It is at this time that Dickens is writing the autobiographical fragment he shares with Forster and which he mined for his most autobiographical novel, The Personal History of David Copperfield , published in twenty monthly installments from May, 1849, to November, 1850, the last issue being a double number. David Copperfield opens with David, the narrator, indicating that the pages of his book must show whether he will turn out to be the hero of his own life. After overcoming the brutal experiences based on Dickens’s own experience at the blacking warehouse, David eventually marries, sets up household, establishes a growing reputation as a novelist, and yet discovers "a vague unhappy loss or want of something" in his life. He wonders if this unhappiness is the result of his having given in to "the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart" by marrying his child-wife, or if it is representative of the human condition. He does know it would have been better if his wife "could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts to which I had no partner; and that this might have been; I knew." (Ayer, 93)
Dickens was himself experiencing a similar sense of vague dissatisfaction at this time and may have wondered if his wife were not partly responsible. Whether she was or whether Dickens was experiencing the angst that every major Victorian thinker suffered from we cannot know. David’s problem is settled by Dora’s early death and David’s recognition that Agnes has loved him all along and that on a level he was not aware of he had loved her too. They marry, have a lovely family, and share a fulfilled existence. ( Smith 72)
The novel ends with David’s apostrophe to his true wife: "Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!" In his Preface to the novel, Dickens talks about "dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world" as he finishes David Copperfield. Both Dickens and David equate the world of vision with the world of actuality–one is as impermanent as the other. For David, Agnes is pointing to a world he hopes lasts beyond the worlds of shadow. In 1842, Dickens had written to Forster in response to the overwhelming triumph of his welcome in Boston: "I feel, in the best aspects of this welcome, something of the presence and influence of that spirit which directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed upward with unchanging finger for more than four years past." He is referring, of course, to Mary Hogarth. (Ackroyd 188)
In the novel, David is able to realize his ideal vision, actually to possess the beauty that is his inspiration and end as artist. Mary Hogarth becomes, for Dickens, an idealized vision of beauty that cannot be possessed, but she serves "as a presence and influence of that spirit that directs" Dickens’s life. Whether that ideal can be attained beyond this realm is not the issue. The ideal has allowed David to become the hero of his life, not by possessing the ideal but by acting on its inspiration. David the artist becomes artist as the result of realizing his imaginative vision, of creating art. In the act of creating art he possesses the vision. (Ackroyd 192)
The world David is born into is flawed. He experiences the evil of the world, deeply at Murdstone and Grinby’s, and escapes it. In his adult world he participates in the evil, contributes to it, unwittingly, as when he introduces Steerforth to the Peggottys and brings ruin upon that innocent house. He feels responsible for Dora’s death, the loss of Em’ly, Steerforth, and Ham. But in the end he is able, with Agnes’s help, to put his universe back together. He has been involved in a struggle, with his undisciplined heart on the one hand, with active evil in the form of Uriah Heep on the other. Agnes tells David that she believes simple love and truth will prevail over evil in the end. It will, for Dickens, only if goodness has the measure of evil and if good people are willing to use their creative energy to work hard to realize that goodness. The evil that David experienced as a child on the streets of London sharpened his wits so that, for example, David is able to catch Uriah staring at him while pretending to write, on their first encounter. And as a result of David’s experience on the streets, he has the help of Mr. Micawber in defeating Uriah in his scheme to take over the Wickfield firm, indeed to take over the world of the novel. David’s first-hand experience with the evil streets of London as a boy gives him the knowledge and wherewithal to take the measure of evil. His imaginative creativity, inspired by Agnes, allows him to order his universe. The very powers that allow David Copperfield to succeed as hero are the powers that allow Dickens to create David Copperfield . He will extend those powers beyond the world of the novel to continue to address the evils of a social system that is oppressive and life denying.
Dickens extended his capacity to address social issues and to provide entertainment by founding Household Words , a weekly magazine that first appeared on March 30, 1850, and continued until he replaced it with All the Year Round , which he founded and edited in 1859.
