Charles Dickens: A Life (24 page)

Dickens himself suffered as he wrote of Nell’s decline, and shared his sufferings with his friends through November and December 1840. He told Forster, ‘You can’t imagine how exhausted I am today with yesterday’s labours … All night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself … I think the close of the story will be great.’ Then, a few days later, ‘The difficulty has been tremendous – the anguish unspeakable.’
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To his illustrator, Cattermole, he wrote, ‘I am breaking my heart over this story, and cannot bear to finish it.’
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In January, Macready was told, ‘I am slowly murdering that poor child, and grow wretched over it. It wrings my heart. Yet it must be.’ A few days later it was Maclise who heard, ‘If you knew what I have been suffering in the death of that child!’
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Another letter to Forster shows how Dickens used his suffering, deliberately summoning up painful feelings, in the cause of telling a better story: ‘I shan’t recover it for a long time. Nobody will miss her like I shall. It is such a very painful thing to me, that I really cannot express my sorrow … I have refused several invitations for this week and next, determining to go nowhere till I had done.
I am afraid of disturbing the state I have been trying to get into, and having to fetch it all back again
.’
⁹

In such a state of mind he could not bear to be distracted or crossed, and there was a disconcerting episode when, as he was writing these chapters, Macready’s three-year-old daughter, Joan, died suddenly. Dickens sent him an affectionate note, as a close but busy friend, while Forster, who was Joan’s godfather and adored her, visited Macready daily, shared his grief, went to the funeral and gave way to intense sorrow himself. At this Dickens complained to Maclise about Forster’s ‘amazing display of grief’: ‘I vow to God that if you had seen Forster last night, you would have supposed our Dear Friend was dead himself.’
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It looks as though he was jealous that Forster had turned his attention aside from the imaginary death they had dreamt up together to mourn the death of a real child, and in his jealousy raged against him. Little Nell must not be upstaged, even by Macready’s dead daughter.

When Dickens reached Nell’s death he chose not to describe it, but to let it happen offstage, in the village church where she and her grandfather had found shelter.
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If he was torn to bits by his feelings, Victorian families, with their all too frequent experience of the deaths of children, responded in their thousands. Christianity told them they must accept and even be glad when a child went to heaven, but this hardly makes sense to a grieving parent. Macready put the case with stoic dignity, ‘I have lost my child. There is no comfort for that sorrow; there is endurance – that is all.’
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This seems right, and much truer than any suggestion that dead children turn into angels and proceed to enjoy themselves, but Dickens set out to palliate and soothe. Although he showed that Nell herself feared death, once she is dead he offers conventional words of comfort: ‘Sorrow was dead indeed in her, but peace and perfect happiness were born; imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose.’ His intention was ‘to try and do something which might be read by people about whom Death had been, – with a softened feeling, and with consolation.’
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With such readers in mind, he asked his illustrator to draw a tailpiece to the story, ‘giving some notion of the etherealised spirit of the child’. Cattermole understood perfectly and showed her being lifted up to heaven by four angels, her eyes shut and a slight smile on her face.
¹⁴

To modern readers, Little Nell herself is less interesting than her travels as she leaves London, walking through the edges of town where houses gave way to brickfields, past small Dissenting chapels and piles of oyster shells; and later through the Black Country, with its cinder-paths, blazing furnaces and roaring steam-engines, its miserable workers and starving children, which Dickens had seen for himself two years before; or taking refuge with stout Mrs Jarley who travels about with a hundred wide-eyed waxwork figures in her caravan, Mary Queen of Scots and Mr Pitt keeping company with a wife murderer and the wild boy of the woods. And there is a cast of remarkable characters, starting with Mr Quilp, the malevolent dwarf who hopes that Nell might become his second wife. Quilp delighted Dickens as Squeers did, by his sheer wickedness and energy, and is a pleasure to read about as he drinks boiling spirits from the saucepan, eats hard-boiled eggs with their shells, taunts and threatens his wife and mother-in-law, lusts after Nell, bites, pinches and plots evil like a pantomime villain.

