Dickens' Women Read Free

day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.
    My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the royal academy of music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from Chatham Workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street North. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour, and, usually, I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at some neighbouring shop. In the latter case, it was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf; sometimes, a fourpenny plate of beef from a cook’s shop; sometimes, a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from a miserable oldpublic-house over the way: the Swan, if I remember right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room in Johnson’s alamode beef-house in Clare Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition, coming in all alone, I don’t know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn’t taken it.
    There is something naked and pained in that account which strikes at the heart of the man. At his core, he felt betrayed by the very women whom he most trusted, his mother, his first love, Maria Beadnell, his wife, and perhaps even by his mistress, Ellen Ternan, with whom he conducted a relationship for twelve years from 1857 to his death in 1870.
    Out of that hurt and sense of abandonment came vivid and crafted characters; again and again he returned to the depiction of women who led men on and let them down; they haunt his books and their chiselled cruelty both convinces and disgusts. It’s not a complete portrait of the female sex but it is a damning one.
    Dickens repeated in his portraits of women these stereotypical archetypes – the pre-pubescent child, usually described as ‘little’ (Emily, Nell, Dorrit, Dora, Ruth Pinch); the unattainable sexual object (Estella, Lady Dedlock, Edith Dombey); the grotesque, sometimes evil (Madame Defarge, Mrs Squeers), sometimes comic (Mrs Gamp, Mrs Corney); the bad and incompetent mother (Mrs Clennam, Mrs Nickleby); the spinster longing for a man (Rosa Dartle, Miss Tox), but never was he able to draw a complete, believable, fully realised female – because the women in his life never offered him the opportunity.
    Dombey and Son contains two remarkable female portraits, both of women trained, like Estella, to ensnare men; it’s worth comparing Alice Marwood and Edith Dombey.
    Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done, she sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing at the fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to her old mother’s inarticulate complainings.
    â€˜Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away, mother?’ she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. ‘Did you think a foreign life, like mine, was good for good