Dickens amp;amp;amp;amp; Women ReObserved

Dickens & Women ReObserved is a rich collection of new essays by scholars and critics from various parts of the world who represent a new appreciation and understanding of Charles Dickens and things woman. / A new generation of scholars and critics, first led by feminist critics of the 1970s, began to re-observe the man and his works with fresh eyes. A second generation of critics—those now schooled in gender studies, cultural studies, psychological theory, play theory, eco-criticism, thing theory, and a range of isms and schisms that flourish in the academy today—have originated a new and more reflective discourse on Dickens and women, and women generally in the nineteenth century. / Collectively, the essays in this volume overturn a prevalent and largely unchallenged belief held for more than 150 years: that Dickens’ female characters were one-dimensional Victorian stereotypes only and that, as exemplified by his literary depictions and conflicted personal life, he did not understand or value women as important, capable, or gifted in their own right. / While neither ignoring nor discounting Dickens’ troubled relationships with women and reliance on certain Victorian stereotypes, the essays in Dickens & Women ReObserved demonstrate that in a myriad of ways Dickens’ appreciation of women in his fiction and his life was far more subtle, sophisticated, and complex than previously understood. Consciously or unconsciously he crafted characters more individualized, independent, rounded, and assertive than typical stock cultural characterizations of women. Additionally, in his exuberant social and professional life, he was drawn to and worked amiably with such “new” women. Dickens life and work today appear evidently modern and nuanced in his regard for women and their abilities. / Dickens & Women ReObserved is an important work for comprehending one of the world’s greatest novelists and, by extension, facilitating greater study of contemporary views of Victorian women. In prose accessible to the general reader as well as scholars in literary studies, the diverse essays in this volume investigate a broad range of subjects in Dickens’ celebrated artistry, including Modernism, Queen Victoria, Ellen Ternan, adaptations, composition methods, gender, sensuality, agency, major female characters, and French as well as African relevancies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Everett Root
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913087210

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Dickens & Women

ReObserved

Dickens & Women

ReObserved

Edited by Edward Guiliano

EER

Edward Everett Root, Publishers, Brighton, 2020.

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Edward Everett Root, Publishers, Co. Ltd.,

30 New Road, Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1BN, England.

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Dickens & Women ReObserved

Edited by Edward Guiliano

First published in Great Britain in 2020.

© Edward Guiliano and contributors 2020.

This edition © Edward Everett Root 2020.

ISBN: 978-1-913087-20-3 Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-913087-21-0 eBook

Edward Guiliano and the individual contributors have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as the owners of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Cover designed by Dylan R. Jhirad.

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Contents

Complex Women Because of or Despite Dickens?: An Introduction

Edward Guiliano

Making a Rosebud of Her Mouth: Erotics, Semiotics, and Agency in Dickensian Female Mouth

Colette Ramuz

Raving with Love for the Queen: Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, and British Belonging

Adrienne Munich and Anthony Teets

Romance Games: Gender and Play in Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop

Robert Sirabian

Dickens’ Feminist Heroines: Edith Dombey and Louisa Bounderby

Susan Jhirad

The Complications of Virtue: Florence Dombey and Lizzie Hexam

Tamsin Evernden

Bleak House, Esther Summerson, and Gendered Identity: A Material Feminist Rereading

Adrian Tait

The Design on the Skin: Rosa Dartle’s Scar as Multisignifying Palimpsest

Céline Prest

Esther’s Potential Visible Facts: Visual Language and the Problem of Perception in Bleak House

Megan L. Hansen

Navigating the Beauty and Brokenness of Humility: Esther Summerson and Amy Dorrit as Presented by Dickens and Adapted by Hopcraft, Davies, and Edzard

Christine Colón

You Can’t Look at Me Out of a Child’s Eyes: Vision, Gender, and Knowledge in Dickens’ Little Dorrit

Stacey Kikendall

Devilishly Attractive: Dickens on French Women

Claire E. Woods

Dickens’ Women in Great Expectations Against the African Social Landscape

Masumi Odari and Ciarunji Chesaina

Holiday Romance: Subversive Girls in Dickens’ Fiction

Francesca Orestano

Nelly Onstage: Writing Our Mutual Friend

Stanley Friedman

A Horrid Female Waterman: The Contentious Legacy of Grace Darling in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend

Lydia Craig

Refraction and Reflection in the Swiss Chalet: Controlling Femininity in George Silverman’s Explanation

Margaret Flanders Darby

The Woman Detective in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Julia Clarke

Dickens Among Women Modernist Writers

Michael Hollington

Selected Bibliography: Dickens and Women

List of Contributors

Complex Women Because of or Despite Dickens?

An Introduction

Edward Guiliano

To say Charles Dickens lived a Dickensian life is to say how large and dramatic in life and afterlife is this towering figure. In the hero of his own story, rising from humble origins to extraordinary fame and influence, we apprehend a life full of poverty and riches, mysteries and intrigues, passions and despairs, secrets and lies, ideas and stratagems, mythologies and moralisms, family and friends, loves and marriages, energy, energy, and the abcs and xyzs of things. The larger-than-life operatic scale of his human interactions and events is rich, dense, troubling at times, yet entertaining all in the sweep of intense periods of time and work. His was a life with family dramas of epic proportions and dynamic adventures, including even a life-threatening railway crash.¹ As readers will know, it is also a life populated with a large cast of women: women in his family, platonic relationships with women in his professional and charitable and reformist worlds, and women in his stories and novels, some of whom are very much alive as part of our cultural heritage.