In 1850 he also helped to establish the Guild of Literature and Art to create an endowment for struggling artists. Money was raised for the Guild through amateur theatrical performances that Dickens usually performed in, directed, and managed. Dickens was a brilliant actor and loved the stage, producing plays throughout his career as fund raisers for the many charitable concerns he worked tirelessly to support. His love for the theater culminated in his captivating public readings from his own novels. ( World Book 153)
Bleak House , appearing in twenty monthly installments from March, 1852, to September, 1853, is a scathing indictment of government, law, philanthropy, religion, and society in nineteenth century England. The organizing principle of the plot is the hopelessly entangled lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which destroys the lives of all who become enmeshed in the Court of Chancery through the suit. The legal system is exposed as itself a symptom of what is wrong with a society that is structurally flawed. The mud, ooze, slime, and fog that symbolically dominate the world of this novel suggest that this society cannot be redeemed through a simple restructuring. The spontaneous combustion of Krook, the counterpart of the Lord Chancellor, indicates that this society must be fundamentally altered or it will explode of its own internal corruption. Jo, the crossing sweep, has neither the energy nor the tools to sweep away the mud and slime into which the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s is crumbling. And Tom-all-Alone’s is infecting all of London, just as surely as Jo’s smallpox infects the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson.
If this society is to be redeemed, Dickens insists, it will be through the values represented by Esther Summerson. Jo’s broom cannot sweep away the mud of Tom-all-Alone’s, but the clarity and warmth of Esther’s sympathetic love may be capable, if it becomes contagious, of illuminating this world and dissipating the fog. Esther and Allan Woodcourt, the physician who attends Jo at his death, marry, and we believe that their family can contain, in miniature, the order and love that must be transmitted to the larger society if it is to be saved. But Dickens is not sure, at this point, if what Esther and Allan represent can withstand the evils of London: they set up household in a country cottage, provided by the benevolent John Jarndyce, Esther’s guardian. (Ayer 79)
In order to improve the sales of Household Words , which had started to slip in 1854, Dickens began to publish a new serial in weekly installments in that magazine. Hard Times. For These Times , an assault on the industrial greed and political economy that exploits the working classes and deadens the soul, ran from April 1 to August 12, 1854. The Gradgrind philosophy, based on Facts, Facts, Facts of utilitarian calculus, is demonstrated as being not only cruel and destructive to the workers–"hands"–it dehumanizes and exploits but humanly inadequate to the Gradgrind family it purportedly serves. Mrs. Gradgrind sees that her husband has missed something, "not an ology at all," in his life, and Louisa and her brother Tom, "the whelp," are nearly destroyed by the mechanical philosophy of Gradgrindery. Sissy Jupe, who grew up among Sleary’s Horse Riding Circus, represents the imaginative creativity and generosity that the Gradgrind family miss. The union of Sissy and Loo, at the conclusion of the novel, is emblematic of what Dickens believes industrial England needs: "let me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart," Loo says to Sissy at the end. (Smith 103)
The Crimean War, which broke out in March, 1854, prevented the government from addressing the domestic social ills Dickens had been railing against since at least as early as Oliver Twist. The inept government, which cannot seem to get beyond just muddling along, is captured brilliantly in the portrayal of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit , published in monthly numbers from December, 1855, to June, 1857. The dominant symbol of the novel is imprisonment, and society itself becomes the prison of its inhabitants. Dickens had begun the novel, significantly, with the title "Nobody’s Fault" in mind, but later entitled the work after its heroine, Amy Dorrit. Amy is the daughter of the "Father of the Marshalsea," who has been confined in debtors’ prison for twenty five years. Arthur Clennam, whose gloomy childhood resembles what David Copperfield’s would have been had he been raised by the Murdstones, is a middle-aged man looking for meaning in life. Clennam and Little Dorrit escape the imprisonment of this stultifying society by discovering their love for each other, a love that is difficult to discover since Arthur is so much older than Amy and she has the goodness, and physical resemblance, of a child. Importantly for Dickens, Arthur and Amy are willing to engage the fallen society of London and to attempt to change it. After their wedding Arthur and Amy "went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar." Unlike Esther Summerson and her husband, Arthur and Amy stay in London where they live "a modest life of usefulness and happiness." (Kaplan 174)
On April 30, 1859, Dickens launched the weekly journal, All the Year Round . To get the journal off to a good start, the first installment of A Tale of Two Cities appeared in the inaugural issue and continued in weekly installments until November 26, 1859. Set in the time of the French Revolution, this novel once again looks at the potential for revolutionary violence Dickens had explored in Barnaby Rudge . If the ruling class in England does not take seriously the lesson of the French Revolution, Dickens appears to be saying, such a violent outburst is possible again. While Dickens deplores violence, his sympathies are clearly with the victims of oppression. Only the kind of sacrificial love represented by Sydney Carton’s willing sacrifice of himself for his loved ones will be able to prevent such a revolution if society continues along its present course
