Charles Dickens: A Life (28 page)

Meanwhile Macaulay, who considered Dickens a man of genius and had asked to review
American Notes
for the
Edinburgh Review
, changed his mind on reading it and told the editor, ‘I cannot praise it; and I will not cut it up.’ He found ‘some gleams of genius’ but ‘What is meant to be easy and sprightly is vulgar and flippant … what is meant to be fine is a great deal too fine for me, as in the description of the fall of Niagara.’
⁴⁴
The reviews in England were mixed, but it sold well, going into four editions and making Dickens £1,000. In America, where it appeared in November, the sales were enormous: 50,000 copies selling in two days in New York and 3,000 in half an hour in Philadelphia.
⁴⁵
The press was again divided, those who liked Boz praising his humour and humanity, while hostile papers treated him with contempt. The
New York Herald
, which had greeted him so warmly on his arrival in American, called the book the work of ‘the most coarse, vulgar, impudent and superficial mind’.
⁴⁶
Others accused him of hasty composition, egotism, coxcombry and cockneyism. Liberal Americans and abolitionists naturally liked his stance on slavery, and
American Notes
ends with two chapters in which he summarizes his impressions, one of them entirely devoted to slavery. In the final, general chapter he complained of the viciousness of the American press and the lack of moral sense among people who prized ‘smartness’ above goodness, and went on to itemize other defects of the Americans: he found them dull and lacking in humour, with poor manners; their diet was coarse and their eating habits graceless; they were short on personal cleanliness and their living conditions were insanitary. Behind these remarks is the condescension of the old world to the new, or so it must have seemed. Even Dickens’s Boston friends saw that he would be unpopular. Dana, who thought Dickens a genius but no gentleman, wrote in his journal that ‘His journey to America has been a Moscow expedition for his fame,’ and Poe called it ‘one of the most suicidal productions, ever deliberately published by an author, who had the least reputation to lose’.
⁴⁷

At the end of the year Dickens returned to fiction and embarked on a new serial novel,
Martin Chuzzlewit
. Its setting was England and its theme selfishness, but as he progressed he saw that he could use his American experiences further, and say more about the way he had been ill-used in America: not only their refusal to do anything about international copyright, but the publication in August of a crudely forged letter attributed to him in a New York newspaper,
⁴⁸
and the rude reviews of
American Notes
. The more he thought about all this the fiercer grew his anger. When he came to write the American chapters of
Chuzzlewit
, he was avenging himself on everything he disliked about the way he had been treated, and pointing out, with savage humour, what he hated about America: corrupt newspapers, violence, slavery, spitting, boastfulness and self-righteousness, obsession with business and money, greedy, graceless eating, hypocrisy about supposed equality, the crude lionizing of visitors. He mocked their newspaper editors, their learned women and their congressmen through the figures of Mr Jefferson Brick, Mr La Fayette Kettle, Mrs Hominy and Congressman Elijah Pogram, and he parodied the overblown rhetoric of their speech and writing. Just one decent American appears, the generous Mr Bevan from Massachusetts, but he remains a shadowy figure. The satire is biting, funny and unfair, so much so that it lost him the friendship of Washington Irving.

His feelings about America remained angry, and two years later he warned Macready, who had been invited to lecture in New York, against the country. It was ‘a low, coarse, and mean Nation’ and ‘driven by a herd of rascals’. ‘Pah!’ he finished his diatribe. ‘I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.’
⁴⁹

Setbacks

The return to fiction was a dismaying experience.
Martin Chuzzlewit
was planned as a big book to run as a serial for a year and a half and to have the same appeal as
Pickwick, Oliver, Nickleby
and
The Old Curiosity Shop
. The first monthly number appeared in December 1843, and it was soon clear that the public did not warm to it. Where
The Old Curiosity Shop
had reached sales of 100,000 each month,
Chuzzlewit
settled down to a fifth of that, never rising much above 20,000. The 1840s were a time of recession and severe hardship in England, and people did not have the money in their pockets to spend on stories, even stories by Dickens. His last two books,
Barnaby Rudge
and
American Notes
, had not increased his popularity. Worse, the new one got off to a poor start. Intended as a humorous chronicle of a family and mockery of people who boasted about their ancestors, Dickens had laboured to think up a droll name for the family, trying out his ideas on Forster – Sweezleden, Sweezleback, Sweezlewag, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy and Chubblewig – but he managed only to be facetious in the opening chapter, and when modern Chuzzlewits are brought into the story, they are no more interesting than their forebears. The young hero Martin and his cousin Jonas are set up like toys programmed to run on course, one selfish, the other villainous, and Martin’s grandfather is a mere mechanical device for activating an absurdly improbable and tedious plot.