Dickens’ life and works are arguably the most studied of authors, or nearly so. Yet what we know and understand continues to evolve, inform and educate us, shock us at times, and reward us with new insights. We are seeing more in Dickens’ life and especially in his works than previous generations because we are bringing more to them—more facts and information about his personal life, more knowledge and appreciation for elements of his Victorian world, and certainly more refined critical approaches to his work by a new generation of scholars and critics far different from those of the past.

The premise of this volume is that, while neither ignoring nor discounting Dickens’ sometimes troubled relationships with women and a reliance on certain Victorian stereotypes, the critics and commentators of Dickens & Women ReObserved demonstrate collectively that in a myriad of ways—in his fiction and in his personal life and relationships—Dickens’ appreciation of women was far more subtle, sophisticated, appreciative, and complex than previously understood. Consciously or seemingly unconsciously at times, he crafted characters more individualized, independent, rounded, and assertive than stock characterizations of Victorian women. We can now see clear representations of female agency in some of them. Additionally, in his exuberant social and professional life, he was drawn to and worked amiably with such new women. Dickens life and work today appear evidently modern and nuanced in his regard for women and their abilities.

Our previous understanding of Dickens and women has been weakened by two generalizations broadly repeated for more than a century: that Dickens did not understand women and that he populated his novels mostly with one-dimensional, stereotypical Victorian angels in the house. These oversimplified surface views surely have been mindlessly accepted by too many. Some even have argued that his portraits of women in the novels express Dickens’ own misogynous delight in and low opinion of women. This view represents a fundamentally flawed leap from the fact that Dickens drew from his personal, emotional life in shaping his characters. Of course he drew upon what he could see and knew, but as the consummate actor, he loved to take on the lives of the women and men he was imagining, famously gesticulating in mirrors to capture descriptions of facial expressions, for example. In a letter to his close friend and future biographer, John Forster, he confessed his pleasure in creative transformations and possessions, in sketching a character: Assumption has charms for me so delightful—I hardly know for how many wild reasons—that I feel a loss . . . when I lose a chance of being some one not in the remotest degree like myself.² And through his successful transformations and possessions, he created works and characters that we are still growing to understand. It was not until 1940 that Edmund Wilson famously established there was much more complexity in Dickens’ characters and stories than previous critics, notably Victorian reviewers as well as readers, saw. Wilson championed the symbolism and artistic creativity in Dickens’ novels and stories, their social criticism, and identified a duality of a melodramatic good and bad of everything that runs through Dickens’ works as well as his life.³ But it took another forty years for Michael Slater to be the first to focus in an exhaustively researched, full-length study on the nature of women in Dickens’ life and works, published as Dickens and Women (1983), and fleshing out a comprehensive and accurate record that this volume extends.

Slater

Michael Slater’s classic study, to which the title of this volume pays homage, is divided into three parts. In the first, he details Dickens’ formative personal relationships with females: his mother and her son’s relationship with her; his sister; Lucy Stroughill, an early friend; Maria Beadnell, a first (and flirtatious) love; Mary Hogarth, the idealized young sister of his wife; Catherine, his wife; Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’ most devoted and trusted sister-in-law; his daughters; and finally his late-in-life mistress, Ellen Ternan. The second part treats the women of the novels. The final part addresses The Womanly Ideal, that is, what Dickens wrote, or is reported to have said, about women in general, about female nature and the role of women both inside the home and in society at large.⁴

To his credit, Slater establishes a factual platform for discussion and, as Susan Jhirad notes in her essay that follows in this volume, reconfirms that in Dickens’ mid-to-late period the women in his later novels became more complex and realistic. In the introduction to the 2017 reprint of his book, Slater points out the two comparative weaknesses that have emerged in the more than thirty years since his book appeared. The first is his neglected treatment of Dickens’ many nonromantic relationships with women, some of which were very important to him. Especially notable were his friendships with the fashionable and literary Countess of Blessington (discussed by Munich and Teets in their essay on Dickens and Queen Victoria in this collection); Lavinia Watson; the Hon. Mary Boyle, who partnered him in various amateur theatricals and with whom he carried on a mock-flirtation; Frances Dickinson (later Mrs. Gilbert Eliot), an amateur actress; and the best known of them all, Angela Burdett Coutts, the philanthropic wealthy lady with whom he worked closely on extensive charitable activities.⁵ To these we should add the now increasingly recognized strong professional relationship he had with female authors and journalists, especially those he mentored into print in his Household Words and All the Year Round periodicals. Mrs. Gaskell is the best known of these fellow authors, but there were many more, such as Harriet Parr, Adelaide Anne Procter, mentioned briefly or in other contexts by Slater, and Amelia B. Edwards.⁶

