This article was originally published in the print edition of the New Yorker August 29, 2011 edition. Written by Jill Lepore.
In the summer of 1841, Charles Dickens found himself with not quite enough to do. “I am in an exquisitely lazy state, bathing, walking, reading, lying in the sun, doing everything but working,” he told his friend John Forster. Dickens was twenty-nine and wrote, as a rule, on a rampage. When he was sixteen, he started working as a court reporter. At twenty, he was hired by a newspaper; two years later, he became a political correspondent for the Morning Chronicle and began writing sketches of London life under the name Boz. The first number of “The Pickwick Papers” appeared in March of 1836, three days before Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a Chronicle editor. By November of that year, he was making enough from writing stories to leave the paper. He liked to write from nine to two every day, “walking about my room on particular bits of all the flowers in the carpet.” For most of his career, Dickens was also the editor of a weekly magazine. Nearly all his novels were published in either weekly or monthly installments. For thirteen months in 1838 and 1839, he wrote “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby” at the same time, abandoning Fagin in Newgate to pursue Mr. Squeers, only to leave Bill Sikes hanging while failing to rescue sorry little Smike.
Everyone in Dickens is either a jailer or a prisoner, and some, like Dickens himself, are both: the author, his own turnkey. Whenever an extra in a Dickens novel needs to make an escape, he exits stage left, to an unseen America; characters with better billing merely gesture westward, like so many weathercocks. Mr. Monks flees “to a distant part of the New World,” where he meets his end in an American penitentiary. Amy Dorrit wishes her worthless brother, Tip, would decamp for Canada. Herbert Pocket fancies “buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.” Sam Weller’s father proposes sneaking Mr. Pickwick out of Fleet prison by concealing him in a piece of furniture (“A pianner, Samivel, a pianner!”), and sending him across the ocean, where all his troubles will be over, because he could “come back and write a book about the ‘Merrikins as ’ll pay his expenses.” It needed only the piano.Readers were so keen to see Mr. Pickwick set sail that Edward Lloyd published a knockoff called “Pickwick in America.” Here Mr. Pickwick meets his first Virginian:
“America is a fine place, sir, is it not?” inquired Mr. Pickwick, looking with a searching glance into the countenance of the gentleman of the gigantic brimmer. . . .“A fine place!—I calculate you’re right there to an iota”; replied the singular little gentleman; “every swamp in America is a perfect pride of paradise.”
Dickens sued Lloyd for plagiarism.By September of 1841, Dickens was close to finishing “Barnaby Rudge,” a novel of revolution that, like “A Tale of Two Cities,” begins in 1775. At its climax, Joe Willet, who has just returned from fighting in the American Revolution, breaks into a prison to rescue the woman he loves, who happens to be the daughter of a locksmith. Dickens had written six books in as many years. He had never been out of England for more than a week or two, and only as far as France. He and his wife had four children. You can hear the keys jangling, as if in Miss Murdstone’s very jail of a purse. “Haunted by visions of America night and day,” Dickens wished to avail himself of Mr. Weller’s stratagem. He wrote to his publisher, “It would be a good thing, wouldn’t it, if I ran over to America about the end of February, and came back, after four or five months, with a One Volume book?”The trouble was his wife, who didn’t want to go without the children; the oldest was four, the youngest only six months. “Kate cries dismally if I mention the subject,” Dickens wrote to Forster. “But, God willing, I think it must be managed somehow!” Dickens sometimes signed letters from Mr. and Mrs. Dickens “Bully and Meek.” Forster had no doubt it would be managed.On January 4, 1842, Dickens and his wife boarded the steamer Britannia. The bed in his cabin was so thin that, he informed the artist Daniel Maclise, he thought he could put it in an envelope and mail it with one extra stamp. Maclise had made a drawing of the Dickenses’ children. Catherine took it out and put it on the table.The couple set sail. They were so seasick that Dickens was possessed of “a kind of lazy joy—of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title—in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me.” When Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley sail to the States on a packet ship called the Screw, Tapley takes care of a poor woman and her three weakened children while Chuzzlewit lies abed, moaning:
“Why, you don’t suppose there is a living creature in this ship who can by possibility have half so much to undergo on board of her as I have? Do you?” he asked, sitting upright in his berth and looking at Mark, with an expression of great earnestness not unmixed with wonder.Mark twisted his face into a tight knot, and with his head very much on one side pondered upon this question.
