Simply Dickens

Paul Schlicke

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• ISBN:
  9781943657025
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Oliver Twist. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield. Bleak House. A Tale of Two Cities. GreatExpectations. The novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) read like a "Who's Who" of canonical works. Yet, less well known is the fact that Dickens himself was something of a created character, a larger-than-life figure who lived through his art and pursued his many passions with a theatrical zeal that could have belonged to one of his famous protagonists.

Largely self-taught, with little formal education, Dickens was catapulted to fame at the age of 24 with the publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1836. For the next 30 years, he wrote a prodigious number of novels, short stories, essays and other works, while simultaneously campaigning for a variety of social reforms. As Simply Dickens colorfully describes, in life and in art, Dickens threw himself into everything he undertook—from taking on the personalities of his characters as he wrote, to pursuing such causes as children's rights and universal education.

While some authors have depicted Dickens as a tormented soul or cruel misogynist who compromised his work by pandering to a wide audience, Simply Dickens convincingly shows him as a purposeful, supremely talented, and versatile personality, whose popular appeal was central to his achievement.

5

Memory and Growth: Dickens in the 1840s

In the decade following the shock of his American experience, Dickens undertook a searching revaluation of his role as a popular author, clarifying his central beliefs and introducing radical innovation in his artistry. Although never one for passively adapting traditions he inherited, and only rarely reprising materials he had previously used, the 1840s marked a radical shift of gears, as he achieved new levels of complexity and excellence in his craft. This stock-taking involved painful meditation on events from his past, a coming to terms with the hardships and frustrations he had undergone, and—if not an exorcism of his demons—at least a new ability to draw on his past with consummate creativity.

Martin Chuzzlewit, the novel he wrote after his return from North America, marked a new beginning in several ways. Focusing on a variety of manifestations of selfishness, Chuzzlewit was the first of his novels to place thematic unity at its core. With all of the characters, both in England and North America, Dickens worked, for the first time, variations on a central motif, making it a structural principle. We have already seen how he introduced an array of American characters, each defined by narrow-minded, prejudiced egotism; similarly, all of the Chuzzlewit clan were motivated by self-aggrandizement: Mrs. Gamp was cocooned in a solipsistic world of her own; Mr. Pecksniff thrived complacently in an utterly specious self-image as a moral exemplar; and even poor Tom Pinch—a prime instance of critic and novelist Chesterton’s observation that Dickens had a tendency to treat his characters as guests—was marked by his complete lack of self-interest.

Young Martin represented another departure for Dickens—a character whose moral growth was central to the author’s conception. Previous protagonists—Oliver, Nell, Barnaby—utterly lacked inner development; Mr. Pickwick was minimally defined by the education he received from Sam Weller and his incarceration in the Fleet Prison, and even Nicholas Nickleby experienced only perfunctory growth in worldly wisdom as a result of his adventures. Oliver and Nell were both static embodiments of the “principle of good” (as Dickens described Oliver in his Preface), and Barnaby’s addled brain left him incapable of development. But young Martin, who started out impervious to the feelings of others, learned from his experience in Eden to look beyond his personal concerns. His moral development was scarcely one of Dickens’s great achievements, but it pointed the way to a new concern with the evolving inner lives of his characters, which distinguished all of Dickens’s later fiction.

On the other hand, the book’s triumph rested on two characters who were quite impervious to change. William Hazlitt, writing a generation before Dickens and thinking of Don Quixote, suggested that a particularly rich vein of comedy occurred in “consistency in absurdity;” a method, which he called “keeping in comic character.” “That reason and good sense,” he wrote, “should be consistent, is not wonderful: but that caprice, and whim, and fantastical prejudice, should be uniform and infallible in their results, is the surprising thing.” This description accurately identified the source of hilarity aroused by the characterizations of Pecksniff and Gamp, and later of Mr. Micawber and Flora Finching. Dickens delighted in placing Pecksniff’s absurd urbanity in situations where it seemed impossible for the character not to be flustered. In chapter 20, for example, the monthly part ended with old Martin (whom Pecksniff was trying to bilk) arriving at Pecksniff’s door, at just the moment when the house was in chaos because Jonas Chuzzlewit had proposed to the wrong daughter. By switching in the next serial number to events in North America, Dickens kept first readers on the edge of their seats for two whole months, wondering how Pecksniff coped. Again, in the story’s conclusion, when his rascality was publicly exposed, Pecksniff reacted by forgiving old Martin for knocking him down. Mrs. Gamp, likewise, buttressed her own comfort by incessantly quoting paeans of praise from her imaginary friend and admirer Mrs. Harris, and she rose magnificently from the shock of Betsy Prig’s apostasy: when her crony announced that she ‘don’t believe there’s no sich a person!’ Mrs. Gamp solemnly responded:

“Wot I have took from Betsey Prig this blessed night, no mortial creetur knows! If she had abuged me, bein’ in liquor, which I thought I smelt her wen she come, but could not so believe, not bein’ used myself”—Mrs Gamp, by the way, was pretty far gone, and the fragrance of the teapot [filled with gin] was strong in the room—“I could have bore it with a thankful art. But the words she spoke of Mrs Harris, lambs could not forgive. No, Betsey!” said Mrs Gamp, in a violent burst of feeling, “nor worms forget!”