More defensively, Slater states he would no doubt write some of the book differently today, having regard to all the enormous developments in feminist literary theory and criticism that have taken place since 1983. These have informed a number of illuminating studies of Dickens’s female characters—his filial women, domestic women, dissenting women, fallen women, villainous women, mad women, etc., etc.⁷ Indeed, Nina Auerbach took Slater to task for being cavalierly ill-informed about the other half of its subject, the nineteenth-century woman.⁸ Auerbach was frustrated by his pragmatic, biographical approach because recent scholarship has told us so much about what it felt like to be a Victorian woman. The material was there and Slater did not know it. So, in terms of his presentation of the women in Dickens’ life, the lives of the dispirited wife, the energetic sister, the actress and so on, have no context beyond the fantasies Dickens spun around them.⁹ In short, Slater does not try to examine his women from a female perspective. Thus, when it comes to Dickens’ greatest characters and Slater’s discussion of them, they transcend Slater’s commonsensical plausibility in favor of a mythic and monstrous grandeur we rarely encounter in life.¹⁰

Despite inevitable disagreements with his take on various situations, Slater’s landmark work cannot be ignored in the discourse on Dickens and women. Nina Auerbach concludes her discussion with a further lament and observation for ignoring the scholars of the present who have taught us more than Dickens ever could have known about the women of the past.¹¹ Her comment is a tacit invitation to the essays that follow, as at times in little and subtle ways and other times in big and bold ways they re-observe Dickens and see in him and his works what he was sometimes conscious of but sometimes unaware of, but are there. It also points to a shift in the academy and how we see Dickens today that merits discussion.

The Evolving Academy and Critical Perspectives

In 1845, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, I look everywhere for Grandmothers and see none,¹² noting the lack of a family or tradition of female authors to draw upon. Similarly, Virginia Woolf valued the notion of a female lineage and worked to build such a tradition, claiming we think back through our mothers.¹³ With the rise of feminist studies in the early 1970s, much attention was paid to building this family lineage, of bringing back to life forgotten authors. Established critics and historians not only studied these authors and their characters but also looked at literary characters whose personalities had not been understood in the Victorian era, some even being outside the normative gender characteristics then customarily discussed. Additionally, most of what was written till then about Victorian women in life and literature was by men. Plus, it was by Victorianists who generally were comparatively light on theory. By the early 1980s, however, this situation had changed at universities and scholarly communities in major ways. So, too, the myth that Dickens could only write about marginalized women and those living in separate spheres began to die as his ability to provide meaningful profiles and explore alternatives to societal stereotypes became more recognized.

Recovery feminism of the noncanonical was and is still practiced productively, but gender studies has expanded in form, theory, and content and, as Talia Schaffer observes: The 1990s saw the emergence of political criticism and attention to material culture and the economics of publishing, enabling an outpouring of new work on sensation fiction, periodicals and New Women fiction.¹⁴ I would add that beyond a new wave of feminism in theory and practice, a broad palette of new critical and theoretical approaches to literary texts was being practiced in English and humanities departments around the world (and are in evidence in the essays that follow).

It is the change in diversity of both people and theories that most marks the academy of our lifetime. When, as a young Victorianist, I began to co-edit Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, my co-editors were men. Today they are women. There has clearly been a feminization of higher education as more women were granted PhDs, entered the academy, moved on to tenured and administrative positions (in the past decade, for example, three or four of the eight Ivy League institutions have been headed by women). This foothold has had broad effects. Sitting at conferences on Dickens or Victorian studies, I continue to be rewarded with fresh insights into works and events that date back well over a century and a half. That the majority conference presentations are routinely delivered by women is a sign of our times, as is the training and critical perspectives they bring to their topics. Victorian studies of animals, environment, technology and communication, cognition and affect, and the sciences from astronomy to geology now join resurgent poetics and poetry studies, stylistics and digital textual studies, and book history—the trends are stimulating,¹⁵ Alison Booth has written recently in the context of feminist Victorian studies.

Of course, men participate effectively in this re-observing of Dickens as well. But Odari and Chesaina’s essay and insights on Dickens’ women and the African social landscape is likelier to have been conceived and written by African-based women housed in a university—as it is—than by an earlier generation of Dickens commentators. It is a happy coincidence that the great majority of the essays in this volume are by women. After all, how creditable would a volume re-observing Dickens and women be taken without at least equal representation by women as the observers? That is another sign of our times.

Context, New Historicism, and Personal Lies and History

We certainly live in what frequently is an Alice-in-Wonderland consider-your-verdict-before-the-evidence world. Readers of this essay will likely know that in 1858 Dickens left his wife, the mother of his ten children (nine survived), treated her very badly at the time, and took up with an eighteen-year-old girl who eventually became his mistress—something that was covered up and only confirmed convincingly nearly a century later. That and his related impulsiveness and poor behavior at times is enough for many to dislike, distrust, and dismiss Dickens generally as well as his treatment of women in his writings. It is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Beyond the obvious, You don’t have to love the author to love and appreciate the work dismissal, there is context that should be considered.

