Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 586
This of course is true. These are the limitations under which Dickens and all English and American writers lived and worked, — the limitations under which they thought. In his day no one (no one who mattered or counted) wanted to read or write things, or use or hear language, not fit for a Kensington drawing-room or a Boston boarding house. These were the fetters worn by Dickens as he wrote: but he never felt them: he himself was utterly and absolutely respectable. For him the book David Copperfield would have been ruined and disgraced by an ecstatic chapter describing the rapturous months of little Emily in Italy with Steerforth before he tired of her and threw her aside. For M. Taine that would have been a great improvement — more true to life. That is exactly the difference between Dickens and his French counterpart Alphonse Daudet.
Dickens, one repeats, never felt these fetters. Others did. His junior contemporary in America, Mark Twain, was unhappy all his life that he couldn’t put into his books oaths and dirty language such as real people really use: that he couldn’t ‘get after God’ if he wanted to and ‘take a rise’ out of hell. All of this, — American profanity and French immorality, — was utterly alien to Dickens. He himself was utterly and absolutely respectable and orthodox. He turned his Christianity round to get the bright side out, and he turned sinfulness the other way to make it look black. We English are still all like that. We try hard to be tough in our literature, but we can’t, — only in our conduct. Thus may Pecksniff have felt towards life in general, and this, since all is pardonable, may be his exculpation.
If a paradox is in place, it may be said that perhaps the best translator of Charles Dickens is Alphonse Daudet. Not that Daudet copied Dickens. He had begun to write in the Dickens manner before he ever heard of Dickens. Later he read his English senior with delight and took on his influence as naturally as a generation of young Englishmen took on Victor Hugo. The result is that his characters are Dickens’s characters turned into French in the real way, in place of the literalism which makes Sam Weller talk the argot of Montmartre for the Cockney of the Strand. Monsieur Delabelle of Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné could slip across into Bleak House as Mr. Turveydrop.
And Tartarin! He is Daudet’s own, absolutely and triumphantly, but he is also a Dickens character fit to sit beside the best of them.
Dickens left Paris in April of 1856. He spent some time in London (till the middle of June) occupied, among other things, with the purchase of his new house at Gad’s Hill: went to Boulogne, as already said, for his final summer there (1856), spent in his original Château des Moulineaux. The winter following was passed in London. On Twelfth Night (January 6, 1857) there were the usual Tavistock House theatricals, the chief piece being The Frozen Deep, a romantic drama specially written by Wilkie Collins.
Apart from the editing, which never stopped, the chief literary work was now the writing of Little Dorrit. Dickens had begun the story in 1858: much of it was written and some of it had appeared while he was still in Paris. The story came out in the usual monthly numbers, with ‘Phiz’ (Hablôt Browne) as the illustrator. It ran all through 1856, and for the first six months of 1857. It was published by Bradbury and Evans as a book in June 1857.
The book is certainly not one of the most readable of Dickens’s novels. The plot is intricate and confused. Few readers follow it and none remember it. The separate threads of the story are ill joined. It was the characteristic mode of Dickens, — as of Walter Scott and of so many of the writers of the nineteenth-century novel, — to start a story from a variety of separate scenes and characters, at first entirely disconnected and presently joining like little rivers to form a single stream. As rivers joining swell in power to a flood, so the convergent streams unite to intensify their common interest. It is doubtful whether such art is ever level with the intensity of a single interest sustained without a break, maintained without digression and without retrospect, moving like life itself. But the method at least allows for greater length, for more characters, for variety and diversity of appeal. A story of the length of a Dickens book told along a single thread would of necessity be without climax or culmination, or would have to keep ‘culminating’ and starting again like Pickwick. Such a narrative is apt to degenerate into the endless repetition of the picaresque narrative or of the thirty-night Chinese drama. But, on the other hand, the story with a culminating plot arising from separate beginnings can only truly succeed if the parts are really connected and come together as natural components of a common climax. This is done, and done with great effect, in Bleak House: but not so in Little Dorrit or the later completed books. The reader keeps wondering what certain people have to do with the story, and probably never knows, or finds the connection faint and unwarranted, the motives and actions overstrained and overdrawn.
But the story is at least majestic in the main conception of its pathos. The sombre shadow of the Marshalsea prison lies across its pages. Nor is there any more marvellous depiction of character in all fiction than that of Edward Dorrit. He is drawn not only with all the skill of Dickens, but with a different kind of skill from that which Dickens generally cared to use. Even people outside of college classes, who read books only for the pleasure of reading them, and never spoil fiction by studying it, have some general notion of the broad distinction of romanticism and realism. The romanticist tries to convey the truth of art by idealizing it, by over-stating it, by exaggerating it. The realist seeks to convey truth by describing things, or trying to describe things, just as they are and by reporting language just as said. The danger is that the sheer exaggeration of the romanticism may lead away into unreality, and the attempt of the realist to describe things as they are may lead to an impression of things as they are not.
