Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (40 page)

But didn't he exaggerate everything? his critics ask.

“When people say that Dickens exaggerates,” George Santayana writes, “it seems to me that they have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only
notions
of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value.” And to those who contend that no one was ever so sentimental, or that there was no one ever
like
Wemmick or Jaggers or Bentley Drummle, Santayana says: “The polite world is lying; there
are
such people; we are such people ourselves in our true moments.” San-tayana also defends Dickens's stylistic excesses: “This faculty, which renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated him from a later generation in which people of taste were aesthetes and virtuous people were higher snobs; they wanted a mincing art, and he gave them copious improvisation, they wanted analysis and development, and he gave them absolute comedy.”

No wonder that — both because of and in spite of his popularity — Dickens was frequently misunderstood, and often mocked. In his first visit to America he was relentless in his attack on America's practice of ignoring international copyright; he also detested slavery, and said so, and he found loathsome and crude the American habit of
spitting
— according to Dickens, practically everywhere! For his criticism he was rewarded by our critics, who called him a “flash reporter” and “that famous penny-a-liner”; his mind was described as “coarse, vulgar, impudent, and superficial”; he was called “narrow-minded” and “conceited,” and among all visitors, ever, to “this original and remarkable country,” he was regarded as “the most flimsy — the most childish — the most trashy — the most contemptible.

So, of course, Dickens had enemies; they could not touch his splendid instincts, or match his robust life. Before beginning
Great Expectations
, he said, “I must make the most I can out of the book — I think a good name?” Good, indeed, and a title many writers wish were free for them to use, a title many wonderful novels could have had:
The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Sun Also Rises, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick
— all great expectations, of course.

2. A Prisoner of Marriage; the “One Happiness I Have Missed in Life …”

But what about the plot? his critics ask. Aren't his plots unlikely?

Oh, boy; are they ever “unlikely”! I wonder how many people who call a plot “unlikely” ever realize that they do not like any plot at all. The nature of plot
is
unlikely. And if you've been reading a great many contemporary novels, you're probably unused to encountering much in the way of plot there; should you encounter one now, you'd be sure to find it unlikely. Yet when the British sailed off to their little war with Argentina in 1982, they used the luxury liner, the
Queen Elizabeth II
, as a troop transport. And what became the highest military priority of the Argentinean forces, who were quite overpowered in this war? To sink that luxury liner, the
Queen Elizabeth II
, of course — to salvage, at the very least, what people call a “moral victory.” Imagine that! But we accept far more unlikely events in the news than we accept in fiction. Fiction is, and has to be, better made than the news; plots, even the most unlikely ones, are better made than real life, too.

Let us look at Charles Dickens's marriage for a moment; the story of his marriage, were we to encounter it in any novel, would seem highly unlikely to us. When Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, Catherine's younger sister Mary, who was only 16, moved in with them; Mary adored her sister's husband, and she was an ever-cheerful presence in their house — perhaps seeming all the more good-natured and even-tempered alongside Catherine's periods of sullen withdrawal. How much easier it is to be a visitor than to be a spouse; and to make matters worse, Mary died at 17, thus perfectly enshrining herself in Dickens's memory — and becoming, in the later years of his marriage to Kate (Catherine was called Kate), an even more impossible idol, against whom poor Kate could never compete. Mary was a vision of perfection as girlish innocence, of course, and she would appear and reappear in Dickens's novels — she is Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shop
, she is Agnes in
David Copperfield
, she is Little Dorrit. Surely her goodness finds its way into Biddy in
Great Expectations
, too, although Biddy's capabilities for criticizing Pip come from stronger stuff than anything Dickens would have had the occasion to encounter in Mary Hogarth.