First, Dickens lived and mostly wrote about a world created by men for men. Dickens cannot be blamed for that world. Let us recall he vigorously opposed many of its offensive realities. His very depictions of the condition of women in his novels drew attention to their plight and the lack of possibilities for female agency. Often the treatment of women in his stories is what angers us, engages our emotions, and drives our thoughts. Mostly consciously, but sometimes inadvertently, he raises our consciousness of what we now perceive as flaws in Victorian culture and society. He is, after all, the Please, sir, I want some more social critic, challenging a litany of injustices in his talks, journalism, and fiction. With satire and indignation, he skewered lawyers and the legal system; the poorhouse administration; slow, inefficient, and even uncaring government; educational practices in many forms, child abuse; the master-slave industrial system; materialistic and property evils; and on and on. He was an advocate for the poor and, again, for women. As a political and social critic, he was outspoken in his charge, for example, to change the divorce laws that favored men and the wealthy so one-sidedly and expensively to the point of negating the very possibility of divorce for all but a class of men and nearly all women. In his charitable work he decidedly provided a chance for education to the poor and a new life for unfortunate and/or victimized girls and women.

Certainly, there is some hypocrisy in the public and private lives of this psychologically complex and burdened man. Again, he lived a Dickensian life with all its dualities and counterbalancing values. To borrow an apt phrase from Edmund Wilson, he was capable of extremes of both malignity and benevolence.¹⁶ That he kept secrets and rewrote the story of his life is not news. The secret he guarded most in his life was not that he loved and, late in life, had an intimate relationship with Ellen Ternan—people in his family and circle knew that well, and he spoke openly about it with them (he wrote about it discretely to his disadvantage, thus breaking the time-honored edict of never putting it in writing)—but the greatest secret was that his mother had forsaken his education and made him work in a blacking warehouse when the family was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. During his lifetime neither his friends nor even his children were given entry into this personal history and shame. (Forster learned of it in 1849 though the text of the autobiographical fragments Dickens trusted him with, and Catherine may have learned about the episode around the same time but if so was sworn to the strictest confidence.) Dickens is hardly alone in creating a revisionist history of one’s own formative years, though. His includes a host of sustained lies, including, for instance, with regard to his first publication,¹⁷ that are beyond the scope of this introduction. He could be devious and manipulative, but at times when he is genuine, he was most endearing. Recall that he loved Christmas and its embracing feeling, and as the author of A Christmas Carol and other Christmas works, he celebrated good will and second chances, and especially of being good and feeling good. He did not whip up a synthetic Yuletide bonhomie to appeal to popular taste but expressed with heartfelt conviction a lifelong deep delight in children and goodness. He took to heart his role as the steward of high morality in his age. As the great moralist, he enjoyed his unique position as voice of the conscience of his age, a social force as well as a literary phenomenon and a man esteemed as well as beloved. He could not bring himself to open up to some of the truths about himself and disappoint his readership. This relates directly to the separation from his wife.

His marriage to Catherine broke up after twenty-two years. There is little doubt there were many happy years together and little doubt that Catherine had a difficult time recovering mentally and physically from her many childbirths and that her sister Georgina took on much of the charge for raising the children and managing the household. Catherine certainly loved her children, and they reciprocated her feelings. And she certainly loved Dickens her entire adult life. But by the early 1850s she had grown stout and a less amiable and compatible companion, and Dickens’ behavior toward her was at times harsh and wounding. By the early 1850s, Dickens was professing his unhappiness with his world broadly. Certainly, the financial burden of caring for his large family and their future, his detested mother-in-law and her needs, his mother and his siblings, as is well established, created pressures that drove him to maniac behaviors in pursuit of funds to support everyone or to escape those pressures.

Dickens’ malaise was spread wide. Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855–57), his so-called dark novels, are imbued strongly with his indignant sense of the removable evils in British society (but also his pessimism about any prospects of reform) and the potentialities of humanity. He was depressed about British politics and emotionally dissatisfied with his own life. Despite his success and popularity, something was missing. In his letters to his friend John Forster, he began to refer to his marital unhappiness. Indeed, he convinced himself he had to break with Catherine, which he did in 1858, after a remarkable episode earlier of instructing a servant by letter to board up the door between their two bedrooms. He did not want to live with the guilt of sex with his wife without love. Yet he had sexual longings and a wandering eye, which seems clear in accounts of his trips to Paris.

His feelings for Catherine were probably never as intense as had been his earlier yearning for a girl whom he had loved and lost, Maria Beadnell. Another intense experience of his earlier years was the death of Catherine’s young sister Mary, who was staying with them when, in May 1837 at the age of seventeen, she suddenly collapsed and died in Dickens’ arms. His grief-stricken feelings about her went into the presentation of Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist and Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.

In 1857, he met the greatest passion of his life, the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, known as Nelly. That he grew increasingly besotted with her, madly in love, is now clear. He pursued Nelly, following her to performances in England and arranged for meetings out of the public eye. Dickens certainly understood, as always, that he was a slave to his feelings or what he had called in a different context, the desperate intensity of my nature.¹⁸ He was certainly frustrated as well as elated by this new situation. Divorce was legally challenging as well as socially impossible, so there was no prospect of marrying Nelly, and he was too respectable and too much in the public eye to be able to live openly with her (as his friend Wilkie Collins did with his mistress, Caroline Graves)—even assuming that she desired any such thing. Young Nelly was a chaste, untouched girl. As Claire Tomalin puts it, If Dickens once touched her, he would become the villain who put her in the category of his own Little Em’ly¹⁹ who, seduced by a gentleman, would be doomed never to be a good wife or happy mother. This is not how he wanted things to be at all, Tomalin observes. What he wanted was to start life again as a romantic bachelor, in romantic purity.²⁰ As the reader may well recall, eventually Nelly did indeed become his mistress and was carefully, deviously maintained and protected outside of purview. That he loved her to the day he died is abundantly clear. In fact, Georgina reportedly welcomed her to Dickens’ deathbed, and she was present when he died but then faded from sight the next morning. She is also conspicuously named first in his final will, ahead of his never-divorced wife, Catherine.