Dickens was confident that Chuzzlewit was “in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories,” but sales were poor—whether from his extended absence from public view, the economic hardship in the country, or some other possible causes. When his publisher William Hall ill-advisedly hinted that the author might, in consequence, have to take a pay-cut, Dickens became furious, and resolved to break away from the firm he had not long previously described as “the best of booksellers past, present, or to come.” He initiated a new arrangement with Bradbury and Evans, who had up to then worked as printers only, and made a lucrative contract with them. His determination to change publishers was reinforced when the sumptuous production of A Christmas Carol that winter, with color plates and gold embossing, meant that despite vigorous sales, profits from that work were much lower than he anticipated.

Dickens interrupted work on Chuzzlewit to write the Carol, which, upon its publication in December 1843, immediately became one of his best-loved works, endlessly reprinted and adapted. Although he had written about the festive season previously, in one of the Sketches by Boz, and again in the “Story of the Goblins Who Stole Christmas” (one of the inset tales in Pickwick), it was the Carol that had irrevocably established his association with Christmas in the public mind. It is the best work he ever wrote: comic, pathetic, hard-hitting, simultaneously fanciful, realistic, and perfectly poised in structure and tone. It dramatizes the joys of cheerful conviviality and encapsulates the central pillar of his philosophy, which is the necessity of selfless fellow feeling. This little book also marks a crucial development in Dickens’s thinking: a growing conviction that by facing the sorrows and hardships of one’s past, a person gains self-understanding. When the miser Scrooge is taken back by the first of the three spirits to his own lonely boyhood, the tears he sheds on seeing his former self, cleanses his soul and, by teaching him the value of love for others, brings him happiness. Wisdom and maturity, Dickens shows, depend on a living sense of one’s own past. He encapsulated that belief in the motto of one of his later Christmas books, The Haunted Man, in which he wrote, “Lord keep my memory green.”

After the Carol, Dickens wrote four more Christmas books: The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and the above-mentioned The Haunted Man (1848). These books consolidated the association of Dickens’s name with Christmas and evolved into the Christmas stories, an annual feature of his periodicals, a special issue containing a series of short stories by several authors, written for (rather than about) Christmas, in a framework devised by Dickens. While the Carol was both for and about Christmas, the later Christmas books and stories were tales for Christmas only, and none captured the celebratory mood so exquisitely as the depiction of Fezziwig’s ball, the dinner at the Cratchits, and games at the house of Scrooge’s nephew. For Dickens’s readers, these later works did not evoke the meaning of Yuletide quite as emphatically as the Carol did.

Following his sojourn in Italy, and his brief stint as editor of the Daily News, Dickens returned to Switzerland, where he began work on Dombey and Son, generally seen as the commencement of his full maturity as a novelist. Like Chuzzlewit, it is centered on a “leading idea,” but while Chuzzlewit simply worked variations on a theme, Dombey was the first of Dickens’s novels to be governed by a narrative structure, which developed a strong, overarching theme—in this case, pride. Not coincidentally, it was also the first of Dickens’s novels for which detailed working notes setting forth his plans for the entire book have survived to this day. The full title of the work pointed to its purpose: Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation. Dickens was concerned with dramatizing the consequences of trying to organize one’s personal life along business principles, and the novel showed the results to be disastrous. The story begins with Mr. Dombey welcoming his newborn son, Paul, into the world as the heir to the firm of Dombey and Son. When, a quarter of the way into the tale, Paul dies, Dombey sets out to find a new wife (the previous one having died during childbirth)—not as a companion, but as a functional necessity for the production of a new heir. The collapse of that marriage signals the ruin of Dombey’s business, and it is left to his daughter Florence, who was neglected and abused from the start, to nurture him back to life on a new, domestic basis.

The novel was vigorously engaged with one of the principal industrial events of the day, namely, the coming of the railway. In the decade and a half since the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, over 1500 miles of track had been laid in the United Kingdom, and an extra 2500 miles sanctioned. The speed, noise, smoke, and upheaval—vividly evoked in Dickens’s description of Staggs’s Gardens—made the railway a vivid symbol of the radical physical, social, economic, and psychological transformation. As Kathleen Tillotson, one of the most distinguished Victorian scholars pointed out, Dombey was the first of Dickens’s novels to confront social issues not as specific, remediable wrongs, but with “a pervasive unease” about the very fabric of society. The railway brought new prosperity to the Toodles family, but it also precipitated Carker’s violent death.