Dickens always wrote this way, cleaving a man from his conscience by splitting one character into two and then locking them together in a prison, or a contract, or a marriage. His novels are cunningly arranged to appear all a-clutter, like a Victorian parlor, ottomans and mahogany card tables higgledy-piggledy with chintz-covered armchairs and marble columns topped with busts of Roman statesmen, a curiosity shop of characters, but somewhere, caped by heavy velvet drapes, there always hangs a pair of pendant portraits. Twain had his Huck and his Jim. Dickens had his Chuzzlewits and his Tapleys, his Pips and his Magwitches, locked in a cell, bound by a knot, fastened by a screw.
Dickens liked to figure himself as imprisoned by his readers; writers more commonly think of themselves as hostage to critics. Readers have loved Dickens so long and so well that there are people who have been going to Dickens camp, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, every summer for decades. What lies between a devotion so passionate and lasting and the changing but often harsh judgment of critics is not only Dickens’s work but also Dickens’s history, the history of reading, and even the history of criticism itself.Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines—they were new, too—started printing essays about them. In the nineteenth century, an age of factories and suffrage, literacy rates increased, the price of books fell, and magazines were cheaper still. A democracy of readers rose up against an aristocracy of critics.Edward Bulwer Lytton, a friend of Dickens, the contemporary novelist he most admired, a Member of Parliament, and one of the few nineteenth-century novelists to rival Dickens in sales, worried that, as the literary marketplace was opening up, “all powerful opinion, that of the majority, will rule.” Edgar Allan Poe thought that readers were wrong about Bulwer but right about Dickens. In 1841, Poe compared “The Old Curiosity Shop” with Bulwer’s “Night and Morning.” Bulwer, he wrote, “has arrived at the capability of producing books which might be mistaken by ninety-nine readers out of a hundred for the genuine inspirations of genius,” while Dickens, “by the promptings of the truest genius itself, has been brought to compose, and evidently without effort, works which have effected a long-sought consummation—which have rendered him the idol of the people, while defying and enchanting the critics.”But Dickens didn’t unify the House of Critics and the House of Readers. For a very long time, critics—Poe being one of the few exceptions—dismissed him as a caricaturist: facetious, melodramatic, antic, clumsy, and, on political questions, dangerously out of his depth. There never lived a man as hideous as Quilp. Mr. Gradgrind was not to be credited; Nell was not to be borne. Mirth could not answer tyranny. “Bleak House” was belabored. The novels before “Copperfield” were meringue and treacle; those which followed were burned pot roast. Mr. Dickens did not satisfy.Anthony Trollope found Dickens’s writing wanting, and his popularity vexing. “The primary object of a novelist is to please; and this man’s novels have been found more pleasant than those of any other writer,” he admitted. “From all which, there arises to the critic a question whether, with such evidence against him as to the excellence of this writer, he should not subordinate his own opinion to the collected opinion of the world of readers.” Who decides?
“I installed Skype, so it’ll be just like you never went away to college.”
In 1939, Edmund Wilson turned the critical tide, arguing that Dickens was not only “the greatest dramatic writer that the English language had had since Shakespeare” but also an astute social critic—he had a singular vantage on the Pecksniffian moral dishonesty of Victorianism—even if he was fundamentally “not interested in politics.” Months later, George Orwell described Dickens as chiefly interested in politics; it was just that his politics weren’t half as radical as some people wanted them to be. Lionel Trilling threw up his hands: “With a body of work as large and enduring as that of Dickens, taste and opinion will never be done.” A classy dodge.Agood place to puzzle over all this, I thought, must be Dickens camp: a week of discussing Dickens, sleeping in dormitories, and eating in a cafeteria, bringing together literary scholars, teachers, and students with readers who love Dickens so much I thought they must be like the people in the final chapter of “Fahrenheit 451,” hiding out in the hinterland, mumbling lines they had committed to memory. I pictured meeting an old man Copperfield wandering beneath the redwoods, muttering, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”Every year, the campers read a different book. This year, it was “Great Expectations,” which also happens to have been a recent selection of Oprah’s Book Club, membership nearly two million. The number of people who turn up at Dickens camp in any given summer depends on how much people like the book. “The Christmas books were, for instance, a hard sell,” Catherine Robson, a literary scholar from N.Y.U., told me. Throngs were anticipated for “Great Expectations.” Robson volunteered to let me room with her. When I wrote her that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it, being reluctant to leave a houseful of pips, she wrote back, “What could be more Dickensian than abandoning your children?” She had me there. I headed for the airport, wishing that I had the brass to use, for an e-mail out-of-office auto-reply, Boz’s boilerplate:
