Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens
Despite a world-renowned father and merry times at Christmas, the lives of the 10 children born to Charles Dickens were anything but easy.
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In ejecting Catherine from the house, Dickens insisted that she be separated from her children, the youngest of whom was but six years old; only Charley stayed with his humiliated mother in her banishment. This public separation -- and the subsequent installment of Catherine's unmarried sister, Georgina, as the head of Dickens's household -- resulted in the social ostracism of his two daughters, Mamie and Katey. Mamie never married, whether from lack of opportunity attendant upon that ostracism or from choice, it cannot be said. In any event, she became peculiar, a spendthrift and a drinker, and eventually took up, possibly sexually, with a "shadowy couple," a clergyman and his wife who seemed to have been after what money Mamie had. Dickens's other surviving daughter, Katey, married Wilkie Collins's brother, Charlie, unwisely and probably as an escape. Still, we can call her life happy, as she did bloom into a celebrated painter and, after the death of Charlie, married again far more successfully.
Dickens's seven sons, in particular, were caught in the force field of their father's powerful will and his controlling nature. He piled gigantic names upon their newborn heads: his eldest son, Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, carried the freight of three of Dickens's own names. Among the others were Walter Savage Landor Dickens, Alfred d'Orsay Tennyson Dickens, and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens. Having so monumentalized them, Dickens made them his creatures in conferring upon them comic nicknames that might have come from his own works, among them "Young Skull," "The Ocean Spectre," and "Chickenstalker." The last, laid upon Francis Jeffrey Dickens, was, indeed, one of Dickens's actual characters, a jolly old lady, as it happens, an unfortunate moniker for a little boy who grew up to be an unfortunate man: a lifelong toper whose death (W. C. Fields could have warned him) was brought on by a drink of ice water.
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Having created and named them one by one, Dickens decided upon their careers for the most part, shoving them at early ages into the world, where many of them suffered galling reverses and ran up debts. It was his sons' repeated calls for money (added to the pleas of his extended family and other petitioners) that brought to a boil a passionate desire in Dickens to disencumber himself from the paternal role -- or predicament. ("Why was I ever a father!") Still, among the book's virtues is its generous spirit. Purse our lips though we may at the great man's cruelty and high-handedness, to say nothing of his philoprogenitiveness, we are shown enough from all sides to sympathize with this father's frustration and pain and, more surprising perhaps, to see how deeply his daughters and sons loved him.
Looking at Dickens's children through the lens of their father's shaping influence has brought them into history's scope, for, except in the cases of Katey and Henry, it is the reason they have been noticed at all. But Gottlieb's range of view is wider than that, and therein lies the value of dividing the life stories into two parts: before and after the father's death. In this way we come to see both the effect of this demanding and critical man on his children and the daunting undertaking of going forth into the unforgiving world of nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial realm.
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