Dickens A Biography Fred Kaplan To Julia, Noah, and Ben, and to the memory of my father Contents Illustrations Preface, 1998 CHAPTER ONE: Scenes of His Boyhood (1812–1822) CHAPTER TWO: The Hero of My Own Life (1822–1834) CHAPTER THREE: The First Coming (1834–1837) CHAPTER FOUR: Charley Is My Darling (1837–1841) CHAPTER FIVE: The Emperor of Cheerfulness (1842–1844) CHAPTER SIX: An Angelic Nature (1844–1846) CHAPTER SEVEN: As My Father Would Observe (1846–1849) CHAPTER EIGHT: No Need for Rest (1849–1853) CHAPTER NINE: The Sparkler of Albion (1853–1855) CHAPTER TEN: Superfluous Fierceness (1855–1857) CHAPTER ELEVEN: My Own Wild Way (1857–1859) CHAPTER TWELVE: A Splendid Excess (1860–1864) CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Sons of Toil (1864–1868) CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Castle in the Other World (1867–1870) Notes Image Gallery Acknowledgments Index Illustrations 1. From an unsigned miniature, said to be the earliest portrait. Courtesy of the Dickens House Museum. 2. John Dickens, from an oil painting by John Jackson 3. John Dickens, c. 1845 4. Elizabeth (Mrs. John) Dickens, c. 1845. Courtesy of the Dickens House Museum. 5. Mrs. John Dickens, engraved by Edwin Roffe 6. No. 18, St. Mary’s Place, Chatham, Dickens family residence, 1821–1823. From a photograph by Catherine Ward. 7. Wellington House Academy, Hampstead Road, Dickens’ school, 1821– 1823. From a photograph by Catherine Ward. 8. Maria Beadnell, c. 1835 9. Private Theatricals, Clari, etc., April 27, 1833 10. Charles Dickens, 1835. From a miniature by Rose Emma Drummond. 11. Catherine Hogarth (Mrs. Charles Dickens), shortly before her marriage, c. 1835. From a photograph by T. W. Tyrrell. 12. Charles Dickens, 1838. From a drawing by Samuel Lawrence. 13. Dickens, Catherine, and Mary Hogarth, c. 1835. From a sketch by Daniel Maclise. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 14. Dickens, Thackeray, Maclise, and Mahony, 1836. From a sketch by William Makepeace Thackeray. 15. 48 Doughty Street, Dickens residence, 1837–1839. From a photograph by Catherine Ward. 16. Arrival of the Great Western steamer at New York, April 23, 1836, with Mr. Pickwick and other characters from Pickwick Papers 17. Charles Dickens, 1839. From a painting by Daniel Maclise. 18. William Makepeace Thackeray. From a sketch by Daniel Maclise. 19. George Cruikshank, c. 1840 20. Richard Bentley, c. 1850. From an etching by T. Brown. 21. William Harrison Ainsworth. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise. 22. John Forster, 1830. From a portrait by Thomas Warrington and Daniel Maclise. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 23. John Forster reading, May 22, 1840. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 24. Daniel Maclise. From an engraving by J. Smith. 25. William Charles Macready, c. 1835. From a painting by Briggs. 26. T. N. Talfourd, c. 1845 27. Clarkson Stanfield, c. 1835 28. Catherine Dickens, 1842. From a painting by Daniel Maclise. 29. The Dickens children, 1842. The painting the Dickenses took with them on their American trip. From a painting by Daniel Maclise. 30. Charles Dickens, 1844. From a drawing by Charles Martin. 31. No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, Dickens’ residence, 1839–1851. From a photograph by C. W.B. Ward. 32. Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), c. 1845 33. Edward Chapman, Dickens’ publishers 34. Frederic Chapman, Dickens’ publishers 35. William Bradbury, Dickens’ publishers 36. F. M. Evans, Dickens’ publishers 37. Dickens and his friends in Cornwall, 1842. From a sketch by William Makepeace Thackeray. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 38. Dickens reading The Chimes, December 2, 1844. From a sketch by Daniel Maclise. 39. Every Man in His Humour playbill, 1845, with drawings of Dickens and John Forster. Sketches by Daniel Maclise. 40. Dickens in Every Man in His Humour, 1845. From a portrait by C. R. Leslie. 41. Forster acting, c. 1845. From a sketch by Clarkson Stanfield. 42. Mrs. Charles Dickens, 1846. From a painting by Daniel Maclise. 43. Charles Dickens, 1848. From a drawing by Count D’Orsay. 44. Georgina Hogarth, c. 1856. PREFACE, 1998 W E LIVE IN A CULTURAL CLIMATE QUICK TO ACCEPT THE WORST, DENY the best. And we often have difficulty, unlike Dickens, in being sure about how to define moral indicators, especially in complicated human matters. To Dickens, that came easily. He unhesitatingly believed in absolute truths, both moral and cosmological, though, paradoxically, opposite absolutes often co-exist, as in “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When, in 1854, he learned of the allegation that the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the North Pole had in its final days resorted to cannibalism, he would not accept even the possibility that such a horror had happened. With Wilkie Collins, he soon collaborated on a play, The Frozen Deep, a main purpose of which was to affirm that Englishmen (and by extension Europeans and their American offspring) were not capable of such base behavior, even in extreme circumstances. Like culturally self-assured cannibals, we put Dickens into our particular contemporary pot, bring the water to a boil, and then help ourselves to those parts that entice our palates. Dickens the moral absolutist appeals to few modern readers, though there is still an audience, mainly of political and religious conservatives, who find this aspect of him attractive and even reassuring. Dickens biographers, from the beginning, have been aware that some of the facts of his life and personality may seem to some readers uncomfortably out of synch with the Christian and humanitarian messages of his novels. Still, since Edgar Johnson’s somewhat innocent but still brilliantly successful Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and His Triumph (1952), Dickens biographers have attemped to see Dickens “warts and all,” as Carlyle said about his effort to write a truthful