Thus when Dickens as a romanticist pours out a flood of tears and sentiment from Mrs. Annie Strong, or a moral homily of Kate Nickleby, he fails utterly. But look at Edward Dorrit. Every word that he says is exactly what he would have said, not a syllable, not a sentence, not a pause or an ejaculation, that is not absolutely and literally Edward Dorrit. No Maupassant that ever wrote could have wished the transcription more photographic, the art more literal. There is no need for comment, for direction, for confidential comments with the reader. Dickens and his reader for once have stepped clean out of the book and there is just Edward Dorrit, — living, moving — not even a book at all. It is marvellous. Sustained quotation is not here possible. But let the reader consult again, let us say, the chapters 17 and 18 of Part II, the concluding scenes of Dorrit’s life. The sentence, ‘ ”Amy, my dear,” he repeated, “will you go and see if Bob is on the lock” ’ — is one of the great things of literature.
Apart from its larger interests, the book contains, unrecognized by those who do not know about it, the record of an interesting episode in Dickens’s life, and a unique episode in the history of letters. By this is meant the inside history of Flora and Dora.
It is an episode which Dickens’s biographer Forster, who probably knew all about it, prefers to gloss over, without actual names. But what was sacred then is history now.
All readers of Dickens’s books recall Dora of David Copperfield as one of his chief creations, never forgotten by any reader. The sudden falling in love of David Copperfield, annihilated at sight by the vision of Dora Spenlow, is one of the treasures of literature. Readers of Little Dorrit are not so numerous, and many of them could easily forget poor Flora Finching, — fair, fat, and forty, and such a contrast to the radiant and juvenile charm of Dora. Yet Flora and Dora are the same person. And Dickens himself was at one time the David Copperfield enslaved by Dora and the Arthur Clennam, from whom fell so easily the shackles he had worn in slavery to Flora.
The story runs thus. In Dickens’s youthful days when he was struggling with shorthand, reading in the British Museum and hoping to become a parliamentary reporter, he made the acquaintance, as already noted, of the Beadnell family. Mr. Beadnell was a banker of Lombard Street, and as such was, as already said, a cut above Dickens and his queer half-shabby home. Mr. Beadnell’s more genteel establishment was adorned further by the presence of three charming daughters. With one of them, Maria, young Charles fell violently in love: to see how violently we have only to open the pages of David Copperfield. We are told that when Dickens undertook to write his autobiography and set down with pen and ink the story of his early and unforgettable love, he tore the pages up as if the story were too sacred for revelation. Later on, — and we have his own written word for it, — he rewrote it as the love of David Copperfield for Dora Spenlow. Fiction contains no better portrayal of the sudden onslaught of the God of Love.
‘Where is Miss Dora?’ said Mr. Spenlow to the servant. ‘Dora!’ I thought. ‘What a beautiful name!’
We turned into a room near at hand, and I heard a voice say, ‘Mr. Copperfield, my daughter Dora, and my daughter Dora’s confidential friend.’ It was no doubt Mr. Spenlow’s voice, but I didn’t know it, and I didn’t care whose it was. 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 human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph. I don’t know what she was, — anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. There was no pausing on the brink: no looking down or looking back: I was gone headlong, before I had the sense to say a word to her.
For the next year or more (this was in 1830 and 1831) Dickens remained in the same state of agonized love which he has described in the case of David Copperfield. But his passion was scarcely reciprocated. The young Maria, — she was nineteen, — was what is described in the Victorian days as a coquette, and what has since been called a ‘vamp.’ The banker and his family did not regard the lovesick boy as a serious suitor. Maria presently was sent away to a French school. Charles wrote impassioned letters such as he alone could write. Maria sent back the letters but made copies of them to keep, — not for love’s sake, but as an Iroquois kept scalps. Within a year or so the correspondence died, frozen to death. For twenty years Dickens never saw Maria again. She remained as a ‘lost love’ whose memory carried through his subsequent engagement, his marriage, his home life, — unspoken but not forgotten.
Then, twenty years later, she came back into his life. In February 1855 she wrote to her now famous sweetheart of old days. She too by this time was married, had been married for ten years, to a Mr. Henry Winter, and had a little daughter of her own. Dickens wrote back with wild exuberance. He wrote as David Copperfield would have written Dora. It never occurred to him to wonder what Mrs. Winter looked like now. He wrote to her as she was then: once again he did not pause on the brink but plunged in headlong. He sent her the Copperfield book and told her to read in it of his feelings for her and to realize, ‘How dearly that boy must have loved me, and how vividly this man remembers me.’ A correspondence followed, — love letters one might call them apart from the outward decorum of the form.
Then came a meeting: and with the meeting all Dickens’s passionate love for the sweetheart of his dreams broke instantly and vanished into such stuff as dreams are made of.
The scene may be read in the pages of Little Dorrit where the fictitious Arthur Clennam meets after twenty years the imaginary Flora. Changed the names and fiction and imagination are turned into cruel facts.