Another section of the story is given to Dick Swiveller, a lanky, humorous clerk who keeps a notebook with the names of streets he has to avoid because he owes money to the shopkeepers. Like the young Dickens, Swiveller yearns after an unattainable girl for a while, is much given to quoting from popular poetry and coins special phrases of his own: alcohol is ‘the rosy’, sleep is ‘the balmy’, a single drink is a ‘modest quencher’ and a piece of bad news is ‘a staggerer’. Working in a law office, he becomes aware that there is a small, half-starved girl-child kept locked in the basement, dressed in cast-off clothes, ‘a small slipshod girl in a coarse apron and bib, which left nothing of her visible but her face and feet. She might as well have been dressed in a violin case.’ She does all the work of the house and has no name. ‘There never was such an old-fashioned child in her looks and manner. She must have been at work from her cradle.’ First he pities her and then he becomes interested in her. ‘She never went out, or came into the office, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse apron, or looked out of any one of the windows, or stood at the street door for a breath of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever. Nobody ever came to see her, nobody spoke of her, nobody cared about her.’
¹⁵
Dick’s lawyer employer, Mr Brass, had said once that he believed she was ‘a love-child’, and a note in the manuscript suggests she was the daughter of his sister Sally Brass and Quilp. As Dickens adds, the name of love-child means anything but a child of love, and this little slavey is the embodiment of his dictum that ‘the poor have no childhood. It must be bought and paid for.’
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Dick privately teaches her to play cards, gives her food and drink, including ‘purl’, a cheering concoction of boiling hot beer with gin, sugar and ginger, grows fond of her and names her ‘the Marchioness’ in tribute to her extraordinary independence and dignity. She is thirteen, the same age as Nell, and has brains and character, but she is allowed only a small strand of the plot. Dickens may have worried that she would steal the limelight, and he cut short the tale of the poor clerk and the slavey, sketching in an adventure for them, and an improbably cheerful conclusion.
¹⁷

During the September visit to Broadstairs, while he was working hard on
The Old Curiosity Shop
, Dickens was observed by a clever young woman of nineteen, Eleanor Picken. She is a valuable witness because hers is the only written account of the impression he made on a young woman while he was still young himself. She published nothing until after his death, but she goes into enough detail to suggest she had kept notes at the time she knew him, and she says she drew on her diary; and her response to him is so fresh and frank that you are ready to trust what she says. It is also ambivalent. She remembered the days at Broadstairs as ‘almost the brightest in my life’, but she was worried by his changes of mood, and miserably upset when, having played games with her, flirted and teased her, he retreated into cold politeness and made it clear that he wanted to have nothing more to do with her. ‘I had been so proud of the notice of so great a man, I had sunned myself in his smiles, that it was like an untimely frost,’ she wrote wistfully.
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Eleanor had lost her father, a writer, as a child. She was well educated and had her own ambitions to write and to paint. She had been taken under the wing of the family of Charles Smithson, one of Dickens’s lawyers, a partner of Mitton, after becoming unofficially engaged to a family connection of the Smithsons, who invited her to dinner to meet Mr and Mrs Dickens in the summer of 1840. He was already famous and she was excited to meet him, and ready to be awestruck. But she was not uncritical. While she admired his marvellous eyes and long hair, she did not like his taste in dress, the huge collar and vast expanse of waistcoat, and the boots with patent toes. She described him as sucking his tongue when he was thinking, dragging his fingers through his hair and comically raising one eyebrow before making a joke. She also said that he had a thickness in his speech, as if his tongue were slightly too large for his mouth, and she noticed the same thing in his brother Fred and their father. At the Smithsons’ dinner Forster was a fellow guest, and Dickens let him hold forth while seeming preoccupied himself – this was perhaps when he sucked his tongue and ran his hand through his hair. Soon after this dinner he urged the Smithsons to take a house at Broadstairs, where he was going to be with his family in September. They did so, and Eleanor went with them. Mrs Smithson acted as chaperone, and her unmarried sister, Amelia Thompson, was also of the party. Although Amelia was ten years older than Eleanor, who described her as being ‘of a certain age’, they were good friends and went about together.

