858. There were nine recipients of the copy, among whom was Dickens; he sent a letter of admiration of it to George Eliot by way of Blackwood on 18 January, asking her to show him ‘the face of the man or woman.’ Eliot cxxxii forwarded the letter to John Blackwood on 21 January, requiring him not to leak its contents to others and not to take off ‘the iron mask of [her] incognito,’ and expressing a hearty appreciation for Dickens’s warm sympathy and generous impulse in the letter (Letters 8: 506n). Thus the novelist George Eliot was produced by Lewes, and Eliot’s contact with Dickens was opened by her presentation of a copy to him. 4 The Leweses—a couple fearful to Dickens Both George Lewes and George Eliot were doubtless aware of Dickens’s private life; three grounds for proving it will be given next. First, rumours about Dickens and Ellen had spread through the Garrick Club and beyond, before he expressed his ‘PERSONAL’ statement in The Times for 7 June 1858 and Household Words for 12 June to deny ‘all the lately whispered rumours’ and to justify his separation (Letters 8: 744; Ashton 191); second, the rumours, as Reynolds's Weekly News reported in June 1858, had been ‘generally credited in literary and artistic circles.... The names of a female relative, and of a professional young lady, have both been, of late, so freely and intimately associated with that of Mr. Dickens’ (Letters 8: 745); third, Lewes could get some information on Ellen Ternan from one of his ‘dearest friends,’ Anthony Trollope, whose elder brother Thomas Adolphus Trollope had taken care of Ellen Ternan’s eldest sister Fanny Ternan by Dickens’s recommendation for one year from the end of September 1858 to September 1859 cxxxiii (Letters 8: 666-67 & nn, 687 & n; Letters 9: 124 & n; Letters 11: 158n, 226n, 260n; Tomalin 117, 127, 153; Nisbet 26). Such being the case, it could be probable that Dickens dreaded the acute and severe open couple ‘Mr. and Mrs. Lewes’ at heart. 5 Adam Bede—the second shock George Eliot completed her second work Adam Bede in January 1859, and it was published by Blackwood on 1 February. The novel soon became very popular; The Times reviewed it on 12 April, ‘It is a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art.’ Early in June it was reprinted in two volumes in Britain, on the Continent, and in America, and it was translated into German, Dutch, Hungarian, French, and Russian. Tolstoy read it in Russia on 11 October 1859, holding it as one of the examples of the ‘highest art.’ As to Gordon Haight, he refers to it as ‘taking precedence over A Tale of Two Cities and The Virginians’ (Haight, GE 272, 279). Adam Bede was presented to seven persons through Blackwood, among whom was Dickens (Letters 9: 92n; Haight, GE 273); Dickens, it is sure, could never read it without a shock, because he was to Ellen Ternan what the Old Squire’s handsome, kindhearted grandson Arthur Donnithorne was to the pretty young peasant girl Hetty (Hester Sorrel), and because Hetty, being lured by Arthur, bore an illegitimate baby, left it in a wood to die, was cxxxiv arrested for infanticide, and tried and sentenced to death. Adam Bede was a terrible story and a second shock to Dickens. As late as 10 July 1859 Dickens wrote a letter to George Eliot in acknowledgement of Adam Bede, Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life. [. . .] The conception of Hetty's character is so extraordinarily subtle and true, that I laid the book down fifty times, to shut my eyes and think about it. [. . .] And that part of the book which follow’s Hetty’s trial (and which I have observed to be not as widely understood as the rest), affected me far more than any other, and exalted my sympathy with the writer to its utmost height. You must not suppose that I am writing this to you. I have been saying it over and over again, here and elsewhere, until I feel in a ludicrously apologetic state for repeating myself on this paper. (Letters 9: 93) This letter allows us to surmise that Dickens, while reading Adam Bede, was connecting Ellen with Hetty with grave care, and to conjecture that Dickens wrote the letter on the supposition that George Eliot would know of his private life. George Eliot wrote to a friend on 26 July 1859 that Adam Bede occasioned in Dickens so deep an impact as to make an cxxxv epoch in his life: ‘I must tell you, in confidence, that Dickens has written to me the noblest, most touching words about “Adam” -- not hyperbolical compliments, but expressions of deep feeling. He says the reading made an epoch in his life’ (Letters 9: 93n). Distinctly, Adam Bede was a terrible story to Dickens, and could be so great a blow and shock to him as to shake him with a sense of sin. 6 Two rival weeklies—All the Year Round and Once a Week Dickens, without knowing George Eliot’s identity, invited her, care of Blackwood, at the end of April 1859 to write a new novel for his weekly All the Year Round (AYR), the substitute for Household Words, which he was launching after breaking with Mark Lemon and Frederick Evans in July 1858; the first issue of which he published on 30 April 1859. Dickens, who had reconciled with Lewes in the late 1850s, asked him to move her (Ashton 147, 203). Samuel Lucas, too, editor of Once a Week which Bradbury and Evans set up as the rival magazine of AYR, asked George Eliot to write a novel, and requested Lewes to urge her to do so around in June (Haight, GE 305, 311; Ashton 202, 207; Karl 316-17). Lucas published the first number of the new weekly on 5 July 1859; among the contributors was Lewes (Letters 9: 87n.), who had contributed neither to Household Words nor to AYR by this time, and would not in future (cf. Lohrli and Oppenlander). He could be said to have been friendly rather to Lucas than Dickens. cxxxvi 7 Lewes’s severity—the third shock It was as late as July 1859 that George Eliot announced herself as Marian Evans to the world; and within the month (i.e., July) she expressed an interest in Dickens’s proposal (Haight, GE 310; Letters 9: 55 & n, 92 & n). On the other hand, there took place in August 1859 a happening that made Dickens realize Lewes’s severity again: Dickens wrote two letters to him; one, on the 6th, in which he included the sentence, ‘I hope you and George Eliot will hold me in your kind remembrance’; and the other, on the 14th, which he, surprisingly enough, ended, ‘With kindest regard to Mrs. Lewes’ (Letters 9: 14, 105 & n; emphases added). It is clear that Dickens was directed to write not ‘George Eliot’ but ‘Mrs. Lewes.’ What disgraceful directions! This was the third shock to Dickens. He was obliged to stare at his own humbugging attitude and to ponder on his own sinfulness. Lewes was, indeed, acute and severe to him. The Leweses invited Dickens on 10 November 1859 to a dinner at their new home (since 11 February 1859), Holly Lodge, Wandsworth, London (Haight, GE 272, 292, 580, 589). Prior to Dickens’s arrival, Lewes had written to his three sons in Hofwyl School, Switzerland, a letter in which he mentioned George Eliot as their ‘mother’: ‘He [i.e. Dickens] is an intense admirer of your mother [i.e. George Eliot], whom he has never seen’ (Letters 9: 103-04, 151, 155n, 161n.; Haight, GE 311; Haight, “Dickens …” 172). The cxxxvii application of the word ‘mother’ to her was quite natural to Lewes, so he could have thought of Dickens as a humbug. 8 Lewes’s severity—the fourth shock Four days after the visit, i.e., 14 November 1859, Dickens repeated in a letter his request to Lewes for George Eliot’s new novel, which was to succeed Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White for AYR (Letters 9: 160-61; Haight, GE 311). Lewes wrote in his Journal on 15 November, ‘Dickens having written [i.e. to him] to ask Polly [George Eliot] if she could on her own terms write a story for “All the Year Round” we have turned the matter over and almost think it feasible’ (Letters 9: 160-61n). George Eliot’s Journal on 18 November was thus: ‘We have written to Dickens saying that Time is an unsurmountable obstacle to his proposition as he puts it’ (Haight, GE 311; Letters 9: 160-61n). Dickens wrote another letter dated 20 November to Lewes inquiring how much time Mrs. Lewes would want to write a new story for AYR, and even begged him, too, to write, in AYR, a paper charging the publisher T. C. Newby, who had announced Adam Bede, Junior. A Sequel as forthcoming in October (Letters 9: 168 & n; Haight, GE 313-14). Around this time, Samuel Lucas gave up inviting George Eliot to his Once a Week, because she would not accept the suggestion of £4,500 for a new novel by his publishers Messrs Bradbury & Evans (Letters 9: 160-61n; Haight, GE 317). As for Dickens, he could not but resign to invite her to AYR, either, because John Blackwood succeeded in making a cxxxviii contract with the Leweses by the end of November 1859 for her third work The Mill on the Floss, which George Eliot had worked on since January 1859 (Haight, GE 302, 314-17; Ashton 202). Lewes did not write a paper to charge Newby for AYR, either; it was for The Times for 2 December 1859 that he wrote it in George Eliot’s name (Letters 9: 168n.; Haight, GE 314). Here too Lewes was not favorable to Dickens. Thus Dickens was dispirited by the two consecutive blows Lewes gave him, which made the fourth shock to him. 9 Lewes’s severity—the fifth shock As mentioned above, Dickens had to resign his request to George Eliot, which he had made at the end of April 1859, for a new novel at the end of November 1859. Dickens, who had never abandoned the wish, was completely disheartened by Lewes, because Lewes told him through a letter of 13 February of ‘a postponement sine die’ of George Eliot’s new novel due to the tightness of the weekly installments. Dickens, to discuss it, called on Lewes on the next day, and asked her to follow Wilkie Collin’s novel in July 1860 (though serialized until 25 August 1860), but in vain (Letters 9: xii, 160, 168, 213; Haight, GE 311). Dickens was clearly declined; this was the fifth shock to him. George Eliot completed The Mill on the Floss on 21 March 1860, which Blackwood published in April 1860 (Ashton 202; Haight, GE 302, 321; Karl 335; Kitchel 197, 200). cxxxix She, who had already held a good impression of Dickens back on 10 November 1859 (Letters 9: 155n.), expressed her sincerity to Dickens by telling Blackwood, ‘I don’t mean to send the “Mill on the Floss” to any one, except to Dickens, who has behaved with a delicate kindness in a recent matter, which I wish to acknowledge’ (Haight, “Dickens .. ” 174). The presentation of The Mill on the Floss only to Dickens meant that she had no regard for anybody but Dickens; she was now filled with satisfactory self-confidence as a novelist although the very confidence was Lewes’s: it was he who raised her to that high place. The ‘sine die’ suggested the Leweses’ spiritual independence from Dickens as well. That presentation was the last to him. 10 The Leweses and Tom Trollope—the first meeting The Leweses went on their first Italian journey on 24 March 1860 to visit Villino Trollope in Florence, and met, at the end of May, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Adolphus Trollope, who had engaged Fanny Ternan as the companion-governess of their daughter Beatrice (Bice) for one year beginning in September 1858 (Thal 206, 273; Haight, GE 321, 325-26, 345). So the hosts and the guests could take up Dickens’s private affairs as one of their topics. The Leweses went then to Switzerland to see Lewes’s boys, who met their ‘mother’ George Eliot for the first time on 24 June (Ashton 206, 208, 335; Haight, GE 325-26, 329-30; Karl 340). cxl 11 Dickens’s conversion—a stimulus by Lewes As touched on above, the Leweses left for Italy on 24 March 1860. Dickens moved to Gad’s Hill in June 1860, setting Tavistock House for sale, and had the wedding service of his daughter Kate and Charles Collins on 17 July at the county church of Higham. Kate had wished her mother Catherine to join in, but she didn’t because Dickens had objected (Letters 9: 230 & n). Kate was ‘not in the least in love with’ her bridegroom; she only wanted to escape from her ‘unhappy home’; as for Dickens, he did not ‘desire the marriage’ (Storey 105-06; Adrian, Georgina .. 