Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 587
In part one admits this change in Dickens is but the transit of the mind from the laughing years of adolescence to the sobriety, the disillusionment of age. Dickens, of course, as a young man was filled with high spirits beyond the common lot. He loved laughter, wild pranks, huge jokes and vast pretences. At sea he organized the amusement of a ship’s company. On land he led in merriment and fun. His life was a game of leap-frog. All of this was reflected in the tumult of his books, — the wild images, the crowded metaphors, the rushing thoughts like autumn leaves in the wind. This quality could not be simulated. When it is artificial, the artifice falls into tatters. As Dickens weakened under the strain of his life this high quality of spontaneous fun slackens and passes away. It is in the pages of Little Dorrit that we are first truly conscious of its absence.
The book was written as the shadow, — like the shadow of the Marshalsea wall — began to fall over its writer’s later life. Yet even in these later days fate and fortune which had given him so much had still one more magic offering. This was the gift of his country home, — at Gad’s Hill in Kent, — and with it the fulfilment of a childish dream. It was like a fairy story come true.
Gad’s Hill, where the house stood, is half a mile from Chatham, on the road from London to Dover. When Dickens lived at Chatham as a little boy and went out for walks with his father, he used to notice and admire a country house that stood on the summit of the hill. He himself has described in his own unique fashion how the house attracted him as a child. In a paper written in The Uncommercial Traveller about a journey on the Dover Road, he draws a picture of meeting his imaginary former self as ‘a very queer small boy’ to whom he gives a ride on the way to school.
‘ ”Do let us stop at the top of the hill and look at the house there, if you please,” said the very queer small boy.
‘ ”You admire that house?” said I.
‘ ”Bless you, Sir,” said the very queer small boy, “when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, If you were to be very persevering, and were to work very hard, you might some day come to live in it. Though that’s impossible,” said the very queer little boy, drawing a low breath.’
It is a pretty fancy, and conveys its meaning better than volumes. Not only the Gad’s Hill house but all the country was included in Dickens’s memory and his affections and connected with his work. On the Dover Road, that winds its seventy miles from the south side of the Thames to the channel, is Greenwich, six miles out, where Dickens and his companions held their uproarious dinners in the early days of success: two and a half miles further is Shooter’s Hill, where the coach went tugging upward in the heavy fog of the November night that opens the Tale of Two Cities: twenty-three miles from London is Chalk, where Dickens spent his honeymoon: three miles on is Gad’s Hill, and beyond that, twenty-nine miles from London, is Rochester, the Cloisterham of Edwin Drood, but still more immortal from the fact that ‘Mr. Pickwick and his three companions had resolved to make Rochester their first halting place.’ One can almost hear from its cathedral the voice of Mr. Jingle,— ‘glorious pile, — frowning walls, — tottering arches.’
The Gad’s Hill house fell on to the market in 1855. Dickens chanced that way and saw the notice of sale. ‘When I was at Gravesend t’other day,’ he wrote to Wills (February 9, 1855) ‘I saw at Gad’s Hill, a little freehold to be sold. The spot and the house are literally “a dream of my childhood.” ’ By an odd chance the property belonged to one of Dickens’s magazine contributors. He opened negotiations at once and finally bought it in March of 1856 for £1780. He had at the time no intention of making it his permanent or even his principal home. He calculated that by spending a thousand pounds on renovation he could rent it for a good return (£100) on his investment. Meanwhile he could have the joy of possessing it and of occupying it between whiles. He actually moved into it as a summer residence in June 1857. As it turned out, he never rented it except for four months (in 1860). Later on, after his separation from his wife, he sold Tavistock House, and Gad’s Hill Place became and remained his permanent home. It was there that he died, and the house is more identified with his name than any other of his many residences.
Gad’s Hill Place, as the Dickens house is called, stands on the top of Gad’s Hill, the rendezvous of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. It was a two-story brick house at that time, about eighty years old. It stood in comfortable grounds with gardens, lawns, and orchard. The property included, across the Dover Road, a piece of woodland with two beautiful cedars. This Dickens connected to Gad’s Hill Place by a subway. Here he presently set up (1865), as a study, a Swiss chalet sent to him, in ninety-four pieces, as a present from a French friend. Here he sat at work, in the wonderful spring-time of Kent, on the last afternoon of his life. But before that, much work, much achievement and no little suffering were still to come.
CHAPTER IX. DICKENS SEPARATES FROM HIS WIFE (1858)
TO THE OUTSIDE world, and to those who knew him only as a sort of public character, the life of Charles Dickens in 1857 and 1858 was still a continued round of activity and success.
But for those who knew him in his domestic life, the situation in his home was reaching a climax. We are told that there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. So, too, in the written record of a life we may mark the inevitable movement of the ebb tide. For Charles Dickens this ebb tide may be said to date from his separation from his wife in May 1858. Up to this time, in the record at least, his adult life looks like one continued and rising success. There had been the phenomenal success of Pickwick and its immediate successors from the pen of ‘Boz’: the triumphal tour to America: and the series of great novels culminating in David Copperfield, which had placed him in the foremost rank of the world’s men of letters, then and for ever. There was as yet nothing, or nothing for the public eye, of the reverse side, — the overwork, the overstrain, the inability to rest: and with it the impatient temperament that cannot tolerate criticism or contradiction: and of the other factors that can sunder lives and break homes, nothing.
But no doubt, — and indeed it so appears from what is written below, — what followed did not come without a long preparation of circumstance. In most of the books upon Dickens very little is made of the separation of the husband and wife, after twenty-three years of a marriage marked by the birth of ten children. The reason is that at the time when John Forster and other early biographers wrote, the death of Dickens was so recent, so many of the family group concerned were still alive, that it seemed indecent to display to the rude eye of public curiosity the sorrows of a broken home. This was, no doubt, a proper feeling, and in a measure still is. Charles Dickens is not yet history, to be mauled about like Charles the Second or Charlemagne. But at the same time it is rather a childish pretence for Forster and such to make out that the separation of Dickens from his wife is of no importance, a mere trivial matter; ‘an arrangement’ as he says, ‘of a strictly private nature.’ If Dickens’s life is so important that we may chronicle all the sorrows of his childhood, the raptures of his courtships, his every movement from London to the sea and from the sea to London, then it is only natural that some little public curiosity may well surround the most important domestic event of his career.
In one guise or another Dickens ‘wrote up’ almost every important phase of his life, — the sufferings of his childhood, the debtors’ prison, his father and his mother and his earliest love. But among the assorted and ill-assorted marriages of his books, — the Dombeys and the Deadlocks, the Gowans and the Murdstones, — one looks in vain for the record of his own marriage. Some instinct withheld his hand.
To the English reading public of 1858 the news that Charles Dickens had separated from his wife came as a sudden shock, with a sense of something like a personal blow. But it had long, long been preparing. Those who knew most said least.
In his intercourse and communications with various friends for some years past Dickens had referred to the increasing unhappiness of his married life. To this was due in part, the restlessness which seemed to haunt him, the inability to obtain tranquillity which hurried him from each exertion to the next. The passing years only added to the strain that was reaching the breaking point. That he refrained so long from an open separation was due, no doubt, largely to his conceit of his own eminence, his acceptance of himself as a sort of trustee of public morality. Of great men we must take the bad with the good. And there is nothing to admire in Dickens’s attitude towards his wife and the conduct he saw fit to adopt.
To his friend Forster, to whom he always looked for that vindication of his conduct in the eyes of the world which was so essential to his happiness, he had for years back hinted at the failure of his married life. About a year before the final break which he evidently anticipated and, one may say, intended even then, he wrote in some detail.
‘Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too and much more so. She is exactly what you know in the way of being amiable and complying: but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is for her own sake that I ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise the moment I was well again: and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming ever since the days you remember when Mary was born, and I know too well that you cannot and no one can help me. . . . I claim no immunity from blame. There is plenty of fault on my side, I dare say, in the way of a thousand uncertainties, caprices and difficulties of disposition, but only one thing will alter all that and that is the end which alters all.’
Forster and other friends seemed to have attempted in vain to intercede: to have called Dickens’s attention to the singularity of his situation in the eyes of the world: to his responsibility to those whose laughter and whose tears had created out of his matchless books a sort of national heritage. They tried to show him that there was in his lot nothing that honour or conscience need refuse to bear, nothing that had not been borne before by thousands less fortunate than he.
It was in vain. Dickens wanted the separation: and when he wanted anything he wanted it with eager intensity and could find a thousand reasons to justify him in wanting it. Nor is there any reason to maintain the pretence that the separation was really by mutual desire. We have no reason to believe that Catherine Dickens,— ‘amiable and complying’, — did anything more than yield to an imperious will and an inevitable fate. But Dickens himself not only wanted the separation: he wanted more than this. He wanted the public, the readers of his books, to accept his separation from his wife as a natural, simple matter, like the news of a trip to the Continent or a visit to Scotland. He wanted no trouble made about it, no criticism and no condemnation.
So when the separation came in May of 1858 Dickens announced it in a sort of manifesto, published in the June number of Household Words, the magazine of which he was the editor. It runs thus:
Twenty-and-three years have passed since I entered on my present relations with the Public. They began when I was so young, that I find them to have existed for nearly a quarter of a century.
Through all that time I have tried to be as faithful to the Public, as they have been to me. It was my duty never to trifle with them, or deceive them or presume upon their favour, or do anything with it but work hard to justify it. I have always endeavoured to discharge that duty.
My conspicuous position has often made me the subject of fabulous stories and unaccountable statements. Occasionally, such things have chafed me, or even wounded me; but, I have always accepted them as the shadows inseparable from the light of my notoriety and success. I have never obtruded any such personal uneasiness of mine, upon the generous aggregate of my audience.
For the first time in my life, and I believe for the last, I now deviate from the principle I have so long observed, by presenting myself in my own Journal in my own private character, and entreating all my brethren (as they deem that they have reason to think well of me, and to know that I am a man who has ever been unaffectedly true to our common calling), to lend their aid to the dissemination of my present words.
Some domestic trouble of mine, of long standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no anger or ill-will, of any kind, and the whole origin, progress, and surrounding circumstances of which have been throughout, within the knowledge of my children. It is amicably composed, and its details have now but to be forgotten by those concerned in it.
By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel — involving, not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if, indeed, they have any existence — and so widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an unwholesome air.
Those who know me and my nature, need no assurance under my hand that such calumnies are as irreconcileable with me, as they are, in their frantic incoherence, with one another. But, there is a great multitude who know me through my writings, and who do not know me otherwise; and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt, or hazard of doubt, through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort, of circulating the Truth.
I most solemnly declare, then — and this I do, both in my own name, and in my wife’s name — that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which I have glanced, are abominably false. And that whosoever repeats one of them after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie, before Heaven and earth.
Charles Dickens.
It seems deplorable that Dickens should have stooped to an act of such atrocious bad taste. In still worse taste was what happened after. He insisted that the publishers of Household Words, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, should also publish the manifesto in another of their publications with which Dickens himself had no connection, namely, the gay and youthful Punch. Their common sense compelled a refusal. Dickens in a frenzy of anger broke off all dealings with them. He raged and fumed at the comments, the condemnations and the innuendoes that appeared in the Press. He prepared and gave to an American newspaper correspondent an intimate account of his domestic troubles, excusing himself from blame. Then he raged and fumed again when the correspondent printed it all in the New York Tribune. Dickens claimed that it was only a private letter, a plea which shows how unbalanced was his mind.
The letter runs: —
‘Mrs. Dickens and I lived unhappily together for many years. Hardly any one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, ever were joined together who had a greater difficulty in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An attached woman servant (more friend to both of us than a servant), who lived with us sixteen years, and is now married, and who was and still is in Mrs. Dickens’s confidence and in mine, who had the closest familiar experiences of this unhappiness, in London, in the country, in France, in Italy, wherever we have been, year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, will bear testimony to this.
‘Nothing has, on many occasions, stood between us and a separation but Mrs. Dickens’s sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the age of fifteen she has devoted herself to our house and our children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend, protectress, adviser, and companion. In the manly consideration towards Mrs. Dickens which I owe to my wife, I will merely remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on some one else. I do not know — I cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine — what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them. She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, again and again to prevent a separation between Mrs. Dickens and me. Mrs. Dickens has often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate care and devotion in the house — never more strongly than within the last twelve months.
