This Day in Literary History (Charles Dickens, ‘Generously Angry’ Champion of the Underdog, Dies)

June 9, 1870—Charles Dickens, whose prolific career included forerunners of the modern crime novel, left a few mysteries of his own when he died at age 58 of a stroke at his country home Gad’s Hill Place, in Rochester, England, including:

*How did he intend to finish the novel on which he was working at the time of his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

*Was he at home at the time of his fatal stroke?

*Why were his wishes for a simple burial disregarded?

The following is what we know—or don’t—about these questions:

*Drood: Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon, Dickens left no notes for how his book might turn out. We only know, based on the number of installments, that he had reached the halfway mark of the novel. Writing in installments for magazine publishing helped him to adjust plots and characterizations by gauging ongoing reader reaction, but it also deprived us of knowing his final destination for what turned out to be his last book.

*Dickens’ whereabouts on the day before his death: In her judicious 2011 biography, Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin reviewed the recollections of his beloved daughter, sister-in-law, and a local doctor called to Gad’s Hill. His careful concealment of involvement with his much younger mistress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, led Tomalin to offer an alternative scenario for the day of his stroke, one that she admitted was “a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one”—i.e., that, instead of suffering his stroke at home, Dickens collapsed at the home of Nelly, who—to preserve her lover’s reputation and her own—got him, with some help, into a hackney cab, where he was conveyed back to his own home.

*Burial: Dickens’ will specified that he wished to be “buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.” That is hardly what occurred. In the end, his remains were brought to the Valhalla of English literati: Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. In a very revealing article this past February in Smithsonian Magazine, Leon Litvack disclosed that this circumvention of Dickens’ wishes was engineered by his friend and eventual biographer, John Forster, and the dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, both of whom stood to gain by creating an unstoppable groundswell of public opinion on behalf of this move.

(Incidentally, the involvement of Nelly Ternan in this closing chapter of Dickens’ story remains as murky as much else: At the final services, Dickens’ estranged wife Catherine was excluded; accounts of those present note that 14 mourners were in attendance. Many, but not all, were specifically named. It is possible that Nelly was the unnamed attendee.)

It is natural that Dickens, a spellbinding storyteller given to astonishing plot twists, left a few in his own life. But I could not write this post without considering his larger legacy.

Dickens pioneered so much in the writing and marketing of modern fiction, but his influence on the crime novel receives less attention than it should. From Oliver Twist to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he continually turned his attention to its significant presence in Victorian England. 

Just as masters of the genre have discovered in the past century, such subjects offers unique and abundant opportunities to consider both twisted individual psychology and larger social pathologies. In other words, the forces of injustice create the preconditions for crime, its exploiters and victims.

In contemporary America, where the police are increasingly regarded as abusers of power, it may come as a shock that Dickens sees the London police force as a bulwark of the moral order. The Dickens novel I was assigned in a college Victorian Literature course, Bleak House, even creates one of the first detectives in fiction: Inspector Bucket.  

A post from the Web site “Read Great Literature” offers the presence of this character as a reason to love this novel, noting his resemblance to my favorite TV sleuth, Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo: his humble nature, his dogged pursuit of clues, and even a beloved wife!

Above all, Dickens recognized that crime, like injustice, left untold victims in its wake, and it needed to be countered not just with the highly rational faculties of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a fearless commitment to truth and a stout heart. That type of person would be a champion of the underdog like Dickens himself, as summarized by George Orwell:

“In the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

Quote of the Day (Wilkie Collins, on the “Woman in White”)

“There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments…All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight, was a colourless, youthful face, meager and sharp to look at, about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully-attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue.”—English novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), The Woman in White (1860)

Read over that quote again. In its pathos and, especially, rising dramatic tension, it’s not hard to think that it comes from one of Charles Dickens’ later novels.

In some ways, in fact, we can think of Wilkie Collins—Dickens’ junior by 12 years—as the writer who, on the written page as well as in private life, pushed to a logical conclusion everything his longtime great friend and mentor did in these years.

The Woman in White, though not Collins’ first novel, was his first major success. The thriller began U.S. serialization in Harper’s Weekly on this date in 1859, one day before it was set to do so in the author’s native Britain, in the Dickens-edited magazine All the Year Round.

(What an extraordinary amount of thrilling literature that readers received in that single issue of the latter: not only the first installment of Collins’ book, but the last of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.)

What did I mean about Collins pushing “to a logical conclusion” everything Dickens did? Well, consider some of the ways that The Woman in White resembled, then diverged from, Dickens’ Bleak House (1853):

* Bleak House split between an omniscient, third-person narrator and a first-person one; Woman in White features five first-person narrators.

