Dickens' Women (4 page)
Authors: Miriam Margolyes
But his childhood was shrouded in debt and disgrace. His grandfather was forced to flee to France because he was caught embezzling the funds of the Navy pay office where he worked and his father John Dickens (he wasn't a criminal, but he was a feckless man, hopeless with money â probably the model for Mr Micawber) was finally arrested when Dickens was twelve years old for owing the baker forty pounds. The whole family was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in London, all except for little Charles himself. His parents sent him quite alone to board with a Mrs Elizabeth Roylance, âa reduced old lady, long known to our family, in Little College Street, Camden Town, who took children in to board and had done so in Brighton'. She is the
inspiration
for Mrs Pipchin, here confronting little Paul Dombey in
Dombey and Son
.
This celebrated Mrs Pipchin was a marvellous ill-favoured,
ill-conditioned
old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face, like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard grey eye, that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury.
Forty years at least had elapsed since the death of Mr Pipchin; but his relict still wore black bombazeen, of such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade, that gas itself couldn't light her up after dark. She was generally spoken of as âa great manager' of children; and the secret of her management was, to give them
everything they didn't like, and nothing that they did. Which was said to sweeten their dispositions very much.
âWell, Sir,' said Mrs Pipchin to Paul, âhow do you think you shall like me?'
âI don't think I shall like you at all,' replied Paul. âI want to go away. This isn't my house.'
âNo. It's mine,' retorted Mrs Pipchin.
âIt's a very nasty one,' said Paul.
âThere's a worse place in it than this though,' said Mrs Pipchin, âwhere we shut up our bad boys,' for Mrs Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday nights.
And there with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange, Paul sat as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming.
Music
.]
Dickens saw himself for the rest of his life as a deprived child. He wrote of Florence Dombey â but really it was himself â ânot an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent's love.'
The core of resentment which he felt stems from his
feelings
about his mother. The family was always terribly poor, always struggling with debt, and Elizabeth Dickens was always fanatically trying to keep up appearances â like Mrs Micawber in
David Copperfield
:
âI never thought before I was married, when I lived with papa and mama, that I should ever find it necessary to take a lodger. But Mr Micawber being in difficulties, all considerations of private feelings must give way.
âMr Micawber's difficulties are almost overwhelming just at present and whether it is possible to bring him through them, I don't know.
âIf Mr Micawber's creditors will not give him time they must take the consequences; and the sooner they bring it to an issue the better. Blood cannot be obtained from a stone, neither can anything on account be obtained at present from Mr Micawber.
âWith the exception of the heel of a Dutch cheese â which is not adapted to the wants of a young family â there is really not a scrap of anything in the larder.
âI was accustomed to speak of the larder when I lived with papa and mama, and I use the word almost unconsciously. What I mean to express is, that there is nothing to eat in the house.
âI have pawned the plate myself. Six tea, two salt, and a pair of sugars, I have at different times borrowed money on, in secret, with my own hands, and to me, with my recollections, of papa and mama, these transactions are very painful. There are still a few trifles that we could part with. Mr Micawber's feelings would never allow him to dispose of them; and Clickett being of a vulgar mind, would take painful liberties if so much confidence was reposed in her. Master Copperfield, if I might ask youâ¦?
âMy family may consider it banishment, if they please; but I am a wife and mother, and I will never desert Mr Micawber.
âThat, that is my view of the obligation which I took upon myself when I repeated the irrevocable words, “I Emma, take thee, Wilkins”. I read that service over with a flat-candle on the previous night, and the conclusion I derived from it was, that I could never desert Mr Micawber.
âAnd though it is possible I may be mistaken in my view of the ceremony, I never will!'
Dickens is so wonderful with names. Wilkins makes it perfect.
You can see from his notebooks how Dickens arrives at the various names. Mrs Pipchin for example started off as Mrs Tipchin, then Mrs Alchin, Mrs Somechin, Mrs Pipchin.
After the family came out of the Marshalsea prison they were still desperately poor and his parents sent Dickens to work
for six shillings a week, in a blacking factory at number 30, Hungerford Stairs, just off the Strand.
It was the worst time of his whole life. He could never pass by that address, for the rest of his life, without crossing the road, and he never spoke of it to anyone.
The extraordinary thing was that even as a little boy he had such a sense of himself, such a belief in his own destiny, that he felt humiliated because the passers-by could see him through the factory windows, pasting the labels on the blacking bottles.
He felt it the more keenly, because his sister Fanny had just won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music and while he was toiling away in the dirt, she was learning the graces of music and piano.