66). The service was carried out all right; after which the people present drove to Rochester and Chatham, and returned to Gad’s Hill for dinner at seven, when Kate was ‘crying bitterly on her father's shoulder, Mamie disolved [sic] in tears, Charlie as white as snow. No end of God Bless yous [sic]’ (Letters 9: 272 & n). The couple went off on honeymoon, and Dickens expressed a deep remorse, sobbing, ‘But for me, Katey would not have left home’ (Storey 106). Ten days after which, Dickens’s regret and sadness was doubled by his most reliable brother Alfred’s death after an illness of ‘some three weeks’ (Letters 9: 272, 276n, 277, 279, 280 & n, etc.). That remorse, regret and sadness in July 1860 were new blows to him. During the two years from June 1858 to that time he had already suffered from the disgraceful rumours and gossips about him and Ellen and had met with many defeats; and during the recent eight months from July 1859 cxli to February 1860 he had just been given the four great shocks by Lewes. It was in a letter of 8 August that Dickens wrote, ‘I am prowling about, meditating a new book.’ This very book was the rather autobiographical, conversional novel Great Expectations (Letters 9: 284). On 3 September he burnt ‘the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years’ in the field at Gad's Hill. This bonfire itself was a symbol of his spiritual ‘conversion’ in the sense of ‘a spiritual change from sinfulness, ungodliness, or worldliness to love of God and pursuit of holiness’ (OED): he had then attained the peak of his conversion. Now he was his own Scrooge, whom he had made undergo conversion in A Christmas Carol (1843), and about whom he had written in December 1852, ‘I converted Mr. Scrooge by teaching him that a Christian heart cannot be shut up in itself, but must live in the Past, The Present, and the Future, and must be a link of this great human chain, and must have sympathy with everything’ (Letters 6: 828). Who could believe that Dickens did not go through conversion when forced to gaze at his own high sin? Who could believe he did not ‘put [his] hand to [his] heart’ and did not repeat, ‘What have I done! What have I done!’ innumerable times in a low voice, just like Miss Havisham did (Great Expectations, Chs. XLIV and XLIX)? Who could believe he had not been converted, when he told the five of his sons (Sydney, Frank, Alfred, Edward and Henry) who gained independence from him in and after 1860: ‘if you cxlii humbly try to guide yourself by the beautiful new testament, you can never go wrong: also that I hope you will never omit under any circumstances to say a prayer by yourself night & morning’ which prayer includes ‘I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. […] Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. […] And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us.’? (Letters 11: 48; Letters 12: 734; see also Letters 12: 188, 202) Who could believe he could create, without conversion, the nobly great conversional Bildungsroman of Great Expectations? Who could believe he died without conversion? Incidentally, it should be pointed out that Sydney was the first to receive his father’s letter with his advice in it. He accepted the letter on 24 September 1860 at Portsmouth (cf. Letters 11: 316-18). Although we cannot find the letter today, the proof can be done by Dickens’s letter of ‘?28 MAY 1865’ to his fourth son Alfred: You know that I never interfere with the religious opinions of my children, preferring they should reflect for themselves, as they grow old enough to do so: but in parting from you, as in parting from Sydney & Frank I tell you that if you humbly try to guide yourself by the beautiful new testament […]. (Letters 11: 48) cxliii As for the second son Walter, we cannot find any evidence that he got the same admonition from his father; the reason, I am sure, is that his departure for India was on 20 July 1857, viz., one month before the final performance of The Frozen Deep. Dickens, after his inner conversion, continued to make efforts to ‘improve’ himself, as related in my essay titled ‘Dickens and Gad’s Hill Place.’ He thought, certainly, that to ‘improve’ himself was a way ‘to do right in everything,’ and that he believed ‘God will forgive us our sins and mistakes’ (Dickens, The Life .. 124-27). Later in a letter of 3 November 1861 Dickens depicted his wife Catherine as ‘his foolish mother,’ but it should be noticed that the description including ‘her [i.e., Bessie’s] hatred of the bride [i.e., Charley]’ was made in the paragraph of ‘a family joke’ (Letters 9: 494n). It must be added conclusively that the shocks to Dickens by Lewes worked as an indispensable stimulus to Dickens’s conversion. 12 Silas Marner—the sixth shock The Leweses returned to Holly Lodge in July 1860, and then moved to Harewood Square on 24 September (Haight, GE 332-34). Afterwards, the idea for Silas Marner occurred to George Eliot, and she finished writing its sixty-two pages by the end of November, publishing it by Blackwood on 2 April 1861. Soon The Times gave the novel a long discriminating review, and The Saturday Review placed cxliv George Eliot above Scott, Bulwer Lytton, and Dickens (Haight, GE 342). The Leweses’ self-confidence was made objective and real. George Eliot’s presentation of Silas Marner was made only to Lewes’s mother Mrs. John Willim (Haight, GE 340-41). There was no room any longer for Dickens in her mind; her intention was Lewes’s; he was really acute, severe, and even proud. Dickens was quitted by the Leweses. Silas Marner brought the sixth shock to him. 13 Lewes’s severity—the seventh shock Dickens, after giving up George Eliot’s contribution to AYR, seems to have written no letter to Lewes except for three dated 14 March 1863, 26 February 1870, and 1 March 1870, judging from The Letters of CD. Not that he broke off his relation with Lewes, he maintained ‘perfectly friendly terms’ with him (Haight, “Dickens …” 174); one of the proofs was that he was dropped in on by Lewes on 6 June 1866, viz., the day before his departure for a leisure trip with his wife Eliot to Germany (Ashton 234). Lewes, however, still remained acute and severe; he, it seems, used a word like ‘a humbug’ in a letter to Dickens, which we can know from the second letter dated 26 February 1870: ‘This is merely to express my hope that Mrs. Lewes and you will not consider me a humbug just yet. Between my readings, my book, my weekly journal . . . I am really hard put to it occasionally.’ The word ‘humbug’ was a very cxlv dishonorable one to Dickens; he often had used it for negative subjects in his works, as in ‘“Humbug!” said Scrooge’ (Christmas Carol), ‘the Deputy was a humbug’ (The Cricket on the Hearth), ‘that remarkable man and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown’ (Hard Times), etc. To the open couple the Leweses, who had tolerated the contempt and sneer of the public, Dickens was none other than a humbug. Dickens, who had gone through internal conversion in 1860, had come to be more and more conscious of his sin as time passed; in February when he wrote the letter, he was performing his public readings under very bad condition as if wishing to ‘die in harness.’ 