The separation circumstances troubled Dickens greatly, though, and his mind was not quite right during his midlife crisis in 1858, leading him to a number of questionable and demeaning actions. (A second marriage would, of course, be viewed, internalized, and accepted differently today.) Consumed by his attraction to Nelly, pursued by close and extended family for financial and other support—members who often went against his advice and wishes—and agitated to move on and free his mind of Catherine, plus feeling betrayed by some long-time friends who were actively sympathetic to Catherine, he was often annoyed, short-tempered, and highly agitated. For the first time since he began writing fiction, he published no story or novel that year; indeed, he was not even able to work on one in 1858.

He was however, rewriting his own history with Catherine. He not only wanted to banish her from his presence, but abolish her from his imagination, Tomalin affirms. And thus driven he began to rewrite the history of their relations from the start, to claim that the marriage had always been unhappy, to insist on the acquiescence of this children and friends to the new version of history, and indeed to enroll his sister-in-law as his chief ally against her own sister.²¹ His marriage was not always unhappy, but his saying it was is probably one of those unkind, untrue, and self-exculpatory things that some people tend to say in such strained circumstances. To her credit, Catherine corrected his accounts of their relationship as Lillian Nayder demonstrated with documentary evidence.²²

Dickens was especially thin-skinned about any suggestion that his separation from Catherine had anything to do with the emergence of Nelly or associated in any way with his sister-in-law Georgina, who stuck by him and continued to manage his household and children. He did not want them tainted by any suggestions they had behaved improperly, or Nelly exposed, and he went to extremes to defend himself and her against any perceived slights. He divided up his acquaintances into those who supported him after the separation and those who did not, never again speaking to his friend Mark Lemon, for example, as Lemon took to helping Catherine through the terms of the separation. Into this context can be added the burden of his brothers, who not only appealed to him for financial help but, in 1858 and into the early 1860s, carried out blatant infidelities and eventually abandoned their wives. Dickens feared guilt by association and public recognition and scandal. His agitation grew as did any number of unwise, even bizarre acts during 1858 and 1859, all recounted in detail in recent biographies of Dickens. There was the Garrick Club Affair, for one instance, where he threw himself in the middle of a gentlemen’s satisfaction quarrel between upper-class William Thackeray, who demanded an apology, and Dickens’ young friend and writer Edmund Yates, who had insulted him in a piece in Household Words. Dickens’ attempt at written and personal intervention and mediation was aggressive and inflammatory. His reasoning was suspect, and this further alienated him from his sometimes rival, Thackeray. It was known Thackeray and his friends looked down upon Dickens as being vulgar in the sense of not being well-enough educated or a born gentleman as well as for his manners and the way he dressed. And always sensitive to public and private opinion of himself and believing Thackeray was one of the people talking about the cause for his separation (Thackeray remained a friend of Catherine), this all hit Dickens in a very sensitive spot and time and drove him to the point of madness.

His behavior was indeed mad when he defended himself in a letter that he released for publication against charges of leaving Catherine for Nelly. Just as his separation agreement was about to be finalized, it seems he learned about the threat by his mother-in-law to bring a legal action and potentially create a scandal, to which he lashed out. As Peter Ackroyd has written, Dickens reacted badly to stress and how, now, during the most anxious days of his life, he ceased to behave in a wholly rational manner.²³ My father was like a madman, his daughter later reported. Against obvious advice not to make any public statement—most forcefully by Forster—Dickens insisted on squelching rumors about his separation by appealing to his vast public. That included a statement in the Times and an announcement in his own paper, Household Words. The episode was delusional, and the attempted exculpatory letter he penned became public and is known as the violated letter, though Dickens invited the recipient to share it. A media storm arose and, as Rosemary Ashton points out, the folly of his appeal, for starters, made him look boastful when he wrote of the faith of his readers—the breathren over many years.

