Source: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 836974.ece
Charles Dickens was one of those people for whom the term “control freak” might have been invented. He could not feel easy in a hotel room until he had rearranged all the furniture to his liking. He needed to know, too, that the furniture back home was just as he had left it: “Keep things in their places,” he wrote in one letter to his wife, Catherine, “I can’t bear to picture them otherwise.”
He could not settle to work if he did not have, set out in their regular places on his desk, certain talismanic objects such as his group of duelling bronze frogs, as well as the little china monkey now on view at the Charles Dickens Museum in London. Every morning he inspected his children’s bedrooms to check that they were all in apple-pie order and left little notes of reprimand — “pincushion notes”, his daughters called them — if he noticed anything amiss. “Neat” is one of his highest terms of praise for young female characters, and he certainly cultivated neatness in his own appearance. If the wind blew his hair about, he would often rush back indoors to brush it back into order. Neatness did not mean sartorial sobriety, however. He was known for his fancy waistcoats, and once planned to wear a particularly dazzling one at a friend’s wedding in order, as he put it, to “eclipse the bridegroom”.
Dickens’s normal daily routine was unvarying. Four hours or so at his desk in the morning were followed by a 12-mile walk in the afternoon, then a convivial dinner, frequently including house guests, and, finally, organised party games until bedtime.
At the height of his career, between the ages of 35 and 45, he had to factor into his working life a weekly management committee meeting at Urania Cottage, the “home for homeless women” he had persuaded the millionaire philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to set up in Shepherd’s Bush. Dickens chaired the meetings, interviewed every applicant for admission to the home and dealt personally with the crises that arose from time to time as a result of insubordinate behaviour, not hesitating to expel persistent offenders. The minutely ordered daily routine of the cottage was, of course, entirely arranged by him, and it was he who decided how the young women should be dressed — very neatly, of course.
Three years after Urania Cottage admitted its first residents, Dickens took on another big and continuing commitment. He became the “conductor” (his preferred term for editing) and part-proprietor of a weekly journal, first one called Household Words and then its successor, All the Year Round, and continued in this position until his death. Household Words was, he once wrote, forever “spinning round like a gigantic top, and murmuring ‘Attend to me!’” He had an excellent and devoted sub-editor, but still involved himself deeply in every aspect of the journal’s production. He wrote dozens of brilliant, often highly topical, articles himself (sometimes interwoven with the writing of the monthly instalments of his great novels) and commissioned numerous other pieces. He trawled through the unsolicited submissions that poured in constantly, often writing detailed and constructive rejection letters. He regularly revised in detail, and even partially rewrote, contributors’ articles so that their proofs often ended up looking like what one of his staff writers, Percy Fitzgerald, described as an “inky fishing net”. Elizabeth Gaskell was one of the few contributors to his journals important enough to insist on her proofs not being tampered with, “even by Mr Dickens”. This did not please him. “If I were Mr G,” he wrote to his sub-editor, “O Heaven, how I would beat her!”
As far as charitable activities were concerned, Urania Cottage was far from being Dickens’s only big project. During the 1840s and 1850s he also initiated a number of elaborate fundraising amateur theatrical productions for one charitable purpose or another. The plays he chose were Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and, later, a specially written comedy with a contemporary setting written by his literary idol, Bulwer Lytton (who later persuaded him to alter the ending of Great Expectations). Dickens played Bobadil in Every Man and Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives, as well as leads in the various hyperactive farces that rounded off each evening’s performance. He was a superb actor (if he were to turn professional, he would, said Thackeray, “make his £20,000 a year”), but revelled especially in the role of actor-manager. He operated a fierce rehearsal schedule and concerned himself with the minutest details of staging, costumes and publicity, also coping with the significant logistical problems involved in touring the plays by rail to the great cities of the north and to Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he told a friend that his “most cherished daydream” was that of holding “supreme authority” in the direction of a great theatre with “a skilled and noble company”. The pieces acted, he said, “should be dealt with according to my pleasure... the players as well as the plays being absolutely under my command”.
Dickens’s passion for order and control no doubt had something to do with his vivid memories of the somewhat chaotic lifestyle into which his debt-afflicted parents had fallen when he was 10 years old. The family had to move house frequently, and his father even had a brief spell in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, while young Charles, his schooling broken off, was sent to paste labels on bottles in a rat-infested blacking manufactory off the Strand. For all the care that was taken of him at this time, he wrote later, he might well have become “a little robber or a little vagabond”, the fate so narrowly escaped by little Oliver Twist. As a writer, his imagination was haunted by the idea of “vagabondage”; that is, of being a homeless wanderer. In a haunting essay called Night Walks, written in 1860 for his journal All the Year Round, he takes the name of “Houselessness” and vividly describes the experience of wandering all night through the spectral streets of London. His imagination was also strongly drawn by a process he described as “the attraction of repulsion”, to the depiction of disorder, whether this took the form of Mrs Jellyby's shambolic housekeeping in Bleak House, with envelopes floating in the gravy at dinner time, or of the vaster, terrifying chaos of savage, rioting mobs in his two historical novels, Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. In both stories, the riots climax in the tearing down of a great prison, that ultimate symbol of repressive order towards which Dickens had always such a deeply ambivalent attitude.
It is hardly surprising that someone so concerned with controlling everything and everyone about him as Dickens was should have quarrelled so fiercely with his various publishers, nor that he should have reacted so badly to his experiences in America in 1842, when he found himself on what Jane Smiley has compared to “a nightmare book tour” with no manager or other staff to keep at bay the surging crowds of fans and celebrity-hunters. “I can’t drink a glass of water,” he lamented in a letter to his friend John Forster, “without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow.” His tightly organised return visit in 1867-68, to give public readings from his books, could hardly have been a greater contrast. Then he had a whole team, under his absolute control, dedicated to protecting their “Chief”, as they called him, from his fans.
Nor is it surprising that Dickens should have been drawn towards the phenomenon of mesmerism, or hypnotism, which involves the temporary gaining of control over another person. By the 1830s, mesmerism had become the subject of fierce medical controversy. Dickens regularly attended Dr John Elliotson’s demonstrations of mesmeric powers at University College Hospital and staunchly championed the doctor after his dismissal by the hospital authorities. Later, he was excited to discover that he himself had mesmeric powers, and when he and his family were living in Genoa during 1844-45, devoted himself to using them to alleviate the sufferings of the English wife of a Swiss banker. She was afflicted with an acute neurasthenic disorder that caused frightening hallucinations and often convulsions. Dickens found he could reduce the incidence of these things by regularly mesmerising her, and he threw himself so intensely into this treatment that he aroused the jealousy of his normally placid wife.
In 1858 Dickens successfully embarked on his second, highly lucrative, career as a public reader, giving solo performances of scenes from his own books. This enabled him, in effect, to realise in his own person that dream theatre over which he had total control. He was author, producer, director, stage manager and sole actor, or rather many actors in one. Carlyle famously said to him: “Charley, you carry a whole company of actors under your own hat.” With consummate skill he could, in effect, mesmerise whole audiences of thousands of people, making them laugh and weep at will. It is hard to imagine an activity that could possibly have been more utterly satisfying to such an artist and such a man as was Dickens. And, like everything else in his life, his spectacular triumphs as a public reader were firmly based upon the utmost rigour in preparation and rehearsals. We may well believe that David Copperfield speaks for his author when he declares: “I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order and diligence.”
Charles Dickens by Michael Slater is published by Yale on September 29