The situation is partly saved by Pecksniff, a Chuzzlewit cousin who keeps his hand in his waistcoat as though ready to produce his heart for inspection, and who presides over much of the narrative, advancing his own interests by lying and keeping us entertained. Dickens’s enjoyment in supplying him with his well-oiled voice is clear, as he relished creating Quilp and Squeers before him. Getting into his stride, he becomes inventive with minor characters like Mrs Todgers, in whose London lodging house Pecksniff goes to stay. Mrs Todgers is chronically anxious over the supply of gravy for the gentlemen’s dinners: ‘The gravy alone, is enough to add twenty years to one’s age … The anxiety of that one item … keeps the mind continually upon the stretch. There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen … a whole animal wouldn’t yield – the amount of gravy they expect each day at dinner.’
¹
She could have appeared in
Sketches by Boz
, and around her house Dickens creates a virtuoso piece of London scenery, consisting of byways, ‘nothing that could reasonably be called a street’, making it so hard to find that some people, invited to dinner there, go round and round until they give up and go home again. Her house boasts a roof terrace, decorated with dead plants in tea chests and rotten washing lines, from which you can see ‘steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships: a very forest. Gables, house-tops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness’ – and the shadow of the Monument, making a long dark path over the rooftops.
²

Mrs Todgers’s boy Bailey is another lively character, an undersized, self-possessed lad who is petted by the lodgers, warns them against the fish (‘Don’t eat none of him!’), wears their cast-off clothes, which are several times too large for him, entertains Pecksniff’s daughters by putting a lighted candle in his mouth, has himself shaved in advance of any whiskers appearing (‘Go a tip-toe over the pimples!’ he tells the barber), and is as worldly and knowing as an old roué. Mrs Todgers hits him and pulls his ears and hair regularly, and he leaves her for a new master, a City financier, who allows him more licence, for example to drive his horses at a gallop round St James’s Square. Then, halfway through the book, Mrs Gamp, an ancient hard-drinking professional nurse, appears, and takes it over with her monologues, spoken in a language peculiar to herself, gorgeously mispronounced, much of it devoted to recounting conversations with her imaginary friend Mrs Harris. Dickens revived Mrs Gamp to make one of his public readings in the 1860s, and she and Mrs Harris have achieved a position quite independent of the book in which they first appeared. Like Pecksniff, they are so entertaining that the failings of other parts of the book fade when they are speaking. The same is true of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, with its grand premises and lavish dinners, and its porter whose red waistcoat is so impressive that it guarantees the respectability, competence and funds of the company that employs him, so that rival offices try to lure him away from the Anglo-Bengalee. The satire on high finance is as good today as it was then. Long, confused and uneven as
Chuzzlewit
is, with the American scenes, some sickly sentimentality and a showy murder thrown in, it also has these scatterings of brilliance which suggest why Dickens felt it to be ‘in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories’.
³

Yet even as he was meditating Mrs Gamp’s first appearance he had the dispiriting experience of going into the offices of his publishers and hearing that they were thinking of reducing what they paid him. A clause in their agreement allowed them to cut the payments from £200 to £150 if sales of
Chuzzlewit
were not enough to repay the advance – and they were not. Dickens was angry and hurt, and felt unable to work for a week. He proudly insisted that they should cut the payments at once, but he told Forster he felt ‘rubbed in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt’, and his immediate response was to think of changing his publishers again.
⁴
Short of money, he had to borrow from Mitton and instructed him to let one of his life-insurance policies lapse. He asked Forster to sound out William Bradbury and Frederick Evans, his printers, as to whether they might like to become his publishers. They did not seem to be interested, which was a relief for Forster, since he was Chapman & Hall’s literary adviser.

There was another year to go before
Chuzzlewit
could be finished, but Dickens began to think of going away, giving himself another break from novel writing, living cheaply abroad with his family and telling his publishers he would make new arrangements whenever he chose to return to England.
⁵
He told Forster he might write a book while he was abroad and publish it in Paris. Another plan was to find a patron, and he asked his friend Smithson, with whom he stayed in Yorkshire in July, if he would advance him £3,000, but Smithson was in no position to do so. Meanwhile American reviewers had seen his account of their country as
Chuzzlewit
instalments appeared there, and were voicing their objections.