In his first visit to America, while Dickens made few references to the strains that Kate felt while traveling (her anxieties for the children back in England, especially), he did observe the profound lack of interest in America that was expressed by Kate's maid. Kate herself, he documented — in the course of getting on and off boats and coaches and trains — had fallen 743 times. Although this was surely an exaggeration, Mrs. Dickens did compile an impressive record of clumsiness; Johnson suggests that she suffered from a nervous disorder, for her lack of physical control was remarkable. Dickens once cast her in one of his amateur theatrical company's performances — it was a small part in which Kate spoke a total of only 30 lines; yet she managed to fall through a trapdoor on stage and so severely sprained her ankle that she had to be replaced. It seems an extreme step to take to gain Dickens's attention; but Kate surely suffered their marriage in her own way as acutely as her husband did in his.

When Dickens's 23-year-old marriage to Kate was foundering, who would be living with them but another of Kate's younger sisters? Dickens found Georgina “the most admirable and affectionate of girls”; and such was her loyalty to him that after Dickens and Kate separated, Georgina remained with Dickens. She might have been in love with him, and quite more to him than a help with the children (Kate bore Dickens 10 children), but there is nothing to suggest that their relationship was sexual — although, at the time, they were subject to gossip about that.

At the time of his separation from Kate, Dickens was probably in love with an 18-year-old actress in his amateur theatrical company — her name was Ellen Ternan. When Kate discovered a bracelet that Dickens had intended as a present for Ellen (he was in the habit of giving little gifts to his favorite performers), Kate accused him of having already consummated a relationship with Ellen — a relationship that, in all likelihood, was not consummated until some years after Dickens and Kate had separated. (Dickens's relationship with Ellen Ternan must have been nearly as guilt ridden and unhappy as his marriage.) At the time of the separation, Kate's mother spread the rumor that Dickens had already taken Ellen Ternan as his mistress. Dickens published a statement under the headline “
PERSONAL
” on the front page of his own, very popular magazine
(Household Words)
that such “misrepresentations” of his character were “most grossly false.” Dickens's self-righteousness in his own defense invited controversy; every detail of his marriage and separation was published in
The New York Tribune
and in all the English newspapers. Imagine that!

It was 1858. Within three years, Dickens would change the name of
Household Words
to
All the Year Round
and continue his exhausting habit of serializing his novels for his magazine; he would begin the great numbers of fervent public readings that would undermine his health (he would give more than 400 readings before his death in 1870); and he would complete both
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Great Expectations.
“I am incapable of rest,” he told his best and oldest friend, John Forster. “I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing.”

As for love: he would lament that a true love was the “one happiness I have missed in life, and the one friend and companion I never made.” More than a little of that melancholic conviction would haunt Pip's quest of Estella's love (and profoundly influence Dickens's first version of the ending of
Great Expectations).
And the slowness and the coldness with which the teenaged Ellen Ternan responded to the famous author in his late forties would cause Dickens to know more than a little of what Pip's longing for Estella was.

His marriage to Kate had, in his view, been a prison; but in taking leave of it, he had encountered a most public scandal and humiliation, and a reluctant mistress — the relationship with Ellen Ternan would never be joyously celebrated. The lovelessness of his marriage would linger with him — just as the dust of the debtors' prison would pursue Mr. Dorrit, just as the cold mists of the marshes would follow young Pip to London, just as the “taint” of Newgate would hang over Pip when he so hopefully meets Estella's coach.

Pip is another of Dickens's orphans, but he is never so pure as Oliver Twist and never so nice as

David Copperfield. He is not only a young man with unrealistic expectations; he is a young brat who adopts the superior manners of a gentleman (an unearned position) while detesting his lowly origins and feeling ashamed in the company of men of a higher social class than his. Pip is a snob. “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,” he admits; yet as he sets out to London to enjoy his unknown benefactor's provisions, Pip heaps “a gallon of condescension upon everybody in the village.”

It must have been a time of self-doubt for Dickens — at least, he suffered some reevaluation of his self-esteem. He had kept his workdays in the blacking warehouse a secret from his own children. Although his origins were not so lowly as young Pip's, Dickens must have thought them low enough. He would never forget how deeply his spirits sank when he was pasting labels on the bottles at Hungerford Stairs.

