Charles Dickens: A Life (35 page)

Meanwhile, Dickens, having tried and failed to put his ideas and energies into a newspaper intended to promote liberal ideas and serve the community in England, found his escape to Switzerland unhelpful as he returned to his real vocation as a novelist. The physical and mental crisis he went through, charted in his letters to Forster, was the most severe he had undergone, bringing him to the edge of a breakdown. He pulled himself through, helped and comforted by Forster’s responses, and he began to open up memories he had so far kept hidden. Both the ordeal and the process of remembering would strengthen him and enrich his work over the next years.

Dombey, with Interruptions

Three carriages carried the family from Lausanne to Paris, children and nurses (and dog, no doubt) in one, adults in another. They left on 16 November, passed through the Jura in frost and fog, rose at five each morning and were on the road for nearly twelve hours each day, putting up at inns and reaching Paris four days later. They all piled into the Hôtel Brighton, Dickens immediately set about finding a house to rent, and within a week they were installed at No. 49 rue de Courcelles, close to the Champs Elysées and the rue du Faubourg St Honoré. It belonged to a French marquis, and Dickens complained that the doors and windows failed to close properly against the freezing weather, the bedrooms were as small as opera boxes, the drapery on the walls ‘inscrutable’, and the dining room absurdly painted to look like a grove of trees. He had already embarked on exploratory walks through the streets of Paris, and caught a glimpse of the King, Louis-Philippe, sitting far back in his carriage and protected by a throng of mounted guards and police who scanned the avenues suspiciously as they went forward. The King made a poor impression on him, and he decided that Paris was ‘a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive’.
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Soon he was planning dinner with Charles Sheridan, attaché to the Ambassador, at a famous restaurant in the Palais Royal, Les Trois Frères de Provence, and Forster agreed to come over for two weeks in January so that they could discover Paris together.
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In a letter to Lord Jeffrey, Dickens told him that Forster was ‘my right hand and cool shrewd head too’, and he confessed to Forster just how close he had been to a breakdown in Switzerland.
³

Dombey
needed his attention, but as soon as he was installed in the rue de Courcelles a letter came from his father, giving him grim news of his sister Fanny’s health. She had consumption – tuberculosis of the lung – and the doctor advised that neither she nor her husband should be told the truth, which suggested he did not expect her to recover. That evening Dickens was too upset to go with Catherine and Georgy to the theatre. A week later he was still unable to settle to work, disliking his study, unable to find a corner anywhere else in which to write, moving the furniture about, distracting himself by writing letters, grumbling about the French as lazy, unreliable and fit for nothing but soldiering, and taking Georgy out to see Paris by night.
⁴
But when he did get down to writing, he told Forster coolly, with none of the agonizing he had shown over the end of Little Nell, ‘Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five,’ and as soon as number four was done he took himself to London, the Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields again, for a week just before Christmas.
⁵

