I am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from it nor set to rest. . . . He daunts me! I have not the key.There is no simple key to so prolific and multifarious an artist nor to the complexities of the man, and interpretation of both is made harder by his possessing and feeling the need to exercise so many talents besides his imagination. How his fiction is related to these talents--practical, journalistic, oratorical, histrionic--remains controversial. Also the geniality and unequalled comedy of the novels must be related to the sufferings, errors, and self-pity of their author and to his concern both for social evils and for the perennial griefs and limitations of humanity. The novels cover a wide range, social, moral, emotional, and psychological. Thus, he is much concerned with very ordinary people but also with abnormality (e.g., eccentricity, depravity, madness, hallucinations, dream states). He is both the most imaginative and fantastic and the most topical and documentary of great novelists. He is unequal, too; a wonderfully inventive and poetic writer, he can also, even in his mature novels, write with a painfully slack conventionality.
Biographers have only since the mid-20th century known enough
to explore the complexity of Dickens' nature. Critics have always
been challenged by his art, though from the start it contained enough easily
acceptable ingredients, evident skill and gusto, to ensure popularity.
The earlier novels were and by and large have continued to be Dickens'
most popular works: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin
Chuzzlewit, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. Critics
began to demur against the later novels, deploring the loss of the freer
comic spirit, baffled by the more symbolic mode of his art, and uneasy
when the simpler reformism over isolated issues became a more radical questioning
of social assumptions and institutions. Dickens was never neglected
or forgotten and never lost his popularity, but for 70 years after his
death he received remarkably little serious attention (George Gissing,
G.K. Chesterton, and George Bernard Shaw being notable exceptions). F.R.
Leavis, later to revise his opinion, was speaking for many, in 1948, when
he asserted that "the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a
challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness"; Dickens was
indeed a great genius, "but the genius was that of a great entertainer."
Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me, now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?This comes from the correspondence with Forster in 1854-55, which contains the first admissions of his marital unhappiness; by 1856 he is writing, "I find the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one"; by 1857-58, as Forster remarks, an "unsettled feeling" had become almost habitual with him, "and the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find in his home." From May 1858, Catherine Dickens lived apart from him. A painful scandal arose, and Dickens did not act at this time with tact, patience, or consideration. The affair disrupted some of his friendships and narrowed his social circle, but surprisingly it seems not to have damaged his popularity with the public.
Catherine Dickens maintained a dignified silence, and most of Dickens' family and friends, including his official biographer, Forster, were discreetly reticent about the separation. Not until 1939 did one of his children (Katey), speaking posthumously through conversations recorded by a friend, offer a candid inside account. It was discreditable to him, and his self-justifying letters must be viewed with caution. He there dated the unhappiness of his marriage back to 1838, attributed to his wife various "peculiarities" of temperament (including her sometimes labouring under "a mental disorder"), emphatically agreed with her (alleged) statement that "she felt herself unfit for the life she had to lead as my wife," and maintained that she never cared for the children nor they for her. In more temperate letters, where he acknowledged her "amiable and complying" qualities, he simply and more acceptably asserted that their temperaments were utterly incompatible. She was, apparently, pleasant but rather limited; such faults as she had were rather negative than positive, though family tradition from a household that knew the Dickenses well speaks of her as "a whiney woman" and as having little understanding of, or patience with, the artistic temperament.
Dickens' self-justifying letters lack candour in omitting
to mention Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior, his passion for
whom had precipitated the separation. Two months earlier he had written
more frankly to an intimate friend:
The domestic unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can't write, and (waking) can't rest, one minute. I have never known a moment's peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep.The Frozen Deep was a play in which he and Nelly (as Ellen was called) had performed together in August 1857. She was an intelligent girl, of an old theatrical family; reports speak of her as having "a pretty face and well-developed figure"--or "passably pretty and not much of an actress." She left the stage in 1860; after Dickens' death she married a clergyman and helped him run a school. The affair was hushed up until the 1930s, and evidence about it remains scanty, but every addition confirms that Dickens was deeply attached to her and that their relationship lasted until his death. It seems likely that she became his mistress, though probably not until the 1860s; assertions that a child, or children, resulted remain unproved. Similarly, suggestions that the anguish experienced by some of the lovers in the later novels may reflect Dickens' own feelings remain speculative. It is tempting, indeed, to associate Nelly with some of their heroines (who are more spirited and complex, less of the "legless angel," than most of their predecessors), especially as her given names, Ellen Lawless, seem to be echoed by those of heroines in the three final novels--Estella, Bella, and Helena Landless--but nothing definite is known about how she responded to Dickens, what she felt for him at the time, or how close any of these later love stories were to aspects or phases of their relationship.
"There is nothing very remarkable in the story," commented one
early transmitter of it, and this seems just. Many middle-aged men feel
an itch to renew their emotional lives with a pretty young girl, even if,
unlike Dickens, they cannot plead indulgence for "the wayward and
unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one
holds an imaginative life." But the eventual disclosure of this episode
caused surprise, shock, or piquant satisfaction, being related of a man
whose rebelliousness against his society had seemed to take only impeccably
reformist shapes. A critic in 1851, listing the reasons for his unique
popularity, had cited "above all, his deep reverence for the household
sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods." After these
disclosures he was, disconcertingly or intriguingly, a more complex man;
and, partly as a consequence, Dickens the novelist also began to
be seen as more complex, less conventional, than had been realized. The
stimulus was important, though Nelly's significance, biographically and
critically, has proved far from inexhaustible.