Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 588
‘For some years past, Mrs. Dickens has been in the habit of representing to me that it would be better for her to go away and live apart; that her always increasing estrangement aggravated a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours — more, that she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife, and that she would be better far away. I have uniformly replied that we must bear our misfortune, and fight the fight out to the end; that the children were the first consideration, and that I feared they must bind us together “in appearance”.
‘At length, within these three weeks, it was suggested to me by Forster that, even for their sakes, it would surely be better to reconstruct and rearrange their unhappy home. I empowered him to treat with Mrs. Dickens as the friend of both of us for one-and-twenty years. Mrs. Dickens wished to add, on her part, Mark Lemon, and did so. On Saturday last, Lemon wrote to Forster that Mrs. Dickens “gratefully and thankfully accepted” the terms I proposed to her. Of the pecuniary part of them I will only say that I believe they are as generous as if Mrs. Dickens were a lady of distinction and I a man of fortune. The remaining parts of them are easily described — my eldest boy to live with Mrs. Dickens and take care of her; my eldest girl to keep my house; both my girls, and all my children but the eldest son, to live with me, in the continued companionship of their aunt Georgina, for whom they all have the tenderest affection that I have ever seen among young people, and who has a higher claim (as I have often declared for many years) upon my affection, respect, and gratitude than anybody in the world.’
But he got what he wanted. Out of his house went Mrs. Dickens, and he never looked upon her again.
After the first rancorous splutterings in various newspapers about Dickens’s separation from his wife, there seems to have settled down over the whole matter a sort of decent conspiracy of silence. It still lies under a veil. The relation of Charles Dickens to those who read his works was of a unique character: it was a sort of personal bond in which admiration was fused into affection. He seemed not a writer but a friend, a comforter whose wide human sympathy brought consolation to the afflicted and laughter to the disconsolate. To such readers it seemed painful to think that the writer who had depicted a hundred happy marriages of people who lived happily ever afterwards, had put aside his wife: that he could not bear the little trials of daily life, that he could not exercise the tolerance he extolled nor the quiet devotion which he loved to exalt. On his own statement there was no question of those grave faults which even then could break asunder the marriage bond. It seemed, and it still seems, amazing that one who enjoyed fame and fortune and adulation could not find the manhood to endure such minor misfortune as came to his lot.
So there arose the conspiracy of silence. Take as typical the almost ridiculous explanation given by a biographer of his ‘life,’ published just after the great novelist’s death, — at a time when there were still thousands of people who must have had some knowledge of the inner aspects of his family life.
‘The simple explanation was,’ he writes, ‘that a misunderstanding had arisen between Mr. and Mrs. Dickens of a purely domestic character, — so domestic, — almost trivial indeed, — that neither law nor friendly arbitration could define or fix the difficulty sufficiently clear (sic) to adjudicate upon it. All we can say is that it was a very great pity that a purely family dispute should have been brought before the public, and saying this much, we trust the reader will think we add wisely in dropping any further mention of it.’
‘A misunderstanding of a trivial character!’ So trivial that Dickens put aside his wife for it; put her out of his beautiful home and went on living there himself; that on account of it the children were divided up; that the eldest son left his father’s house; that Dickens, on account of it, never saw his wife again; that when he was stricken and dying no one sent for her, and in the wording of his will his antipathy to her spoke from beyond the grave.
It is not possible to gloss over so utter a catastrophe, such a complete collapse of what should by rights have been the happiest home in England.
What, then, was the trouble? It is amazing how little information in regard to Dickens’s wife is given in the voluminous mass of biographies, criticisms, articles and letters which record the incidents of his life. She was younger than he was by some years; it was no case of crabbed old age assorted with glowing youth. She was little over forty years old when he put her aside. The portrait painted by Maclise of the Royal Academy about 1846 shows her as a beautiful woman. In point of intellect one looks in vain in the record for any sign of a brilliant mind or a cultivated intelligence. It would seem probable that Mrs. Dickens had not a mind of a high order, that she was even what is called in the slang of to-day, ‘dumb.’ Her husband in one of the few letters from America in which he gives her more than a casual mention as ‘Mrs. Dickens,’ writes of her acting in garrison amateur theatricals at Montreal (1842); ‘But only think of Kate playing! And playing devilish well, I assure you!’ And on the playbill which he enclosed, where her name appears as taking the part of Amy Templeton in a farce called Deaf as a Post, he puts no less than eight notes of exclamation after it (!!!!!!!!). As who should say, what do you know about this? Such comments as applied to a good-looking young woman of twenty-six seem to mean only one thing.
But, after all, a woman who brings ten successive children into the world in sixteen successive years, and carries the burden of a noisy nursery, may well shine with a different illumination than that of the footlights of the stage and the chandelier of the drawing-room.
Mr. A. W. Ward, who wrote in 1882 a critical account of Dickens’s career, implies that Dickens had never loved his wife. The causes of the separation, he says, ‘were an open secret to his friends and acquaintances. If he had ever loved his wife with that affection before which incompatibilities of temper and disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed to her.’
And, on the other hand, what a difficult person, what an almost impossible person, must Charles Dickens have been to live with and to live up to. It was not alone the sheer exuberance of his energy, the intensity of his mental life, his thought, his conversation. It was, as he grew older, his impatient temperament, his inability to brook criticism or contradiction, his inordinate desire to be always right. The very meekness which bowed before it became in itself an added offence.
In the vast mass of literature which has grown up about Charles Dickens, it is strange what a silence envelops the personality and the memory of his wife. He himself lived in a blaze of notoriety, and in his later life in the limelight of publicity. Public attention was naturally focussed upon him. She passed unnoticed. In the American tour of 1842 she got no further than to be chronicled in the Press as part of ‘Charles Dickens, Esq., and lady,’ and the polite generalities already quoted. Hardly a word is said about her in all the contemporary pictures of Charles Dickens and his entourage at home. There is extant a letter in regard to her written by a Mrs. Christian which carries a description of what she looked like.
I thought her a pretty little woman, with the heavy-lidded, large blue eyes so much admired by men. The nose was a little retroussé, the forehead good, mouth small, round, and red-lipped, with a pleasant smiling expression, notwithstanding the sleepy look of the slow-moving eyes. The weakest part of her face was the chin, which melted too suddenly into the throat. She took kindly notice of me, and I went down with a fluttering heart to be introduced to ‘Boz.’
There is also a description written by the dreamy little Dane, Hans Andersen of the Fairy Tales, who had formed a pen-and-ink friendship with Dickens and visited the family just before the crash. Mrs. Dickens, he says, ‘had a certain soft and womanly repose about her; but whenever she spoke there came such a light into her large eyes and such a smile upon her lips, and there was such a charm in the tones of her voice, that henceforth I shall always connect her and Agnes together.’ Hans Andersen, in short, saw, or thought he saw, the vision of a happy home graced by the noblest heroine of Dickens’s works. But little Hans Andersen had only eyes for Snow Men and enchanted mermaids, and not for the realities of life.
What was Mrs. Dickens like, anyway, as a person? If the accusation of Dickens’s letter to Arthur Smith is true, she must have been a creature to shudder at. Notice the force of the words used, — that he cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine what would have become of his children if left to the care of their own mother. These are terrible words to cast at a woman. Was it right that child after child should be brought into the world to face such awful risk as this? Dickens ought to have talked to their father about it.
What did Mrs. Dickens think? Again silence. When she abandoned her children, — or when they were taken from her (which is the proper phrase?), the youngest was a little boy of six years old. There were two grown girls of eighteen and twenty, and in between a group of five little brothers, — in all, a bevy of bright sweet children halfway between the nursery and the world. Is it nothing to be taken from all that? When they laughed and romped with their clever father at the beautiful Gad’s Hill home and Mrs. Dickens sat in her lodging alone, — what a tragedy Dickens could have made with a pen and ink of a scene like that.
But all is wrapped in silence.
The most brilliant living interpreter of the books of Charles Dickens has sought to explain it for us by saying: ‘His selfishness was wholly a selfishness of the nerves.’ But this explains nothing, or too much. There are a lot of nervous fellows in the penitentiary.
It is to Mrs. Dickens’s honour that she took the separation without complaint, without protest. She did not write to Bradbury and Evans; she did not communicate her side of the story to the correspondent of the New York Tribune; she did not take all England into her confidence; she did not wish to have her sorrows chronicled in the pages of Punch; nor had she an affectionate brother-in-law to whose home she could retire.
Here Dickens was fortunate. He had, — or at least a sister-in-law.
Ever since his return from America his wife’s younger sister, Georgina Hogarth, had lived in their house. After the separation she continued to live with Dickens and to look after his children to the end of his life. She was with him when he died.
Mamie Dickens, in her little book to which reference has been made, has spoken in affectionate terms of the part played by her aunt. ‘She has been to me,’ she says, ‘ever since I can remember anything, and to all of us, the truest, best, and dearest friend, companion, and counsellor. To quote my father’s own words, “The best and truest friend man ever had.” ’
In his will Dickens left to his sister-in-law the sum of £8,000 free of legacy duty. To his wife he left an annuity of £300 a year. In his will he says: ‘I also give to the said Georgina Hogarth all my private papers whatsoever and wheresoever and I leave her my grateful blessing as the best and truest friend man ever had.’ And when he had finished in his will (it was dated May 12, 1869) the ‘form of words necessary to the plain objects’ of it, he went out of his way to add, ‘I desire here simply to record the fact that my wife since our separation by consent, has been in the receipt from me of an annual income of £600, while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family have devolved wholly upon myself.’ That is to say, that even after his death, he wanted the world to understand what a generous fellow he had been. The extent of the generosity might have been measured better if he had added that in the last year completed before the will was written the £600 came out of an income of over £30,000. In the same part of the will, he wrote, ‘I solemnly enjoin my dear children how much they owe to the said Georgina Hogarth, and never to be wanting in a grateful and affectionate attachment to her, for they know well that she has been, through all the stages of their growth and progress, their ever useful, self-denying and devoted friend.’
Thus the story of Dickens’s broken marriage makes rather sad reading. It leaves a great and unforgettable imperfection in a life otherwise filled with devotion. Nor does it correspond with what one might have expected from the general character of Charles Dickens. In him was nothing of the philanderer, the Lothario, the Don Juan. He drew Mr. Mantalini out of his head, — not out of his life. He was a man who loved his home and his home life. But outside of it, he seems to have preferred the society of men to that of women. Female friendships formed no particular part of his life. One might think perhaps of his long connection with Miss Coutts (the Baroness Burdett-Coutts), to whom he is said to have written over six hundred letters. But then Miss Coutts was a multi-millionaire giving away money. Any of us would have written six hundred letters to her. And the connection implied was not with Miss Coutts, but with the causes she so nobly served. In the volume of such letters recently published the warmth is regulated to the temperature of charity. Dickens enjoyed also to a certain degree the friendship of the somewhat dubious Lady Blessington of Gore House, patroness at large of art and literature. But she was, after all, twenty-three years older than he was, and died when he was thirty-seven. In all the records of his comings and goings there are no surreptitious pages.
Indeed, in regard to women, Charles Dickens from first to last took what one might call an entirely Victorian point of view. He lived well before the days of women’s rights, women’s votes, women in college, and women in the business world. Like all his generation, he rated women intellectually away down. While nominally placed upon a pedestal as angels, fairies, and ministering spirits, in reality they were the inferior sex. Their function was to adorn life, to soften it, to beautify it, — and so on; under these flattering terms was concealed the fact that it was the men who ruled and thought and acted and created. One may realize the position of women as Dickens saw them and depicted them by turning to the pages of the poets:
‘Oh woman! [thus sings one of them] in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!’
