LITMIR.BIZ

       The bright, ferocious flames of his internal ether

      The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume VII, 1853–1855,The Pilgrim Edition EDITED BY GRAHAM STOREY, KATHLEEN TILLOTSON AND ANGUS EASSON

      NO WONDER DICKENS BELIEVED in spontaneous combustion. The three years covered by this volume are so absurdly full of life that he seems himself in danger of burning up or flying apart.

      The labours of the Oxford editors have retrieved 1,271 letters from this brief period, bearing witness to the extraordinary balancing-act he was managing: the public man and do-gooder, the man of letters, the crony and diner-out, the amateur actor, the editor (Household Words), the friend, the mentor, the traveller writing home. Not to mention the novelist. At the beginning of the volume he’s finishing Bleak House, in the middle he writes Hard Times, and by the end he has started Little Dorrit.

      At the height of his powers, he is ebullient, sentimental, a practised and hard-nosed literary entrepreneur. If he believes in unrealities – like spontaneous combustion – he does it with shameless conviction. The victims go up in flames because they’re old and gin-soaked, he assures a sceptical George Henry Lewes. His own fuel is altogether more mysterious stuff – seemingly inexhaustible psychic energy.

      Except that he did get ill, for about a week, and frightened himself, in the last stages of Bleak House: ‘I have been shaving a man every morning – a stranger to me – with big gaunt eyes and a hollow cheek’, he wrote to Lady Eastlake. And he finished the book in relative retreat in Boulogne, away from the teeming London that gave it its epic shape. In fact, he hardly notices London any more in the letters, now that he’s got it onto the page so triumphantly. Only the occasional casual afterthought registers the city – ‘Today there is a great thaw, and London looks as if it had a gigantic dirty nose’ – where it’s a familiar grubby urchin, for all its immensity. Nor does he comment on the creative process, though he does confess to not having invented the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, who is not merely based on, but is, Leigh Hunt: ‘I suppose he is the most exact portrait that ever was painted in words! … It is an absolute reproduction of a real man.’ (Later on we find him apologising to the original – ‘I am deeply sorry, and … I feel I did wrong in doing it’. But in fact he got the egregious effrontery of Hunt so right, that he didn’t care, and their friendship was hardly affected at all.)

      Escaping for a while from novel-writing in the autumn of 1853 he goes on a continental jaunt with Wilkie Collins and painter Augustus Egg, whipping through Italy with impatient zest. It’s wonderful in this pretty land, of course, but:

      I am so restless to be doing – and always shall be, I think, so long as I have any portion in Time – that if I were to stay more than a week in any one city here, I believe I should be half desperate to begin some new story!!

      So by his own frenetic logic he has to stay on the move in order to ‘rest’ from writing. It’s the same story a little less than a year later, when he’s finished Hard Times and is troubled by ‘dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere’:

      Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it … If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.

      His travels are mostly described in the comic vein, though. On the earlier journey’s channel crossing, for instance, he describes, courtesy of Collins’s malicious eye-view (‘raised aloft on a high pile of luggage’) a deckfull of sick ladies ‘wet through … like an immense picnic party with everybody intent upon a pigeon pie of her own – from the immense number of white basins’. He celebrates discomfort wherever he finds it, in fact – ‘We have been in the most extraordinary vehicles – like Swings, like boats, like Noah’s arks, like barges and enormous bedsteads.’

      And wherever he goes he not only sends letters, but demands them. Writing to Georgina Howarth from Naples he bewails the absence of mail – ‘I wish I had arranged … to find some letters here. It is a blank to stay for five days in a place without any.’ For of course he lives on words, anybody’s and everybody’s. He may cruelly reject aspiring contributors to Household Words, but he very much enjoys doing it:

      People don’t plunge into Churches and play the Organs, without knowing the notes or having the ghost of an ear. Yet fifty people a day will rush into manuscript … who have no earthly qualification but the actual physical act of writing.

      With real writers he is circumspect. Mrs Gaskell, whose Cranford and North and South he serialised, brought him out in facetious-but-furious asides (‘If I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her!’). He professed to think Collins’s apprentice Hide and Seek ‘much beyond Mrs Gaskell’, and was even a touch gratified that circulation went down during North and South – ‘Mrs Gaskell’s story, so divided, is wearisome in the last degree.’ In Hard Times he kept out of her way, plot-wise (‘I am not striking’), and in general of course their styles couldn’t have been more different. When she writes about working people, and about the north, she’s calling on her intimate observation, and she does it in the mediating anti-excess tones of the realist. Whereas he is melodramatic by conviction.

      He was, at the same time, indefatigable in his efforts on behalf of Miss Coutts’s Home for reclaiming fallen women, and many of these letters are to her, and are eminently practical. Still there’s the characteristic note (‘one more chance in this bitter weather’) even here; and perhaps it’s not unfair to note that it was in mass readings (an audience of 3,700 in St George’s Hall in Bradford) that he seems to have come closest to working people.

      These years are of course only an arbitrary slice of his life. However, the volume does acquire an almost fictional plot of its own when, towards the end, one finds him writing to Forster, gestating Little Dorrit:

      Am altogether in a dishevelled state of mind – motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older growth threatening to close upon me …

      And, seemingly summoned from the ether by this mood, his old adolescent love Maria Beadnell (now, slightly ominously, middle-aged Mrs Winter) resurfaces suddenly in a letter – ‘the remembrance of your hand, came upon me with an influence that I cannot express to you. Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream.’ Her reappearance provokes a kind of self-analysis that’s rare with him – ‘the wasted tenderness of those hard years … I refer to it the habit of suppression which now belongs to me … which makes me chary of showing my

Скачать книгу