Dear SirI beg to acknowledge the receipt of your obliging letter, and to assure you that my time and attention are far too much occupied, to admit of my having the pleasure you propose to me.Faithfully YoursCHARLES DICKENS
Instead, I made do with the usual feeble promise: Back soon.On January 22, 1842, the Britannia reached Boston, a port that, in Dickens’s honor, Americans took to calling Boz-town. Ribbons fluttered from lampposts. Hackneys lined up at the dock, fighting for the chance to drive Dickens to his hotel. Bundled in a brown peacoat, his feet stuffed into cork-soled boots, Dickens looked a fright; Catherine wanted him to change his clothes before getting off the ship. “Never mind that, dear,” he said. “We are on the other side now.”Dickens considered himself an honorary American, and Americans thought of him that way, too. The twenty-two-year-old Walt Whitman hailed him as a “democratic writer.” The United States Magazine lauded his “democratic genius.” Dickens had received letters “from the dwellers in log-houses among the morasses, and swamps, and densest forests, and deepest solitudes of the Far West.” He wanted to meet the readers who wrote those letters. He once described to his wife what it felt like to watch the actor William Macready listen to one of his stories: “If you had seen Macready last night, undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read, you would have felt, as I did, what a thing it is to have power.” He wanted to watch his American readers swoon.He bounded like a madman through Boston’s snow-covered streets. When he reached the Tremont Hotel, he yelled, “Here we are!” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Sumner took him for a ten-mile walk. Longfellow thought Dickens had “a slight dash of the Dick Swiveller about him.” James Fields, later the editor of The Atlantic, called him the “Emperor of Cheerfulness.”
“The American poor, the American factories, the institutions of all kinds—I have a book, already,” Dickens wrote to Forster, a week after he arrived. But by the time he reached New York everything had begun to go wrong. His books sold wildly in the United States, but his income from their sale amounted to no more than fifty pounds. In the absence of enforceable international copyright law, no American printer need pay any English author royalties. And when Dickens argued on behalf of copyright reform (“I,—the greatest loser by the existing Law, alive”) New York newspapers damned him as mercenary, a poet of poverty who loved nothing better than money.He travelled southward, his spirits sinking. In a prison in Philadelphia, he saw a man who had been held in solitary confinement for six years and who sat in his cell wearing “a paper hat of his own making.” It was the shadow of Dickens’s own terror. To have no communion with humanity—no readers for his writing, no audience for the performance—is what Dickens dreaded most.“This is not the Republic I came to see,” he wrote to Macready from Baltimore. “This is not the Republic of my imagination.” In Washington, he watched a congressional budget debate and reported to Macready that American politics were grotesque:
Look at the exhausted Treasury; the paralyzed government; the unworthy representatives of a free people; the desperate contests between the North and the South; the iron curb and brazen muzzle fastened upon every man who speaks his mind, even in that Republican Hall, to which Republican men are sent by a Republican people to speak Republican Truths—the stabbings, and shootings, and coarse and brutal threatenings exchanged between Senators under the very Senate’s roof—the intrusion of the most pitiful, mean, malicious, creeping, crawling, sneaking party spirit into all transactions of life.
Dickens made it as far south as Richmond and then turned west. The American people were not only savage, he wrote to Forster; they were also humorless: “I am quite serious when I say that I have not heard a hearty laugh these six weeks, except my own.”America is where Dickens’s love affair with his readers fell apart. Ask a reader to pay an author and, according to Dickens, you get but one answer: “Dollars, banks, and cotton are our books, sir.” The emperor of cheerfulness turned sarcastic. “The Americans like him! They are glad to see him when he comes here!” he wrote from Niagara Falls. “The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have?”He could hardly have been more eager to leave. “We sail from New York, per George Washington Packet Ship (none of your steamers) on Tuesday the Seventh of June. Hoo-ray—ay—ay—ay—ay—ay—ay—ay!!!!!” He brought on board a spaniel named Timber Doodle; a wife, homesick; and his expectations for America, dashed. The republic he had admired was a sham: its politics violent, its people tasteless, his readers cheap. “I am a Lover of Freedom disappointed,” he lamented.As soon as he got home, he wrote “American Notes for General Circulation,” an account of his travels only slightly less candid than his letters to Forster, with scabrous reflections on the avarice and coarseness of the