Eleanor found Mrs Dickens kindly and likeable. Her contribution to the fun of the family was making puns, the more outrageous the better, with an innocent expression, while Dickens tore his hair and pretended to writhe in agony. He was more complicated. Having looked forward with some excitement to spending her holiday close to the great man, Eleanor found that his moods changed without warning from day to day, now genial, now cold. His high spirits were contagious; his bad moods made her wonder how there could ever be any friendship with him. We know that he was producing weekly episodes of
The Old Curiosity Shop
that September, and that he usually worked from Tuesday to Friday, when he sent his copy to London, and corrected proofs of the previous number on Saturday to send with his comments to Forster on Sunday.
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This meant he had to keep to a strict timetable, but Eleanor and Amelia were unaware of this, only that on one day he would initiate or join in games, and the next day walk past without a greeting, his eyes like ‘danger-lamps’. She remembered that ‘at these times I confess I was horribly afraid of him’, although not too afraid to tell him later how much he had frightened her, and to observe that her confession amused him.

The games they played included Vingt-et-un – gambling with cards for small sums of money and cheating wildly to add to the fun – guessing games like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, and charades. Dickens sometimes addressed the two young women in cod Elizabethan English, as ‘charmer’, ‘fair enslaver’, ‘sweet lady’, and asked them to dance with ‘Wilt tread a measure with me?’ After his brother Fred arrived to join them there was a memorable evening when the Dickens brothers, fooling about on the pier with Eleanor and Milly, decided that the four of them should dance a quadrille to music provided by Fred whistling and Charles playing on his pocket-comb. After the dance they walked to the end of the pier to watch the evening light fade as the tide came in. Eleanor tells her story well:

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 a tall post. He put his other arm round this, and exclaimed in theatrical tones that he intended to hold me there till ‘the sad sea waves’ should submerge us.

‘Think of the emotion we shall create! Think of the road to celebrity which you are about to tread! No, not exactly to
tread
, but to flounder into!’

 

Here I implored him to let me go, and struggled hard to release myself.

 

‘Let your mind dwell on the column in
The
Times
wherein will be vividly described the pathetic fate of the lovely E. P., drowned by Dickens in a fit of dementia! Don’t struggle, poor little bird; you are powerless in the claws of such a kite as this, child!’

 

 … The tide was coming up rapidly and surged over my feet. I gave a loud shriek and tried to bring him back to common sense by reminding him that ‘My dress, my best dress, my
only
silk dress, would be ruined.’ Even this climax did not soften him: he still went on with his serio-comic nonsense, shaking with laughter all the time, and panting with his struggles to hold me.

 

‘Mrs Dickens!’ a frantic shriek this time, for now the waves rushed up to my knees; ‘help me! make Mr Dickens let me go – the waves are up to my knees!’

 

The rest of the party had now arrived, and Mrs Dickens told him not to be so silly, and not to spoil Eleanor’s dress. ‘Dress!’ cried Dickens … ‘talk not to me of
dress
! When the pall of night is enshrouding us … when we already stand on the brink of the great mystery, shall our thoughts be of fleshly vanities?’

 

Eleanor finally succeeded in wrestling herself free. Her clothes were wet, and Mrs Smithson scolded her and thought her to blame. She may have had some reason. Clearly there was some chemistry between Eleanor and Dickens, and he must have felt that she enjoyed his attentions. She was after all the star of the evening, the chosen one, even if chosen as victim. But he was an aggressive admirer. On two occasions he rushed her under a waterfall, ruining the bonnet she was wearing each time, and he pulled her hair during games, a gesture both boyish and intimate. Quilp was in his mind, and his behaviour was Quilpish. But Eleanor was not a meek girl, and she also describes how she argued with him during games, and stood up for herself.