The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (67 page)

A great love affair needs two willing partners, as there surely were here. Charles Dickens and the people of early Victorian England were made for each other. This happy coincidence explains much of the appeal and also the limits of Dickens’s work. Seldom has an author been so cherished by his readers or an audience so beloved by an author. Dickens himself boasted
of “that particular relation (personally affectionate like no other man’s) which subsists between me and the public.” Perhaps this was because he was “a brilliant listener,” and “allowed no man to be a bore.”

Dickens’s childhood prepared him to speak about the common life. If Balzac’s family worried over their claim to add a “de” to their name, and disciplined him at the Oratorian Brothers’ best school, Dickens suffered the working-class discipline of a boot-blacking factory, the shame of a father in debtor’s prison, and the hunger of a six-shilling weekly wage. While Balzac shared the mercenary ambitions of middle-class France and the intrigues of Paris salons, Dickens was trying to stay alive and to make a living. They produced two versions of the human comedy as different as the France and England of their time. Balzac’s France was turbulent, with memories of the guillotine and recurrent surging Paris mobs, with a new “constitution” every fifteen years, with upstart and defunct titles, ephemeral monarchies, royalist and democratic ideologies, and resounding street slogans. Balzac’s beau ideal was Napoleon and in his own fashion Balzac had determined to conquer the world. Money and the salon were his refuge from war and politics. Without a family or children, Balzac had a dozen mistresses.

Dickens’s England was another story. The slender young queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the year when Dickens first achieved fame with “Pickwick Triumphant.” It was an age of empire, an age of complacency and reform. The Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 would disintegrate the rotten boroughs, and respond to the agitation of Workingmen’s Associations, Chartists, and others. The contradictions of the era were expressed in the Crimean War. On the other side of Europe, in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” at Balaklava and Inkerman, gallant British troops recklessly disregarded casualties. But the scandalous disregard of the health of the troops sparked the saintly heroism of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910).

It was an age of public brutality and unctuous religiosity, of private insensitivity and sentimentality, an age of cruel prisons, unbending factory discipline, and illiterate workers. Yet all these ills, it was believed, could be cured by better orphanages, humane prisons, Factory Acts, improved Poor Laws, repealed Combination Laws—generally by heeding the voice of the people spoken through a widening suffrage. The ills of this society, unlike Balzac’s, would be cured not by revolution but by muscular Christianity and strong-willed morality.

The trials of Dickens’s childhood would put his own optimism to the test, and would figure disproportionately in his works. In Balzac’s human comedy children are only pawns in the game of inheritance, but in Dickens’s they play leading roles. The childhood fortunes and misfortunes of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Tiny Tim engage us as much as those of any
of his adult heroes. Little Nell of
The Old Curiosity Shop
never ceased to be the author’s favorite, and Dickens wept whenever he gave public readings of her death. Unique among the great novels, his human comedy is enlivened by young men and women who were not yet rocked by adult passions.

Born in Portsmouth in 1812 to John Dickens, a paymaster in the Navy, Charles Dickens, at the age of five, moved with his family to London. John Dickens, the son of a domestic servant, had married the pretty daughter, one of ten children, of another Navy paymaster. Before they moved to London, John Dickens’s father-in-law had embezzled £5,000 of Navy funds, was convicted, and fled the country, which destroyed John Dickens’s hopes for financial help. A devoted family man, he did not gamble and drank only moderately. But he was generous, and loved to entertain, always hoping (like Mr. Micawber) that something would turn up. John Dickens could never live within his income, and throughout his life Charles Dickens had the burden of trying to keep his father out of debtor’s prison.

When Charles was only twelve, his father, “as kindhearted and generous a man as ever lived,” was committed to Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. There Dickens recalled:

Mrs. Dickens had imprudently rented a large house to be a school where she might repair the family fortunes, but no pupils ever came. Meanwhile, to save money, they took Charles out of school. “What would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!”

When a friend, manager of a boot-blacking factory in the Strand, offered Charles a job at six shillings a week, “in an evil hour for me” the family leaped at it. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age.… My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.” The searing experience of the job he recalled in Dickensian detail.

The manager did the only thing he could to increase Charles’s humiliation, by requiring the boys to work before an open window to attract customers along the Strand.

A curious twist of Victorian humanitarianism allowed the families of Marshalsea prisoners to live with them and come and go to the prison. Charles’s mother lived in the prison, while Charles and his sister Fanny spent Sundays there. When John Dickens was released, Mrs. Dickens would have been happy to keep Charles making his six shillings a week at the blacking warehouse. But John Dickens disagreed, and sent Charles as a day pupil to the respectable Wellington House Academy. It was ruled by a sadistic headmaster who seemed to enjoy hitting the palms of offenders’ hands with “a bloated mahogany ruler,” or “viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight with one of his large hands and caning the wearer with the other.” Dickens did passably, and even won a Latin prize though he had never taken Latin. But when his struggling parents, already evicted from their house for failure to pay their rent, were burdened with another baby, they could no longer pay the fees, and Charles, just fifteen, was taken out of school. Hired as office boy in a firm of solicitors, he saw his salary soon rise from ten shillings to fifteen shillings a week. He found the work repetitious—registering wills, serving processes, filing documents—but he amused himself by observing the pompous idiosyncrasies of lawyers and clients.