He contradicts himself by claiming at once that he is a public man and yet that his private life is no one else’s business, then compounds the contradiction by voluntarily referring to that private life, thus making it everyone’s business. By alluding to grossly false, monstrous, and cruel slanders while not saying directly what they are, and by talking mysteriously of innocent persons, some known to him and others perhaps imagined (who? and by whom?), he invites the interested but not initiated reader—in other words everyone outside the small circle of friends and family and London’s journalists and clubmen—to ask what the terrible slanders are and who the innocent persons could be. He insists most vehemently on his truthfulness just where he is being most untruthful, but no doubt he speaks truly when he says he cannot bear for even one of his readers or admirers to think badly of him.²⁴

He had surely lost his head. It was also at this time that he was working manically to launch and perform the first of his reading tours, designed specifically to bring in financial relief toward all his burdens. Another incident during this period and in this context has recently made news. In 2019, the Times Literary Supplement published—subsequently picked up in many newspapers and other media outlets around the world—John Bowen’s comments on a cache of letters that provided detailed and shocking new information on how Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylum.²⁵ While Bowen states this is Almost certainly true, this is not news. The details have been known and discussed by scholars;²⁶ it was one more of Dickens’ mad grasps that troubled summer of 1858. There is almost no chance he actually intended to have Catherine institutionalized. The possibility of an asylum was likely more designed as negotiating ammunition against the Hogarths’ legal threat and the resolution of the settlement agreement than a plan he was fixed upon.²⁷ He had ruthlessly introduced the notion of Catherine’s supposed madness in his violated letter, suggesting she suffered from a mental disorder. Perhaps she did at times, and some defenders have pointed to the possible side effects of menopause on her. Georgina, who reconciled with her after Dickens’ passing, continued to find her sister’s mental state a bit peculiar. But the asylum episode ended quickly and went nowhere. It gained some attention, however, because there were general discussions in England at the time of mental health institutions and abuses and because at this very period Dickens’ friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, unstable himself, had questioned his wife’s sanity publicly and unwisely had her committed to a lunatic asylum (from which she was later released). Stories of incarcerations in lunatic asylums were among the hot topics of the day,²⁸ Rosemary Ashton noted, and a Lunacy Commission was active. No doctor with integrity, however, would certify Catherine unfit for society because she was not. Perhaps Ackroyd’s comment on Dickens is apt here: The truth was always a very fluid concept for Dickens; he did not so much lie as believe in whatever he said at the time.²⁹ It was an ugly incident in a life that had much in it to respect.

It must be said that Dickens tried his hardest to live up to his responsibilities and mostly did. Upon separation, he gave Catherine a house, a carriage, and for the rest of her life a comfortable annual income. Although he never met with her again, he encouraged his children to visit her. Reading accounts of his estate planning and wills testifies to his concern for his family’s well-being to his dying day.³⁰ He was never the same, though, after the emotional dramas and strain of the separation moment and his bewitchment with Nelly. Characters in all the novels written after the Ellen Ternan affair began to display suffering, self-loathing, and guilty consciences. Previous Dickens characters had not done so. Consider Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Pip in Great Expectations (1860–61), Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), and John Jasper in Edward Drood (1870). It seems reasonable to relate the intensity of this new situation in the novels to his new bittersweet experience in life and his understanding of it.

Concurrently, the lead female characters in these same novels took on a more overt complexity with Dickens displaying a perceptive understanding of the women of his times, as noted earlier and expressed in many of the essays that follow. Lydia Craig argues that in Our Mutual Friend Dickens presents female agency and courage as qualities British society should wholeheartedly approve of and reward, rather than suppress or control to enforce delicate female helplessness or maintain class boundaries. Consider Madame Dafarge in A Tale of Two Cities, as Claire Woods does in her essay, or Estella and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, or Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend, as Tamsin Evernden does, and certainly Princess Puffer and Rosa in Edwin Drood, as several others do. Indeed, many of these women are self-fashioning, to borrow the phrase and concept from Stephen Greenblatt. They recognize that identity is manipulable and they possess the power to impose a shape upon oneself . . . to control identity—that of others at least as often as one’s own.³¹ Several contributors, Colette Ramuz for example, writing about Drood and other novels, illuminate the agency in these female characters. This sensitivity and understanding of women was always below the surface in Dickens’ earlier as well as later stories and novels. It was waiting for this generation of scholars and critics to reveal it—put there both consciously and inadvertently because of or in spite of Dickens.

Notes

1. Throughout this essay I introduce facts about Dickens’ life and his attitudes that are well known, discussed, and established. At such, I have not documented many, as they can be conceived of as a form of common knowledge. For verification and expansion on any of them, I suggest among many fine biographies, these three: Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2011); Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

2. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Memorial Edition, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Baker and Taylor, 1911), 2:445.

3. See Edmund Wilson’s discussion on Dickens in The Wound and Bow (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), which contains a version of his landmark essay The Two Scrooges that appeared on March 4, 1940, in The New Republic. Wilson begins his book on page one with the dramatic assertion: Of all the great English writers, Charles Dickens has received in his own country the scantiest serious attention from either biographers, scholars, or critics. He has become for the English middle class so much one of the articles of the creed—a familiar joke, a favorite dish, a Christmas ritual—that it is difficult for British pundits to see in him the great artist and social critic that he was. Dickens had no university education, and the literary men from Oxford and Cambridge, who have lately been sifting fastidiously so much of the English heritage, have rather snubbingly let him alone. The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky’s master, Dickens.

4. Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (1983; Brighton: EER Publishers, 2017), 301.

5. Slater, Dickens and Women, xvi.

6. For a discussion of Dickens as editor and collaborator with various women, albeit with a focus on the Christmas periodicals, see Melisa Klimaszewski’s Collaborative Dickens (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019).

7. Slater, Dickens and Women, xvi–xvii.

8. Nina Auerbach, "Review of Dickens and Women," Kenyon Review, n.s., 5, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 132.