* Bleak House concerns itself with the maddening vagaries of the law; Woman was written by someone who broke off legal training after his father’s death allowed him to pursue what he really loved--writing. The latter book’s narrators were meant, in effect, to sound like witnesses at a trial.

* Bleak House, with its Inspector Bucket, might be thought of as the first detective novel; Woman might be considered the first novel narrated (at least in part) by an individual who functions as the “detective” of the plot by unlocking a mystery. Collins is generally regarded as the master of the Victorian “sensation novel”—a genre in which the commonplace facts of life collide with subject matter bound to shock the mores of the time: substance abuse, sexual transgressions, and insanity. That genre also further developed the beginnings of the modern detective story pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe.

* Bleak House spawned three adaptations for the BBC; Woman was spun off as a stage play in the 1870s (written by Collins himself), twice for the “Beeb,” then turned into a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I should also point out a few other ways in which the lives and/or works of Dickens and Collins reflected, in sometimes odd ways, on each other:

* Bleak House and Woman deal with secrets; their authors had their own, of a sexual nature. Dickens left his wife of two decades for Ellen Ternan, a young actress he met while taking part in Collins’ The Frozen Deep; for years, Collins maintained two separate households with two different women—a set of irregular relationships that increasingly alienated him from Dickens.

* Dickens’ daughter Katie married Collins’ sickly brother Charlie.

* By the end of the 1860s, Collins had become addicted to laudanum, and his novel The Moonstone would explore opium and laudanum addiction; addiction to opium would also prove a key plot element of Dickens’ unfinished 1870 novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which Collins, it was discovered years later, privately criticized as a product of an exhausted man).

I started The Woman in White a few weeks ago before being forced to put it down because of other projects. I’ve begrudged every minute I’ve spent away from the book since.

The first thing a modern reader notices about it is that it’s long—more than 600 pages in the edition I own. The quote above hints at why it bulks up so much, but also why it’s been adapted so much to the stage, screen and television—much like Dickens, Collins’ frequent collaborator in theatrical ventures.

Can you imagine what an editor like Gordon Lish—who made the minimalist Raymond Carver howl over his excisions—would do with this passage? Forget about three adjectival phrases to a noun, as Collins resorts to here, or two, or even one such phrase—poor Collins would be reduced to nouns and verbs!

But the effect of all of this verbiage is unforgettable—cinematic, really, in a way that the setting—a moonlit Hampstead heath—by itself couldn’t totally convey. Long after you’ll close the book, you’ll not soon put out of your mind, if ever, the image of the solitary, sad title character.

This Day in Literary History (Dickens’ “Personal” Statement on his Separation)

(Note: This was posted a bit late, but in my opinion is too interesting a story not to tell.)

June 12, 1858—Charles Dickens, having separated from wife Catherine the month before, posted a front-page “Personal” statement in the journal he edited, Household Words, obliquely commenting on his troubled marriage.

The situation, arising from his affair with a young actress, not only ended his 21-year marriage but also drove a wedge between himself and his children and wrecked a profitable relationship with his publisher.

In the copious Dickens literature, you first receive a hint of something amiss in perhaps his most unusual novel, Hard Times, for These Times (1854). 

It’s not only the shortest of his books (perhaps necessitated by the limited space he had in his journal), but, in its portrait of the loveless marriage of Louisa Grandgrind to Josiah Bounderby, the novelist’s first major acknowledgement of the difficulties in this institution. 

You get the distinct sense that someone who could write so knowledgeably about this was facing all kinds of emotional turmoil himself (sort of the same sense I had when listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love).

A couple of factors left the author susceptible to an affair:

1) Growing disenchantment with Catherine. After the birth of 10 children (nine surviving to adulthood), Dickens had grown resentful of his wife, as much for presenting him with so many mouths to feed as for the fact that she was not his intellectual equal. That he played an equally—and, really, more significant—role than Catherine in her continual pregnancies never seems to have occurred to him.

2) Irrepressible energy. Dickens did more than write many massive novels. He edited a journal, wrote 12 volumes of letters, hiked all around London and the countryside at all hours of the day and night, and, when it came to partying, was a veritable Mr. Fezziwig. Yet all of this portended something darker. "I am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from it nor set at rest,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson to a friend, Annie Fields.

3) A passion for the stage. One outlet for this demonic energy was theater. He loved not only to attend plays, but to participate in them, as producer, director and actor – a kind of forerunner of cinema actor-hyphenates like Orson Welles, Warren Beatty and Woody Allen. Actually, he even one-upped them by helping with carpentry, costumes, playbills—you name it.

