Charles Dickens: A Life (21 page)

So great was Dickens’s admiration for Talfourd that he made him the dedicatee of
The Pickwick Papers
when it appeared in volume form in November 1837. A dedication was a show of affection and respect, and also a gesture that cheered Dickens when he came to the end of a long book. He did not like parting with the characters whose voices and idiosyncrasies had filled his life for so many months, mourned for them when he reached the end, and said so at the conclusion of
Pickwick
: ‘It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art.’
⁵
It is also true that Dickens kept his characters alive in his imagination for the rest of his life.

The death of William IV in June and the accession to the throne of his niece, Princess Victoria, passed pretty well unnoticed by Dickens, hard at work on his two novels again. He took Forster on a tour of Newgate: a prison visit was a ritual to share with a friend. In July he made a rapid cross-Channel trip with Catherine and his illustrator Hablot Browne, visiting Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp. He had to be back in time for his sister Letitia’s wedding to Henry Austin, and for dinner on 11 July at Macready’s, where he met the philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill. Mill wrote to a friend that Dickens had a ‘face of dingy blackguardism irradiated with genius’ – a phrase cribbed from Carlyle’s description of Camille Desmoulins, journalist of the French Revolution. ‘Such a phenomenon does not often appear in a lady’s drawing room,’ he went on, perhaps a little shocked by Dickens’s appearance and outspokenness, although Mill surely shared many of his social and political opinions.
⁶

The blackguard meanwhile was writing to Bentley, telling him he hoped for much better terms, given the increased popularity of his works.
⁷
Bentley was ready to give bonuses when
Oliver
made the sales of the
Miscellany
soar, but not to relinquish the copyright of
Oliver
, as Dickens wished. According to Bentley, Dickens threatened to stop writing
Oliver
. Bentley gave way and a new agreement was signed, with Forster taking much of the blame for this hard bargaining. Wrangling continued throughout 1838. Dickens, however, agreed with Bentley to edit the memoirs of the famous clown Grimaldi for £300, just managing to squeeze the work into the three-month gap between finishing
Pickwick
in October 1837 and starting
Nicholas Nickleby
for Chapman & Hall in the new year. He also agreed to write a short book,
Sketches of Young Gentlemen
, for Chapman & Hall for £125. He started writing on 8 January and this too was done to time, despite the occasional disturbed night with one-year-old Charley, and it was published on 10 February. Forster also published this February a volume of biographies of revolutionary leaders of the English Civil War period, and Dickens found time to read one of them, and to write a letter appreciating its ‘staunch and jolly’ subject, and finding the whole biography ‘glorious’.
⁸

He had signed an agreement for
Nickleby
with Chapman & Hall in November, promising that the first number would be ready to appear at the end of March 1838. By 21 February the first chapter was written; on 28 February it appeared in print, and promised to be another success. The opening theme was the Yorkshire schools where unwanted boys, illegitimate, orphaned or otherwise out of favour with their guardians, could be dumped, and where they were kept with no holidays or breaks, ill-used and starved, without medical care, so that they pined, sickened and died in large numbers. Dickens had heard of such schools and knew they were a horror needing to be dealt with. He travelled to Yorkshire in February 1838 with Browne to see what they could find, pretending to be seeking a school for the son of a widowed friend. They were unable to visit any school, but talked to one headmaster with a bad record, and were warned by an honest Yorkshireman not to send a child to the school he was asked about – even a gutter in London would be better for the boy than such a school, he assured them, and repeated his warning emphatically.
⁹

Dickens had already constructed in his mind one of his great comic characters, Mr Squeers, the headmaster of such a school, who advertises and comes to London to collect unwanted boys, colluding with those who are keen to be rid of them. What he does with Squeers and the situation might seem impossible but is in fact extraordinarily effective. He shows the cruelty and vileness of the school and the terror of the boys, starved, beaten, made to work and taught nothing, and at the same time he makes the appalling Squeers and his wife and monstrous son and daughter so funny that we can’t help laughing at them. It would be like a joke in a concentration camp were it not shown through the eyes of the dashing hero, Nicholas Nickleby, who is strong enough to turn on Squeers and give him a beating, and good-hearted enough to rescue at any rate one of his victims, poor Smike, reduced to feebleness of mind and broken in health by the treatment he has received.