In this novel, the mercantile themes are interwoven with gender issues, both erotic and filial. The subplot dealing with the prostitute Alice Marwood is explicitly sexual, but Carker’s attempted seduction of Edith Dombey owes more to his rivalry with his employer than to sex. Far more important is the contrast between nurturing femininity—introduced in the person of Polly Toodle, hired as a wet nurse to keep the infant Paul alive—and the male energies represented by Mr. Dombey. In the final reconciliation of Dombey with Florence, she places his head gently upon her breast—the very breast, which, in frustrated outrage, he had previously struck and bruised. In Dickens’s mind, feminine values are important for humanity. They are seen most overtly in the love of little Paul and Florence, and more complexly in the relationship between Florence and Edith. Men such as Walter Gay and Sol Gills share these values, whereas their absence is depicted in “good” Mrs. Brown, in Mrs. Chick, and in Mrs. Skewton.

Dickens articulated these values in a delicate balance between realism and fairy tale. The latter is evident not only in the miraculous survival of Walter Gay and the happy reconciliation of father and daughter—and the dog, which Dickens remembered at the last minute to include in the finale—but also in the character of the ogress Mrs. Pipchin. The latter was drawn from the real life Dickens told Forster, recollecting his landlady in the blacking warehouse days. Memories of his childhood inspired one of the book’s triumphs—the depiction of Paul’s final days as seen through his own eyes. Whereas Dickens had invited us to look at Little Nell’s sufferings, with Paul we look through the child’s vision as his life ebbed away. Famously, Dickens’s fellow novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, at work on his masterpiece Vanity Fair at the time, read the chapter presenting Paul’s death and exclaimed, “There’s no writing against such power as this—one has no chance . . . it is unsurpassed—it is stupendous.”

At some point during those years, Dickens began to write an autobiography. He wrote happily about his childhood in Chatham, anxiously about his father’s financial troubles, and bravely about his own employment in the blacking warehouse, but when he came to recall his failed romance with Maria Beadnell, he abandoned the project. He gave the unfinished manuscript to Forster, who preserved it and reprinted portions of it in his Life, published two years after Dickens’s death. There for the first time Dickens’s public, and even his friends and closest family, learned of his employment in the blacking warehouse and discovered the source of his growing conviction about the importance of facing one’s past. The significance of Dickens’s attempt at penning his autobiography cannot be overstated: not only because his experiences offered the key to essential traits of his character—a deeply mixed attitude to his parents, shyness in close relationships, profound insecurity about his social respectability, terror of financial failure, and iron determination to succeed—but also due to his belief that facing and overcoming hardships tempered the character.

Several momentous results followed directly from this retrospection and revaluation to which the autobiographical fragment attests. The first was a return to Dickens’s earlier ambition to edit a periodical miscellany. Secondly, he wanted to give public readings from his works. The third was a project to publish an inexpensive collected edition of his works. An explicit statement of the vital importance of facing one’s sorrows, as exemplified in The Haunted Man, followed. And finally, on Forster’s suggestion, a decision to transform Dickens’s unfinished autobiography into a fictionalized account of his childhood and adolescence in a first-person narration took shape.

What happened to all these plans? Despite the setbacks he suffered while editing Bentley’s Miscellany, Master Humphrey’s Clock, and the Daily News, Dickens continued to aspire to conduct a periodical journal. In 1845, he wrote to Forster, outlining the idea for a weekly miscellany to be called The Cricket: “Carol philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, jolly good temper, papers always in season, pat to the time of year; and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference to everything to Home, and Fireside.” Nothing came of this idea, save the title for that year’s Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth. Four years later, he tried again with a revised proposal for a periodical, this time, to be organized around the idea of a “cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow.” Once more, the idea was for a weekly miscellany, partly original, partly select, with emphasis on variety. As before, nothing came of it until 1850, when he finally launched Household Words, which continued, with a modulation into All the Year Round in 1859, until long after Dickens’s death.

Regarding his second plan, it was during the writing of Dombey that Dickens first proposed giving public readings of his works. “I was thinking the other day,” he wrote to Forster, “that in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Dickens
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Cast of Characters
• “Almost a little vagabond”
• Here Comes Boz!
• Boz as Editor
• Dickens the Traveler
• Memory and Growth: Dickens in the 1840s
• Dickens as Editor – Continued
• Dickens as Social Activist
• At the height of his powers
• New love
• Splendid strolling: The public readings
• Last works
• Coda: The Inimitable Boz
• Note on Sources
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher