What the Dickens
F.S.
Schwarzbach
- The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. VI:
1850-1852 edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson
and Nina Burgis
Oxford, 909 pp, £80.00, June 1988, ISBN 0 19 812617 4
On 25 May 1851 Dickens wrote no fewer than
11 letters – or perhaps it is better to say that 11 of those he wrote have
survived. Several were only a line or two, declining an invitation to a public
dinner at the Royal Literary Fund, thanking a theatre manager for the use of
the stage for rehearsals of his amateur players, and the like. But most were
substantial: a few involved business relating to the Guild of Literature and
Art, a sort of union and mutual aid society for authors that Dickens was then
busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David
Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up
his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by
Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report
to a Swiss friend he hadn’t seen in years and one more thanked a Scottish
author for sending a book of literary lectures. All in all, a busy but not an
untypical day.
These were three busy years, and productive
ones. As 1850 began, Dickens was halfway through David Copperfield, and
as 1852 ended half-done with Bleak House. In those same years he founded
and edited a weekly journal, Household Words, and wrote or collaborated
on about a hundred articles, essays and stories for it – nearly one a week.
Included among these were his Child’s History of England and several
long Christmas stories.
So much for writing. But Dickens was busy
in other ways as well, helping to found the Guild of Literature and Art, and
attempting to create for it an endowment by producing, directing and acting
lead roles in an ‘amateur’ theatrical company to give benefit performances for
it. The company was in fact all but professional, giving a private performance
for the Queen and public ones several times in London and on three provincial
tours (the last in seven cities). One of the two plays in the repertoire was a
farce Dickens co-authored for the occasion with Mark Lemon. All the while
Dickens continued his management of Urania Cottage, Angela Burdett Coutts’s
home for the reformation of prostitutes, supervising it daily on the most
minute matters. He was constantly visiting magistrate’s courts, prisons and
other likely places to interview prospective inmates, and appears to have vetted
every new woman personally. In 1852 he also began working with Miss Coutts to
purchase a site on which to erect cheap housing for working people, a project
which eventually developed into a large housing estate at Columbia Square in
Bethnal Green. (The name survives, but the buildings were demolished not long
ago.) And all the while there were speaking engagements.
This frenetic activity went on in the
midst of other important events in his life. Two children were born, the first,
Dora, dying suddenly at the age of eight months. Only a fortnight before that
his father, John Dickens, had died after enduring a horrifying surgical
operation (while his son looked on) without the benefit of anesthesia. His wife
suffered for some time from a ‘nervous’ condition, perhaps post-natal
depression, or perhaps simply exhaustion. In 1851 he moved house, which
involved virtually gutting and reconstructing the new residence in Tavistock
Square, where the offices of the London Review now stand. Dickens wrote
almost daily for weeks to provide his instructions (including construction of a
cold shower). And, as 1852 drew to a close, three of his closest friends
died.
There were also, inter alia,
Dickens’s pastimes: constant visits to the theatre (marathon programmes then,
which might last five or six hours); visits to friends’ homes round the
country; longer excursions to Paris; family removals to Broadstairs or Dover in
the summer; tours of schools, factories or other places that might be worked up
into a Household Words article; increasingly grand formal dinners at
home (Mrs Gaskell reported that she dined off gold plate at Tavistock House);
and, always, the long walks, often at night. One such jaunt he proposed to a
friend was to include Hendon and Highgate and back again, a circuit of about
twenty statute miles, hardly an unusual distance for him. Such a round of
recreational activities might have killed a lesser spirit – for Dickens they
were relief from the rigours of writing.
And somehow Dickens also found the time to
write the 1600 letters collected here, 641 published for the first time, others
reprinted from obscure periodicals, and the texts of many significantly
corrected. This latest instalment of the Pilgrim Letters is as
meticulously edited, copiously annotated and faultlessly produced as its
predecessors:
Nearly half of the 14,000 letters known to
the Pilgrim editors are now in print. Do these letters give us an entirely new
Dickens? The answer is, in the main, no. The great revelation, about his
mistress Ellen Ternan, came in the Thirties, and while many other bits and
pieces of information are emerging in the Pilgrim, there has been nothing of
equal importance since. That is not to say that there is nothing of
biographical importance here. For one thing, never before have we had so
powerful a sense of that frenetic activity of his. Take, for example, those
amateur theatricals. Dickens handled everything, from selecting the plays,
editing them for performance, casting the roles, choosing the music, designing
the theatre (a prefabricated stage that could be erected in any large open
room), finding costumes, arranging rehearsals and directing at them.
This before a single performance
had taken place. During the performances he was no less in command. As he wrote
to an old acquaintance during one of the tours, explaining why he could not get
away for a short friendly visit: ‘I am on the stage all day, rehearsing with
everybody, from breakfast until dinner. I preside at all the meals ... and carve
all the large joints. We carry into the country a perfect army of carpenters,
gasmen, tailors, barbers, property-men, dressers, and servants; all of whom
have become accustomed to do everything with the utmost precision and accuracy
under the Magisterial eye, but none of whom would do anything right, if that
luminary were withdrawn from any of them for five minutes at a stretch.’ In
addition, he went on, he had personally to see dozens of disappointed
‘impossible people’ demanding seats which were already all sold, and
perform himself, playing two parts he reckoned longer ‘than the whole play of
Hamlet’ and involving 14 changes of costume. And Dickens was also at this
very moment writing and publishing the monthly parts of Bleak House,
continuing his editorial labours on Household Worlds, and running Urania
Cottage.
How can anyone have done so much? Part of
the answer is by being very, very orderly in his working habits. Thus the great
distress occasioned by moving house: ‘You may faintly picture to yourself how
low this makes the undersigned,’ he wrote a friend during the worst of it, ‘who
is accustomed to keep everying belonging to him in a place of its own, and to
sit in the midst of a system of Order.’ So disrupted were his working habits
that the publication of Bleak House was pushed back from summer 1851 to
February 1852. His usual routine seems to have been to work from breakfast
until two in the afternoon, and only when absolutely necessary did he deny
himself the pleasures of evening company or entertainment.
If that explains the how of it, we are
still left to puzzle out the why. It takes no great psychological perspicacity
to see that the obsession with order was closely related to a passion for
control. The two went hand in hand: perhaps he realised this, referring to
himself in one letter as ‘the Punctual Inimitable B[oz]’, orderly and
irresistible all at once. Beginning to plan still another amateur theatrical
event, he wrote: ‘I am in the business, heart and soul ... I wouldn’t go into
such a thing – or anything – halfway ... for any earthly consideration.’
Whatever he did he did with furious passion, and there could be no project he
collaborated on of which he was not master.
The letters hint that he kept so busy to
fend off the demons that idleness might let loose. One of the most remarkable
series of letters is to Emmely Gotschalk, evidently a young Danish woman about
whom nothing else is known. We can guess from the letters that she wrote to
Dickens expressing despair and gloom about life, religion and herself. For some
reason Dickens let down his guard writing to her, and admits that her own
morbid journeys touch closely upon ground he too had trod. So, in one, he
advises: ‘If we all sat down to brood on death, this scene of Duty would become
a dismal place ... I apprehend it is because we are placed here to work (all of
us in our spheres of action can work, whatever those spheres be) that it
is so natural to us to dismiss the contemplation of that end that must come in
the fullness of God’s time ... Action, in an earnest spirit, is the refuge from
Gloomy thoughts.’
Dickens has always, at least since
Forster’s great biography in the 1870s, seemed larger than life, and now when
the Pilgrim is complete he will probably seem larger still. We are not, these
days, much disposed to admire imperial egos like his, more likely to see them
as monstrous than as laudable. Yet the man we see here is one more tormented
than we have been used to think, and for that reason more sympathetic as well.