Nickleby
makes a tremendous start, which is followed by a series of encounters between Nicholas and his sister, Kate, with other employers. Money is a running theme, and Kate is offered starvation wages – between five and seven shillings a week – by the London dressmaking establishment of Madame Mantalini and her high-spending, debt-ridden husband. She is also used, unpaid, by her financier uncle, to attract his aristocratic clients. Nicholas, paid five pounds a year as a schoolmaster, is offered ten times more – a pound a week – to write and act for Vincent Crummles’s theatre troupe. By contrast, the MP Gregsbury, who has ‘a tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them’ and who seeks a low-paid secretary to keep him informed of what he ought to know, offers only fifteen shillings a week.
¹⁰
Dickens stiffens his comedy with a strong economic backing.

Nickleby
also excels in its descriptions of London life, as Forster pointed out in his review: ‘We enter with him by night, through long double rows of brightly burning lamps, a noisy, bustling, crowded scene, in which he shows us the rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttering in the same rich light that shows the goldsmith’s glittering treasures, and where one thin sheet of brittle glass is the iron wall by which vast profusions of wealth and food are guarded from starved and pennyless men … At all times, and under every aspect, he gives us to feel and see the great city as it absolutely is.’ Forster gets this right, praises the ‘sparkling stream of vivacity or humour’ in
Nickleby
and was not afraid to point out some of its failures: the rambling unplanned plot, the feebleness of several of the villains, to which must be added the still greater feebleness of the benevolent characters and the interminable and almost unreadable last quarter of the book, where forced marriages, stolen wills, lost children found and sudden deaths are all requisitioned from the crude traditions of melodrama. Mrs Nickleby, whose confused stream of consciousness, and inattention to any attempt to interrupt it, was based, according to Dickens’s own word, on the conversation of his mother, is another of his great comic creations, although even of her there is rather too much: he always found it hard to let go of a character whose dialogue delighted him. But the public was entertained, and had no objection to melodrama. After only eight instalments of
Nickleby
had appeared it began to be dramatized, and was played in theatres all over England. It reached the Theatre Royal in Newcastle in December 1838, as part of a benefit for Mrs Ternan, a well-known actress, then seven months pregnant with her third daughter, Ellen.

Dickens was under pressure all through 1838 with the renewed double monthly tasks, now of
Oliver
and
Nickleby.
Forster said later that he never knew him work so much after dinner or such late hours. There was extra urgency because he had promised to complete
Oliver
for publication in book form in September, months before the serial publication was to end in March 1839. So he worked, and worked, and although Doughty Street was a comfortable home, he had his private worries there too. He loved his son Charley, ‘the darling boy’, with passion, but was anxious about him when he could not be with him. ‘Don’t leave him alone too much,’ he wrote to Catherine from Yorkshire in February, as though he feared the precious boy might not be getting enough of her attention. On 6 March she gave birth to their second child, a daughter, Mary, always known as Mamie, or Mamey. Catherine was ill afterwards and he took her to Richmond to convalesce at the end of the month, leaving both children at home, the baby with the wet nurse. Forster came to join them on 2 April – the joint birthday and wedding anniversary – and it may have been after this that Dickens first spoke to him about his sense that he and Catherine were temperamentally unsuited to one another, amiable and compliant as she was; that they made one another uneasy, and that he saw trouble ahead.
¹¹

He could never stay in the same place for long. For June and July that year they agreed to take a house in Twickenham, in Ailsa Park Villas, Isleworth Road, close to the river, to enjoy the fresh air and to be out of town for the coronation.
¹²
There were regular boats between Hungerford Stairs and Twickenham, and in spite of his workload he immediately started inviting friends to come down: Forster, of course, and Beard, Mitton, Ainsworth, Talfourd, Hullah, Harley – even Bentley had an invitation. Thackeray came with Douglas Jerrold, whose stories he had just illustrated. There were visits to Hampton Court, rides by the river and games with balloons for Charley, now nicknamed the ‘Snodgering Blee’ by his loving father. Forster was made responsible for supplying the balloons and appointed President of the Balloon Club, and affectionately teased, Dickens concocting spoof letters to him from an imaginary female admirer.

