‘Barking mad’... how Dickens led to our modern gaslighting men

From Charles Dickens’s treatment of his wife to the abuse of leading women now, little has changed

If not exactly a local saint, like Churchill or Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens comes close enough for his reputation to have largely survived, to date, the documented mistreatment of his wife, Catherine, mother of his 10 children. She was publicly dumped by him, denigrated and separated from all but one of their children, having become fat and – to Dickens – dull.

Indeed, as the playwright Martin McDonagh demonstrated in a recent play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, the reputational damage has been so scant that his hilarious reimagining of the creator of Tiny Tim – as a foulmouthed, lecherous fraud – came across as not so much counterfactual as wildly blasphemous.

It was natural, then, that last week’s revelation by John Bowen, professor of 19th century literature at the University of York that Dickens may have taken gaslighting his wife to the point of attempted false imprisonment would be received with dismay, even reluctance. “But he’s still a good man?” pleaded one prominent, male, interviewer, evidently eager to find some, any excuse, for a celebrated man who appears to have wanted to consign a sane woman, against her will, to a private asylum from which she would have been unlikely to escape.

“If you were in a private asylum, discharge rates were a mere 10-14%,” writes Sarah Wise, the author of Inconvenient People, Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England. But this, Bowen has now concluded from a cache of letters, is probably what Dickens intended for his wife. Before she died, he writes in the Times Literary Supplement, the dying Catherine confided in a friend, Edward Dutton Cook, who told another correspondent: “He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.”

The new information accords, as Bowen says, with existing evidence that Dickens, once he was besotted with Ellen Ternan, deliberately circulated lies about his wife’s sanity, alluding to “a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours”. Responding to Bowen’s discovery, Dickens’s biographer Clare Tomalin told MailOnline: “I think during this period he was mad effectively and their lives were thrown into turmoil.”

Charles Dickens: ‘He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!’ Photograph: traveler1116/Getty Images

Along with his possible insanity, any reputational readjustment must also take into account Dickens’s close friendship with a fellow gaslighter, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a powerful politician and novelist, during a period Wise says was “the high-water mark of the Victorian malicious lunacy incarceration phenomenon”.

After his (sane) estranged wife, Rosina, publicly denounced his “unexampled career of vice”, at a political hustings, Bulwer-Lytton secured the medical signatures needed to have her carried off, in 1858, to a private asylum, a nightmare she later described in A Blighted Life. (That same month, Bowen notes, the Dickenses separated.) “Never,” Rosina wrote, “was a more criminal or despotic Law passed than that which now enables a Husband to lock up his Wife in a Madhouse on the certificate of two medical men, who often in haste, frequently for a bribe, certify to madness where none exists.” Dickens, she describes as “that patent Humbug”.

A year after Rosina escaped, Dickens published, in his journal All the Year Round, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, based on a true story of false incarceration in a Parisian asylum. The principal villain, Sir Percival Glyde, says of one victim: “She’s just mad enough to be shut up and just sane enough to ruin me when she’s at large.”

How substantial, if any, will be the damage to Dickens? Must he now shift into the creative subset, genius wife torturers, along with Philip Roth, Kingsley Amis, Picasso, Hemingway, Ted Hughes? His devotees could argue, against such an outcome, that Bulwer-Lytton got away with it. If, moreover, in the years since Dickens invented Catherine’s mental disorder health practitioners have become more reluctant to collaborate with controlling spouses, variations on gaslighting have definitely outlived him, in public as well as private life. While the responses to #MeToo, and The Archers storyline, have increased recognition of this form of abuse, crude public insinuations about the mental stability of prominent women remain, in contrast, permissible.

Were, for example, the intentions of Andrew Neil notably enlightened, when the BBC presenter described my colleague, the award-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, as the “mad cat woman from [The] Simpsons, Karol Kodswallop”? Neither the BBC nor Neil apologised for his misogyny towards Cadwalladr, nor, with this high-profile rehearsal of the “crazy cat lady” meme, for this misguided contribution (following his colleagues’ mockery of Carrie Gracie) to the gendered denigration of strong or combative women as mental, shrill, hysterical, stroppy, bloody difficult, insufficiently calm.

