Charles Dickens: A Life (36 page)

Dombey himself is a construct of pride, obstinacy and cruelty in his dealings with his daughter. Florence’s perfect submission and goodness have irritated readers, and indeed she has no character to speak of. Dickens shows that he does not quite know what to do with her by putting her into fairy-tale settings, allowing the Dombey house to fall into decay with extraordinary rapidity while her father is away on holiday, keys rusting in the locks, fungus appearing in the cellars, dust, spiders, moths, black beetles and rats taking up their abode in the walls, grass growing on the roof and fragments of mortar dropping down the chimneys – an unlikely situation in a splendid town house staffed by many servants. It is pure fantasy, but it allows Dickens to say, ‘So Florence bloomed there like the king’s fair daughter in the story.’ She is in a fairy-tale again when she finds a safe retreat from her father’s cruelty with good old Captain Cuttle, a retired sailor living in a ships’ instrument shop, with a hook for a hand. Here Dickens acknowledges openly what he is doing with the words ‘a wandering princess and a good monster in a story book might have sat by the fireside and talked as Captain Cuttle and poor Florence … and not have looked very much unlike them.’
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Florence does not inhabit the same world as her businessman father, although she is loved by his office boy, and Dickens tells the reader disappointingly little about the business of Dombey, or the reasons for its failure. He is more interested in describing Dombey’s second marriage, to Edith, a young widow who agrees to become his wife while making it plain she does not care for him. She is following her mother’s instructions to marry money, and Dickens underlines the point by giving her an unknown cousin Alice, who also sells herself, in her case as a prostitute. His intentions are serious, but undermined by his inability to present real women: Florence has to be a fairy princess; Edith is a leading lady in a
mélodrame
, Alice also. All Edith’s behaviour is taken from the theatre, whether she is tearing the diamonds out of her ‘rich black hair’ and throwing them on the floor, trampling on her expensive bracelets, beating her hand against the marble mantelpiece until it bleeds, or puffing herself up as a sign of rage, inflating her nostrils, swelling her neck and dilating her whole form, like an angry toad (Dickens had been watching actresses carefully). Her face becomes that of a beautiful Medusa, looking on her husband to strike him dead. And when she is departing from the Dombey house, she shrieks and crawls past Florence on the stairs ‘like some lower animal’.

She leaves Dombey and runs off with his repellent office manager Carker in order to humiliate him. Dickens originally intended her to become Carker’s mistress, but was talked out of this by his old and respected friend Jeffrey; instead he made the plot still more improbable by having her meet Carker in a distant part of France, Dijon, only to tell him she has no intention of having anything to do with him or ever seeing him again. Her scorn and bad temper make you doubt that any man could have contemplated sexual relations with her either in or outside marriage, and you can’t help wondering how she handled the wedding night with Dombey. Dickens naturally excluded any allusions to sex, as the conventions of the time required, but the deeper reason was that he did not know how to write or think about it, at any rate in relation to adult women. There are moments when he apostrophizes Edith in the course of the narrative: ‘Oh, Edith! It were well to die, indeed, at such a time! Better and happier far, perhaps, to die so, Edith, than to live on to the end!’ He repeats the suggestion that it would be better to die than to be sexually disgraced in his next book, thinking of Little Em’ly, and in both cases it sounds like a piece of piety offered to a public that expected this sort of thing, either because he could not bring himself to write truthfully on this subject, or because he did not know how to.
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Carker, knowing himself to be pursued by a vengeful Dombey, hurries back to England and dies under a train.
Dombey
is often praised as the first great novel of the railway, and it makes good use of the building of the lines through Camden Town, which meant the demolition of rows of small houses with gardens, and changed the neighbourhood and patterns of life there, something he had observed closely.
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Further on in the book trains are used as symbols, less successfully. When Dombey takes a train he feels it is ‘a type of the triumphant monster, Death’ because he is thinking of death that has taken his son. ‘Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle’ goes his train, giving ‘glimpses of cottage-homes, of houses, mansions, rich estates, of husbandry and handicraft, of people, of old roads and paths that look deserted, small and insignificant as they are left behind: and so they do, and what else is there but such glimpses, in the track of the indomitable monster, Death!’
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The prose becomes purple as Dickens enjoys himself with the image of the train as Death for two pages. Towards the end of the book he indulges himself again, as Carker is drawn to obsessive train watching, seeing the engines like fiery devils, roaring and dropping glowing coals, with two red eyes and a track of glare and smoke, until he falls to his death under one, and his mutilated fragments are cast into the air. Although Dickens himself thoroughly enjoyed travelling by train and made good use of the railways, their power to terrify was irresistible material for his fiction, and every reader remembers the death of Carker.

