Initial Thoughts: “Charles Dickens in Love” by Robert Garnett

Oh my god, you guys, this book.

The Charles Dickens in Love bio is 390 pages, not counting end notes and index. It could EASILY have been a longish New Yorker article. Peter Ackroyd’s bio is at least a gabillion pages long, but I didn’t feel it.

Garnett leaves no point un-repeated — sometimes within the same paragraph. Again and again he’ll remind us that Maria Beadness was the first, fiery, sexual love, and that Mary Hogarth was the chaste, virginal, lasting love. He then does this very curious thing: he begins by saying, “We don’t know if Charles and Ellen had a child together.” But then, to make the rest of his belaborings not seem wasted, he just decides that yes, of course, they did have a baby. (This is all based on “reading between the lines” of Dickens’s journals and letters. I’m not saying that it’s entirely unlikely; maybe I’m just cranky with this guy for later stuff, so I’m busting his chops about this particular point. What makes me allow some doubt about a baby is this: Dickens was TERRIBLE at keeping this affair a secret, pretty much EVERYONE knew about it, and I can’t see him keeping the birth of a son close to the chest at all.)

Garnett is also incredibly unkind about Catherine. Look, okay, sure: Catherine Dickens put on some weight because she’s a human being Going Through Some Things and WE GET IT. She had 10 kids and at least two miscarriages. She was saddled with Charles Dickens as a husband — a husband who, by the way and p.s.: only married her because Maria Beadnell broke his heart and her younger sister Mary was too young. I mean, couldn’t it be possible that Catherine was just PROFOUNDLY depressed? So why you gotta be a dick, Robert Garnett, with your “Catherine’s reckless fecundity” this, and your “overly prolific wife” that, and going on about her stoutness and unattractiveness (even quoting someone ELSE: “Repeated pregnancies were exhausting Catherine’s sexual role, and lacking the personality to keep her in favour with Dickens, she had no other.”) and for FUCK’S SAKE, where is CHUCK in all of this? It’s like we’re all just supposed to conveniently forget that women had about thismuch reproductive agency in the nineteenth century and just blame poor Catherine for having a uterus.

I mean SERIOUSLY.

Anyway. He also keeps talking about Wilkie Collins’s “mistress” — a term I have specific rules about and for it to work, at least one of the two individuals involved need to be married and neither Wilkie Collins nor either of his two lady-friends were ever married. (Well, Caroline did leave him for a brief period and got married, but then she divorced that guy and came back and that’s a weird episode in Collins’s life because it’s likely that Caroline was playing a game of emotional chicken with Collins, only she lost, because dude did not want to be married.)

I liberally skipped a significant chunk of the last 100 pages of Charles Dickens in Love because OH MY GOD I CAN’T CARE ABOUT HOW MANY TRAINS HE TOOK.”

Oh! Oh! Oh! AND: later in the bio– WAIT. Before I get to that, let’s go back to the pregnancy thing for a moment because here’s where all those fucking TRAINS make an appearance. This guy has very carefully looked at old train schedules and tracked them with Dickens’s post-marks and references in his letters and this is the kind of shit that happened in that movie about the Torah guys: I DON’T NEED TO SEE THE WORK. Just, you know, give me the conclusions. And I suppose that there are some people out there who are just fascinated by that kind of minutia — the kind of people who thought Driving Miss Daisy was an action-filled adventure picture, no doubt. Those people are none of my business.

So, later in the bio– Sorry. I have another quick point about Ellen Ternan. She’s a cipher. We don’t have any of her letters or her diaries or anything. She shows up in Dickens’s letters, and other people write about her, so she’s more of a character than an actual person. Maybe there’s nothing to be done about that. But she just felt so lifeless and inert in this bio; she felt like a movable object, a chess piece, not a human being. And interestingly, Garnett never mentions that Ternan is alleged to have said, about her time with Dickens, “I so loathed the old man’s touch.” (Because it would interfere with his thesis, maybe? About how important this love was to Dickens? And maybe he feels like it would be too heartbreaking to discover that the love of his life loathed him?)