Already, the Tory recruits to the Independent Group have, being women, been described on social media as, variously, crazy, mental, barking mad, unhinged, hysterical, emotional, bonkers. At least one is, of course, a batshit crazy cat lady. A Mail writer adds, perhaps because Soubry ignores the Mail, that she drinks to excess.

If it’s impossible to know how women in public might behave if their conduct were not continually up for shaming by the craziness police, a look at unusual behaviour that is considered permissible and rational in their male peers maybe hints at what public gaslighting suppresses. The rarity of any equivalent female eccentricity tells its own story.

Under current, unspoken regulations, it would be impossible for a female politician to speak or dress or act with the affectation or disinhibition of, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson. The same, with his trusty shell-suit and sacks of allotment potatoes, his precious hoard of manhole covers and assorted jetsam, applies to that surely Dickensian figure, Jeremy Corbyn. There’s no need for mad-doctors, when a simple mention of crazy cat ladies will do the job.

(Source: The Guardian)

The endurance of 'A Christmas Carol'

‘A Christmas Carol’ has been “reproduced so often, and in so many different forms, it has become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies or turkey,” writes Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the author of Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), in The Paris Review. Read on: 

On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care:

My Dear Sirs,

I determined not to thank you for the Turkey until it was quite gone, in order that you might have a becoming idea of its astonishing capabilities.

The last remnant of that blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday—the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two.

It is a generous letter, fully in keeping with the generosity of the people he is addressing. Still, like many people who write to express their thanks for unexpected or unwanted Christmas gifts, it seems that Dickens could not resist poking gentle fun at the purchasers’ taste, not least by hinting that sending him a turkey the size of a small child was perhaps being generous to a fault.

Is there a note of reproach in “My Dear Sirs”? There is certainly more than one sense in which a turkey that hangs around for a week might be thought of as “that blessed bird,” as is clear from Dickens’s decision to pump up “turkey” into “Turkey,” the double insistence on its final reappearance “yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday,” and the drawn-out sentence that describes the many attempts made by the Dickens household to finish it off (“seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two”), like a chorus of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which partridges in pear trees and swans a-swimming have been usurped by this one “blessed bird.”

Even the reference to the turkey’s “astonishing capabilities” seems suspended between wonder and worry, as if a turkey that produced so many leftovers came close to being a real-life version of those enchanted objects and creatures—pots overflowing with porridge, or geese laying limitless supplies of golden eggs—that throng the pages of fairy tales.

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN LEECH. PUBLIC DOMAIN.

Four years later, Dickens had written something that possessed still more “astonishing capabilities.” A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was first published just before Christmas in 1843, and since then it has never been out of print. Originally written as a tract for the times, this cautionary tale about the ongoing tussle between greed and goodness has been thought of as timely whenever it has been read.

Enjoyed by its first readers as a modern expression of the spirit of Christmas—as modern as Christmas cards, which were sent for the first time in the same year as the Carol’s publication—it has since become popular for quite different reasons: the sense of tradition it is thought to embody, a reminder of the simple pleasures that seem to have been lost sight of in the seasonal scrum of shoppers, an annual invitation to the pleasures of nostalgia. Reproduced so often, and in so many different forms, it has become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies or turkey, with the key difference that, as Martin Heidegger argued was true of all classic works, it has never been “used up.”

There have been dozens of films, starring everyone from Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson to Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse, operas and ballets, an all-black musical (Comin’ Uptown, which opened on Broadway in 1979), Benjamin Britten’s 1947 Men of Goodwill: Variations on ‘A Christmas Carol,’ even a BBC mime version in 1973 starring Marcel Marceau. So regular are the annual returns of the Carol to our stages and screens, in fact, that it has become something like a secular ritual, an alternative Christmas story to its more obviously religious rival, in which the three wise men are replaced by three instructive spirits, and the pilgrimage to a child in a manger is replaced by a visit to the house of Tiny Tim.