14 Dickens cornered Three days after he asked the Leweses not to consider him ‘a humbug just yet,’ he wrote another and last letter to them; according to which he was to be invited to a regular lunch on 6 March 1870 by them. They, on Sunday afternoons, would welcome friends like Spencer, Mrs. Congreve, and A. Trollope for lunch to their home the Priory, Regent’s Park, where they had resided since November 1863 (Letters 12: 483 and n; Ashton 219, 251-53; Haight, GE 371-72, 389, 422, 406-07). At the table Dickens told them a ‘fine story of Lincoln’s dream’ (Letters 12: 483n): President Abraham Lincoln dreamed the same dream twice, on the days before battles unfavorable to the North. He, who had the dream one more cxlvi time, said prophetically on the following day in a cabinet council: ‘Gentlemen, something very extraordinary is going to happen, and that very soon,’ and on the very night, i.e., that of 14 April 1865, he was shot to death. This story Dickens told them ‘very finely’ with a ‘dreadfully shattered’ look, and ended it with ‘I am on a great broad rolling river-and I am in a boat-and I drift-and I drift!’ (Letters 12: 38-9; Haight, GE 422). Actually, it was he himself who was drifting: he had already written far back on 11 March 1861, ‘I seem to stop sometimes like a steamer in a storm, and deliberate whether I shall go on whirling, or go down’ (Letters 9: 391). ‘To be or not to be’ had been a real question to him. Three months after the Lincoln story he died; it is sure that Lewes’s acuteness and severity, as a result, had worked to drive Dickens into a fix. 15 Lewes’s severity—after Dickens’s death Lewes’s severity to Dickens was displayed even after Dickens’s death. John Forster published the first of his three-volume The Life of Charles Dickens in December 1871 (dated 1872), which was not well spoken of among some of Dickens’s old friends like G. H. Lewes, Wilkie Collins and Shirley Brooks (Punch’s editor). They talked, at the weekly Punch dinner on 7 December 1871, of Forster’s obtrusive way by which he produced it ‘without referring for help […] to others who had known Dickens well,’ and Lewes and Collins called it ‘Life of J. F. with notices of C.D.’ (Ashton cxlvii 256; Forster’s Life, ed. Ley 544; Collins 565; Gasson 62; Ford, Dickens and.. 161). Lewes desired to write not a review of Forster’s Life but Dickens himself (Ashton 256), yet he eventually wrote an essay of ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’ for the monthly magazine Fortnightly Review (XVII) for February 1872, of which Lewes was founder-editor in 1865 and of which his intimate friend Anthony Trollope was one of the founders. He was really severe to Dickens even after his death. In the essay Lewes mentioned that he felt ‘a shock’ in Dickens’s ‘collection of books’ on his first visit to his home of Doughty Street in 1837 because there were ‘none of the treasures of the bookstall,’ and also that he, on his second visit in 1840, found ‘no physiognomy in the collection’ in the library even if he saw ‘a goodly array of standard works’ in it (Haight, “Dickens ...” 166-67; Letters 1: 402-03n; Ford, The Dickens .. 69-70). Further, Lewes insisted in the essay that there could be detected in Dickens’s works ‘the action of the imagination in hallucination’ or ‘the action of the imagination’ happening in an imperfectly sane mind or ‘an animal intelligence, i.e., restricted to perceptions’ (Ford, The Dickens .. 59-61, 69; Collins 337-42, 569). This criticism which could not be necessarily considered as favorable to Dickens had been much inspired by the distinguished French critic Hippolyte Taine, who had commented back in 1856: ‘The imagination of Dickens is like that of monomaniacs. […]. Therefore Dickens is admirable in cxlviii the depicture of hallucinations. We see that he feels himself those of his characters, […] that he enters into their madness’ (Taine 2: 344). Furthermore, Lewes wrote about defects in Dickens’s works, too: ‘Their falsity [i.e., Dickens’s types’ falsity] was unnoticed in the blaze of their illumination. Every humbug seemed a Pecksniff, every nurse a Gamp, […].’ / ‘The drawing [of Dickens’s] is so vivid yet so incorrect, or else is so blurred and formless’ / ‘Dickens sees and feels, but the logic of feeling seems the only logic he can manage. Thought is strangely absent from his works.’ / ‘there was no physiognomy in the collection [of books]’ / ‘He still remained completely outside philosophy, science, and the higher literature’. (Ford, The Dickens .. 61, 64, 69, 70) All these critical references enraged John Forster (Forster’s Life, ed. Hoppé 2: 267-72; Ashton 256). Particularly by ‘Dickens sees and feels […]’ Lewes meant that Dickens was lacking in the qualities which George Eliot had richly (Ashton 257). Thus Lewes was acute and severe to Dickens even after his death; he was rather a rival than a friend of Dickens. Thomas Adolphus Trollope cxlix 1 Tom Trollope and Fanny Ternan—the first meeting The famous female writer Mrs. Frances Trollope (1780-1863) and her eldest son, the writer Thomas (Tom) Adolphus Trollope (1810-92), migrated to Florence, Italy, in 1843. Tom married Theodosia Garrow, a poet, musician and translator, in April 1848 (Letters 9: 55n), and bought a house on the Piazza Maria Antonia, Florence, which was to become known by the name of Villino Trollope or Villa Trollopino as a gathering place for men of letters like the Brownings and the Leweses (Letters 9: 35n). They received Fanny Ternan, who visited them to study music for a year with Dickens’s letter of commendation to Mrs. Frances Trollope dated 20 September 1858, and they got her a position as a companion-governess to their five-year-old daughter Beatrice (or Bice, 1853-81), as already referred to. Tom Trollope was begged to write for AYR by Dickens in April 1859; he presented the first contribution to the weekly for 4 July 1859, and became a warm friend of Dickens (Letters: 9: 35n, 55 and n, 66 and nn). 