Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley

England, even in the England of Dickens’s time, which was undergoing a vast social shift. Dickens’s friends—Maclise, Macready, Wilkie Collins, and Forster himself—were usually men who, like Dickens, had used talent and energy to make their own way. But as they rose in economic and social status, they encountered more conservative elements of society, men and women who gave them respect for their accomplishments, but a respect always circumscribed by reservations about dress, or education, or behavior, or modes of speaking. Dickens’s colorful manner of dressing, for example, was always judged as a bit déclassé. The sheer weight of his talent and charm gained him passage pretty much wherever he wanted to go in English society, but it did not gain him the invisibility of perfect acceptance. One index of this was the difficulty his daughters had, later on, in making good marriages. For all these reasons, Dickens’s secretiveness and shame at his origins was a realistic response to the closed, judgmental nature of English social life.
    But Dickens’s shame was not merely social embarrassment, and in the months after the completion of Dombey and Son he seems to have understood intuitively that his growth as an artist depended upon the excavation of his boyhood and the revelation of some of those experiences. The success of Dombey permitted this in several ways. One was that the novel was a rousing success, both critically and financially,and the terms of Dickens’s contract with Bradbury and Evans meant that he profited handsomely. He became financially secure and remained so thereafter (though he was at times beset by worries, especially late in life). Another was that he had approached one of the critical episodes of his childhood through the depiction of Mrs. Pipchin, and he had enjoyed writing about it. From the evidence of Dombey, he had, as it were, reduced her to her proper size—his adult mind had come to comprehend her and his power over his childish self, and he had experienced one of the special privileges of writing novels—putting powerful early experiences into a context. That Dickens felt a kinship with his former friend Madame de la Rue seems undeniable. That he helped her find a process for contextualizing and releasing herself from ideas and fears that oppressed her seems equally undeniable. Now he was ready to do something similar for himself, and he set about it with his usual energy. No doubt an additional motivation was the death from tuberculosis of his sister Fanny, only thirty-eight years old.
    Dickens had finished writing Dombey at the end of March 1848. The final number appeared in April, when the novel was also published in volume form. In April, Dickens and several friends also put on eight performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor as well as another farce, for the charitable benefit of the purchase of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford. Catherine was pregnant again, with the Dickenses’ eighth child, sixth son. (Sydney, son number five, was two.) As Frederick W. Dupee notes, “To his more and more open dismay, she continued to bear him children at brief intervals. . . .” The modern reader must wonder how heexpected her to stop bearing these children, but nineteenth-century sources don’t engage substantively with the harder dilemmas of reproductive rights and choices. Ackroyd notes only that while Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins was reputed to have recourse to the seamier side of London life, and while Dickens showed no judgment of, and some interest in, Collins’s activities, there is no evidence that Dickens himself conducted his sexual life with anything but the greatest propriety. He was a firm believer in the Victorian domestic ideal of male-female familial companionship, except that the companion he had chosen was proving less and less satisfactory.
    During this time, it is not clear exactly when,