He needed to be in London with Forster for the good of his soul as well as having many practical reasons for going. There were arrangements to be made for Fanny’s care in her illness, making sure she was seen by the best doctors, and considering whether the Burnetts should be persuaded to move to London to be close to them. There was the publication of his new Christmas book,
The Battle of Life
, on 19 December, the story of a girl who gives up her lover to her sister, feebly sentimental, but it sold out its first printing of 24,000 copies before Christmas Day and made him £1,300 by the end of the year. The Keeleys were putting on a dramatized version at the Lyceum which Dickens had offered to supervise, and he gave a reading to the actors for which Forster lent his rooms; Dickens mocked his friend for his pains, and especially for providing seventy-six thick ham sandwiches for the company. Dickens found the Keeleys’ production poor and did his best to liven it up. He also had business with publishers, consulting with Chapman & Hall about a cheap edition of his works, and this now went ahead.
⁶
Hurrying from one appointment to another he caught cold, so that ‘I can hardly hold up my hand, and fight through from hour to hour’, as he wrote to ‘My dearest Kate’, telling her he was impatient for a letter from her.
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Back in Paris just in time for Christmas, a letter went off to ‘My Very Dear Forster’, wishing him ‘Many merry Christmases, many happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and heaven at last, for all of us’. Forster had to hear about his cold too: ‘I am going to take a jorum of hot rum and egg in bed immediately, and to cover myself up with all the blankets in the house. I have a sensation in my head as if it were “on edge”.’
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On the last day of 1846 he visited the morgue to look at the unidentified bodies laid out there. He went alone at dusk and saw an old man with a grey head in the otherwise empty place.
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The Battle of Life
sold because there was a market for any Christmas book from Dickens, but the critics were merciless. When the reviews reached Dickens in January, he winced and told Forster he felt disposed to go to New Zealand, but at the same time he was on to the fifth number of
Dombey
: ‘I am slaughtering a young and innocent victim – ’ The deed done, he walked the streets of Paris all through the night before going to meet Forster in the morning.
¹⁰
The two friends packed their fortnight together with pleasures. They went to Versailles, St Cloud, the Louvre, the Conservatoire, to hear a lesson given, and the Bibliothèque Royale, where they saw Gutenberg’s type and Racine’s notes in his copy of Sophocles. They dined at the British Embassy, surveyed hospitals, prisons, the morgue again irresistible to Dickens, and went to every possible theatrical performance. They conversed with the playwright Scribe and took supper with Dumas. They talked with Gautier, with an ailing Chateaubriand, and with Lamartine, whom Dickens had met briefly in Genoa, and whose liberal politics he admired; and called on Victor Hugo in his apartment in the Place Royale. Hugo made a profound impression on both of them with his eloquence, and Forster observed that he addressed ‘very charming flattery, in the best taste’ to Dickens. Dickens thought he ‘looked like the Genius he was’, while his wife looked as if she might poison his breakfast any morning; and the daughter who appeared ‘with hardly any drapery above the waist … I should suspect of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays, but for her not appearing to wear any’.
¹¹
Having made his joke, he decided that ‘Of all the literary men I saw, I liked Victor Hugo best.’
¹²

The time he and Forster spent together in Paris developed his view of the people, and he began to see the virtues of the French, to forget his earlier outburst about their unreliability, and to be charmed by the people and the place. ‘The general appreciation of, and respect for, Art, in its broadest and most universal sense, in Paris, is one of the finest national signs I know. They are ’specially intelligent people: and though there still lingers among them an odd mixture of refinement and coarseness, I believe them to be, in many high and great respects, the first people in the universe.’
¹³
This was the beginning of a real love for France, and the French reciprocated, with translations and imitations of his work, culminating ten years later in the publishers Hachette commissioning new translations of all the novels and stories, approved by Dickens.
¹⁴
Already in the 1840s his work was being translated into many other European languages, German, Italian, Dutch and even Russian, but with none did he have so close a relationship as with the French, whose language he learnt.
¹⁵
Forster said he had a poor accent but good written French. He signed off a letter to Forster ‘Charles Dickens, Français naturalisé, et Citoyen de Paris’, and in 1847 he began to write to D’Orsay in French, bold if simple and inaccurate: ‘Ah Mon Dieu! Que les mois s’ecoulent avec une terrible rapidité! L’instant que je me trouve libre, je me trouve encore un forçat lié a la rame. N’importe! Courage Inimitable Boz! Vous l’aimiez assez-bien mon Brave, après tout!’ Within two years he had mastered the language well enough for serious correspondence.
¹⁶