And was he feeling guilty, too, and considering some of his own ventures to have only the airs of a gentleman (without real substance) about them? Surely the patrician goals to which young Pip aspires are held in some contempt in
Great Expectations:
the mysterious and elaborate provisions that enable Pip to “live smooth,” to “be above work.” At the end — as often at the end with Dickens — there is a softening of the heart; the work ethic, that bastion of the middle class, is graciously given some respect. “We were not in a grand way of business,” Pip says of his job, “but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well.” This is an example of what Chesterton means: that “Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.” This is an important distinction, especially when regarding Dickens's popularity; the man did not write
for
an audience so much as he expressed an audience's hunger — he made astonishingly vivid what an audience feared, what it dreamed of, what it wanted.

In our time, it is often necessary to defend a writer's popularity; from time to time, in literary fashion, it is considered bad taste to be popular — if a writer is popular, how can he be any good? And it is frequently the role of lesser wits to demean the accomplishments of writers with more sizable audiences, and reputations, than their own. Oscar Wilde, for example, was a teenager when Dickens died; regarding Dickens's sentimentality, Wilde remarked that “it would take a heart of steel not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” It was also Wilde who said that Flaubert's conversation was on a level with the conversation of a pork butcher; but Flaubert was not in the conversation business — which, in time, may prove to be Wilde's most lasting contribution to our literature. Compared to Dickens or Flaubert, Wilde's
writing
is on a level with pork butchery. Chesterton, who was born four years after Dickens's death and who occupied a literary period wherein popularity (for a writer) was suspect, dismissed the
charges
against Dickens's popularity very bluntly. History would have to pay attention to Dickens, Chesterton said — because, quite simply, “the man led a mob.”

Dickens was abundant and magnificent with description, with the atmosphere surrounding everything — and with the tactile, with every detail that was terrifying or viscerally
felt.
Those were among his strengths as a writer; and if there were weaknesses, too, they are more easily spotted in his endings than in his beginnings or middles. In the end, like a good Christian, he wants to forgive. Enemies shake hands (or even marry!); every orphan finds a family. Miss Havisham, who is a truly terrible woman, cries out to Pip, whom she has manipulated and deceived, “Who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?” Yet when she begs his forgiveness, he forgives her. Magwitch, regardless of how he “lived rough,” is permitted to die with a smile on his lips, secure in the knowledge that his lost daughter is alive. Talk about
unlikely!
Pip's horrible sister finally dies, thus allowing the dear Joe to marry a truly good woman. And, in the revised ending, Pip's unrequited love is rectified; he sees “no shadow of another parting” from Estella. This is mechanical matchmaking; it is not realistic; it is overly tidy — as if the neatness of the
form
of the novel requires that all the characters be brought together. This may seem, to our cynical expectations, unduly hopeful.

The hopefulness that makes everyone love
A Christmas Carol
draws fire when Dickens employs it in
Great Expectations;
when Christmas is over, Dickens's hopefulness strikes many as mere wishful thinking. Dickens's original ending to
Great Expectations
, that Pip and his impossible love, Estella, should stay apart, is thought by most modern critics to be the proper (and certainly the modern) conclusion— from which Dickens eventually shied away; for such a change of heart and mind he is accused of selling out. After an early manhood of shallow goals, Pip is meant finally to see the falseness of his values — and of Estella — and he emerges a sadder though a wiser fellow. Many readers have expressed the belief that Dickens stretches credulity too far when he leads us to suppose, in his revised ending, that Estella and Pip could be happy ever after; or that anyone can. Of his new ending — where Pip and Es-tella are reconciled — Dickens himself remarked to a friend: “I have put in a very pretty piece of writing, and I have no doubt that the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.” That Estella would make Pip — or anyone — a rotten wife is not the point. “Don't be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” she slyly tells Pip, who is bemoaning her choice of a first husband. The point is, Estella and Pip are linked; fatalistically, they belong to each other — happily or unhappily.