Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley

overexposure. He did not want to wear out his welcome with his audience and possibly thought that it was overexposure that accounted for the continuing poor sales of Martin Chuzzlewit .
    Catherine’s pregnancy with Francis, the fifth child of the family in seven years, seems to have marked a turning point in Dickens’s attitude toward his wife. The agitation he betrayed in his money worries and his eagerness to go abroad met with great reluctance and depression on her part. He seems to have held against her both the inconvenience of the pregnancy and her inability to rally quickly after the birth. The stresses of their life together accentuated their temperamental differences. Where perhaps he had valued her placidity in the past, now he grew impatient with it and was willing to air his impatience to friends. Georgina Hogarth, too, was a continued contrast to Catherine—quicker, younger, perhaps able to share Dickens’s mental life more readily than her sister. The balance among the three was shifting, and Dickens seems at this point to have begun to have brief infatuations with young women. The first of these was an eighteen-year-old girl he met while giving a speech in Liverpool, Christiana Weller, in whose album he wrote, “I love her dear name which has won me some fame / But Great Heaven how gladly I’d change it.” Some weeks later, a friend of his, T. J. Thompson, informed Dickens that he wished to marry Christiana, and Dickens asked him to save the dress Dickens had first seen her in, just as he had saved one of Mary Hogarth’s dresses after she died.
    When the family departed for the Continent at the end of June 1844, it is safe to say that every aspect of Dickens’s life was in turmoil, including, again, his relationship with his publishers. With the end of Martin Chuzzlewit, he left Chapman and Hall for Bradbury and Evans, still smarting over the idea that fifteen months before, it had been suggested that herepay part of his Chuzzlewit advance. Finance, family life, relations with his parents, the direction of his work, his emotional attachments, and, of course, his domiciliary arrangements, all were in flux. He was determined that these worries were to be resolved in Genoa, where the family settled in a large house in the suburbs overlooking the sea.

CHAPTER THREE
    I N THE TWO YEARS between the end of Martin Chuzzlewit and the beginning of Dombey and Son, Dickens tried several things that failed to come to fruition, each in a different way, and that were expressive of his unsettled mind and his anxiety about how he was to live with his well-populated family. The first of these, of course, was the move to Genoa, first to the Villa Bagnerello and then, at the approach of winter, to the Palazzo Peschiere, which was easier to heat. Over the course of his Italian sojourn, he wrote Pictures from Italy (to be published in 1846), and in October, eager to repeat the success of A Christmas Carol, he began to write The Chimes, which has a more explicit satirical purpose than the earlier work but is similar in theme. Trotty Veck—an impoverished ticket porter who carries messages and does small jobs—is accosted by a magistrate, a Benthamite, and another idle gentleman, who discuss his meal and his life in utilitarian terms. Afterward, he has a dream or a vision of his future: himself dead, his daughter worked to death, and her fiancé a drunkard. Once again, Dickens expresses his opinion that mental images create worldly conditions. To embrace the utilitarian view, or the puritanical view, or the Tory view, that poor people have no reason to live, or are inherently prone to evil, or are a burden on the rich, is to create a more than self-fulfillingprophecy—not only do the individuals themselves live joyless, wasted lives, they are sundered from one another by suspicion and solipsism. Only connection, forgiveness, and hope can prevent such an outcome. The Chimes has not been