Even people who have never read the Carol know the story of Scrooge, the miserable old skinflint who repents after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. So widely and deeply has this story entered the popular imagination that phrases such as Bah! Humbug! have floated free of their original context and acquired the force of common proverbs, while Scrooge himself has entered the language as a piece of cultural shorthand “used allusively to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy” (OED, “Scrooge”).

This can make it hard to read, even for the first time, without the uncanny feeling that it is both familiar and strange, ancient and modern. As with any story that has developed the power of a myth, as Virginia Woolf once observed, we tend to know the Carol even before we know how to read, and our knowledge comes from many different sources, with the result that any attempt to assess what Dickens actually wrote can be an experience as hazy and disorientating as Scrooge’s first impressions of the Ghost of Christmas Past: “What was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness.”

And yet to read his original story closely is to realize that, even though at first it may seem to lack the zip and glitz of later adaptations—there are no Cockney dance routines in the snow, no bustling crowd scenes full of cheeky urchins, no Muppets belting out big musical numbers—Dickens’s plot cannot properly be separated from the strange and haunting power of his narrative style. In both the local details and the overall shape of his writing, Dickens sets out to show his readers that what happens in the Carol is intimately bound up with how it is described as happening.

To take just one example, the story of Scrooge’s mean-spirited solitude being replaced by openhearted sociability is echoed in a style marked by narrative generosity. Repeatedly, the narrator lingers over examples of human activities that show companionability spreading from one person to another—Bob Cratchit joining some strangers for a slide on the ice, or Scrooge’s nephew playing games with his friends and relatives—in a way that is as involuntary and catching as a cough.

Even the natural world, far from being indifferent to these activities, seems to be working on a similar principle of benevolent overflow, with fog that busies itself “pouring in at every chink and keyhole,” or “great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts” that tumble out onto the street “in their apoplectic opulence”—a cheering alternative to the water plug, as solitary and frozen as Scrooge, with its “overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice.”

Whether moving or static, animate or inanimate, everyone and everything appears to be spilling over, breaking out, extending beyond itself. Dickens’s narrator, too, repeatedly sets out to convince us that the world we share is, or should be, one of liberality, plenitude, intimate connectedness. Whether he is describing Scrooge’s character (“a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”), or the weather (“cold, bleak, biting”), or the objects that make up Marley’s chain (“cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel”), rarely is one detail given when three or four or more will do, as Dickens crams every sentence with alternatives and supplements, like a set of thesaurus entries spread out across the page.

Indeed, there are times when the Carol reads more like an extended shopping list than a book, as when Dickens describes the throne of the Ghost of Christmas Present, made up of “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.” That’s quite a mouthful, even for a reader, and one of the problems Dickens confronted when inserting such lists into the Carol, with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a small child leaving a note for Santa, is that they might not be properly absorbed into the story as a whole; however lip-smacking each item might be individually, put together like this they run the risk of producing a nasty case of narrative indigestion.

Faced with the prize turkey Scrooge sends to the Cratchits, a suspicious reader might then wonder whether Dickens was winking at his readers about the nature of the story he had produced for them. “He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird,” we are told by the narrator, voicing Scrooge’s gleeful thoughts. “He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.” An oddly self-conscious thing to say at this stage of a story, perhaps, when the writer is close to wrapping up his manuscript and sending it off to the printers, especially given how spindly Dickens’s plot is when compared to the top-heavy nature of his style, chiseled with italics and spattered with exclamation-marks (“It was a Turkey!”).

But it takes a confident writer to joke about what he is up to, and a swaggeringly confident one to tease his readers with the thought that he might not be up to it. And sure enough, the delighted lists that stretch across the Carol’s pages serve as a valuable reminder that, even when Dickens’s prose risks sounding strained or anxious, he is fully in control.

Writing in an accretive style was nothing new for Dickens; from the start of his career, he had been alternately celebrated and condemned as a writer unusually fond of what George Orwell described as “the unnecessary detail.” However, never before had he set out so deliberately to bring together his style and his narrative subject. As the Carol develops, even details that at first appear superfluous, narrative grace notes, are revealed to be part of a pattern, “a genial shadowing forth,” designed to alert the eyes and ears of Dickens’s readers to the dangers of assuming that anything or anyone is as “self-contained” as Scrooge supposes himself to be.

