The curse of unresisting adoration
After Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, there is every reason to suppose that Dickens was essentially done. After the publication of that magnificent novel in 1864-5, his fiction takes on the quality of an afterword; it is as if he knew what we know, that with Bleak House, Little Don*, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend he had written what may plausibly be considered the four greatest novels in the English language, and that was enough. In the five years before his death in 1870, his fiction is fitfully dazzling, but the old blaze has gone. The only really indispensable thing from this last period is a magnificent short story, 'George Silverman's Explanation'; the novel he was publishing when he died, however, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, looks to me like the only real disappointment among all his novels.
Edwin Drood has been endlessly gone over in a speculative way, and been the unconsenting victim of some horrid attempts at completion. The discussion is, however, all on the level of 'Who is Datchery?' (My money is on Rosa Bud, ghastly girl.) It does ignore the startling thing about Edwin Drood: by Dickens's standards. it is really not very good.
There are. of course, magnificent things in it. The opening chapter, of Jasper's awakening after an all-night session in an opium den in a cathedral town is astonishing. Even if it seems wildly improbable — it is difficult to see what on earth would have drawn the comatose 'Chinaman' to Cloisterham, for instance — the phantasmagoria of East and West, of sultans and cathedral towers dancing together as the drugged delirium fades is extraordinarily powerful, and something quite new in Dickens. But after that, there is a sense of creative exhaustion. The names are terribly first-stab — Rosa Bud, and Miss Twinkleton, and (what was he thinking of?) Crisparkle. The limp borrowings from Thackeray, Collins and. amazingly — it's unimaginable that Dickens could have reached the point where he needed to borrow from such a boring grinder — Trotlope. The automatic present tense worked before, but here it just looks like a flimsy old device, which isn't going to make flatly routine writing vivid or immediate. There are knackered old jokes dug up from Pickwick — Sapsea's wife's epitaph was once a good joke, but by the time Dickens has put it in six separate novels and plonked it down here in a completely random place, it is like listening to a German explaining the one about the penguin in a bar, It is the one real disappointment among the novels. Something has gone.
The explanation for the abrupt collapse after the inexhaustibly fecund fantasy of Our Mutual Friend is to be found in this
final volume of Dickens's letters. From one point of view, this volume is less absorbing than its 11 predecessors: there is not that much of Dickens the raconteur and wit here, and much less of the idle, casually brilliant correspondent which made previous volumes in this great enterprise such a delight. There is, too, one big hole, of which more Later. But in another way the letters from the very end of Dickens's life are inadvertently telling. They are the letters of a man working himself into an early grave.
A large number of the letters here are supremely trivial, but that in itself is suggestive. There are huge numbers of thankyou letters, three charming sentences. There are a lot of letters refusing requests, honours, invitations — Dickens authorised his staff at All the Year Round to refuse most solicitations, but an amazing number had to be dealt with directly, whether the absurd invitation to stand for parliament, or the earnest entreaties of sponging nephews to turn up at the funerals of inlaws he'd never met. And there are a very large number of letters of this sort, on 9 February 1870, to Charles Kent: 'My dear Kent, Say at half past 2, Ever affcy, CD.'
In a way, these last letters show what Dickens' life was like by now; not by what they say, but by the mere fact of their survival.
Dickens wrote 11 words, of absolutely ephemeral significance, and Kent preserved the note. The monstrosity of that is compounded by the consideration that, in all probability, Dickens knew that he would. There are a huge number of letters here which, in one sentence, order some more cigars, accept an invitation or propose a time for a meeting. Sometimes they are of great interest; without one brisk letter to a servants' outfitter, one would not have known that Dickens lived in the sort of style where his footmen wore livery — something intriguing in itself, and it casts a curious light on some of the most memorable lines in the Dedlock scenes in Bleak House and the Veneering dinners in Ow. Mutual Friend.
But when they do have this sort of interest, it is inadvertent; neither sender nor recipient would have thought the letter anything but trivial, And most really are trivial. The fascinating thing is that there are so many of them here. Kent was not alone; hostesses, publishers, tradesmen, merchants, all treasured any kind of correspondence from the great man, and preserved it scrupulously. Dickens, at the end of his life, lived with greater fame than any writer before him — his celebrity was wider and more universal than even Byron, Goethe, or Voltaire experienced. The purity of his fame, too, was unprecedented and perhaps remains unique — those three were famous figures, famous for their personal corruption or their atheism among people who never read their works; subsequent immensely famous writers, like Wilde, Solzhenitsyn or Salman Rushdie, are similarly more celebrated than their books. Dickens's celebrity was extraordinary, because his personal celebrity, even within his lifetime, was secondary to that of his books. Few writers have ever had to live and work in that situation; perhaps only Tolstoy. And no one can go on writing well against unresisting adoration indefinitely; even Dickens in the end, ill and exhausted, dropped the guard he had kept up for decades. Like Shakespeare, he had done what he could.