NOW, the other thing: Later in the bio, Garnett brings up this FASCINATING lady named Frances Dickinson. He says that during one of her divorce proceedings (she had a slew of divorces), the judge stopped the proceedings because he felt that the whole thing was too disgusting to talk about in court. (She also talked often of her love of wigs and I know that this may not be the thing that makes you sit up and take notice but I’m a homosexual and a crazy divorcee talking about wigs? HEAVEN.) Anyway, Garnett decides that’s all we need to know about her and doesn’t even give us a HINT about the disgusting divorce proceedings and I just think he could THROW ME A BONE HERE, Garnett.

Anyway. Ugh. I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 7

Catch up with past entries:

• “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5
• Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5
• “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 6 – 7

Let me just confine myself to Mrs. Grose for this installment, since Mike is like a dog with a bone, all over every exchange to prove that the narrator is forcing her impressions on the poor old housekeeper, who is clearly reluctant to endorse the narrator’s wilder surmises.

“The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 6 – 7

Catch up with past entries:

• “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5
• Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5

She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess’s plight; yet she accepted without directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her. – The “she” there is Mrs Grose. And we’ve touched on the class differencesbetween the governess and Mrs Grose in an earlier exchange. Mrs Grose simply isn’t in the position to challenge a lot of what the governess is saying. Mrs Grose certainly can’t outright call the governess a liar without risking, well, everything.

Also: the governess is honest about saying that Mrs Grose has seen nothing. This is going to be a common refrain from the governess. Either someone hasn’t seen something, or someone willfully doesn’t see something — whatever that means.

Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5

Catch up with past entries:

• “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• “The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5

I’ll start off-topic a little, with “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 

“The Turn of the Screw” — Chapters 3 – 5

Catch up with past entries:

• “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2
• Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2

Hey, guess what! My Norton has the serialization notations, so I’m going to try to get us in line with each official segment. Chapter 5, according to Norton, is the end of the fourth installment.

On with my notes. 

Steve’s Response: “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2

You’ll find the first entry here: “The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2

I think I’ve been inveigled into this, but what the hey . . . I’m always up for defending the naive reading of an unsophisticated doofus.  I see that Mike, to soften the blow of the blitzkrieg he has planned against me, says a few kind words about me at the start, including “Steve is usually right.”  I suspect that he first wrote “Steve is a legend in his own mind.”  Feeling that this was a little strong, and wanting to open with a formal exchange of compliments, he crossed that out and wrote “I don’t care what they say about Steve, he makes a decent cup of coffee.”  Then he decided that this was too complimentary, and with the kind of irony that he is going to find in The Turn of the Screw, wrote about my record of rightness in a preface to what he intends to be a thorough dismantling of my rightness and a demonstration that I read on the level of the comic strip Nancy.

Whatever.  Game on.

“The Turn of the Screw” — Introduction through Chapter 2

It’s Steve’s fault. It’s always Steve’s fault. “The Turn of the Screw,” he said, “is just a straight-forward ghost story. The governess isn’t mad. The ghosts are real. Anything else is post-modern supposition.” So we’re in an argument. My hope is that by the end of this, I’ll have proven — to Steve, and, I guess, to myself, because Steve is usually right, and he may be right this time, but I don’t want him to be — that Henry James meant for The Turn of the Screw to be more than just a ghost story.

What follows will be the emails I send to Steve from each section I read through, and Steve’s responses.

A last bit of housekeeping: the edition I’m using is the Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition.

Today in Anniversaries: Thomas Hardy Died Today in 1928

When Hardy died in 1928, at the age of 87, he was on wife #2, a woman named Florence.

It’s not especially unusual for a man to remarry — married men usually aren’t good at being unmarried men because sometimes patriarchy works for people, like male people, and once you’ve gotten used to being cared for, because that’s what women do, right, is care for men, then it’s sort of rough to go back to caring for yourself — and it’s almost guaranteed when the man had been having an affair with the woman who would become his new wife roughly seven years before his first wife’s death.