The light that spills out of the shop windows, for example, which “made pale faces ruddy as they passed,” sets the tone for light to become a central image of the different ways in which human beings, too, might reach out beyond the boundaries of the self: the “positive light” that issues from Fezziwig’s calves when he dances, which is echoed in his power “to make our service light or burdensome”; the lighthouse, which offers a model of cheerful solidarity in the face of chilly adversity; the “light hearts” of Scrooge’s creditors when they think he is dead; the precious burden of Tiny Tim, willingly taken on by his father, for whom “he was very light to carry”; finally, Scrooge signaling his redemption by whooping that he is “as light as a feather.”

Gently but insistently, Dickens educates his readers into the need to make connections in a world that might otherwise shiver into isolated fragments. It is the same idea and the same technique he would later develop in novels such as Bleak House, where his listing of objects and urgent cross-referencing of ideas would again reflect his pleasure in the sprawling multitudinousness of the world and his anxious desire to keep that sprawl in check. At this stage in his career, however, writing the first narrative that he had planned as “a little whole,”

Dickens seems more confident in his ability to keep his imagination from overspilling the boundaries of his plot, and less worried about his ability to find a style to match the dense weave of affection and obligation that should bind together the rich with the poor, the living with the dead. And the writer with his readers? Who better to remind us that other people are “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys,” as Scrooge’s nephew puts it, than a writer whose story has asked generations of readers to make the same journey, as each pair of eyes travels across the page to meet that clinching final sentence, at once conclusive and all-embracing, “God bless Us, Every One”?

How the food of Charles Dickens defined Christmas

Charles Dickens was a serious foodie and his literature introduced a festive menu that has barely changed since the Cratchits gathered round their table in A Christmas Carol, writes Emma Jane Kirby in  BBC. Read on: 

"The thing about Dickens," says food historian Pen Vogler as she takes a tray of caraway seed biscuits out of the oven, "is that he knew what it was like to be hungry."

She's explored how cuisine shaped his writing in her recipe book, Dinner With Dickens. In it she recreates dishes that the literary giant wrote about, and shows how he used food to create character and comedy but also highlighted social issues.

She's also whipped up a Christmas pudding but thankfully has avoided making gruel.

"Dickens did not have food security as a child," continues Pen as she slips the steaming biscuits onto a wire rack to cool.

"His novels often contain innocent, hungry children - he wanted to show readers that good food and nourishment were a human right, even if you were poor."

Before Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, Christmas pudding was known only as plum pudding

When Charles Dickens was 12, his father was imprisoned for debt and while the rest of the family went to live with him in prison, Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory where he had to manage his tiny wages to buy penny buns and bread to eat.

His interest in food, says Pen, stems from this time.

David Copperfield offers these seedy biscuits to a young girl he has fallen in love with as a token of his esteem

In his writing, his characters' attitude to food often gives us clues to their morality. Fat adults often starve thin children; characters who share and enjoy lavish feasts are good, characters who make lavish food just for show or who waste food are generally bad. Think Miss Havisham's wedding cake….

"If the right emotional feelings are not there, it is worse than worthless," says Pen. "Food's got to be enjoyed in the right way and appreciated. Food for him was much more emotional than showy."

Charles Dickens was a serious foodie (check out his leg of mutton stuffed with oysters) who was famous for his generous dinner parties; his wife Catherine even published a little book of recipes to suit all budgets.

"If Dickens had been alive today," muses Pen as she chops apples, "I could definitely see him judging Bake Off, although he was much more of a savoury man than a pudding man."

She grates some nutmeg. "There are very few cakes and puddings in his writings except in the autobiographical David Copperfield where he remembers the sweet tooth and treats of childhood."

Fat adults often starve thin children in Dickens' work, like Oliver Twist

Pen's little black cat watches attentively from the floor as she stirs currants into her Christmas pudding mix. She tips in a very generous amount of brandy.