American people. Even the title is a swipe at Americans’ preference for money over books. It is generally considered the worst thing he ever wrote, and it is also the reason, both fairly and unfairly, that so many critics regard him as politically naïve. Dickens “is a man of very ‘liberal’ opinions in politics,” one reviewer remarked, but “we greatly doubt whether he has read or thought sufficiently long and deeply on such matters, to enable him to offer confident opinions.” Poe called it “one of the most suicidal productions ever deliberately published by an author, who had the least reputation to lose.” America had nearly ended him.The University of California, Santa Cruz, sits at the edge of an America that Dickens never saw, in a forest of redwood and eucalyptus just below the mountains and just above the ocean, foggy in the morning and dark as tar at night. It smells of lavender, and of the sea.At twilight, Catherine Robson and Teresa Mangum, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, led me to the week’s first lecture, along a path of pine needles bordered by thyme and lamb’s ear and past a vegetable garden where spent sunflowers drooped over a patch of summer squash. Nearby, deer grazing in a field eyed us with gentle indignation.A Dickensian waved as he passed us.“Wemmick,” Robson whispered. “The postbox mouth.”“More Tom Pinch,” Mangum murmured.It is a quirk, at Dickens camp, to liken everyone you meet to a character in a Dickens novel. The week’s opening lecture was delivered by Andrew Miller, from Indiana University, an earnest man, all in black and white, and with a discerning stare. Nickleby? I looked out the lecture hall’s windows, at the redwoods, and the darkening sky. In an hour-long talk, rife with allusions to Leibniz, Hume, Kierkegaard, Wilde, Woolf, and Hardy, Miller offered a reading of “Great Expectations” in which he argued that the novel is defined by “the optative mode of self-understanding,” an experience of modern life, in which everything is what it is but could have been something else.
“I’ve got a feeling this thing may be even more dangerous than the cat!”
I walked back alone in the dark, wondering how Dickens ever survived the bashing he got after “American Notes” to be the subject of such elaborate academic scrutiny and popular adulation that two hundred and sixty people had given up a precious week of summer vacation just to talk about him.Right after finishing “American Notes,” Dickens wrote “Martin Chuzzlewit.” (“I have nearly killed myself with laughing,” he wrote, while working on the American chapters.) “What are the Great United States for, sir, if not for the regeneration of man?” General Choke asks, in the course of swindling Chuzzlewit into investing in the Eden Land Corporation. But when Chuzzlewit and Tapley arrive in Eden they find not the thriving republican city they were promised but festering swamps, rotting cabins, and dying settlers. “There’s one good thing in this place, sir . . . and that is, that it’s a reg’lar little United States in itself.” Both Tapley and Chuzzlewit get sick and nearly die, which changes Chuzzlewit for good:
In the hideous solitude of that most hideous place, with Hope so far removed, Ambition quenched, and Death beside him rattling at the very door, reflection came, as in a plague-beleaguered town; and so he felt and knew the failing of his life, and saw distinctly what an ugly spot it was. Eden was a hard school to learn so hard a lesson in; but there were teachers in the swamp and thicket, and the pestilential air, who had a searching method of their own.
Dickens had found something out, in America: “So low had Eden brought him down. So high had Eden raised him up.”I went to bed. There is very little time to sleep at Dickens camp, but, if you wanted to try, you could buy, at a silent auction, Miss Havisham’s Insomnia Kit, which consists of tea and a candle. Reading seminars start at eight-thirty and lectures are delivered in the morning, afternoon, and evening, followed by late-night screenings of film adaptations of the week’s novel. There are daily rehearsals of an original farce, written for the occasion. In addition, there are faculty seminars, graduate writing colloquiums, and teaching workshops, not to mention Victorian tea, a Victorian dance, and, presumably, summer romance for graduate students, the less Victorian the better. (“Grass in the hair is the tell,” I was told.) Much anticipated was a lecture titled “Great Sexpectations.”Breakfast starts at seven-thirty. I sat down with the Cheerybles of what is known as the Dickens Project: John Jordan, Murray Baumgarten, and Ed Eigner. Jordan grew up in Memphis. His grandmother read Dickens to him. “She used to say she had never met anyone in her life whom she hadn’t first met in ‘Pickwick Papers,’ ” he recalled. In the nineteen-seventies, when Jordan and Baumgarten started teaching a course on Dickens at Santa Cruz, they got to talking with Eigner, who was teaching a Dickens course at U.C. Riverside, so when the U.C. president invited proposals for inter-campus initiatives they proposed a research consortium. The chancellors were mostly scientists. The Dickens Project was one of the few humanities projects that were funded. Baumgarten smiled. “We told them we wanted to run a Dickens lab,” he said.Dickens camp is officially called Dickens Universe. Eigner named it. It was also Eigner’s idea to let anyone come. “It turned out to be the most important part of the whole thing,” he said. The first year, though, the non-specialists staged a revolt. “Can’t you just talk like ordinary people?” they asked the academics. No, the academics answered. They had worked very hard to prepare these lectures, and, damn it, they were going to read them.Alexis DesRoches—who works in a real-estate office in Industry, Maine, population 697—had been to Miller’s talk. “I have never used the word ‘optative’ in my life,” she told me, “but, once you make the translation, the guy is really fascinating.” Her family thinks she’s nuts: “My sister-in-law said, ‘A week of English class? Blech.’ ”I sat next to DesRoches in John Bowen’s class. (Thirty-nine faculty from thirty-three institutions came this year; none of them are paid for their teaching.) Bowen, who is lithe and effervescent, teaches at the University of York. His grandfather was a miner. He belongs to the first generation in his family to go to college. He has been coming to Dickens camp since 1998. “The first time I came home, I flew home, my wife picked me up at Heathrow, and I talked non-stop for four hours,” he told me.He went to the chalkboard. “If we might begin by just thinking about a thing or two you found weird about the book . . . ?” The questions tumbled out. Why is Pip such a little shit? How much did Jaggers know? What’s up with the weather? Bowen’s eyes grew wide. He picked up a nub of chalk and began to write.The room grew warm; soon the board was covered with questions. A community-college teacher from New York broached the subject of Pip’s reliability as a narrator. A heavyset woman with frizzled gray hair, spectacles, running shoes, and a black dress patterned with pink roses cleared her throat.“I have a passage I should like to read.”Bowen opened his arms. “How could I stop you?”The woman picked up her paperback and found the page she wanted:
If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine—which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity—it is the key to many reservations.
It wasn’t just what she read; it was how wonderfully she read it. Could we trust Pip? Could we trust the woman in the rose-patterned dress? Could she please read more? Someone whispered, “Isn’t that Professor Sprout?”It was the English actress Miriam Margolyes, who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies and has also played Flora Finching and Mrs. Bumble in adaptations of “Little Dorrit” and “Oliver Twist.” She has attended Dickens camp for more than a decade. (“I so read the book, but I so didn’t understand it,” a recent high-school graduate confessed to me. “But then Miriam, she read that and, all of a sudden, I could hear it, you know?”)I caught up with Margolyes at a crowded table in the cafeteria, where I sat next to Trude Hoffacker, a retired high-school English teacher from Sunnydale, California, who has been to Dickens camp every year since it started. Hoffacker told me about a camp regular who never said much and then, after he’d missed a year, and she asked him why, confessed that he hadn’t been able to get the book on tape. It turned out that he didn’t know how to read.
After five days of breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a couple of hundred people, the attendees can run together, as if we were all always sitting at the same table, sharing an endless plum pudding. Tom and Mary Ann Berry drove here from Durango. This is their first year. He has never read Dickens; she is a Dickens fanatic. John Romano has a Ph.D. from Yale and wrote a book about Dickens and realism and taught at Columbia until he quit to become a screenwriter. “I started writing for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ ” he said. “And I found out we did more talking about Dickens there than I ever did at Columbia.” Meghan Kelly, an elementary-school librarian from Louisiana, runs a Dickens Club for fifth graders, modelled on Dickens camp. Lillian Nayder has just finished a biography of Catherine Dickens and is here to give a lecture. Sybil-Frances Kimbrig, whose late husband was a professor of linguistics, used to go to Elderhostels, but her husband hated it, because he would end up teaching everyone, and she likes this better because the experts are actually experts, and they don’t talk down to you. Ernie Peterson, a retired doctor from Boise, and his wife, Cindy, always room with Aleck Darr and his wife, Nancy; they met one another here nine years ago. Peterson doesn’t have a favorite Dickens. “To me, it’s all one big novel,” he said. Camp was starting to feel that way, too. And God bless them, every one.“We are old; we are young,” Margolyes announced over lunch one day. “We are ignorant; we are scholars.”Margolyes read “Oliver Twist” when she was eleven. “Since then, there hasn’t been a day in my life when I haven’t read Dickens,” she said.“Not a day?” I asked, doubtfully.“Not a day.”“And why?”“Because he’s fucking good.” She put down her fork. “He gathers you into his world, and while you’re in his world you are ravished. You are ravished!” She placed her palms on the table and leaned toward me, her voice rising. “I love him; I hate him. I admire him; I despise him. He is everything.” Or maybe that was at dinner.