Oh, Thomas “Hap” Hardy, you old romantic schemer, you.

Hardy and his first wife, Emma, started out the way one wants all new love to start: fresh and exciting and breathless. He was captivated by her hair. And there’s a wonderful drawing Hardy did of Emma, kneeling, that captures the curve of her breast erotically and again, I want to say: most all of our preconceived notions of prudish Victorians are bunk and useless. Are they flashing their panties as they climb into our out of carriages? We often confuse perversity and ill manners with eroticism. Are they writing poems like Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” and buying pornography outside of prisons*? Yes, they were.

Anyway.

[* A Mr Birtle, secretary of the soon-to-be-dissolved Bristol Society for the Prevention of Vice, wrote a final letter to his group: "Sir, - The Bristol Society for the Suppression of Vice being about to dissolve, and the agents before employed having moved very heavily, I took my horse and rode to Stapleton prison to inquire into the facts contained in your letter. Inclosed are some of the drawings which I purchased in what they call their market, without the least privacy on their part or mine. They wished to intrude on me a variety of devices in bone and wood of the most obscene kind, particularly those representing a crime 'inter Christianos non nominandum,' which they termed the new fashion. I purchased a few, but they are too bulky for a letter. This market is held before the door of the turnkey every day between the hours of ten and twelve." -- quoted from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor]

Eventually Hardy tired of Emma. His eye began to wander over several ladies, usually younger, and usually those who flattered his talents, because for Hardy the most attractive part of a woman is the part of her that finds him brilliant. In 1904, when he was 64, Hardy met Florence Dugdale, when she was 26. She thought he was brilliant. He thought she was insightful. She quit teaching in 1908 to become a professional Thomas Hardy groupie and to make catty comments about Emma whenever possible. In 1912, she multi-tasks her disdain of Emma with production of a book called — and I’m not kidding — The Book of Baby Birds.

What was Emma writing at the time? Her diaries, which she called “Why I Hate My Husband.” (Hardy had that diary destroyed. As Claire Tomalin so wisely and compassionately put it in her biography of Hardy: “Sensibly enough he decided they were largely the product of a mind subject to delusions.”)

Emma died in 1912, Florence moved in in 1913 and she and Hardy were married in 1914. But something had changed in Hardy after Emma’s death. The woman he had grown to despise had become the woman he only ever really loved. He idealized her entirely and mooned over her constantly and, p.s., don’t forget: he had married Florence. And guess who wasn’t Mr Subtle about his new-found love affair with his dead wife? Thomas Hardy. His poetry is filled with love poems to and about and because of Emma. And Florence had to hear them all and read them all and stew about them in her own kettle of rage.

It took Emma over 20 years to get to the “Why I Hate My Husband” stage. It took Florence a little less than that. And yet, symmetrically, after Hardy’s death in 1928, Florence was so grief-stricken that a doctor was called.

Oh, and we haven’t even got to the “Where do we bury Hardy’s heart?” part of the story. Hardy wanted to be buried with Emma in their plot at Stinsford. Literary people wanted Hardy to be buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner. (Hardy probably actually wanted that, too, because he was obsessed with his own fame and standing; however, his Emma obsession in this case overrode his own fame-whoring and we have this late-blooming romance with a grave site.)

The compromise? Hardy’s heart was buried with Emma (Emma Hardy: “Um, gross you guys.”) and his body was buried in Poet’s Corner. However, we all are rewarded in this compromise, because we get this quote from George Bernard Shaw, one of the ceremonial pallbearers at the funeral:

“As we marched, pretending to carry the ashes of whatever part of Hardy was buried in the Abbey, Kipling, who fidgeted continually and was next in front of me, kept changing his step. Every time he did so I nearly fell over him.”

The moral of this story: George Bernard Shaw is awesome.