biography of Cromwell. But the wart we are inclined to see, the meal we are predisposed to dine on, is the one that particularly suits our own late-twentieth- century interests. Even if Dickens has not been quite the tasty meal offered by more culturally scandalous or politically incorrect Victorian and modern lives, he nevertheless has provided for the modern biographer three appetizing areas that can be and have been readily highlighted. The first is his sense of himself as an abused child whose exploitative parents forced him to toil in a blacking factory when he should have been in school; the second, his relationships with and his treatment of women, particularly Georgina Hogarth Dickens and Ellen Ternan; and the third, his schizophrenic division of himself into a person with an open public life and a secret private one. Since this biography was first published in 1988, there have been many articles and books on Dickens’ childhood, none of which has added any significant evidence to our knowledge of those years and experiences in his life. His own and John Forster’s account of the blacking warehouse incident still stand as our primary sources. As in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), the only full-length biography since this one, and in Malcolm Andrews’ Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (1994), our contemporary attraction to the concept of the abused child and the particular language associated with it has, inevitably, been applied to Dickens. It has not been a bad thing to do, as long as it is done within reason and with an understanding of the differences between what Victorians thought and what our late-twentieth-century society thinks the appropriate amount of sympathy and understanding due the child. What it was in the young Charles that made him for all his adult life relive emotionally and imaginatively that childhood experience, no biographer has been able to satisfactorily elucidate. To a great extent it was class humiliation, something harder for us to grasp today than it was for Dickens’ contemporaries. When Elizabeth and John Dickens sent their son to the blacking warehouse to help with exigent family finances, they believed they were doing something socially reasonable and morally defensible. Indeed, British and American Victorian culture abused children even beyond our contemporary abusive depradations. But Dickens’ parents (and most Victorians) would not have thought of young Charles’s treatment as abuse. Dickens’ powerful dramatizations of such children in his fiction and his sense of his own “neglect” (the word he preferred) are attractive to modern readers primarily because they hit so strongly on a preoccupation of ours, in a culture in which sensitivity to the issue has been ratcheted up and the definition of abuse made more extensive and inclusive. It is an emphasis that from the beginning Dickens biographers have not underplayed. It has been an easy or at least a comfortable crux in Dickens biography, primarily because he has seemed especially contemporary in this regard. Dickens’ treatment of women in his life and fiction has not been as sympathetic to modern taste, and on this matter we have all been cultural cannibals, attempting to come to terms, more or less, with what for many modern readers has become a crucial moral crux. That Dickens associated the pain of the blacking house humiliation almost exclusively with his mother’s indifference to his plight and hardly at all with his father’s bankruptcy has made it inevitable that biographers will find important traces of this in his treatment of his wife as well as in the women of his fiction. One prominent review of this biography found serious fault with its treatment of Elizabeth Dickens. The charge was that I had been unfair to her. Probably I was, in that critic’s sense, though my effort to present Elizabeth Dickens mostly through the lens of her son’s feelings, as far as those could be determined, seemed to me entirely separate from the issue of objective fairness. The little that we know about Elizabeth Dickens we know through the record that her son created. Undoubtedly, he could no more provide an objective view of her than I can provide an objective view of him, let alone of my own mother. All such portraits are part fact, part interpretation, and no amount of special pleading or political correctness can gainsay that our interest in any of the women in Dickens’ life resides primarily in what our attention to them can teach us about Dickens. Victorian Studies in general and the Victorian novel in particular have benefited from and been distorted by feminist studies. The benefit has been considerable, the distortion usually only minor. In regard to Dickens, the two major biographical studies of the women in his life, Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women (1983), and Claire Tomalin’s pursuit of Ellen Ternan in The Invisible Woman (1990), have brought together available material to give some special emphasis to a modern interest. Slater and Tomalin both owe a debt, as do all modern Dickens biographers, to Ada Nisbet’s pioneering study, Dickens and Ellen Ternan (1952). Tomalin’s biography of Ternan adds some details about Ternan’s life and gives us the fullest portrait of her days. But even a full-length study of Ellen Ternan exists because of our interest in Dickens rather than in Ternan. As fate and the record require, she still remains largely a shadow lady whom Dickens (and Ternan) preferred to have us know as little about as possible. That she and Dickens were lovers almost every modern biographer believes. Only Ackroyd quixotically but unconvincingly resists the substantial circumstantial evidence. Whatever his motive for doing so, it seems an instance of special pleading. He somehow sees the sexual relationship as some unwarranted avoirdupois grafted onto Dickens by modern biographical cannibals, the better to dine on him. No biographer has been able to demonstrate