I bumped into Bowen, walking to a lecture. I asked him why Trollope was so exasperated by Dickens. “Ah,” he said, and paused. “Trollope mistrusted rhetorical power.”Most scholars mistrust rhetorical power, too. It is the business of a reader to enjoy a book. It is the business of a critic to reckon a writer’s merit. Dickens’s merit being, for the moment, stipulated, it is the business of a literary scholar to decipher a text. But deciphering Dickens is like defusing a bomb.“Began dombey!” Dickens wrote to Forster when he finally began writing again, after the disappointing “Chuzzlewit.” “There’s no writing against such a power as this,” Thackeray exclaimed when he read the fifth installment of “Dombey and Son.” “David Copperfield” appeared in 1849. Little Davy, locked in a room, is reduced, in his longing and his loneliness, to kissing the keyhole. The Prime Minister read it to his wife. “We cried,” he confessed, “till we were ashamed.” Henry James, as a six-year-old boy growing up on Fourteenth Street in New York, hid under a table to listen to his family read it aloud, until his sobs gave him away.“Copperfield,” the first novel that Dickens wrote in the first person, tells the story of his own life:
“I suppose history never lies, does it?” said Mr. Dick, with a gleam of hope.“Oh dear, no, sir!” I replied, most decisively. I was ingenuous and young, and I thought so.
Never be mean, never be false, never be cruel. “Avoid those three vices,” Betsey Trotwood tells Copperfield, “and I can always be hopeful of you.”Dickens began writing “Bleak House” in 1852. “Little Dorrit,” which appeared between 1855 and 1857, outsold all its predecessors and outpaced them, too, in critical contempt. Dickens countered his critics by counting his readers:
In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to repeat the same words.
If he had never had more readers, he had also never been unhappier. In 1857, when Dickens was forty-five, he fell in love with a seventeen-year-old actress named Ellen Ternan. Catherine Dickens, who was forty-two at the time, had endured twelve pregnancies, including two miscarriages. She was no longer the wife of his imagination. She was fat; he found her dull. He moved her into a separate bedroom. In May of 1858, he more or less kicked her out of the house. “She does not—and she never did—care for the children,” he insisted, “and the children do not—and they never did—care for her.” Charley, the Dickenses’ oldest child, went to live with his mother. At twenty-one, he was the only one of the nine children old enough to make his own decision. Dickens all but forbade the rest of the children to see their mother. The youngest, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, had just turned six.On June 8, 1858, four days after Catherine Dickens signed a deed of separation, Edward Bulwer was speaking before his constituents in Hertford when his estranged and often outrageous wife showed up and heckled him, shouting, “Sir Liar!” Bulwer had married Rosina Wheeler, the daughter of a women’s-rights advocate, in 1827, but he beat her, and kept a series of mistresses. According to a well-corroborated story, he once bit his wife in the face and had to be pulled off her by the servants. After they were legally separated, in 1836, he had their children, aged six and ten, taken away from her; she barely saw them again. She took vengeance by writing novels—her first, “Cheveley; or, the Man of Honour,” is a satirical portrait of her husband. After she showed up at the hustings, he had her declared insane, and committed to a lunatic asylum. At the same time, Dickens publicly announced his separation from his wife on the front page of Household Words, a magazine he edited. (Elsewhere, he hinted that she suffered from a “mental disorder.”)With the Bulwers, sympathy fell more on his side than on hers: he was silent; she was shocking. With the Dickenses, the reverse was true. “Incompatibility of temper after twenty-three years of married life! What a plea!” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, and then she added, thinking, perhaps, of both scandals, “I would rather be beaten by my husband once a day than lose my child.”Domestic tragedy, like domestic happiness, is ineffable. “I can never hope that anyone out of my house can ever comprehend my domestic story,” Dickens wrote. In April of 1860, he assured a friend that his unhappiness would not spoil his fiction:
I believe I am exactly what I always have been; quite as hopeful, cheerful, and active, as I ever was. I am not so weak or wicked as to visit any small unhappiness of my own, upon the world in which I live. I know very well, it is just as it was. As to my art, I have as great a delight in it as the most enthusiastic of my readers; and the sense of my trust and responsibility in that wise, is always upon me when I take pen in hand.