Meanwhile, John Dickens, who had been charitably retired from the Navy with a small pension, at the age of forty-one had learned shorthand and joined the Parliamentary reporting staff of the
British Press
. Charles himself while at school had sent that paper some “penny-a-line” notices of local items. Following his father’s example, he now determined to become a journalist. This meant mastering shorthand, and even in this tiresome exercise he found drama. “The changes that were wrung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.” Although not yet
seventeen he obtained a job as court reporter in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London, where he acquired a treasury of jargon, obfuscation, and legal muddles for any number of novels. At eighteen he secured a reader’s ticket at the British Museum and he read fervently in his spare hours. With his remarkable shorthand skill, he went on, by the age of twenty, to report on Parliament for his uncle Barrow’s new paper. His sight of the travesties of the law had already made him a reformer when he witnessed the Parliamentary battle over the Reform Bill of 1832. He widened his view of London life as a reporter for the Liberal
Morning Chronicle
and helped them win some news beats against
The Times
.

Meanwhile the slight Maria Beadnell, who came of a minor banking family above his station, infatuated him by her harp playing, her coy ringlets, and teasing ways. But her family had already promised her to a more appropriate young man, whom she married, and Dickens was left with a frustration from which he would never really recover. Three years later he met a quite different figure, Catherine Hogarth, the full-bosomed daughter of a successful journalist. The Hogarths saw promise in the young Charles, applauded the match, and he married Kate in 1836. She bore him ten children (nine of whom survived), and with his growing fame, their convivial family life became quite public. But she was moody, inept at conversation, and over the years the sociable Charles found her far from an ideal companion for his celebrity.

That celebrity came upon him like a whirlwind at the age of twenty-five. It is still not easy to explain. Dickens’s first notable publication, in February 1836, was
Sketches by Boz
, a collection of his pieces from magazines and newspapers, under the appropriate subtitle “Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People.” The book was widely and favorably reviewed, and the author, likened by critics to Washington Irving or Victor Hugo, was praised for his “power of producing tears as well as laughter.” But when the first number of the scheduled monthly installments of
Pickwick Papers
appeared later that year, it was received without enthusiasm. The publisher Chapman and Hall had printed only 400 copies of the first installment. Hoping to increase the sale in the provinces, they sent out 1,500 copies of the next four numbers “on sale or return.” Of these an average of 1,450 copies were returned. After the first number had appeared, the popular caricaturist Robert Seymour, who was illustrating the series, became despondent over young Dickens’s wholesale revision of Seymour’s original plan. At Dickens’s demand that he redo an illustration, Seymour committed suicide.

With these unhappy events, the publisher Chapman and Hall could easily have dropped the project. But the enthusiastic Dickens persuaded them to find another illustrator whom he would choose and supervise. Luckily, as
it proved, the celebrated George Cruikshank was not available, and they found the sketches submitted by the eager young William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) quite unsuitable. Instead they gave the commission to the precocious but relatively unknown Hablot Knight Browne (1815–1882), who would become famous as “Phiz,” the illustrator of novels by Dickens and others. By the end of July 1836, when Sam Weller had appeared in the
Pickwick Papers
, the sales exploded to forty thousand copies for each number. Dickens wrote his publisher, “Pickwick Triumphant!”

The popularity of
Pickwick
was a literary phenomenon without precedent—in the youth of the author, in the suddenness and durability of the acclaim—and has found few successors. “Here was a series of sketches,” Dickens’s intimate friend and biographer John Forster observed in amazement, “without the pretence to such interest as attends a well-constructed story; put forth in a form apparently ephemeral as its purpose; having none that seemed higher than to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with help from a comic artist; and after four or five parts had appeared, without newspaper notice or puffing … it sprang into a popularity that each part carried higher and higher, until people at this time talked of nothing else, tradesmen recommended their goods by using its name, and its sale, outstripping that of all the most famous books of the century, had reached an almost fabulous number.” Carlyle reported a clergyman who heard a deathly-ill parishioner exclaim, “Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days anyway!”

Forster likened Dickens’s popularity to the slavery of men of letters in ancient times. “He had unwittingly sold himself into a quasi-bondage, and had to purchase his liberty at a heavy cost, after considerable suffering.” But Dickens’s bondage, like Balzac’s, was self-created. He remained in the thick of things, editing magazines, organizing good causes, reporting for newspapers, while he wrote his novels piecemeal. Like
Pickwick
, his next novel,
Nicholas Nickleby
(1838–39), was written in twenty monthly parts. Then
The Old Curiosity Shop
(1849–41) and
Barnaby Rudge
(1841) were written in shorter weekly installments. Novel writing for Dickens was the closest thing to journalism because it was periodical writing. This was a commitment not only to the publisher, for whom the work was contracted, but to the public, whose expectant response could suggest or even dictate the direction of the story. Nearly all Dickens’s novels were written in this way.

With the “serial novel” Dickens was innovating. While nowadays the normal form for a novel is a single volume, it was not so in Dickens’s day. In the eighteenth century a novel might come to five volumes. Later, in the times of Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), three volumes had become standard. When the price was half a guinea (10s. 6d.) a volume, most people could not afford to buy the book. But each installment
of the
Pickwick Papers
published by Chapman and Hall was only thirty-two pages of print. In green paper covers, with two illustrations and some pages of advertisement, three or four chapters were offered to readers on the last day of the month for one shilling.