Today in Birthdays: Wilkie Collins’s Birthday 8 January 1824

To celebrate, I’ll share, with no context at all, my favorite passage from the Catherine Peters biography of Wilkie Collins, The King of Inventors:

The hybrid and Mary don’t agree. I am sorry to lose the hybrid. She sees me into the water-closet and out of it regularly – and tries the door every time I make water. I have reason to believe that the hybrid must have seen My Person!

Happy 188th birthday, Wilkie! I hope they have hybrid-attended water-closets in whatever heaven you’ve ended up in.

Today in Anniversaries: Richard Dadd Died Today in 1886

The painting is titled The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, and was painted by Dadd while he was taking some “me” time at Broadmoor Hospital [personal note to my friend Catherine: BROADMOOR! TONY! GAH!] after murdering his father and then attempting to murder some French guy while on the run in France.

Richard Dadd wasn’t a well man. (Maybe I should have started with that.)

He’s on my radar at all because he makes a quick and creepy appearance in a biography of Wilkie Collins called The King of Inventors by Catherine Peters. I like to keep track of things like credit card payment due dates, social engagements, and the anniversaries of the deaths of schizophrenics on my Yahoo! calendar, and today I got a reminder about Dadd.

Dadd was born 1 August 1817. He’s not part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but he’s Brotherhood-adjacent, because artists have always been great at three things: (1) annoying me, (2) writing ponderous “artist’s” statements, and (3) being incestuous as a group. He studied at the Royal Academy (which is part of the reason why Dadd wasn’t part of the PRB; that group of winners hated the Royal Academy and what it stood for SO MUCH that they gave the founder of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the devastating nickname “Sir Sloshua Reynolds.” If I had to add a (4) to my list of three things artists are great at, I think it would have to be devastating nicknames) where he ran into folks like Augustus Egg and E.M. Ward — both of whom show up frequently in Dickens biographies.

In 1842, he was picked to be a draughtsman for an expedition to Greece, Turkey, Syria, and, finally, Egypt. (And going off topic a moment to talk a little more about Egypt: Remember how great it was when Flaubert took that trip to Egypt with his probably-gay-as-pants friend Max and Flaubert was obsessed with the eunuchs and upset that they wouldn’t hang out with him — “What would I not have given in the Orient, to become the friend of a eunuch! But they are completely unapproachable.” — and Max kept taking pictures using an extremely attractive Nubian “for scale” but I mean, come on: we all know the pyramids are big.) And while it probably can’t entirely be blamed on Egypt, sometime in December, somewhere along the Nile, Richard Dadd started losing his mind, thinking he was under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris (the Egyptian god who was cut up into 14 pieces by his evil brother and then scattered over the world, forcing Osiris’s sister-wife to go searching and assembling only she couldn’t find Osiris’s penis because that had been swallowed by a crab oh my god you guys: think of how different Christmas could have been if we’d all been Egyptian).

His traveling companions attributed it to sunstroke. It was probably paranoid schizophrenia.

Back home, in August of 1843, Dadd murdered his father, thinking his father was the Devil in disguise (he wasn’t), but before that he went through a period where he was obsessed with hard-boiled eggs and “lived on nothing else” according to Peters in her Wilkie Collins bio. (I also love the way Peters describes the murder: “Dadd went spectacularly mad and cut his father’s throat.”)

After his arrest, after trying to kill that other guy in France (who probably also was the Devil in disguise as far as Dadd was concerned), and after he was safely hospitalized away (first at Bedlam before later being moved to Broadmoor [another personal note to my friend Catherine: BROADMOOR! TONY! GAH!]), the police searched his rooms and studio where they found “drawings of his friends, including Frith, Egg, and Ward…with a red slash painted across the throat of each.”

Go ahead and take some time to shudder thoroughly. I’ll wait right here, shuddering myself.

Oh, but I’m not quite done with the uncanny and creepy: as it turns out, years later, E.M. Ward, a narrative painter of British historical scenes, killed himself. By slashing his throat.