9. Auerbach, "Review of Dickens and Women," 132.

10. Auerbach, "Review of Dickens and Women," 133.

11. Auerbach, "Review of Dickens and Women," 134.

12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letter 1809, EBB to Henry Chorley, in The Brownings’ Correspondence: An Online Edition (Winfield, Kans.: Wedgestone Press, 2018), https://www.browningscorrespondence.com/correspondence/2048/.

13. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), 76.

14. Talia Schaffer, Victorian Feminist Criticism: Recovery Work and the Care Community, Victorian Literature and Culture, 47, no. 1 (2018): 68–69.

15. Alison Booth, Feminism, Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter, 2018): 695.

16. Edmund Wilson, Dickens: The Two Scrooges, The New Republic 102 (March 4, 1940): 97, https://newrepublic.com/article/100447/the-two-scrooges. This phrase was not included in the version of the essay that appears in Wilson’s previously cited The Wound and the Bow.

17. See Michael Hancher’s Dickens’s First Effusion, Dickens Quarterly 31, no. 4 (December 2014): 285–97. Hancher discovered and reprinted Dickens’ earliest known story and relates C.D.’s misleading account of his first effusion.

18. Letter to Forster in December 1855, in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1:51.

19. Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan (1990; New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 107.

20. Tomalin, Invisible Woman, 107.

21. Tomalin, Invisible Woman, 108.

22. Lilian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 271–72.

23. Ackroyd, Dickens, 813.

24. Rosemary Ashton, One Hot Summer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 97.

25. John Bowen, Unmutual Friend, Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 2019. The information is contained in a collection of letters written by Mrs. Dickens’ next-door neighbor to a friend almost a decade after Dickens died, reporting that Mrs. Dickens showed him letters and told him how her husband had treated her poorly, including suggesting she be sent to an asylum. At the time of her confession, Mrs. Dickens was dying of cervical cancer and often was dosed with morphine to address her intense pain, so who knows the full accuracy of what she said. But no matter, it is a fact that very late in her life she and daughter Katey would sometimes share grievances about Dickens with each other, and the brief incident of the asylum option was not a secret. Professor Bowen’s account was sensationalized by the media so that people were hearing on the radio that Dickens tried to have his wife locked up. For a fuller, informative account, see Bowen’s Madness and the Dickens Marriage: A New Source, The Dickensian 115 (2019): 5–20.

26. See, for example, Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors in Victorian England (London: Bodley Head, 2012), and John Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), both mentioned by Bowen. The purported doctor involved, Dr. Thomas Harrington Tuke, who ran the Manor House Asylum in Cheswick, was known to Dickens and his circle, including Bulwer-Lytton (as was his father-in-law, Dr. John Conolly, of the same clinic). Dickens did not have good things to say about the doctor in subsequent years. Dickens could have spoken to any number of physicians who knew Catherine, again to scare her and her mother into resolving the separation and not more.

27. John Sutherland was the first to advance this reason in print in Victorian Fiction, 79; I share his view, and probably many others reached a similar conclusion independently as it seems obvious in the context of Dickens’ life in 1858.

28. Aston, One Hot Summer, 103.

29. Ackroyd, Dickens, 1002.

30. See Robert L. Patten’s authoritative accounting in Dickens Wills, Dickens Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2019): 60–94.

31. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Ashton, Rosemary. One Hot Summer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Auerbach, Nina. "Review of Dickens and Women." Kenyon Review, n.s., 5, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 131–34.

Booth, Alison. Feminism. Victorian Literature amd Culture 46, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2018): 691–97.

Bowen, John. Madness and the Dickens Marriage: A New Source. The Dickensian 115 (2019): 5–20.

———. Unmutual Friend. Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 2019.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Letter 1809. EBB to Henry Chorley. In The Brownings’ Correspondence: An Online Edition. Winfield, Kans.: Wedgestone Press, 2018.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens, Memorial Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1911; New York: Baker and Taylor, 1911.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Hancher, Michael. Dickens’s First Effusion. Dickens Quarterly 31, no. 4 (December 2014): 285–97.

Klimaszewski, Melisa. Collaborative Dickens. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019.

Nayder, Lillian. The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Patten, Robert L. Dickens Wills. Dickens Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2019): 60–94.

Schaffer, Talia. Victorian Feminist Criticism: Recovery Work and the Care Community. Victorian Literature and Culture 47, no. 1 (2018): 63–91.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

———. Dickens and Women. Brighton: EER Publishers, 2017. First published in 1983.

Sutherland, John. Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2011.

———. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan. New York: Viking, 1990; New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

Wilson, Edmund. Dickens: The Two Scrooges. The New Republic 120 (4 March 1940): 297–300.

———. The Wound and the Bow. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

Wise, Sarah. Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors in Victorian England. London: Bodley Head, 2012.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.

Making a Rosebud of her Mouth

Erotics, Semiotics, and Agency in the Dickensian Female Mouth

Colette Ramuz

When saucy Rosa Bud in The Mystery of Edwin Drood eats Turkish sweets, the Lumps-of-Delight, in front of her unloved fiancé, she does so with tantalizing eroticism. Having already refused to kiss him because she has something in her mouth—an acidulated drop—she performs an elaborate sort of striptease beneath his bemused gaze.