What the complete Letters does to
change our understanding of Dickens’s fiction is another matter. If the
standard against which all literary correspondence must be judged is Keats’s
letters, then Dickens’s are barely even second-rate. He hardly ever discusses
his writing, except either to complain about not having the time to do it, or
being unable to do it even though he has the time, or (more rarely) exclaiming
that he has written something and it is extremely nice, or the best thing yet, or
something equally vague. Talking about others’ writing, he is not much better:
he can be quite precise about specific changes to improve a tale or essay, but
when discussing writing in the abstract he usually falls back on cliché. Trying
to pressure Mrs Gaskell into changing the ending of a ghost story she’d written
for Household Words, he thunders: ‘I have no doubt, according to every
principle of art that is known to me from Shakespeare downwards, that you
weaken the terror of the story’ – by not accepting his revisions. Anyone
looking for Jamesian metacritical discourse will be very disappointed.
Between the lines, however, there’s
evidence of how the stuff of daily life found its way into the fiction. The
gestation period of Bleak House, prolonged beyond his intentions by the
delayed move to Tavistock Square, is a case in point. A good example of how his
mind digested and finally used such material is his response over time to the Report
on a General Scheme for Extramural Sepulture, issued by Chadwick’s General
Board of Health and given him by his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, a sanitary
engineer. The document presented yet again the horrors of overcrowded urban
graveyards, a subject with which Dickens was familiar, having the magnum
opus of G.A. Walker (‘Walker of the Graveyards’) already on his
bookshelves. On 27 February 1850 he thanks Austin for it, calls it
‘extraordinarily interesting’, and adds: ‘I began to read it last night in bed
– and dreamed of putefraction [sic] generally.’ He must, however, have
passed it on to his sub-editor on Household Words, W.H. Wills, who in
March incorporated material from it in an essay for the magazine. Some months
later, in the manuscript of Chapter 54 of Copperfield, Dickens mentioned
that Betsey Trotwood’s husband was interred in the burial-ground of St Martin’s
in the Fields, one of those overcrowded (though then already disused) church
graveyards; he changed it before publication to a suburban cemetery in Hornsey.
But by the time Bleak House was
under way two years later, urban graveyards had moved to the very centre of his
fictional imagination. That same burial-ground off Drury Lane serves in the
novel as the type of all such horrors, and one of many symbols of the neglect
of pressing social problems by all duly constituted authorities. Here the body
of Nemo, Lady Dedlock’s former lover and Esther Summerson’s father, is shoved
into a fetid, corpse-filled ditch, only to fester into the source of the
infection which strikes Jo and Lady Dedlock dead and scars Esther permanently.
In the meantime other bits and pieces had been fitted to the puzzle: a visit to
a Ragged School, and seeing there a dying boy, was probably the germ of the
idea of Jo; Miss Coutts’s plan to erect decent housing in the East End lay behind
some of the descriptions of indecent slum housing in Tom-all-Alone’s; and the
deaths of his daughter and father involved him personally in the scandalous
state of London’s cemeteries. Yet, for all the fascination there is in tracing
the way in which the events of quotidian life ended in the novels, there is
nothing in the letters that Dickens wrote to suggest anything of the power and
genius of the books that he wrote.
There are nonetheless several interesting
new letters in the volume which do bear upon writing itself. Having been shown
a volume of poems with a long explanatory preface, he doubted the ‘expediency’
of explaining the verse before presenting it: ‘His writing should explain
itself; rest manfully and calmly on its knowledge of itself; and express
whatever intention and purpose are in him.’ Rejecting a story for Household
Words, he remarks of the characters: ‘It is not enough to say that they
were this, or that. They must show it for themselves.’ He counselled a would-be
writer that ‘Fiction’ could not ‘be written easily. Patience, attention,
seclusion, consideration, courage to reject what comes uppermost, and to try
for something better below it’, were necessary. Finally, in response to
complaints about what were termed frivolous attacks on charities in Bleak
House, he wrote ‘Pray do not ... be induced to suppose that I ever write
merely to amuse, or without an object ... Without it, my pursuit – and the
steadiness, patience, seclusion, regularity, hard work, and self-concentration,
it demands – would be utterly worthless to me. I should die at the oar, and
could die a more contemptible and worthless death in no man’s eyes than my
own.’
London Review of Books
Vol.
12 No. 7 · 5 April 1990 » F.S. Schwarzbach » What the Dickens, pages
17-19
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v12/n07/fs-schwarzbach/what-the-dickens/print
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