Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Page A

nearly as popular as A Christmas Carol, and it was very controversial in its day, but it sold well and made Dickens a quick £1,000. As usual, it was faithful to his state of mind at the time he wrote it, so he was extremely pleased with it and went back to London for the publication, traveling alone by laborious stages.
    Upon his return to Genoa, Dickens took up mesmerism. An Englishwoman, Madame de la Rue, had several long-standing complaints that Freud might have called hysterical and we might call schizophrenic. Dickens successfully hypnotized her over and over; during these sessions, he elicited background material and gave her instructions. The progress of her condition was in some ways alarming, but Dickens’s confidence in his “treatment” never flagged, and he persisted, ultimately affording her considerable lasting relief from the conviction that she was being visited at night by a phantom. For Dickens, of course, this “relationship” had irresistible fascination. For one thing, he became intimate to an unusual degree with just the sort of mental pathology and extreme idiosyncrasy that he always found interesting, and for another, his “treatment” was working, which he admitted gave him a sense of power. For a third, the relationship was with a woman, therefore it could be intimate and platonic at the same time. We can only marvel at how, once again, something that turned up in Dickens’s life, like his American celebrity, uncannily presaged a common feature of our time—thetherapeutic relationship. That Dickens should prefigure Freud makes wonderful sense, since Freud loved Dickens and since both Freud and Dickens were essentially highly observant storytellers who gave large meanings to very small details and actions, creating worlds of interlocking meaning out of, in particular, repetition, unconscious actions, and habitual interactions. But Dickens’s pleasure and interest in his “treatment” of Madame de la Rue aroused a protest from Catherine, perhaps her first ever, and even though he was nettled by her reaction, he cooled the relationship. As with acting, perhaps, “therapy” was a great talent Dickens could have developed if circumstances had fallen differently.
    While not exactly giving up his desire to live abroad, Dickens returned to England periodically and involved himself in yet another aborted scheme that redounded less well to his reputation, the founding of a daily newspaper. Dickens’s new publishers, Bradbury and Evans, thought it a good time to start a newspaper to rival the Times and the Morning Herald, but with radical sympathies. Much of the money was railroad money, and the railroad was the transforming technological news of the day. Controversy surrounding The Chimes had proved both profitable and enlivening; how better to build upon it than to make the famous Charles Dickens editor of a paper that would institutionalize his liberal views? Dickens was equally enthusiastic and entered with fervor into the planning of the first editions. He hired the staff (including his father, John Dickens, as manager of the parliamentary reporters). There was a setback—one of the money men went bankrupt. Dickens resigned. But the investors reorganized and found more money, and the project went forward again.
    In the meantime, Dickens wrote his third Christmas book, A Cricket on the Hearth, which had no social dimension at all but was the tale of a jealous elderly man and his young wife, perhaps, according to Ackroyd, a reworking of Dickens’s own marriage with the genders reversed. There are two important things about A Cricket on the Hearth . One of them is that work on the newspaper affected the time and attention Dickens was able to devote to his narrative. The other is that it was a commercial success, selling twice as many copies as The Chimes . That the Christmas books established ever more clearly Dickens’s direct