Dickens noted that he finished his
Oliver
number on 7 July and started on the
Nickleby
number three days later, on 10 July; he spent Sunday correcting proofs instead of going to church. During these pleasant, crowded summer months he heard he was elected to the Athenaeum Club. He succeeded in getting his brother Fred work in a government office, as a clerk in the Treasury, by applying to the Patronage Secretary, Stanley. He wrote his will. He corresponded with the young and aspiring George Henry Lewes, telling him that ‘I suppose like most authors I look over what I write with exceeding pleasure’, that he felt each passage strongly while he wrote it, but that he had no idea how his ideas came to him – they came ‘ready made to the point of the pen’.
¹³
His energy never flagged.

Back in Doughty Street in August, and now hopeless of finishing
Oliver
for book publication in September, he arranged to go to the Isle of Wight for a week’s work and put it about that he was to be out of town for longer. In October he wrote the description of the murder of Nancy by her lover, the burglar Bill Sikes. He tried it out on Catherine, who was reduced to ‘an unspeakable “
state
”’, he informed Forster with great satisfaction.
¹⁴
This was the germ of the readings he gave in 1869 and 1870, when he reduced whole audiences to unspeakable states, and himself to near-collapse: he read it for the last time on 8 March 1870, three months before his death. His confidence in
Oliver
grew as he advanced towards the end of the book, and he told Bentley, ‘I am doing it with greater care, and I think with greater power than I have been able to bring to bear on anything yet.’
¹⁵
A review of his work in the
Edinburgh Review
gave him particular pleasure by praising him as the ‘truest and most spirited delineator of English life since the days of Smollett and Fielding … What Hogarth was in painting, such very nearly is Mr Dickens in prose fiction.’
¹⁶

In
Pickwick
, an innocent middle-aged man is confronted with crooked lawyers and prison, and saved by his street-wise servant Sam Weller.
Oliver
set up a darker scene from the start, as the infant hero and his dying, unmarried mother, two innocents, are confronted with evil licensed by a state system meant to protect and help them. As a charity child, Oliver shows some spirit and gets into trouble that allows Dickens to give voice to a passionate indignation. Then, when he falls into the hands of a professional criminal, Fagin, who trains boys like the Artful Dodger to pick pockets, Dickens shows the mixture of terror and fascination that they produce in Oliver: they are kind to him, amuse him, feed him, shelter him and explain the world to him. Fagin and the Artful Dodger are the stars of the book, as every dramatization has made clear. The only thing that stops Oliver succumbing to their charm and being happily corrupted is that he has had a glimpse of another world, peaceful and orderly, where he might be given an education. He also unwittingly acquires an ally in Nancy, the prostitute who pities Oliver and tries to protect him and help him get away from Fagin. Then Dickens tightens the tension and horror of the plot by making Nancy’s lover Sikes a brutal burglar, and also an ally of Fagin.

It is melodrama, but with moments of real terror, as Oliver tries to escape the villains and they in turn are hunted to the death. Apart from the colourless virtuous characters, the chief failure of the book is Nancy, on whom Dickens lavished great care and whom he claimed to have modelled on a young woman he had known. He was proud of his portrait and said it was drawn from life, but he fails because he makes her behave like an actress in a bad play: she tears her hair and clothes, writhes, wrings her hands, sinks to her knees and contrives to lie down on a stone staircase in the street. She has visions of shrouds, coffins and blood, and is loaded with false theatrical speeches. ‘I am that infamous creature,’ she tells a would-be benefactress. ‘The poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement … the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my death-bed.’ Again, ‘Look before you, lady. Look at that dark water. How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them … I shall come to that at last.’
¹⁷
Dickens must many times have observed prostitutes in the streets, yet he is creating a stereotype here, one he used again in later novels: the penitent woman who tears her hair and seeks the river to make an end of things. But Nancy’s falsity could not spoil the success of
Oliver
, which rose to a fearful conclusion with her murder by Sikes and his subsequent grisly end. Fagin is hanged, and the Artful Dodger redeems the criminal classes with his great performance in the dock, cheeking the magistrate and making even the jailer grin.