It was during one such theatrical venture, an 1857 melodrama written in collaboration with Willkie Collins about the ill-fated John Franklin expedition to the Arctic, The Frozen Deep, that Dickens made the acquaintance of 18-year-old Ellen Ternan, part of a family of thespians (not only her parents but her two sisters were also actors). 

The play’s reason for being showed Dickens at his best—it was staged to raise funds for the family of a late friend. The play’s denouement, however, brought out the worst in the novelist: vindictiveness, secrecy and hypocrisy.

Before long, Dickens decided that he had—just had—to have Ternan for his own. To that end, he put her up in one lodging or another all over London.

(Now, for this blog posting, I thought of including a picture of Charles, but who doesn’t, after all these years, know what the guy looks like? Now, his – if you’ll pardon the expression—“Little Nell” is something else entirely. At least one of my readers—and he knows who he is!—has been dying for a British Beauty on this blog. Well, the photo with this post is as close as you’re going to get.)

Catherine stumbled on the affair in the spring of 1858, when a bracelet that Dickens bought for “Nelly” was delivered to their house by mistake. The novelist’s creative explanation for the gesture—that he always bought little gifts for actors in his plays—didn’t cut any ice with her. 

In May 1858, Dickens separated from Catherine. It was only the beginning of his shabby mistreatment, for in a letter to a friend he attributed the separation to his realization that she was a bad mother.

Predictably and conveniently, Dickens’ private feelings were leaked to the press, with not a word about his responsibility for the separation.

Inevitably, rumors began to fly. The Victorian homebreaker was at first believed to be Dickens’ dear sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, who, amazingly enough, not only did not take Catherine’s part but also acted as housekeeper for Dickens and his children (all but one of whom followed him to his home at Gad’s Hill). 

Friends thought they were helping by saying a close relative was not the one who interfered with the couple’s happiness.

Nowadays, to end scurrilous gossip, especially if you’re a Presidential candidate, you put in up on your Website, where you can denounce it and tear it to shred like the mangy lie it is. If you were a Victorian, you had to be a bit more careful. 

Thus, on June 12, 1858, Dickens’ Household Words statement let out that that "some domestic trouble of mine, of long-standing," had "lately been brought to an arrangement." But he couldn't stop there -- he was forced to denounce unnamed people who had cast blame on unnamed “innocent persons.”

The “arrangement” meant that Catherine would be provided for throughout the rest of her life, but she would never live with the novelist again. Though they could not turn their back on the force of nature who was their father, there are signs that Dickens’ children were, to one extent or another, dismayed by his conduct during this time. 

Kate, whose hot temper and artistic temperament made her the most like Charles, noted years later, “This affair brought out all that was worst--all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us."

Dickens hoped that his printers, Bradbury & Evans, would also publish his “Personal” statement in another serial they handled, Punch. But, smelling the makings of a red-hot sexual scandal, the duo wouldn’t touch it.

Anger had led Dickens to the firm in the first place, when he had been disappointed by the handling by his previous printer, Chapman & Hall, of Martin Chuzzlewit and A Christmas Carol. Now, anger turned Dickens away from Bradbury & Evans and back to Chapman & Hall. He stayed with his original publishers through the end of his life.

As part of the break with Bradbury & Evans, Dickens ended Household Words and started a new journal, All the Year Round. This time the bestselling author would be in as much control as he could want, with a 75% stake in the operation. The first issue of the new journal appeared the following April, with the first installment of A Tale of Two Cities as its lead article.

But if you’re like myself, you don’t want the tale to stop you. What happened to the pretty young woman that Dickens took up with, and how did the public take to her? 

Well, the second question is easier to answer: The public basically didn’t have a clue what was going on, even though Dickens was the kind of celebrity that people didn’t mind interrupting while he was eating dinner or shaking his hand when they encountered him on the street. Whatever the suspicions of the press, they decided to remain silent.

As for Ellen Ternan: she remained Dickens’ mistress for the rest of his life, but let on to a clerical confidant after the novelist was dead that she found relations with him physically repugnant. 

The turning point in their relationship might have come eight years after it began, when a train on which the two were traveling had an accident. Dickens managed to extricate Nelly and bring her to safety, but it was all he could do to keep from getting called as an eyewitness to the tragic events. 

His vigor and peace of mind were never quite the same after that, and he died five years to the day after the accident.

The more intriguing question is where he died. For years, biographers believed that he had died at home with his family. 

A biographer of Nelly, Claire Tomalin, believed so, too, until some months after her book appeared, when a reader told her that an ancestor – minister at a vicarage just down the road—knew what really happened: Dickens had been felled by his fatal stroke at the home of Nelly, who transported the body immediately to Gad’s Hill so that their relationship would not be discovered. 

And it wasn’t, until after her death at age 75, by a son from a post-Dickens marriage.