And then, in a field behind his house, he made a bonfire and burned his letters—including all the letters Catherine had ever written to him—destroying the evidence of history so that he could write the story of his life as a fiction, once again. Telling Forster that “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me,” he started writing a new novel. “The name is great expectations.”“You have just been hired to write an adaptation of ‘Great Expectations,’ ” Marty Gould told us, at the start of the high-school teachers’ workshop. Gould teaches at the University of South Florida. “You can have only ten characters, and eight scenes. You’ve got ten minutes. Go!” Dickens camp is part academic conference, part book club, part vacation, and part liberal-arts boot camp. It was the middle of the week, and I had Dickens fatigue. Bleary-eyed, I made my list, wondering whether, if I did without Mrs. Pocket, I could keep Trabb’s boy.In “Copperfield,” Dickens confronted his childhood; in “Expectations,” his adulthood. “To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day,” Dickens informed Forster. The two novels start in the same place. “During these first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David,” Dickens explained. “Then he will be an apprentice.” And then he will grow up. In “Great Expectations,” Dickens wanted to find a way to be both the Dickens his old readers missed—that Pickwickian boy-child, Pip—and the Dickens he had grown into, as pained and pursued as Magwitch. “I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn,” he wrote. A child will be chained to a convict.Five minutes passed. “Stop!” We put down our pens. “Your budget has just been cut!” Gould said. “Now you can only have seven characters, and eight scenes.” I said a sorrowful goodbye to Mr. Pumblechook.The teachers’ workshop is organized by Alice Alarcon, who teaches at a high school on Long Island, and Wayne Batten, who teaches in Nashville. “Great Expectations” is the ninth most frequently assigned title in ninth-grade English classes in U.S. public high schools. It’s also the longest book and, in reading difficulty, the hardest novel assigned in high school, in any grade. Batten has a passage that he likes to ask ninth graders to read. I read the instructions in the handout: in the following passage, underline the verbs, circle the adjectives, and cross out the adverbs. Pip has just met Miss Havisham:
I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone.
And then I realized I had heard these words all week long. “Miss Havisham is Dickens!” Margolyes had called out on Monday evening, during a performance of her one-woman show about Dickens. Claire Jarvis, from Stanford, had offered a theoretical reading of the novel that cast this scene in a new light in her lecture, “Great Sexpectations,” which, disappointingly to some, focussed on virginity. Miller had cited this scene as an example of the optative mode: Pip, like Miss Havisham, is what he is, but he might have been something else. The ghost of Miss Havisham, in a dress made out of white kitchen garbage bags, had even staggered through the cafeteria one day at lunch, leaning on a cane, and rasping, “Love her! Love her! ”
“We laugh, but it’s a mirthless laugh.”
I read the passage again, and I saw that Miss Havisham’s dress is thin and papery, like the pages of an old book. And I thought that I saw, at last, how Dickens camp works, and what happens when very many people read a very old book together, if it is very good. I saw that everyone wears Miss Havisham’s dress, and I saw that it always fits.On November 17, 1860, Harper’s announced that Abraham Lincoln had been elected President and that a new Dickens novel was on its way. “Great Expectations” was published serially and, in the United States, a week ahead of its publication in England, in Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round. Dickens calculated that he would finish the novel on June 12th, the anniversary of his announcement of the dissolution of his marriage. But writing at breakneck speed wasn’t as easy as it once was. He began suffering from unexplained pains in his side. His face hurt. He couldn’t sleep.Meanwhile, he was reading a draft of a new novel by Edward Bulwer, which he planned to run in All the Year Round. He didn’t want to lose readers after his own novel ended, and Bulwer was the only novelist who could reliably keep up the magazine’s circulation. The story that Bulwer sent Dickens involved two manuscripts, and went like this: while preparing a metaphysical treatise proving the impossibility of an afterlife, Doctor Fenwick falls in love with the ethereal Lilian Ashleigh but is strangely attracted to the mysterious Margrave, whereupon a dying nobleman asks Fenwick to edit his unpublished memoirs, in which it is explained that Margrave has stolen the secret of immortality.
On May 12th, Dickens wrote Bulwer that he couldn’t put the book down, and tossed out some possible titles, including “The Lost Manuscript.” Then he went back to his own manuscript, finishing “Great Expectations” a day early, on June 11th. Four days later, Dickens travelled to Bulwer’s country estate, where he asked Bulwer to read the ending of “Great Expectations,” in proof.
Bulwer didn’t like it. “You write to be read, of course,” Dickens had once reminded a contributor to Household Words, instructing her to make the ending of her story “less painful.” Bulwer told Dickens much the same thing. On June 24th, Dickens sent him a revised ending. “I hope you will like the alteration that is entirely due to you,” he said. In this ending, Pip meets Estella on the marsh:
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.
