Charles Dickens by Catherine Peters

Author:Catherine Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Charles Dickens
ISBN: 9780752487090
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

FOUR

THE CRITIC OF SOCIETY, 1846–55

Dombey and Son appeared in monthly numbers from September 1846 to March 1848, each number selling over 30,000 copies. Comparisons with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, also appearing in numbers, were inevitable, but Thackeray himself despaired of writing in competition with the power of the early numbers of Dombey, and praised Dickens’s account of Dr Blimber’s school, where little boys were force-fed with knowledge: ‘worth whole volumes of Essays on the subject if Bigotry would believe that laughs may tell truth’.1

The two-year break from producing novels had given Dickens the opportunity of writing in a more considered way. Dombey and Son was tightly structured. The main themes were worked out in advance, with the importance of the daughter who is ‘better than any son at last’2 emphasized. Dickens’s attack was no longer aimed at specific social abuses, but at a climate of opinion that saw everything in terms of monetary value, viewing childhood as an irritating preliminary to the real ‘business’ of the world and marriage a matter of buying and selling. Throughout the novel the sea and the railways are used as insistent, perhaps over-emphatic, metaphors: the organic and eternal contrasted with the mechanical and inhuman.

When he returned with his family from the Continent in the spring of 1847 Dickens resumed his usual activities, and eagerly took up new enterprises. He became particularly closely involved with Miss Coutts’s latest venture, a refuge to rehabilitate prostitutes, female ex-prisoners and women who were homeless and destitute. Similar homes had failed because they returned the women to the same environment. Dickens believed that emigration to the colonies, where women were badly needed, would be a better solution, and in David Copperfield Australia provides a happy ending for an improbably miscellaneous group of his characters. He was shocked to discover that candidates for the refuge were so ignorant that they did not understand the difference between transportation and emigration.

Dickens found a suitable house at Lime Grove, then semi-rural, which Miss Coutts renamed Urania Cottage. He intervened in the smallest details. It was he who interviewed prospective matrons; vetted the inmates for their suitability; insisted on gardens, a piano and singing-lessons; even chose the materials – in four cheerful colours – for the women’s dresses. On religion he was not always in sympathy with Miss Coutts. He was convinced that scolding the women at Urania Cottage about their sinfulness would be counter-productive; he wanted them to look forward with hope to a happier future. He disliked much about the established church, particularly the High Church Puseyite wing, and for a number of years he deserted it altogether, attending a Unitarian chapel. Religion for Dickens was always a practical matter. ‘The world is not a dream, but a reality, of which we are the chief part, and in which we must be up and doing something’ and ‘Our business is to use life well. If we do that we may leave Death alone’,3 he wrote in letters to a young woman who had morbid thoughts of death.

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