I’ve started teaching Great Expectations and, as our times will have it, I have used a PowerPoint presentation to accompany a brief introduction to the life and works of Mr. Charles Dickens. In the course of searching for pictures that might make this write out of the remote Victorian past more real for them, I came across Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed biography of his supposed live-in mistress for 13 years: The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (2004). ‘Supposed’ as no documents attest to their actually living together, for this silenced romance was regarded as a scandalous affair in Dickens’s lifetime (1812-1870).
I don’t favour at all biographical approaches to writers’ lives and much less gossip about their romantic privacy, although this is still quite widespread (just read the magazine Qué Leer for a contemporary version). I make a point of never reading biographies, feeling that they can hardly bring a satisfactory explanation to the riddle of why/how some people grow up to become writers. Also, because I feel that many other biographies could be equally enlightening and even more exciting, and I don’t mean those of football players –think here housewives or truck drivers. I am sure Dickens himself would agree that either any life or none at all deserves a biographer (who writes the biographies of biographers, I wonder?).
Just as Pip imagines that his father’s looks reflect those of the letters on his grave, I wanted to imagine that Dickens’s personality reflects the ‘letters’ in his novels. I pictured him not just as a genius but also as the kind of warm, committed person I definitely would like to meet and make friends with. Now my idol is fallen, quite possibly for ever.
What’s changed? My internet search led me to a webpage on his wife, née Catherine Hogarth, which disclosed how nasty Dickens had been to her after they separated and, yes, before. I read gossip I want to forget about his being quite unsympathetic towards Kate during a long breakdown, caused by their baby daughter Dora’s death. It seems he even published a notice in the newspapers when they formally separated in 1858, essentially blaming her for her incapacity to run their large household (there were at least two sisters-in-law helping the wife, maybe the husband had a point?). Someone claimed that Dickens even blamed Kate for their sprawling family of ten children.
I don’t have enough elements to judge Dickens and I don’t want to have them –instead of borrowing Peter Ackroyd’s famed biography from the library, I borrowed Dickens’s own American Notes. My students will learn about the difficulties of divorce in Victorian times but not about Dickens’ ungentlemanly behaviour, unless they read this post (is this censorship?). Yet, I am disappointed, not just as a daft groupie, which I am, but mainly as a feminist teacher who, once more, must separate the man from the artist.
Others may find this irrelevant or even androphobic (I hope it’s not), but when I admire a writer, I admire a mind that I suppose untainted with major sins: misogyny, racism, snobbery, homophobia, anti-semitism… If the mind is tainted, so is my pleasure in the text.
As a woman I am of course particularly sensitive to misogyny. Yet, finding out about Dickens’s private life is teaching me, to my surprise, that I am more willing to accept misogyny in the man’s text than in the man. A radical feminist would tell me I should expose both in class, text and man, as they are inseparable. Being no radical (or not always) and because I still love the text even though I love the man much less, I’ll teach Great Expectations with the enthusiasm it deserves, pointing my finger at its weaknesses, and including mine for Dickens.