No novelist has dealt so directly with the home life of the world as
Charles Dickens. He has painted few historic pictures; he has dealt
mostly in interiors,--beautiful bits of home life, full of domestic
feeling. Indeed, we may say that his background is always the home, and
here he paints his portraits, often like those of Hogarth for strength
and grotesque effect. Here, too, he limns the scenes of his
comedy-tragedy, and depicts the changing fashions of the time. The color
is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coarse a
brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is
never known to flag.
Nowhere else in all the range of literature have we such tender
description of home life and love, such intuitive knowledge of child
life, such wonderful sympathy with every form of domestic wrong and
suffering, such delicate appreciation of the shyest and most unobtrusive
of social virtues; nowhere else such indignation at any neglect or
desecration of the home, as in Mrs. Jellyby with her mission, in Mrs.
Pardiggle with her charities, Mr. Pecksniff with his hypocrisy, and Mr.
Dombey with his unfeeling selfishness. In short, Dickens is
pre-eminently the prophet and the poet of the home.
Now, can it be possible that we must say of such a man as this, that in
his own life he was the opposite of all that which he so feelingly
describes,--that he desecrated the very home he so apostrophizes,--that
he put all his warmth, geniality, and tenderness into his books and kept
for his own fireside his sour humors and unhappy moods,--that he was
"ill to live with," as Mrs. Carlyle puts it? We cannot believe it in so
bald a form, but we are forced to admit that his married life seems to
have been in every way unhappy and unfortunate. No one could state this
more strongly than Dickens himself, in the letter he wrote at the time
of the separation. He said:--
"Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily 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, were ever joined together, who had greater difficulty
in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An
attached woman-servant (more friend to both of us than servant),
who lived with us sixteen years and had the closest familiar
experience 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 home and our
children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend,
protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards
Mrs. Dickens, which I owe to my wife, I will only 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, and come 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."
Again, in the public statement which he prepared for "Household Words,"
alluding to a multitude of damaging rumors which were quickly put in
circulation, he says:--
"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 slanderers
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 irreconcilable 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
my wife's name--that all lately whispered rumors 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."
This denial, coming from a man of truth and honor like Charles Dickens,
must, once for all, dispose of that convenient way of accounting for the
sad estrangement.
The reasons for the unhappy state of things were of a much more
complicated nature than this. Only the most intimate of his friends ever
knew them in full, and of course they were debarred from making them
public. But Professor Ward of Cambridge University, who has written a
very kind and appreciative Life of Dickens, and one which gives a far
more pleasing idea of his character than the bulky and egotistical Life
by Forster, gives a clue to the whole trouble in the following
statement. He says:--
"If he ever loved his wife with that affection before which
so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade
into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of the
numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been
pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which
love and duty made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he
remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how
to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments
has never been written in history or figured in fiction."
And this troublous condition of things was very much intensified by
Dickens having fallen violently in love with Mary Hogarth, Mrs.
Dickens's youngest sister. This beautiful girl died at their house at
the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the
heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the
loss of this dearly loved girl. "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her
mother a few months after her death, "that waking or sleeping I have
never lost the recollection of our hard sorrow, and I never shall."
"If," he writes in his diary at the beginning of a new year, "she was
with me now,--the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathizing
with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I ever knew did or
will,--I think I should have nothing to wish but a continuance of such
happiness." Throughout life her memory haunted him with great vividness.
After her death he wrote: "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks,
and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to
me that I never lay down without a hope of the vision returning." The
year before he died he wrote to a friend: "She is so much in my thoughts
at all times, especially when I am successful, that the recollection of
her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my
existence as the beating of my heart is." In a word, she was the one
great imaginative passion of his life. He is said to have pictured her
in Little Nell, and he writes after finishing that book, "Dear Mary died
yesterday when I think of it."
Have we not in this the key to all the sorrows of his domestic life?
Could he have married the woman he loved in this manner, he would
doubtless have been one of the tenderest and most devoted of husbands,
and a family life as beautiful as any of the ideal ones he has depicted
would have resulted. It is probable that he did not know Mary Hogarth
until after his marriage, when she came to live in his house, and when
his youthful fancy for his wife had begun to decline. Miss Hogarth died
instantly of heart-disease, without even a premonitory warning.
All accounts agree in calling Mrs. Dickens a very pretty, amiable, and
well-bred woman; and even if she was as infinitely incapable as
represented, that alone would seem to be insufficient cause for so
serious a trouble. Miss Georgina Hogarth, whom all describe as a very
lovely and superior person, possessed the executive ability Mrs. Dickens
lacked, it would seem; for all visitors both to Tavistock House and
Gad's Hill describe with enthusiasm the perfect order which prevailed in
the large establishments, attributing this in part at least to Dickens's
own intense love of method and passion for neatness. But no man without
the aid of feminine head and hands would have succeeded in attaining to
this perfect housekeeping, especially where the family consisted of nine
children, as in this case.