Another change to his original plan was to allow Walter – the office boy who loves Florence and is sent away by Dombey, and was originally meant to be corrupted and turn to the bad – to return as a hero. He has kept his love for her, and she greets him with the words ‘Welcome to this stricken breast!’ – she has taken over Edith’s theatre talk. Her sisterly affection easily changes to something warmer, the young couple are married and a happy ending is allowed, in which Dombey, bankrupt, ill and alone, softens to his daughter at last, and becomes an improbably affectionate grandfather. Dickens said he wept continually over the manuscript as he approached the end. The judgement of one of Dickens’s later friends, Wilkie Collins, was that no intelligent person could read ‘the latter half of
Dombey
 … without astonishment at the badness of it’. This is a harsh verdict but true: the disappointment is sharper because the early part of the book is so good and so full of promise, which is wasted in feeble plotting and over-writing. Another old friend, Ainsworth, described the later numbers of
Dombey
as ‘infernally bad’ and ‘disgustingly bad’.
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Since then many critics have praised
Dombey
for its presentation of contemporary society, its concern for social problems, its exploration of relations between parent and child, and its suggested theme that the life of decency and affectionate feeling was becoming more difficult as society moved on.
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You can argue about all these points: Mrs Pipchin and Mrs Skewton are both old and both strikingly lacking in decency or affectionate feeling, whereas young Susan Nipper and foolish Mr Toots are well endowed with both. Dickens introduces a homily against slum housing into a chapter otherwise given to a quarrel between Mr and Mrs Dombey, suggesting that they would have been better people had they devoted themselves to social problems rather than to private concerns; but this is a passing mention, peripheral to the book, which is essentially a story of private, domestic life. So much is the family the centre of interest that we are not even told what Dombey’s business was, or the cause of its failure, other than his inattention. As Dickens finished the last chapters a huge gathering of Chartists, for whom he had considerable sympathy, was in London delivering a petition to parliament for extending the vote, but there is no hint of such contemporary issues in its pages.

One look at the pressures on Dickens during the writing does something to explain the unevenness of the book, and causes astonishment that he got through it at all. In almost every month something happened to interrupt his work on
Dombey
, and he had to give up any idea of writing another Christmas book in 1847. There were family matters to begin with. Having let Devonshire Terrace until the end of June, he had to find another house to rent in London once they left Paris, and one in which Catherine could give birth in April in reasonable comfort. In February, just as Charley started as a boarder at his new school in London, he fell ill with scarlet fever, and Dickens and Catherine rushed over from Paris only to find they were not allowed to see him because of Catherine’s pregnancy. They hovered anxiously, staying in a hotel in Euston while his Hogarth grandparents nursed Charley in their lodgings in Albany Street. Dickens busied himself with house hunting and finding furniture, and fell badly behind with writing the monthly number. ‘My wretchedness, just now, is inconceivable,’ he wrote to Georgy in Paris, where she remained in charge of the other six children.
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Charley recovered and was taken, thin and pale, to convalesce in Richmond, and only at the end of March were his younger sisters and brothers brought over to be reunited with their parents in a rented house at No. 1 Chester Square. It was close to their real home, between Albany Street and the park. Catherine had barely settled in before she gave birth to Sydney after an exceptionally painful labour, probably a breech delivery, so difficult that Dickens had to fetch a second doctor. She made a quick recovery, but three weeks later Dickens was attacked by a horse, a terrifying experience in which his sleeve was torn off and he feared the muscle of his arm was injured. It brought on a nervous seizure of the throat that required treatment and distressed him ‘more fearfully than I could ever tell anybody’, so that he could not write for several days.
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He took himself to Brighton to get over it. After this all the children went down with whooping cough. They were settled in Broadstairs at the end of June, where they played on the beach, ‘choking incessantly’ according to their father.
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So there were few months in which the writing of
Dombey
was not delayed or interrupted by domestic dramas and disasters; and always in the background was the worry of Fanny’s progressive illness. In July he was able at last to move back to Devonshire Terrace and his familiar study.