In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson Crusoe’s money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Future as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’
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?
‘I am sure,’ giggled Flora, tossing her head with a caricature of her girlish manner, such as a mummer might have presented at her own funeral, if she had lived and died in classical antiquity, ‘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 so found out, it’s really shocking!’
He assured her that she was just what he had expected, and that time had not stood still with himself.
‘Oh! 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 — oh!’ cried Flora with a little scream, ‘I am dreadful!’
The Patriarch, apparently not yet understanding his own part in the drama under representation, glowed with vacant serenity.
‘But if we talk of not having changed,’ said Flora, who, whatever she said, never once came to a full stop, ‘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!’
That must be a long time hence, Arthur considered.
‘Oh Mr. Clennam you insincerest of creatures,’ said Flora, ‘I perceive already 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 at least I don’t mean that, I — oh I don’t know what I mean!’ Here Flora tittered confusedly, and gave him one of her old glances.
The Patriarch, as if he now began to perceive that his part in the piece was to get off the stage as soon as might be, rose and went to the door by which Pancks had worked out, hailing that Tug by name. He received an answer from some little Dock beyond, and was towed out of sight directly.
‘You musn’t think of going yet,’ said Flora — Arthur had looked at his hat, being in a ludicrous dismay, and not knowing what to do: ‘you could never be so unkind as to think of going, Arthur — I mean Mr. Arthur — or I suppose Mr. Clennam would be far more proper — but I am sure I don’t know what I’m saying — without a word about the dear old days gone for ever, however when I come to think of it I dare say it would be much better not to speak of them and it’s highly probable that you have some much more agreeable engagement and pray let Me be the last person in the world to interfere with it though there was a time, but I am running into nonsense again.’
Was it possible that Flora could have been such a chatterer, in the days she referred to? Could there have been anything like her present disjointed volubility, in the fascinations that had captivated him?
It is a nice question in the morality of literature, if there is such a thing, whether Dickens was justified in thus putting his old love to the degradation of this appearance as a character in his book. Even as fiction the fate of Flora is cruel enough, and if Arthur Clennam had really said all that is quoted above of a real person in real life, he would have been an unutterable cad. We can only excuse it because it is fiction, and Clennam enjoys the usual licence of fiction in being permitted to think out loud.
But in actual fact, how must Mrs. Winter have thought and felt about it? When Little Dorrit appeared in 1857 she must have recognized herself: and her friends, to whom no doubt she had gushed over the story of the great writer’s infatuation, must have recognized her: and her friends’ friends would soon have heard all about when the whole love affair crumpled flat and Dickens put her in the pillory. For even during her lifetime (she lived till 1886) the story that Flora was Dora was familiar in literary criticism. It is true that Charles Dickens the younger, a kindly man who loved his father’s memory, undertook (years after, in an Introduction written for an edition of David Copperfield) to minimize the connection between Dora and Flora. ‘There is some reference in Mr. Forster’s Life’, he writes, ‘to a “Dora” who came across Charles Dickens’s path very early in his career — when he was eighteen, in fact — but as she married somebody else and developed afterwards into the “Flora” of Little Dorrit, she could have very little to do with Dora Spenlow.’ But this won’t do. And we must remember too that Charles Dickens, Junior, tried to deride the idea that Mr. Micawber was in reality his grandfather, old John Dickens, — a plea which puts his evidence out of court.
In any case the question of Mrs. Winter’s feelings from and after 1857 was probably not a matter of much moment to Charles Dickens. He was quite definitely done with her. After they had met their rôles were changed. She gushed. He froze. Presently her husband lost his money: she appealed to Dickens for help. He suggested that her father, or his estate, ought to help. He was writing to her now as ‘dear madam’ and evidently sick of her. The man was no longer ‘vivid,’ and the boy had vanished as completely as the boy on the burning deck. It is a sad story. One turns from it with pleasure to the eternal loves of fiction.
But whatever its merits and its extraneous interest, the book Little Dorrit gives other evidence of the wearing down of Dickens and of the breaking strain under which he was now living. There is in it little of the comic element, or little that is successful, and hardly anything of what may be called uproarious fun. The test of this quality is applied when a book is read aloud. Throughout Dickens’s life-work it appears in a diminishing degree, from the hilarious merriment of Pickwick to the sombre mystery of Edwin Drood. Pickwick is, of course, the most laughable of Dickens’s books. There is a lot of fun in the books that follow. Mr. Mantalini is gloriously funny. Mrs. Gamp is a treasure: in Copperfield the portrayal of Micawber is the embodiment of humour and runs close to fun all the time. Even in Bleak House Mrs. Jellaby is worthy to sit with Pickwick. But in Little Dorrit how little of this is left, — insight, pathos of character, yes; but of sheer exuberant fun (to be read aloud), — no: not much. Even the Circumlocution Office is satire rather than fun.