He had one friend there, a cheerful, carrotty-headed little boy called Bob Fagin, but he begged his parents to take him away and send him back to school.
One day, his father had a row with James Lamert, the owner of the blacking factory, and took his son away. The very next morning his mother went back to Mr Lamert, trying to persuade him to keep Dickens working. Perhaps she felt they needed the money.
Twenty years later, in an autobiographical fragment that was never published in his lifetime, he wrote of the pain of that realisation:
âI never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.'
Despite the early days Dickens was a dutiful son. He took care of his mother financially. âMy mother was left to me when my father died. I never had anything left me but relations.' (He describes her as being âgot up in sables like a female Hamlet', and when he visited her, she would âpluck up a spirit and asked for a pound'.)
It was different with his grandmother. She was âin service'. She had been the housekeeper to the Earl of Crewe: Dickens loved listening to her stories when he was a little boy. Dickens draws an affectionate portrait of her as Mrs Lirriper, the lodging housekeeper from
Household Words
.
It was early in the second year of my married life that I lost my poor Lirriper and I set up in Islington directly afterwards and afterwards came here.
Servant girls are one of your first and one of your lasting troubles, being like your teeth which begin with convulsions and never cease tormenting you from the time you cut them till they cut you, and then you don't want to part with them which seems hard but we must succumb or buy artificial, and even where you get a will nine times out of ten you'll get a dirty face with it and naturally lodgers do not like good society to be shown in with a smear of black across the nose or a smudgy eyebrow.
Where they pick up the black is a mystery I cannot solve, as in the case of the willingest girl that ever came into a house
half-starved
poor thing, a girl so willing that I called her Willing Sophy down on her knees scrubbing early and late and ever cheerful but always smiling with a black face.
And I says to Sophy, âNow Sophy my good girl have a regular day for your stoves and keep the width of the Airy between
yourself
and the blacking and do not brush your hair with the bottom of the saucepans and do not meddle with the snuffs of candles and it stands to reason that it can no longer be yet there it was and always on her nose, which turning up and being broad at the end seemed to boast of it and caused warning from a steady gentleman and excellent lodger (breakfast by the week, use of sitting-room when required) his words being, “Mrs Lirriper, I have arrived at the point of admitting that the Black is a man and a brother but only in a natural form and when it can't be got off.”'
Well consequently I put poor Sophy on to other work and forbid her answering the door or answering a bell on any account but she was unfortunately so willing that nothing would stop her flying up the kitchen stairs whenever a bell was heard to tingle.
I put it to her: âOh Sophy, Sophy, for goodness, goodness sake, where does it come from?'
To which that poor, unlucky, willing mortal bursting out crying to see me so vexed replied, âI took a deal of black into me ma'am when I was a small child, being much neglected and I think it must be that it works out.'
So it continuing to work out of that poor thing and not having another fault to find with her I says âSophy what do you seriously think of my helping you away to New South Wales where it might not be noticed?'
Nor did I ever repent the money which was well spent, for she married the ship's cook on the voyage (himself a Mulateer) and did well and lived happy and so far as I ever heard it was not noticed in a new state of society to her dying day.
Music
.]
When Dickens was eighteen, and working as a reporter in the Houses of Parliament, he fell wildly and passionately and
explosively
in love with a frivolous young woman called Maria Beadnell.
David Copperfield meeting Dora Spenlow is Charles Dickens meeting Maria Beadnell.
All was over in a moment. I had fulfilled my destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction!
She was more than a human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was â anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted.
I don't remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off Dora entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery.
But to Dickens' despair, Maria's parents were dead against the match. They didn't want their daughter affianced to a young man without prospects â a debtor's son. And Maria herself was very wicked: she led him on, and teased him, and then she spurned him â calling him a mere boy. Boy. B.O.Y.
Three letters, which he wrote, âscorched his brain'. He never got over it. As a matter of fact, Dickens never got over anything that happened to him.
Years later he wrote to her:
But nobody can ever know with what a sad heart I resigned you, or after what struggles and what conflict. My entire devotion to you, and the wasted tenderness of those hard years which I have ever since half loved, half dreaded to recall, made so deep an impression on me that I refer to it a habit of suppression which now belongs to me, which I know is no part of my original nature, but which makes me chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young
.
In 1855, Maria came back into his life, only she wasn't called âBeadnell' any more. She had become Mrs Henry Winter, the wife of an impoverished sawmill manager in Finsbury. Did she make a mistake!