Meanwhile he had his novel to write. It sold unexpectedly well from the opening number in October 1846, keeping Bradbury & Evans busy with reprints, and for the January number they began with 32,000 copies. The success was well deserved, because the book makes a tremendous start with the death of Mrs Dombey in childbed in the great sombre London house near Portland Place, her husband caring only for the newborn son, the fashionable doctors powerless, and her little daughter, Florence, weeping and holding on to her as ‘clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world’. The second chapter builds strongly on this with the hiring of a wet nurse to feed and care for baby Paul: Mr Dombey, jealous of the presence of an outsider and unhappy about handing his son to Polly Toodle, a motherly young woman with a husband working on the railways and many children of her own, insists that she give up her own name and be known as ‘Richards’ in his household, and does his best to remove any human feeling from the arrangement, telling her she need not become attached to the child, or the child to her. Reading this chapter makes you wonder about the wet nurses who came to work for the Dickens family year after year, and what sort of conversations Dickens may have held with them. And did his own small sons, passed from wet nurse to dry nurse to Georgina, sometimes seem uncertain whom they should attach themselves to?

Leaving this aside, the opening chapters of
Dombey and Son
are masterly in conception and writing. Polly Toodle is shown as a good, warm-hearted woman, ‘quicker to feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion’ than any man could be, writes Dickens. She alone comforts six-year-old Florence by telling her that her mother is in heaven and that she will see her there again.
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But when she takes Florence home with her to Camden Town, the child is lost in the street and falls into the hands of an old woman who steals her clothes before sending her home, and Polly is held responsible and summarily dismissed. Little Paul’s long decline begins when he loses the nurse who has been feeding him, and is hastened by his father’s treatment, putting him into the care of the horrible Mrs Pipchin in Brighton for a year, and then sending him to a cramming school where he learns nothing, although he is a quick, sensitive and intelligent boy. He loves and relies on his sister above all others, and as he weakens and she grows, their father comes to hate the daughter he neglects. The telling of Paul’s short life is a
tour de force
. At five, he questions his father about money and, receiving the answer that money can do anything, observes that it did not save his mother and cannot make him strong and well. He puts down Mrs Pipchin with his wit, hears the school clock talking and wonders whether his teacher, Cornelia Blimber, has any eyes behind her glinting spectacles. In fact he thinks like a small Dickens, which is partly what he is, as Dickens made clear to Forster when writing of Mrs Pipchin’s boarding house for children: it was ‘from life, and I was there’.
¹⁸

Forster prepared himself to hear the secrets of Dickens’s early life, and the nation was held in thrall as he killed off this interesting child. Maclise protested privately about Florence, ‘I’m never up to his young girls – he is so very fond of the age of “Nell” when they are most insipid,’ but otherwise he found
Dombey
great, particularly admiring the presentation of London life.
¹⁹
Thackeray gave unmitigated praise to Dickens’s blackly comic account of Paul’s school at Brighton, where boys were force-fed the classics, and he found his death ‘unsurpassed – it is stupendous’.
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Sales fell off a little after Paul’s death, but remained in the region of 30,000.

Dombey
creates a world, draws in the reader and keeps its grip. The London he knew so well (and had missed so badly abroad) is set before us, from the grand residential streets to the northern edges of town, the modest dwellings and shops near the river in the City, and Camden Town. The energy and inventiveness are still there, although the near-perfection of the early chapters falls away sadly, and the idea proposed there – that Dombey and Son might become Dombey and Daughter – fails to deliver its promise. But he allowed himself plenty of room to elaborate on his comic characters, and the best of them are as sinister as they are funny. One is Major Bagstock, a retired Army officer bursting fatly out of his own skin, a flatterer and bully who fixes rewards and punishments for friends and enemies, and who introduces Dombey to his second wife, Edith. Another is Edith’s mother, Mrs Skewton, the aged society lady who has to be assembled each day by her maid – with diamonds, short sleeves, rouge, curls, teeth and other juvenility – and taken apart at night, when ‘the hair dropped off, the arched dark eyebrows changed to scanty tufts of grey; the pale lips shrunk, the skin became cadaverous and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, alone remained … huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a greasy flannel gown.’
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She is one of Dickens’s most splendidly disgusting creations, worthy of Swift.