2 Tom and Lewes—the first meeting and intercourse It was at the end of May 1860 that the Tom Trollopes were called on by the Leweses for the first time, although they knew each other indirectly through Tom’s younger brother Anthony Trollope (Thal 206, 273; Haight, GE 321, 325-26, 345), and they were revisited by the Leweses in June cl 1861 (Haight, GE 345-48; Thal 206-15). It was the Tom Trollopes’ turn to make a visit to the Leweses, at Holly Lodge, London; they did on 12 December 1862, when they four enjoyed dinner together with Anthony Trollope and Arthur Helps (Haight, GE 371). In which they could have talked about Dickens’s private life. 3 Tom and Fanny Ternan—a reunion Tom Trollope, who lost his wife Theodosia in April 1865, moved to the Villa Ricorboli, outside Florence (Letters 9: 35n; Thal 216). In May he and his daughter Bice visited Anthony Trollope at Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, and stayed there until October. In the meantime Tom reunited with Fanny Ternan because Anthony Trollope arranged for her to be Bice’s music governess again though on alternate weekends (Tomalin 153-54). 4 The Anthony Trollopes and Ellen Ternan It was on 9 June 1865 that that shocking Staplehurst railway accident occurred; in which there were involved Mrs. Thomas Ternan, her daughter Ellen Ternan and Dickens, who all were on the way from France to London; Ellen was injured probably in one arm and shoulder (Letters 11: 53n). The mother and daughter were received at their home, Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, London, by Fanny Ternan with great surprise and worry. On the other hand, Tom and Anthony Trollope should have talked, perhaps with the Leweses, about Dickens’s and Ellen’s accidentally striking cli return, which should have been secret, and could derive much detailed information, not only on the accident but on Ellen’s covert life in France, from Fanny Ternan, who was then governess to Bice. Tom Trollope, after a five-month stay at Anthony’s house, returned in October 1865 to Italy with Bice, who promised to correspond with her governess (Tomalin 153-55). The Ternans moved from Houghton Place to nearby Lidlington Place, London, in the same October (Letters 9: 11n; Letters 11: 122n; Tomalin 156). At Christmas 1865 the Anthony Trollopes held, at their house Waltham House, a ball, at which Fanny Ternan joined with Ellen, who had been induced to attend by the intermediary of Fanny Ternan, and who we can conjecture had recovered from the injury of the railway accident (Letters 11: 260nn; Tomalin 154-56; Saito, “Trollope …”). The Anthony Trollopes, judging from the situation, almost certainly had been aware of Dickens’s relation with Ellen, although they had no or almost no contact with Dickens yet. At the ball both the sisters attracted notice, being ‘dressed quite alike in pale green silk’ with ‘scarlet geranium & white heath in [their] hair’ (Letters 11: 260n). Ellen had to be hidden from society; she should not have been in London; she was made to move to Elizabeth Cottage, Slough, Buckinghamshire, in January 1866 (Letters 11: 229n; Aylmer 44; Tomalin 157-58). Dickens was being cornered into a fix. clii 5 Dickens’s humoring of the Ternans Dickens had to prevent the Ternans’s feelings from parting from him, toward which he took some measures. Early in December 1865 Dickens approached Mrs. Ternan with the proposal that his close friend Charles Fechter, the actor and manager of the Lyceum, wanted her to appear on two dramas, in one of which Dickens was deeply involved. She, though having quitted the stage around in 1857 or 1858, gladly accepted and soon joined in rehearsing. The show was given from 11 January 1866 to June; and on the first night, all her three daughters went to see their mother play (Tomalin 156, 158; Nisbet 9; Letters 11: 122 & nn, 125 & nn, 132-33). It was almost surely after the Staplehurst accident in June 1865 that Dickens accepted Ellen’s visit to Gad’s Hill, where she visited ‘many times’ and was received by Georgina with ‘dearest Ellen’ (Tomalin 242; Morley 42; cf. Adrian 94 and Storey 127-28). Dickens offered Fanny Ternan contribution of two novels to AYR: one, The Tale of Aunt Margaret’s Trouble (anonymously published) from July 14 to August 18, 1866, for which he paid her a ‘relatively large sum of £75’ because of her being ‘the sister of Ellen Ternan, Dickens’s mistress.’ The novel was published in one volume by the AYR publishers, Chapman & Hall, in 1866, anonymously with ‘By a New Writer’ and the dedication to Ellen: ‘This Little Story is Affectionately Dedicated To E. L. T.’ (Letters 11: 217-18n, 224 & n). Fanny Ternan went on to contribute another cliii novel Mabel’s Progress (anonymously published) to the weekly for Apr 6 to Nov 2, 1867 (Oppenlander 174-75, 185-93; Letters 11: 221n; Nisbet 26). Ellen ‘enslaved’ Dickens (Storey 93); Fanny did, too. Thus Dickens, almost without doubt, was humoring the Ternans; he was being driven into a corner. 6 Tom and Fanny Ternan—marriage Fanny Ternan left England for Italy in April 1866 to be a full-time governess to Tom Trollope’s daughter Bice, aged 14 (Letters 11: 260n). Dickens could have expected that she might marry Tom; if she did, his private life might not be kept; or she might be alienated from him spiritually. It would be natural even if he had paid some such consideration when he had decided her contribution to AYR. Fanny Ternan married Tom Trollope, twenty-four years older, on 28 October 1866 in the British Embassy, Paris; the official witnesses were Anthony Trollope and Maria Ternan’s husband William Rowland Taylor; among the people present were Mrs. Thomas Ternan, her second daughter Maria Ternan, her third, Ellen Ternan, and Mrs. Anthony Trollope (Letters 6: 766n; Letters 8: 667n; Letters 9: 35n, 55n; Letters 11: 260 and n; Aylmer 94). It is worth remarking that the Anthony Trollopes reunited with Ellen Ternan there in the Embassy. Dickens wrote a letter of wedding congratulations to Tom Trollope on 2 November 1866, which Tom accepted as ‘one of the most warm-hearted’ (Letters 11: 405; Thal 158-59). The cliv marriage, however, meant that Fanny Ternan would be among people severe towards Dickens, like Anthony Trollope and Anthony’s close friend G. H. Lewes. 