Saturday, April 2, 2011

This Day in Literary History (A Happy Charles Dickens Weds)



April 2, 1836—Two days after monthly installments began of the novel that made him a permanent favorite with the British public, 24-year-old Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, at St. Luke’s in Chelsea. The bride was the daughter of a music critic at Dickens's paper who was a friend of the late bestselling novelist Sir Walter Scott—a cultural status the groom would not just achieve but surpass very soon.

Reading about Dickens’ early giddiness as a married man, what springs to mind is “You’re Going to Love Tomorrow,” the flashback song of gleeful promise by twentysomething sweethearts in Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical Follies. The song gains in irony because we know, by its appearance in the show, that the marriage in question, despite abundant success, has turned rancid. That is precisely what happened to the marriage of Charles and Catherine.

In a prior post, I discussed the unraveling of Dickens’ marriage after two decades, and of the manner in which he confronted—in the process, only further publicizing—the rumor of why their relationship had foundered: the novelist’s affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan. But long before all that, when he wed Catherine, young Dickens was, like Sondheim’s Ben Stone, a man of immense intelligence and ambition, certain that he was about to come into his own.

He had well-founded reason to think so. One quality I forgot to mention in the last paragraph was energy. Stints as a reporting covering Parliament and the courts, culminating with employment by the Morning Chronicle, couldn’t sate Dickens’ rage to write. Within a couple of years, he was also writing short stories on the side. In early February 1836, his “First Series” for Sketches by Boz ("Boz" being a pseudonym he adopted) appeared to general acclaim.

The new-found interest shown by publishers gave him the confidence to reshape a second fictional project. Like Sketches, The Pickwick Papers was planned as a series of sketches—a group of short texts between many illustrations. After the suicide of the series’ caricaturist, however, a different illustrator was found and Dickens successfully pushed for a higher text-to-picture ratio.

Second, serialization provided Dickens with the opportunity to, in effect, test-market ideas. Early chapters were not really clicking until he introduced Mr. Pickwick’s manservant Sam Weller.The latter comic character proved so hugely popular that Dickens decided to double the number of installments from 20 to 40, and he began to fashion it into more of a conventional comic novel.

All this success enabled him to settle down—something he’d had in mind for several years by then.

Catherine Hogarth wasn’t Dickens’ first love. That would have been Maria Beadnell, whose parents thought Dickens wouldn’t amount to much and sent her abroad, effectively ending the relationship.

Today’s “Quote of the Day” from William Maxwell confirms what I think of as the “burning wound” theory of fiction: that writers are irresistibly drawn to letting out some great, long-ago wound. In Dickens’ case, the wound was his father’s massive improvidence, which led John Dickens to be imprisoned for debt—and his son to be sent to work for what turned out to be a year in a soul-crushing blacking factory.

Maria’s parents saw that her suitor did not have much money, and concluded, in one of the massive errors of all time, that Charles had no future.

In a way, though, it might have been just as well that Maria didn’t become Mrs. Charles Dickens. In the end, the novelist wore himself out. You can imagine what it must have been like to be close to him.

Dickens couldn’t much abide the changes he thought time induced in the women in his life. After their relationship ended, the novelist immortalized Maria as Dora in the book closest to his heart (and most autobiographical), David Copperfield. Two decades after their breakup, he met her again, only to find her a flibbertigibbet. The resulting depiction, as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit, was colder and crueler than her earlier fictional incarnation.

Maria probably should have counted her lucky stars she didn’t end up being Mrs. Charles Dickens. The novelist’s feelings about Catherine paralleled what he felt about Maria—and the damage was more widespread.

In a sense, the two women became linked at a critical point in the novelist’s life. In March 1851, several months after bearing the couple’s ninth child, named Dora—yes, the same name as David Copperfield's first love—Catherine Hogarth Dickens fell ill. The following month, eight-month Dora passed away.

The swift conjunction of events has led to some controversy over precisely what happened. Many Dickens biographers—including the otherwise accomplished Peter Ackroyd—accept the novelist's explanation that his wife suffered a nervous breakdown after the birth of his daughter, attributing it to postpartum depression. However, Lillian Nayder’s biography of Catherine, The Other Dickens (2010), stresses the death rather than the birth of Dora as the cause of the increasing fragility of her mother.

Whatever the case might be, Dickens complained more and more about his wife’s lack of proper household management, mental condition and the financial burden imposed by all the children she bore him, including a tenth born after the death of Dora. (The fact that Dickens might have had just a wee bit to do with the latter factor does not seem to have penetrated his consciousness.)

Dickens’ novels of the 1850s are characterized by a growing darkness—especially in Hard Times, equally notable as his shortest novel and his most devastating portrait of marriage as a prison. This was a man dying for release, and he found it in 1858, when he separated from Catherine. (He left her, but even though the initiative was all on his side and he was at fault, he managed the neat trick of limiting her right to see their children.)

Dickens wasn’t the only British Victorian novelist in an unconventional—or turbulent—romantic relationship: George Eliot and her longtime paramour never married; Dickens friend Willkie Collins kept two sets of families he’d fathered by two mistresses; and another friend, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, sought to confine his estranged wife in a lunatic asylum when she grew vociferous in public charges against him.

But scandal had the most explosive potential for Dickens, whose books so often celebrated family love. The thought that he was violating social taboos and committing hypocrisy with his affair with Ellen Ternan led him to make extraordinary efforts, during the investigation of a train accident, to hide the fact that he was traveling with her at the time.

Most spectacularly, more than a century after his death in 1870, Ternan’s biographer, Claire Tomalin, discovered that Dickens had been fatally stricken not at Gad’s Hill, the home where he lived after his separation from Catherine, but at the house he’d set up for Ellen, and that she’d transported him back to the family home before the truth could become known to the public.

Catherine outlived her restless husband by nine years. At the end of their marriage, he had sought to marginalize her through the sheer weight of his words, but now Catherine would live to use them against him, in a belated assertion of her autonomy and self-worth. Give his letters to the British Museum, she instructed daughter Kate, “that the world may know he loved me once.”

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