– in which two eight-year-olds elope.
It does seem, however, that even as a youth and a young man, he maintained an uncommonly idealizing attitude to young women. His sense of abandonment and isolation during the blacking warehouse years, the lack of warmth he received from Mrs Roylance in the lodgings at Little College Street, and the shattering betrayal (as he saw it) inflicted on him by his mother, may have impelled him to create a countervailing image of an ideal female presence, instinct with kindness, affection, approval and nurture, not maternal but celestial: beautiful, radiant, the sort of vision that illuminates the blackest night of the soul and heals the wounded heart. The word Angel expresses many of these things, or did in the nineteenth century, and it is a word that he used frequently to describe the women he admired, whether of his own invention, or in life itself.
On his own admission, he was rarely out of love in his early days, and, Dickens being Dickens, it was an overwhelming, an obsessional, a cataclysmic experience. The very phrase ‘Dickens in Love’ conjures up alarming images, his energies so extreme, his need so great, his resources of charm, of eloquence, of comedy, so inexhaustible that it must have been startling to find oneself on the receiving end. There had been several objects of his affection before he met the twenty-year-old Maria Beadnell, but on none of them did he lavish the same degree of passion, nor indeed did he ever lavish as much again on anyone else. The year was 1830; he was eighteen, and still languishing in Doctors’ Commons, only sporadically employed. We have no photograph of the young Maria Beadnell, but there is a charming watercolour of her in the unlikely guise of Dido, Queen of Carthage. In it she is depicted as possessing the huge, limpid, heavy-lidded, almost somnolent eyes that would later feature in so many Victorian depictions of women: deeply passive, unsmiling eyes, surmounting a neat, shapely nose and a tiny red mouth. It is entirely possible that such a woman would stir the loins of a slightly younger man: there is somehow the promise of deep sensual embrace, although the expression on the face itself is oddly inert, which is perhaps part of the charm. It’s an amateur daub, and one should perhaps not read into it too closely, but whatever the precise nature of her appeal, Dickens was certainly enslaved by her.
Maria was no doubt confounded by the ardour of her boyish suitor: for his first forty years, Dickens looked absurdly young, and at eighteen (as we see from a charming watercolour of him by his aunt, Janet Ross) he looks almost girlish, big-eyed and bashful, but his passion was torrential. She tried to control the situation, following the time-honoured policy of blowing alternately hot and cold, in rapid succession. This had the entirely planned effect of whipping him up to even greater heights of desperation and desire, utterly at a loss to know how to please. He must have realized almost immediately that she was not offering the luminous celestial balm he had been looking for; she was a fairly average young woman, not an angel. But it was too late; he was hooked.
Then there was the question of the parents: George Beadnell was a banker and somewhat underwhelmed by the flashy, talkative, manically exuberant young man who was clearly not out of the top drawer; the Beadnells deeply doubted Dickens’s suitability as a prospective husband for their precious little girl. Whether to relieve the situation or not, they sent her off to France. ‘My existence was entirely uprooted, moreover, and my whole being blighted, by the Angel of my soul being sent to Paris to finish her education!’ he wrote to Maria when she made contact with him some twenty years later, effortlessly slipping back into the language of adolescent infatuation. At the time, the inevitable crisis in their relationship came when he found out that Maria’s best friend, Marianne Leigh, who had purportedly been liaising between them, had been imparting to Maria confidences never meant for her to hear, and he realized that he was being played with by the two girls. He wrote Maria an overwrought good-bye letter.
Our meetings of late have been little more than so many displays of heartless indifference on the one hand, while on the other they have never failed to provide a fertile source of wretchedness and misery; and seeing, as I cannot fail to do, that I have engaged in a pursuit which has long since been worse than hopeless, and a further pursuit of which can only expose me to deserved ridicule, I have made up my mind to return the little present I received from you some time since (which I have always prized, as I still do, beyond anything I ever possessed) and the other enclosed mementoes of our past correspondence which I am sure it must be gratifying to you to receive, as after our recent situations they are certainly better adapted for your custody than mine.
He develops a lightly sarcastic manner:
my feelings upon any subject, more especially upon this, must be a matter to you of very little moment; still I have feelings in common with other people – perhaps so far as they relate to you they have been as strong and as good as ever warmed the human heart – and I do feel that it is mean and contemptible of me to keep by me one gift of yours or to preserve one single line or word of remembrance or affection from you. I therefore return them, and I can only wish that I could as easily forget that I ever received them.
He ends: ‘A wish for your happiness, though it comes from me may not be the worse for being sincere and heartfelt. Accept it as it is meant, and believe that nothing will ever afford me more real delight than to hear that you, the object of my first and last love, are happy.’ The most striking thing about this letter is not how deeply felt it is (and there is no doubt that it is) but how conventional the expression is. It could have come from any frustrated young man of the period, or from the pages of any unremarkable contemporary epistolary novel. That is what Maria had done to him. Her conventionally capricious behaviour had forced him to play her game; he was humiliated and toyed with, but worse than that, he was diminished, less than himself. He would never allow that to happen again, with anyone.
But balm was to hand: he was working on a show. He had been writing, directing and acting in plays in his family circle ever since he started work (a little later he wrote a play for them called O’Thello, featuring his father in the role of The Great Unpaid), and during all these anguished months of amorous frustration, he had been directing a triple bill consisting of Clari, the Maid of Milan, The Married Bachelor and Amateurs and Actors. The company and cast were all friends, but there was nothing amateur about his work on the show. He was in supreme command, casting it, staging it, stage-managing it, starring in it, seeing to the music, arranging the set, checking the props. A couple of weeks after his passionate valedictory to Maria, he was writing to his chum Kolle, who was engaged to Maria’s sister Anne, ‘you are, or at any rate will be, what I can never be, that is, happy and contented’, briskly adding that ‘the corps dramatic are all anxiety. The scenery is all completing rapidly, the machinery is finished, the curtain hemmed, the orchestra complete and the manager grimy.’ He was, in short, in his element, and in his letter, the moment he writes about the theatre, he is instantly, unmistakably, Charles Dickens. Lovelorn or not, he had no intention of hiding this particular light under a bushel: he had invited a large audience (including ‘many judges’). It was a triumph. Maria and her family came, too, but she sulked. A month later, he sent her one final, final affirmation of his love, and she was coldly reproachful in return. It was finally over.
He was shaken by the affair, nonetheless. He had given her everything of himself. He had lowered his guard, bared his heart. And she had just toyed with him. ‘It excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four,’ he wrote a quarter of a century later. That the experience of the relationship burned itself into his heart and mind is beyond question, but the contention that it excluded every other idea from his mind will not bear examination. On the contrary. Perhaps the pain was greater precisely because the whole affair dragged itself out over a time when Dickens was first beginning to feel his power in the world, and was exploding in every direction. At the time he met Maria, he was still a shorthand reporter plodding away at Doctors’ Commons; by the time their relationship was over, in 1833, he was a star reporter, trembling on the brink of authorship.
The instant he joined The Mirror of Parliament, in 1832, the uncommon accuracy of transcription made possible by his phenomenal shorthand skills was admiringly recognized, and his self-confidence soared. At about the same time, he started