Other distractions he took up voluntarily. In March his early publisher, William Hall, died, and he insisted on attending the funeral in Highgate, all that day thinking about how Hall had sold him the magazine in which his first piece had appeared in print fourteen years before – a knitting together of past and present that was important to him even when it meant losing a day’s work. Then he undertook another theatrical enterprise, this time to raise money for Leigh Hunt, now in his sixties. Dickens appointed himself manager and took charge of casting, rehearsals, negotiating with theatres and organizing the company’s travel. This occupied much of June and July: ‘Between Dombey and Management, I am one half mad and the other half addled,’ he complained.
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Forster was busier than usual, having taken over the editorship of the
Examiner
, the liberal paper to which he had long contributed, and which he now enlarged and ran firmly and efficiently. And Dickens began to mull over an idea for an insurance scheme for writers, which would grow and require a great deal of organization and more fund-raising theatricals in the next years.

In November he and Catherine visited their friends from Lausanne, the Watsons, in their home in Northamptonshire, Rockingham Castle. It was a spectacular place, set high above a ravine, built as a royal castle in the eleventh century and half destroyed in the Civil War, but it had retained its great hall, gatehouse and round towers, and been altered further over the centuries to make it into a private residence set round a courtyard. Watson had been an Army officer before inheriting the estate in the late 1830s, married his well-born wife and become a benevolent landlord, building a school and improving tenants’ cottages. Cautious as Dickens was about the aristocracy, he was won over by the charm of both the Watsons, and Rockingham set his imagination to work. A few years later it became a partial model for Chesney Wold in
Bleak House
, the splendid but melancholy pile in which generations of titled Dedlocks lived luxurious and useless lives – a slightly equivocal tribute to the house of his friends which he nevertheless continued to enjoy visiting.

After this indulgence in high life he went on to Leeds to address the Mechanics’ Institute on the subject of education, and praise their work, which included day and evening classes in chemistry, French, German, business studies, drawing and design; they had set up a good library, and attracted steadily increasing numbers of women students. An audience of several thousands had gathered to hear him, and when he appeared they rose to applaud ‘the author of Little Nell’, and clapped and cheered many times in the course of his speech, which was a passionate endorsement of the value of the educational work being done there. Although he had been ‘half dead with cold on the chest and loss of voice’, he told Forster he thought he had never spoken better.
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After Christmas at home, he set off again, with Catherine, for Glasgow, where another educational institution for working men and women had invited him to speak, and where the same adoring and applauding crowds greeted him.

Catherine did not hear him speak because she had been taken ill on the train journey. She was suffering from an early miscarriage. Dickens made light of it to Georgy (‘nothing to speak of’), but told his brother Alfred that she had become ‘violently ill’, he had been obliged to call two famous doctors, and they had forbidden anything but a direct return to London on the express train.
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In this way he missed the intended meeting with Alfred and his wife and new baby, and also with their sick sister Fanny and her husband, Burnett. Once home in Devonshire Terrace, Catherine took to her bed for several days, evidently needing the rest.