On top of this, the behaviour of his father presented him with what seemed an insoluble problem. John Dickens was perpetually applying to his son’s friends and even his publishers for money, borrowing sums he could not possibly repay, which forced Dickens to pay on his behalf, and trying other financial dodges which were shaming to Dickens as he saw his name misused, and alarming because he never knew when the next parental demand on his income would turn up. This in spite of his father’s pension from the Navy Pay Office, and his house paid for by Charles. He disliked the Devon cottage and had moved back to London, or at any rate to the south-east suburb of Lewisham, and, finding this inconveniently far from the centre of town, he wrote to Chapman & Hall inviting them to provide him with ‘a free transit Ticket’ on the Greenwich boat, which would allow him to spend ‘two or three days a week at the Museum’, now that he was a gentleman of leisure.
⁶
You have to admire such assurance and bravado. At this point Dickens was refusing to communicate with him directly, and wrote in despair to Mitton, who was dealing with him as best he could: ‘I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his ingratitude. He, and all of them, look upon me as a something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. They have no idea of, and no care for, my existence in any other light. My soul sickens at the thought of them.’ His brother Alfred was still out of work, and Dickens was thinking of employing him as a secretary at a pound a week until a letter from his father, ‘a threatening letter, before God! – to me!’, made him change his mind. He asked Mitton to tell his father ‘that his letter has disgusted me beyond expression’.
⁷

At this time he was engaged in one of his most admirable charitable endeavours, raising funds for the children of Edward Elton, an actor in Macready’s company, whose wife had died leaving him with six daughters and an eight-year-old son, and who was himself drowned at sea returning from an engagement in Hull. Dickens steamed into action, forming a committee, arranging a benefit, visiting the children and arranging for the eldest girl, Esther, to be given a place in a training college. Esther became a schoolteacher, as well as a virtual mother to her little sisters; one was helped to a musical career, one was found a position as a companion, one who was thought to be consumptive was sent to Nice, and the son became an actor like his father. Dickens remained active in helping them for many years. Few men with a multitude of demands on their time and money would be capable of keeping up such a level of commitment, goodness and generosity over so long a period. The Elton children were deeply grateful and in 1859 they sent a joint letter of thanks to the committee. In 1861 Dickens was still writing to Esther, a full, affectionate and even intimate letter, long after she was married and a mother.
⁸

A further activity he took on was advising his friend Miss Coutts.
⁹
She asked him his view of the movement for ‘Ragged Schools’, set up in the poorest parts of London by volunteer teachers prepared to teach any who came, the homeless and starving, the disabled, even pupils who explained that their occasional absences were occasioned by prison sentences. Dickens’s letter describing his visit to the Ragged School in Saffron Hill – where, incidentally, he had placed Fagin’s house – is a masterpiece of descriptive writing and argument. He was shocked by what he saw, and also amused by the children’s cheeky remarks about his white trousers and long hair. He praised the teachers as honest, good men, who ‘try to reach the boys by kindness’ but suggested that beginning with religious teaching was not the best way: ‘To impress them, even with the idea of a God, when their own condition is so desolate, becomes a monstrous task,’ and teaching such things as the Catechism was beside the point to children whose lives are ‘one continued punishment’. He encouraged Miss Coutts to give her support, but wondered how many others would help: ‘There is a kind of delicacy which is not at all shocked by the existence of such things, but is excessively shocked to know of them,’ he warned her.
¹⁰
This was the beginning of his partnership with Miss Coutts in charitable work, which extended itself over the years – she seeking his advice and usually taking it, he making suggestions, researching on her behalf and giving up many hours of his time to it. Miss Coutts, who had inherited one of the largest fortunes in England and owned Coutts Bank, a house in Stratton Street and another in Highgate, was ready to give large sums of money to the causes she took up. She was also deeply and formally religious, but in spite of this she and Dickens, who now called himself a Unitarian, became devoted friends, and
Martin Chuzzlewit
was dedicated to her. He told Forster, ‘She is a most excellent creature, I protest to God, and I have a most perfect affection and respect for her.’
¹¹
She took an affectionate interest in his family, and her strong-minded companion, Miss Meredith, amused Dickens, and had given him a description of the nurse who was sent to look after her when she fell ill, from which came the idea for Mrs Gamp.