That’s what Dickens printed. He wanted his readers back. He got them.“Shall I read the ending?” Bowen asked the class. “Which one?”Lately, everyone likes the sadder ending better. As Dickens originally wrote it, Pip meets Estella in Piccadilly. She is married. They speak, briefly, and part. Softly, Bowen read the final lines:
I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.
When no hand rose, Bowen asked a question of his own, as the best teachers always do. “Is only one of them allowed to have a heart?”But time was up, class was over, and the week was nearly done.Dickens returned to the United States in 1867. In his honor, Bulwer hosted a farewell dinner at Freemasons’ Hall. Dickens and Bulwer entered arm in arm. Bulwer toasted first the Queen, and then Dickens, “a different kind of royalty.” When Dickens rose to speak, he attempted, lamely, to explain why he was returning to a country he had found so disappointing: “Since I was there before, a vast entirely new generation has arisen in the United States.” Americans had changed, and Dickens had changed. And he wanted to make money.In the United States for six months, Dickens gave eighty readings and earned a quarter of a million dollars. He was frantic and exhausted, all at once. Henry James found the readings charmless. Mark Twain described them as “glittering frostwork.” The trip destroyed Dickens’s health. Two years later, at the age of fifty-eight, he died of a stroke.In a three-volume biography that began appearing within two years of Dickens’s death, Forster printed the original ending of “Great Expectations,” which hardly anyone but he and Bulwer had seen before. He also revealed something that, apart from Dickens’s family, no one but he had ever known: when Dickens was twelve, his father had gone to debtors’ prison, and Dickens had been sent to work at a blacking factory, a child, chained to a convict. An unhappy childhood, an unhappy affair, and an unhappy ending—these were Charles Dickens’s unhappy secrets.Catherine Dickens died in 1879. On her deathbed, she handed to her daughter all the letters Dickens had ever sent her, saying, “Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once.”Reading Forster’s biography, Thomas Carlyle had decided that at the very bottom of Dickens a reader finds “deeper than all, if one has the eye to see deep enough, dark, fateful, silent elements . . . the elements of death itself.” But nothing, he thought, was darker than Dickens on America.“American Notes” and “Martin Chuzzlewit” constitute an unforgiving portrait of a troubled republic: ambitious, cruel, ungenerous, brutal, and divided. The problem wasn’t that Dickens’s America was inaccurate: it is, and it isn’t. The problem was that it was vicious, and came from a man known for his cheerfulness. Dickens’s America is a dismal swamp, a failing bank, and a man, alone in a prison, wearing a paper hat. “He was more truly democratic than any American who had yet written fiction,” William Dean Howells wrote, and fair enough. G. K. Chesterton once observed that one of the things Dickens did best was to make democracy funny. Also true. But Dickens’s humor about America was black. “How could he ever go to America!” Mrs. Lupin cries, missing Mark Tapley. “Why didn’t he go to some of those countries which are not quite barbarous; where the savages eat each other fairly, and give an equal chance to every one!”At Dickens camp, in the mountains above the sea, I went, on my last night, to the performance of the farce, written and directed by John Glavin. Glavin, a professor of English at Georgetown, has been coming to Dickens camp for twenty-six summers. This year’s farce featured Pip—played by Richard Porteous, who plans to attend Oxford this fall—tired of being Pip, and wondering, “What would it be like to have been invented by—Thackeray?” After the farce, there was a feast of cakes and tarts. A raccoon sneaked in.There is no Thackeray camp, no Trollope camp, and, most assuredly, no Bulwer camp. Maybe this can work only with Dickens. Precious few humanities initiatives have brought together students and readers, scholars and teachers as well as the Dickens Project has done. Still, it’s not clear how much longer Dickens camp will last. For more than three decades, Californians have been gradually destroying what was once the best public-education system in the world by starving the state government of tax revenue. Two years ago, the University of California stopped funding the Dickens Project. “ ‘Dollars, banks, and cotton are our books, sir.’ ” Thereafter, citing their own budget crises, three affiliate universities (including my own) pulled out. Dickens camp is still growing, but it’s now increasingly dependent on donations.When Bret Harte, who liked to write while on retreat in Santa Cruz, heard, in 1870, that Dickens had died, he composed a poem called “Dickens in Camp.” It was about listening to a haggard old miner reading “The Old Curiosity Shop” around a roaring campfire in the Sierras. But, with Dickens dead, “lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire.” And, lately, forgotten is that America Dickens never found, that Eden, republic of dreams. ♦
Published in the print edition of the August 29, 2011, issue.
Jill Lepore is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her latest book is “These Truths: A History of the United States.”