"Dickens loved a drink!" she says. "He even sent a recipe to a friend for punch so we know exactly how he made it - and his characters drink it all the time! He also drank champagne and claret for celebrations and things we've lost the taste for like purl, flip, dog's nose and wassail."

In 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol, which contained the famous scene of the Cratchits contentedly gathered round the crackling fire with their goose, apples and oranges, chestnuts and the "speckled cannon ball" pudding.

With his emphasis on a family gathering, believes Pen, Dickens set the template for today's Christmas celebrations.

"Until the publication of a Christmas Carol," says Pen, "Christmas pudding was known only as plum pudding - but after that, plum pudding was afterwards always referred to as Christmas pudding… and if you think about it, our Christmas menu hasn't changed since the Cratchits!"

Dickens' wife Catherine published a book of recipes which included one for leg of mutton with oysters

Leg of Mutton Stuffed with Oysters

Young John Chivery, son of the Marshalsea Turnkeeper, is rewarded for running "mysterious missions" with a banquet, for which Miss Rugg "with her own hands stuffed a leg of mutton with oysters." Dickens invited Daniel Maclise to share the same dish before a night walk through the slums (letter, November 20, 1840), and later invented his own twist, adding veal to the stuffing, served at the office of his journal, Household Words.

SERVES 6-8

2 tablespoons freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley

1 dessertspoon freshly chopped thyme leaves

1 dessertspoon freshly chopped savoury

2 hard-boiled egg yolks

6 oysters, cleaned, shucked, and chopped, reserving the liquor, or 6 finely chopped anchovies

3 garlic cloves, minced (I think garlic is better than onion in this dish, but if you prefer to follow Catherine, use one very finely chopped shallot)

leg of mutton (or lamb if you cannot find mutton), approx. 5½-6¾ lb/2.5-3kg

2 teaspoons all-purpose/plain flour

1¼ cups/300ml lamb or chicken stock

Preheat the oven to 425°F/220°C/Gas 7.

Chop the herbs as finely as possible - a meat cleaver is useful for this. Bind them together with the egg yolks, oysters (or anchovies), and garlic (or shallot).

Using a sharp knife, make about 6 indentations in the fleshy part of the leg of mutton (or lamb) and push in the mixture. If you make the indentations at a slight angle, you can pull the fat back over the cut.

Place the meat in a roasting pan and roast in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325°F/160°C/Gas 3. Baste the joint with the fat and juices in the pan and continue roasting for 15-20 minutes per 1 lb/450g.

When the meat is done, remove it from the oven, cover with foil, and let it rest for 15-20 minutes.

Make the gravy by mixing the flour with the fat in the roasting dish over a low heat, and slowly adding the stock and the oyster liquor. Skim the fat off the gravy (putting it in the freezer helps it coagulate on the top) and serve as it is, or add to the Piquant Sauce ingredients

PIQUANT SAUCE

1 shallot, finely chopped

a little oil

1 tablespoon finely chopped gherkins

1 tablespoon finely chopped capers

4 tablespoons good red wine vinegar

1 anchovy fillet, pounded

Sweat the shallot in the oil until it softens, then add the gherkins, capers, and vinegar. Simmer for 4 minutes.

Make gravy from the joint, add the oyster liquor (to make about 1¼ cups/300ml), the shallot mixture, and the pounded anchovy. Simmer for a few minutes before serving in a gravy boat.

"Adult hunger is dangerous in Dickens," warns Pen as she puts the kettle on for tea.

In A Tale of Two Cities, adult hunger leads to riot and revolution, and in Great Expectations, the hungry Magwitch, an escaped convict, is dangerous and frightening to young Pip who must steal food for him.

The seedy biscuits are delicious - the same kind that the young David Copperfield offered to a little girl he had fallen in love with as a token of his esteem- and they go beautifully with our Darjeeling tea.

Pen has worked out that good characters take tea in Dickens' work while the slightly dubious ones tend to drink coffee.

Under the circumstances, it seems only polite to pour another cup and have another soft seedy biscuit...