This last period was dominated by a series of public readings from his work. In 1868, he undertook a profoundly enervating reading tour of America, his first jour ney there since 1842. He had been completely forgiven the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit, and the audiences were vast. But the schedule was appallingly demanding, the climate debilitating, and Dickens quickly found that the theatrical fury of his performances, repeated night after night, was making huge demands on his health. There was, too, another factor which added to the horrors of the American journey. The terrible railway accident of 1865 in which Dickens had nearly been killed had left him with what we would now call post-traumatic stress, and there is a letter here in which he feelingly describes the irrational terror any mode of transport subsequently awoke in him; the constant travelling of the American tour must have placed an unspeakable burden on him.
But the gigantic profits of such reading tours were irresistible, and back in England he continued with them. They were, much more than Edwin Drood, Dickens's final triumph; set-pieces from the fiction, brilliantly reshaped and, often, rewritten, with the end of pure theatrical effect in mind. Even Dickens had doubts about the last and greatest of them, the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist; he thought it possibly too gruesome. Night after night, these thunderous performances were destroying Dickens's health; in the end, death won by a nose over a severe nervous collapse.
The letters in this last volume, as I said, aren't as dazzling as previous volumes, but there is still an enormous amount of fascinating material here. I admit to worshipping Dickens well beyond the point of mania, and, having long ago run out of new novels, short stories, and indeed journalism to discover, would read anything Dickens wrote, down to thank-you notes. After the railway accident, the characteristic grand guignol more or less disappears. The old Dickens would never have written, of another railway accident, 'It is now supposed that the Petroleum (known to be a powerful Anaesthetic) rendered the unfortunate people who were burnt, almost instantly insensible to any sensation.' For a start, it's obviously not true; and in the past the Dickens who, in The Uncommercial Traveller, gleefully informed his readers, 'When I am in Paris, I always find myself at the Morgue,' would have been quite unable to pass up such a terrific opportunity. The usual sanctimonious letters now start to look a little different. He'd always been apt to write letters about the Truth and Beauty of the Christian Religion. But now, coming from a Dickens who worries that Nancy's death might upset audiences, there is a horrible suspicion that he might actually have started to mean it. A Dickens who has suddenly turned compassionate, and given up his previous devout enthusiasm for mutilation, deformity, blood, corpses and (weirdly recurrent, this one) sexually hyperactive dwarves is not really much of a Dickens at all.
But Dickens the writer has almost gone by now; you still hear him faintly when the subject of 'the ample shadows of Lady Molesworth's skirts' comes up, or describing, to J.T. Fields. his son Edward's luggage on his journey to Australia — 'rifles, revolvers, bush saddles and holsters, woodman's knives, carpenters' tools, blacksmith's tools, powder, shot and bullets'. A faint echo, though; the old joking Dickens would have smuggled a quiver of Pictish arrows, or something even more preposterous,
somewhere into that list. There are wonderful letters on the specifics of writing, often on the occasion of rejecting a story for publication — to Sheridan le Fanu on planning and improvisation in writing a novel. Or more detailed writing matters — a brilliantly enthusiastic one to a gentleman who suggested that the card-playing phrase 'roughed the spade' in Pickwick was an error for 'ruffed'. Any small question, any detail of behaviour, speech, clothes, or food, could always interest Dickens, and he instantly becomes interesting, whether giving a very Victorian recipe for salad dressing, or wondering whether you are supposed to RSVP when the Queen asks you to a party, since it's a command and not an invitation. (A very good point, and not one I'd ever heard before.) Dickens could always be interesting, and I read this volume, which is full of minor trivia, with steady absorption — it was only subsequently that I reflected that one of the central facts of Dickens's life in these years, the actress Ellen Ternan, does not enter into it at all, their correspondence destroyed, and she remaining unmentionable to all other correspondents. Fishmongers galore preserved Dickens's orders for haddock; the woman who must have received the letters which really mattered, on the other hand, destroyed them, and here lives a strange, subterranean life in the footnotes.
This volume brings to a close one of the grandest and most important scholarly projects to have been mounted since the war. I have not one word of criticism for the work of the editors, Graham Storey, Margaret Brown and Kathleen Tillotson. In terms of scrupulous editing and analysis of a writer's private papers, it is on a par with such legendary feats of labour as the Yale editions of Boswell's journals and the 45 volumes of Horace Walpole's letters. Sadly, the great Kathleen Tillotson died before the appearance of this last volume — she was 95, and when she officially retired to a consultancy role in 1977 volume five had been reached, which gives you some idea of the years of investigation and intense consideration which have gone into these 12 volumes. I must say, too, that an academic climate which is dominated by the fatuous assumption that you can judge the value of someone's research by the regularity with which they dash into print is not one at all likely to produce such grand projects in the future. It is an absolute triumph.
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