7 Ellen Ternan—‘the gigantic difficulty’ Things were, to be sure, changing. Ellen had some illness in May 1867, so Mrs. Tom Trollope (Fanny Trollope) visited her somewhat hurriedly at the end of May, and her husband Tom came a little later as well. But Ellen had been on her feet by the time her sister arrived (Tomalin 176). The Tom Trollopes were at Waltham House with the Anthony Trollopes (Tomalin 178). There was given a dinner party by Dickens on ‘Saturday,’ probably 26 May 1867, to which Tom Trollope and the Chapmans [i.e., Frederic Chapman, chief director of Chapman & Hall, and his wife] were invited; Tom’s wife Fanny would have been, too, as a matter of course, because Dickens’s daughter Mary and Frederic Chapman’s wife were; as to Anthony Trollope, he was also invited by Dickens through a letter, although the beginning and end of it cannot be read today for being cut off (Letters 11: 373 and n). It is unknown what was talked of at the party, but there can be almost no doubt that Ellen, who was to remove to Elizabeth Cottage about one month later, was one of the topics. Dickens wrote two letters with Ellen’s monogram at the top of each in June 1867. One was a long letter to William Wills dated 6 June, in which he expressed his resolution to go on an American reading tour to cover his great expenses clv despite the strong objections of Forster and Wills, who were both worried about his weak health, and in which he wrote that Ellen Ternan was ‘the gigantic difficulty’ concerning whether or not to take her there (Letters 11: xi, 375-77 & n). The other was a note dated 26 June to John Poole: ‘I will be with you tomorrow (Thursday) between 2 and 3.’ John Poole, a dramatist and miscellaneous author, had returned to England after a poor life in Paris for a few of the years around 1846, and had Dickens arrange a Civil List pension in 1850 (Letters 4: 672n; Letters 5: 107 & n; Letters 6: 116 & n, 233, 239-40, 245 and nn). Poole seems to have given him some help with ‘the gigantic difficulty.’ Ellen moved, on the very day, from Elizabeth Cottage, after a residence of only one year and a half, to Windsor Lodge, Peckham, Surrey, which was her fifth and final house in Dickens’s lifetime (Wright 239-41; Aylmer 40-41, 47; Letters 11: 229n; Letters 12: 161-62n).✴ The two letters with monologues suggest that Ellen was now a subject of ‘the gigantic difficulty’ to Dickens. ✴ The following are the houses and residence where Ellen lived during the 12 years from October 1858 to June 1870. ① No. 31 Berners Street, Oxford Street, London, from Oct 1858 to Mar 1859. (Letters 8: xvi, 433n, 666, 668 and n, 687 and n; Tomalin 79) ② No. 2 Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, N.W., London, from Mar 1859 to Oct 1865. (Ellen, in France from mid-1862 to June 1865) (Letters 9: xii footnote 3, 11n, 87, clvi 455) ③ Lidlington Place, Harrington Sq., London, from Oct 1865 to Jan 1866. (Letters 11: 122n) ④ Elizabeth Cottage, High St, Slough, Buckinghamshire, from Jan 1866 to June 1867. (Letters 11: 229n; Letters 12: 161n; Aylmer 44) ⑤ Windsor Lodge, Linden Grove, Nunhead, Peckham, Surrey, from June 1867 to June 1870. (Letters 12: 161n; Aylmer 44-45, 93-95; Tomalin 178) 8 The Tom Trollopes and Dickens—deterioration of relations The Tom Trollopes’ attitude to Dickens obviously had changed: eight days after Ellen’s removal, on 4 July 1867, when Mrs. Tom Trollope was still serializing Mabel’s Progress in AYR, Dickens wrote a letter to Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, in which he called the Ternan family the ‘magic circle,’ showed outspoken detestation to Mrs. T. T., i.e., ‘Mrs. Thomas Adolphus Trollope’ or ‘Ellen’s mother Mrs. Thomas Ternan,’ and even expressed the ‘fears of the Trollopes’ objections to CD’s liaison with Ellen; even more, perhaps, to their disapproval of the possibility of Ellen’s accompanying CD to America’ (Letters 11: 389-90n; Slater 424-25): The “magic circle” consists of but one member. I don't in the least care for Mrs. T. T. [...]. Of course you will be very strictly on your guard, if you see Tom Trollope -- or his wife -- or both -- to make no reference to me which either can piece into clvii any thing. She is infinitely sharper than the Serpent's Tooth. Mind that. (Letters 11: 389) Dickens not merely disliked but also dreaded Mrs. Tom Trollope as ‘infinitely sharper than the Serpent's Tooth.’ He, however, must not offend but conciliate her; Ellen had been her ‘pet’ since their first years of life (Tomalin 51, 247), so he, for instance, paid a ‘relatively large sum’ to her, as touched on above. Thus the Tom Trollopes turned a menace to Dickens, who was being cornered. 9 The Trollopes and Mrs. Gilbert Elliot Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, who received the letter in question, must be explained. She was called Frances Vickriss Dickinson (1820-98) by her maiden name, only child and heiress of Charles Dickinson of Farley Hill Court, Berkshire, married John Edward Geils in 1838, and won a full divorce in 1855 (Letters 8: 361n; Letters 11: 386n). She, a miscellaneous writer, was introduced to Dickens by Wilkie Collins in 1857, and appeared in the five performances of The Frozen Deep at Gallery of Illustration from 4 July to 8 August, 1857, including one before Queen Victoria on 4 July (Letters 8: xxiv, 361n, 412n.; Dexter 201); she had not done the play with the Ternans, whose performances were in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester on August 21, 22, and 24 (Letters 8: 412n). Afterwards, Mrs. Dickinson remarried the Rev. Gilbert Elliot (1800-91), Dean of Bristol (1850-91), twenty years clviii older than her and one of Dickens’s ‘old friends,’ as his second wife on 3 November 1863; his first wife had died in 1853 leaving two daughters while Mrs. Dickinson had four daughters by her first husband (Letters 6: 538n; Letters 8: 361n; Letters 10: 399; Letters 11: 389n; Letters 12: 387n). This marriage caused marital difficulties including a marriage settlement between man and wife; on which she asked Dickens for far more advice than her husband (Letters 10: 399; Letters 11: 389 & n; Letters 12: xv, 792, etc.). The Gilbert Elliots visited Dickens at Gad’s Hill Place on 9 July 1865 (Letters 11: 65). Before March 1866, Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, it appears, had asked him about Dickens’s ‘romance’ with Ellen; Dickens replied to her on 2 March, ‘As to my romance it belongs to my life and probably will only die out of the same with the proprietor’ (Letters 11: 166 & n). Afterwards she asked him to introduce Ellen, but Dickens declined it in the letter in question of 4 July 1867, for the reason that Ellen would not wish it. In August 1867, however, Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, who was an acquaintance of both the Tom Trollopes and the Anthony Trollopes, surprisingly enough, was visited at Farley Hill Court, Berkshire, by the Tom Trollopes, who were still staying with Anthony Trollope (Letters 8: xxiv, 361n, 412n; Letters 10: 399 & n; Letters 11: 218n, 386 & n, 387, 426 & n; Tomalin 177-78). Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, together with her husband, undoubtedly could be well informed about Dickens’s relation with Ellen. Privacy or secrecy in itself is smelled out little by little as time goes. Dickens was being clix cornered into a difficult position. 10 A gap—between the Tom Trollopes and Dickens Twenty-five days after he wrote to Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, i.e., on 29 July 1867, Dickens urged Tom Trollope to join in a farewell dinner party by letter (date unknown; perhaps someday between July 30 and August 2, 1867) in Regent Street for Dolby, who was to be dispatched to America on 3 August for a preliminary examination of the Reading tour (Letters 11: 378). Tom Trollope took part in it, and felt himself to be not ‘a “clubbable” man’ (Letters 11: 405; Thal 159). In 1869 Fanny Trollope became very friendly with George Eliot: in March 1869 the Tom Trollopes entertained the Leweses, who were on their fourth Italian journey, at the Villa Ricorboli for five days; after which, Mrs. Lewes wrote a long, friendly letter on 1 April to Mrs. Tom Trollope, the letter which enabled Tom Trollope to realize that ‘George Eliot had very quickly fraternized’ with her (Thal 216, 235-36; Haight, GE 414; Tomalin 187). Now Mrs. Tom Trollope could look up to the open couple ‘Mr. and Mrs. Lewes’ as a respectable one even if seeing Dickens with disrespect. It was in a letter of 26 February 1870, as already quoted above, that Dickens wrote to Lewes: ‘This is merely to express my hope that Mrs. Lewes and you will not consider me a humbug just yet.’ Thus the Tom Trollopes became by far more intimate with the Leweses, all the more for which Dickens could not help clx feeling forlorn, it could be possible. Anthony Trollope Anthony Trollope (1815-82) was Mrs. Frances Trollope’s fifth child; he began his career as a novelist in 1847 (Collins 322), parodied Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ in Ch. XV of his first novel of The Warden (January 1855), and wrote, in Dublin on 5 February 1856, a criticism of Ch. 10 of Little Dorrit, sending it to William Dixon, editor of the Athenaeum, with a result of rejection (Letters 8: 40n.; Hall 43-44 and n.); he wrote The Three Clerks in 1856 in which he contained what reads like an attack on the Circumlocution Office, publishing it in 1858 (Letters 8: 40n). Thus Anthony Trollope was originally unfavorable to Dickens. The first appearance of the name of Anthony Trollope in The Letters of CD is in a letter to Frederic Chapman of 11 June 1863, when Anthony Trollope had already published The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), and Framley Parsonage (1861), etc. (Letters 10: 258n) It was much later on 9 May 1867 that Dickens wrote him a letter for the first time according to The Letters of CD, and it is the only one we can find in it. Anthony Trollope became one of the stewards of the Farewell Dinner held on 29 September 1867 for Dickens’s American reading tour, and joined the Dinner with Bulwer-Lytton in the chair on 2 November since he, ‘having been asked,’ ‘did not like to refuse’ (Letters 11: xi, 457-58nn, 464-65n; Page 127, etc.; Tomalin 178; Fielding 368-69; Hall clxi 394, 397; Terry 149). While in America, he happened to see Dickens at the port Queenstown on 30 April 1868 when he, also a Post Office official, was going to come aboard in the Mail Tender; as for Dickens, he was about to start, on his ship Russia, the calling port Queenstown on the way from New York to Liverpool; they were in time to shake hands (Letters 12: 99 & n). Anthony Trollope was referred to by Dickens: ‘a perfect cordial to me, whenever and wherever I see him, as the heartiest and best of fellows,’ but it was in a letter of 6 May 1869 to Tom Trollope (Letters 12: 351). He, after Dickens’s death in 1870, expressed unreserved and unfriendly feelings towards Dickens in a letter dated 27 February 1872 to George Eliot and G. H. Lewes: Forsters [sic] first volume is distasteful to me,--as I was sure it would be. Dickens was no hero; he was a powerful, clever, humorous, and, in many respects, wise man; very ignorant, and thick-skinned, who had taught himself to be his own God, and to believe himself to be a sufficient God for all who came near him; --not a hero at all. (Hall 557; Saito “Trollope …”) In this way he criticized both Forster’s first volume of The Life of Charles Dickens and Dickens’s character the way Lewes did. Anthony Trollope, who took Lewes as one of his ‘dearest clxii friends,’ admired his essay ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’ as ‘the best analysis we have yet had of the genius of that wonderful man’ in an obituary of Lewes in Fortnightly Review for January 1879 (A. Trollope, Autobiography 130; Ashton 256). He published An Autobiography posthumously in 1883, in which he had placed Dickens after Thackeray and George Eliot: ‘I do not hesitate to name Thackeray the first’ and ‘At the present moment George Eliot is the first of English novelists’ (A. Trollope, Autobiography 202, 211; Terry 150; Davis 393). True, Anthony Trollope was ‘at best ambiguous, at worst antipathetic’ to Dickens (Terry 149). Critics of Dickens Dickens had a great number of ardent admirers not only of his novels but of his public readings and amateur theatricals; he, however, had severe, though mostly silent, critics due to his immorality in and after the year 1858. Robert Browning’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning reacted to the ‘PERSONAL’ statement in The Times for 7 June 1858, on 11 July: ‘What is this sad story about Dickens and his wife? Incompatibility of temper after twenty-three years of married life? What a plea!-Worse than irregularity of the passions it seems to me.’ (Letters 8: 597n) This would have been an average reaction to Dickens’s separation. Among the critics of him was ‘a very distinguished man,’ about whom Lewes wrote in his essay ‘Dickens in Relation to clxiii Criticism’ in 1872: ‘I heard a very distinguished man express measureless contempt for Dickens’ (Ford, The Dickens .. 57-58). Ada Nisbet introduced two critical views of Dickens which had appeared in August 1870 and April 1879 respectively: ‘he was guilty of an irreparable wrong, we say only what all men know, but which […] most men keep to themselves. The great novelist had an instructive as well as an educated hatred of shams; […] his whole life was, in a certain sense, a sham.’ (Nisbet 27, 83; Kitton 183; Cohen 28, 264),✲ and ‘It has been alleged against Dickens that he was guilty, not only of levity and unpardonable folly, but of absolute crimes—offences heinous in their character and in contravention of both human and divine laws.’ (Nisbet 27) † Was Dickens indifferent and nonchalant to such views? It could not be; he was a man of such delicacy as to create characters like Sydney Carton and Joseph Gargery, and a man of such noble mind as to create ones like Nell Trent and Amy Dorrit. The fact is that he had been so much afflicted and agonized with his remorse and compunction, and he died as a penitent Christian, not as a sinner. ✲ Ada Nisbet shows the source to be ‘Phrenological Journal (New York), LI, 104 (August, 1870)’ in note 11 of page 83, but this is wrong. The right source is ‘on page 144 of Packard's Monthly, under the heading, “The Lesson of Mr Dickens' Death”,’ which I owe to Matthew Dubord (UCLA) through “[email protected]” (the Charles Dickens clxiv Forum), an email bulletin board run by Prof. Patrick McCarthy. † Ada Nisbet shows the source to be ‘Arnold Quamoclit, “Charles Dickens as a Humaniser,” St. James’s Magazine, XLIV, 281,’ in which ‘281’ should be read ‘283.’ Conclusion Dickens, who had endured much dishonor and many defeats since June 1858, was given four mental shocks by Lewes, acute and severe by nature, during eight months from July 1859 to February 1860; further he had to tolerate two more causes of unhappiness, his daughter’s marriage and his brother’s death in July 1860. All these things were driving him into a fix, and they incited him finally to his wholehearted conversion around July and August in 1860. Tom Trollope took care of Fanny Ternan by Dickens’s commendation for one year from September in 1858, through which he became Dickens’s friend. Tom also became intimate with the Leweses during their first visit to him in 1860, their second in 1861, and the Tom Trollopes’ return visit in 1862. Tom, thus, became much friendlier with his brother Anthony’s close friend Lewes than with Dickens; so he could give him detailed information on Dickens’s private life which he could have gotten from Fanny. Tom, who had lost his wife in April 1865, reunited with Fanny Ternan at Anthony Trollope’s house and engaged her as Bice’s music governess again from May to October, 1865; in the meanwhile, viz., in June 1865, Ellen Ternan returned clxv to London with the shocking railway accident after a three-year hidden life in France. Fanny and Ellen were invited by Anthony Trollope, who was ‘antipathetic’ to Dickens, to a Christmas ball in 1865; at which they both attracted the public eye. Ellen had to be concealed from society; Dickens made her move outside London in January 1866. Fanny Ternan left for Italy in April 1866 to be Bice’s governess, and then married Tom in October. Afterwards the Tom Trollopes turned severe to Dickens: they, spiritually withdrawn from him, shared their feelings with the Anthony Trollopes and the Leweses. Dickens was being cornered. Dickens’s close friend Mrs. Gilbert Elliot, who had had interest in his ‘romance,’ could be well informed about Dickens’s private life by the Tom Trollopes’ visit to her in August 1867. Secrecy or privacy is to be leaked. The Tom Trollopes became by far friendlier with the Leweses in 1869; particularly Fanny Trollope and George Eliot could look at Dickens more indifferently and more severely. Dickens was given the seventh shock in 1870 by Lewes’s application of a word like ‘humbug’ to Dickens. Not only by these familiar persons but also by not a few acid, though mostly silent, persons who looked down on him, Dickens had been driven into a corner. clxvi Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Margaret Brown for giving me a great deal of accurate information on The Letters of Charles Dickens, and to Laura Thompson (Tokyo) for improving the style of this paper though all responsibility belongs to me. References Adrian, Arthur A. Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle. 1957. New York: Kraus, 1971 Ashton, Rosemary. G. H. Lewes, An Unconventional Victorian. London: Pimlico, 2000 Aylmer, Felix. Dickens Incognito. London: Hart-Davis, 1959 The Book of Common Prayer. Oxford: Oxford UP, n.d. Cohen, Jane R. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1980 Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971 Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z, The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark, 1999 Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Stories. Eds. Ruth Glancy and Michael Slater. London: Dent, 1996 ---. Bleak House. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ---. Hard Times. New York: Norton, 1966 ---. Great Expectations. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975 clxvii ---. The Life of Our Lord, Written Expressly For His Children by Charles Dickens. London: Associated Newspapers, 1934 ---. All works and concordance (PC’s search function): clxviii Notes by Andrew Lang. ---. Ed. J. W. T. Ley. London: Palmer 1928 ---. 2 vols. Ed. A. J. Hoppé. London: Everyman’s, 1969 ---. clxix Nisbet, Ada. Dickens and Ellen Ternan. Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California, 1952 OED, or The Oxford English Dictionary. Eds. Murray, James A. H., et al. Oxford: Clarendon, 1933, 1989 Oppenlander, Ella Ann. Dickens’ “All the Year Round”: Descriptive Index and Contributor List. New York: Whitston, 1984 Page, Norman. A Dickens Chronology. London: Macmillan, 1988 Saito, Kuichi. “Trollope, Ellen Ternan, and Dickens.” OTSUKA REVIEW 39 (2003) clxx Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews, introd. Michael Y. Mason. New York: Arno, 1981. See below: Sources of images: clxxi