Rosa . . . begins to partake of it with great zest: previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.¹

Rolling back the pink gloves to reveal pink flesh, and occasionally licking her fingers while Edwin watches, she draws out her performance and constitutes an artful sensuality not usually associated with Dickensian young women.² Rosa’s teasing conveys a degree of sexual agency made legible through Dickens’ bodily poetics—the textual patterns, figurative imagery and visual codes—and through the oral erotics that permeate the scene.

That the mouth is inherently erotic is not revelatory; it has a long history as a visual and textual metaphor of incorporation, particularly sexual incorporation. In the nineteenth century, physiognomy theories, which classified and interpreted personality from the appearance of facial features, declared the mouth to be the preeminent organ of the body and the seat of all love.³ Physiognomically, as the seat of love, full red lips were regarded as a visual manifestation of primitive sexual appetite, while parted lips or an open mouth indicated sexual openness. In nineteenth-century culture, lips, tongue, and teeth constitute the meeting point between sensual corporeality and language, yet in critical discussions of Dickens’ work the mouth has often been overlooked in favor of the ocular.⁴ In re-observing Dickens’ women, I address the relationship between the mouth and female sexuality, showing how sexual agency is legible in the semiotics and erotics of the mouth, and draw out the ways in which the mouth is a crucial signifier, linguistically, metaphorically, sexually, and psychically.

Nineteenth-century culture promulgated the idea that females were innately sensual creatures and their impulse toward sensuality necessarily required discipline;⁵ a girl had to learn to control her appetites and therefore her body, with her mouth at the axis of the relationship.⁶ For young women, gluttony was figured as a sin and inextricably tied to promiscuity and generally poor behavior.⁷ In Dickens, where women’s appetites and ingestion are concerned, the alimental is usually subordinate to the sexual—few women eat in his work, but they do put things in their mouths. The act of a female putting something into this erotogenic opening is an image Dickens returns to repeatedly, from Madame Defarge and her toothpicks to Mrs. Bucket’s sheet. A volatile and unpredictable site, the Dickensian female mouth is often highly active and not only in speech. It flouted the ideal of a passive inanimate Victorian woman whose highest duty, according to Sarah Stickney Ellis, the Victorian protosociologist, was to suffer and be still.⁸ Many Dickensian female characters transgress this dogma through their agile, performative mouths and, in so doing, communicate sexuality and desire. From kissing, pouting, and biting, to Dora Copperfield’s making a rosebud of her lips, female characters have their own particular repertoire.

By rereading Dickens’ women with an appreciation for his oral sensibility, it is possible to see that he endows them with both a sexual persona and more substance than previously acknowledged. I begin with the oral erotics surrounding one of his favorite female tropes that appear in many of the novels, the rose and the rosebud.

Rosy Lips

The rosebud’s symbolic value—its romantic connotations of delicacy, fragrance, and beauty—lends itself to aesthetic descriptions of adolescent girls in nineteenth-century literature. Yet, when Dickens resorts to the conventional, clichéd signs of the delicate, fragrant rose to embody his young women, such as Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist and Lady Dedlock’s maid Rosa in Bleak House, they can seem tired and trite figures. There is, however, an inverted rosebud figure—like the cherry—that acts as a metonym for the blooming and ripening of female sexuality, heightened by its color of arousal and its suggestion of female sexual anatomy. As Natalie McKnight points out, in her compelling assessment of sexual allusion in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, When Robert Herrick exhorted readers to ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ he wasn’t just talking about picking flowers.⁹ It is here that Dickens succeeds, in the parody and poetics of the metaphor with more than a hint of erotic overtones. The rosy mouth plays a complex and often subversive role in Dickens’ idiosyncratic sexual economy. In David Copperfield, it is associated with mischievous eroticism, while its counterpart—a pale, hard, compressed mouth such as Miss Murdstone’s—is associated with frigidity and compliance.

Delicate Dora Copperfield has been described as a failed heroine, the fragile wax doll par excellence.¹⁰ But Dora is anything but waxy and, despite David’s frequent efforts, she proves impossible to mold into the ideal housewife or, indeed, any type of housewife. After yet another of David’s entreaties to persuade her to take up domestic duties, she simply uses her sexuality—a performance of oral erotics—to reestablish the foundations of their relationship very much on her terms:

But I haven’t got any strength at all, said Dora, shaking her curls. Have I, Jip? Oh, do kiss Jip,¹¹ and be agreeable! It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him up to me for that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little mouth into kissing form, as she directed the operation, which she insisted should be performed symmetrically, on the centre of his nose. I did as she bade me—rewarding myself afterwards for my obedience—and she charmed me out of my graver character for I don’t know how long.¹²

There is a striking irony in Dora claiming a lack of strength and then proceeding to control her husband with ease, using her bright, rosy little mouth. The words purpose, directed, insisted, and bade, together with her reward to David for his obedience, all point to her dominance in this triangulated relationship, which includes her dislikeable lapdog. Dickens inserts strangely deviant patterns of behavior into their intimacy, such as the instance when Dora draws on David’s face, first