She wrote to Charles Dickens. He was of course by now the most famous man in England. When he saw that well-
remembered
handwriting on the envelope, his heart flamed into a frenzy of expectation and, very naughtily, he arranged an
assignation
at a time when he knew his wife Catherine would not be at home.
He wrote to her:
I fancy â though you may not have thought in the old time how manfully I loved you â that you may have seen in one of my old books a faithful recollection of the passion I had for you, & may
have thought that it was something to have been loved so well, and may have seen in little bits of âDora' touches of your old self sometimes and a grace here and there that may be revived in your little girls, years hence, for the bewilderment of some other young lover â though he will never be as in earnest as I and David Copperfield are
.
They arranged to meet and, amazingly, this brilliant man, this genius, kept alive an image of Maria as she had been when he had last seen her nineteen years before. She tried to warn him in a letter that she had changed. Dickens replied:
When you say you are toothless, fat, old and ugly, which I don't believe, I fly away to the house in Lombard Street and see you in a sort of raspberry-coloured dress with little, black, Van Dykes at the top, and my boyish heart pinned like a captured butterfly to every one of them
.
She arrived, nineteen years older, and shattered his dreams. He could never forgive her for having grown older and he took his literary revenge when he wrote the character of Flora Finching in
Little Dorrit
.
Little Dorrit
, 1855â57
Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow. This is Flora!
âI am sure I am ashamed to see Mr Clennam, I am a mere fright, I know he'll find me fearfully changed, I am actually an old woman, it's shocking to be found out, it's really shocking.
Flora Finching â Sol Eytinge, 1867
Â
âOh! But with a gentleman it's so different and really you look so amazingly well that you have no right to say anything of the kind, while, as to me, you know â oh! I am dreadful!
âBut if we talk of not having changed, look at papa, is not papa precisely what he was when you went away, isn't it cruel and unnatural of papa to be such a reproach to his own child, if we go on in this way much longer people who don't know us will begin to suppose that I am papa's mama!
âOh, Mr Clennam, you insincerest of creatures, I perceive already that you have not lost your old way of paying
compliments
, your old way when you used to pretend to be so
sentimentally
struck you know â at least I don't mean that, I â oh I don't know what I mean!
âYou mustn't think of going yet, you could never be so unkind as to think of going, Arthur â I mean Mr Arthur â or I suppose Mr Clennam would be far more proper â but I am sure I don't know what I am saying, but I am running into nonsense again.
âIndeed I have little doubt that you are married to some Chinese lady, being in China so long and being in business and naturally desirous to settle and extend your connection nothing was more likely than that you should propose to a Chinese lady and nothing was more natural I am sure than that the Chinese lady should accept you and think herself very well off too, I only hope she's not a Pagodian dissenter.
âOh good gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a
bachelor
so long on my account! But of course you never did why should you, pray don't answer, I don't know where I'm running to, oh do tell me something about the Chinese ladies whether their eyes are really so long and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-of-pearl fish at cards, and do they really wear tails down their back and plaited too or is it only the men, and why do they stick little bells all over their bridges and temples and hats and things or don't they really do it?
âThen it's all true and they really do! Good gracious Arthur! â pray excuse me â old habit â Mr Clennam far more proper.
âDear dear, only to think of the changes at home. Who could have ever imagined Mrs Finching when I can't imagine it myself!
âFinching oh yes isn't it a dreadful name, but as Mr F. said when he proposed to me he wasn't answerable for it and couldn't help it could he? Excellent man, not at all like you but excellent man!
âRomance is fled, however, as I openly said to Mr F. when he proposed to me and you will be surprised to hear that he proposed seven times once in a hackney-coach once in a boat once in a pew once on a donkey at Tunbridge Wells and the rest on his knees.
âYou must know but that I have no doubt you know already, that before I was introduced to the late Mr F. I had been engaged to Arthur Clennam â we were all in all to one another, it was the morning of life, it was bliss, it was frenzy, it was everything else of that sort in the highest degree, when rent asunder we turned to stone in which capacity Arthur went to China and I became the statue bride of the late Mr F.
âAsk me not if I love him still or if he still loves me or what the end is to be or when, we are surrounded by watchful eyes and it may be that we are destined to pine asunder it may be never more to be reunited not a word not a breath not a look to betray us all must be secret as the tomb wonder not therefore that even if I should seem comparatively cold to Arthur or Arthur should seem comparatively cold to me we have fatal reasons it is enough if we understand them hush!'