In accordance with this a generation of women set themselves to be as uncertain and as coy as possible, — no doubt with success. Yet in our day an uncertain stenographer and a coy female police magistrate do not sound quite so convincing; and the pain and anguish business is handed over to the professional care of a trained nurse with a chart and a thermometer. The women, of course, cannot have it both ways, coming and going. And in Dickens’s day they still took it in only one.
It was out of such gossamer as thus indicated that was created the convention of the Victorian heroine; and Charles Dickens took his ‘heroines’ from the accepted Victorian convention.
What he really thought of the intelligence, the intellect, of women can be seen, not through his heroines, but through his female ‘characters.’ Mrs. Nickleby is and remains for Dickens the real embodiment of female intellect, — not an exception or a departure from it, — but the type itself.
To Dickens the female mind, — not Mrs. Nickleby’s alone, but the female mind in general, — is incapable of logic, incapable of a plain sequence of thought, incapable of common sense. It replaces the current of thought by a flow of words. Take, for example, almost at random, any of the Nickleby ‘tirades’ or orations which passed for conversation with that amiable lady, —
‘I am sure,’ said the worthy lady, with a prefatory cough, ‘that it’s a great relief, under such trying circumstances as these, to have anybody else mistaken for me — a very great relief; and it’s a circumstance that never occurred before, although I have several times been mistaken for my daughter Kate. I have no doubt the people were very foolish, and perhaps ought to have known better, but still they did take me for her, and of course that was no fault of mine, and it would be very hard indeed if I was to be made responsible for it. However, in this instance, of course, I must feel that I should do exceedingly wrong if I suffered anybody — especially anybody that I am under great obligations to — to be made uncomfortable on my account. And therefore I think it my duty to tell that gentleman that he is mistaken, that I am not the lady who he was told by some impertinent person was niece to the Countess of Paving-stones, and that I do beg and entreat of him to go quietly away, if it’s only for,’ here Mrs. Nickleby simpered and hesitated, ‘for my sake.’
To Dickens, as to many others, the joy of this is, that it is not only the way Mrs. Nickleby talked; it is the way women talk. It is, — as it was for Dickens, — every man’s mother, wife, sister and aunt. One could, if need be, compile a whole repository of feminine thought from the conversations of Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Micawber, — a hundred Dickens women. Never, or hardly ever, does there appear in Dickens’s books a woman of what one might call a clear intelligence. One thinks of David Copperfield and Betsy Trotwood only to remember that the whole point about her was that she was just like a man. When she breaks away into idiosyncrasies and absurdities, that reveals the fact that after all she was a woman. Hence all the really successful female characters of Dickens, — the Mrs. Micawbers and the Mrs. Nicklebys and so forth, — are really oddities, freaks, queerites, but truly female because illuminated always with the kaleidoscope of the feminine intelligence. If Dickens’s women readers only realized it, his books are one vast panorama of women as the inferior sex, the lesser sex, — not through injustice or lack of privilege, — but as turned out by the hand of nature. In other words, Dickens really thought very little of women.
One asks: What about the ‘heroines,’ — the Agneses, and the Madeleines and the rest. But the answer is that the ‘heroines’ were not women at all, but were abstractions, conventions, idealizations of what women were wanted to be. The freaks were facts, the heroines were fiction. Thus one may compare with interest the speeches of Mrs. Nickleby with those of her heroine daughter Kate. Dickens meant Mrs. Nickleby’s speeches to be funny; so they are. But so are Kate’s funny, and he didn’t know it. Kate is the type of heroine who requests the presumptuous villain to ‘unhand’ her, — a form of manipulation since lost. Mark the way in which she gives her wicked uncle a ‘telling off’ for introducing her to bad men.