In an effort to pick up declining sales of All the Year Round , Dickens once again published a novel in weekly installments of the journal. Great Expectations ran from December 1, 1860, to August 3, 1861. Dickens and Catherine had recently separated after over twenty years of marriage. Perhaps in an attempt to come to terms with his personal unhappiness, Dickens returns to the first person narrator in Great Expectations. To assure that he did not fall into "unconscious repetition" as he wrote this story of a "hero to be a boy-child, like David," he reread David Copperfield. (World Book 155)
Pip is "raised by hand" by his shrewish older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery, whom Pip treats "as an older species of child." Pip comes into Great Expectations as the result of befriending the convict, Magwitch, but is led to believe that it is actually the eccentric and half-mad Miss Havisham to whom he is indebted. Pip is also under the misapprehension that the beautiful Estella, Miss Havisham’s daughter by adoption, will become part of his inheritance. Pip’s real education begins when he realizes that Magwitch is his benefactor and that he has betrayed the loving Joe for the false society made available by ill gotten gains from an escaped convict. His redemption comes as the result of his coming to love and value Magwitch, who, he realizes, has been much truer to Pip than Pip has been to Joe. (Kaplan 191)
In the earlier novel based loosely on his own life, Dickens has David Copperfield marry Dora, has him suffer the consequences of yielding to the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart. When Dora dies, David is able to discover his true wife, Agnes, who had seemed almost supernaturally removed from him. Here, Pip falls hopelessly in love with Estella, who is as icily indifferent to him as are the stars, because, as she says, she has no heart. Dickens originally intended for Pip and Estella to remain apart in the end, but Bulwer Lytton persuaded him to change the ending. Dickens has Estella discover, through suffering inflicted in a brutal marriage, her own heart and the value of Pip’s love. At this time in his career Dickens seems clear about the values that must be embraced if society is to succeed, the values of selflessness, compassion, and sympathetic love. He does not seem as sure that those qualities can sustain personal happiness, at least not for him at this point. (Kaplan 196)
In Our Mutual Friend, published in twenty installments from May, 1864, to November, 1865, Dickens makes still another advance in his artistic vision. Dominated by the dust heaps and the spiritual wasteland they symbolize, the vision of this novel suggests that we must die to ourselves if we are to be redeemed, and society must forego material pursuits if it is to become spiritually and culturally whole. The recurrent theme of death and resurrection indicates Dickens’s developing understanding of the meaning of personal fulfillment that he explores in earlier novels, particularly in David Copperfield and Great Expectations .( Smith 193)
There is no first person narrator in Our Mutual Friend , as there is in David Coppperfield and Great Expectations, although we are given an interior monologue as John Harmon recounts his own near death by drowning. However the novel is framed by Mortimer Lightwood’s stories: he tells the story of "The Man from Somewhere," John Harmon, at the beginning of the novel; his story of Eugene Wrayburn’s marriage to Lizzie Hexam horrifies the "society" to whom he recounts this tale at the end. The narrator/hero role that is central to David Copperfield is shared in Our Mutual Friend among Harmon, Wrayburn, and Lightwood. The roles of the heroines are altered from the earlier novels as well. The Agnes who has been associated with stained glass windows becomes Lizzie Hexam, daughter of the water rat Gaffer Hexam; and the cruel Estella becomes the willful, mercenary Bella Wilfer. Dickens is reworking his themes and relationships from the earlier novels here, particularly those themes he explored in the novels written from the first person point of view, the more autobiographical novels. (Smith 196)
David Copperfield, Lizzie Hexam has much to be grateful for in her sordid background. David’s experiences on the streets allow him to take the measure of evil; Lizzie’s sordid work with her father gives her the strength and the experience literally to save Eugene Wrayburn from drowning. As a result, Eugene is empowered to renounce the false society and indolent existence of his former self and to be redeemed by Lizzie’s love. Bella Wilfer sees her own selfishness and vanity played out in Noddy Boffins’s pretended miserliness, and sacrifices her great expectations in defense of John Harmon. In so doing, Bella demonstrates herself as worthy of Harmon’s love, just as Eugene demonstrates his worth of Lizzie’s love in repudiating the society he had been surrounded by. Unlike earlier Dickens heroines, though, Bella wants to become "something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house," and does. Both Bella (the Estella figure) and Eugene (the Pip figure) prove themselves after marriage, when the real tests come. Marriage is no longer an end for Dickens, the symbol of order and success. Rather it is something that needs to be worked at and worked out. And Bella, who proves to be "true golden gold at heart," and Lizzie, whom Eugene calls a "heroine," live together with their husbands in London where, for Dickens, the real work needs to be done. Dickens celebrates the moment of Bella’s marriage with John with the message that has been central to his vision from the beginning: and "O there days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is that O ’tis love ’tis love, that makes the world go round." ( Kaplan 216)