Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley Page B

relationship to his public was of great importance to him, and all the more important as the first issues of the Daily News began to take shape.
    January 21, 1846, was the first day of publication, and it was not quite a success—there were typos and mistakes; Dickens was dissatisfied with his staff and his work arrangements. It quickly became clear that the project was not going to work as planned, and on February 9, Dickens resigned. In fact, his resignation was considered appropriate by most parties, since he was not exactly suited to the day-to-day detail work of an ambitious newspaper—there was too much of it, and he was constitutionally incapable of delegating editorial duties, as other experiences with weekly and monthly periodicals showed. Nevertheless, at first the transition seemed like a crisis—Dickens had formed the staff and the paper as much in his own image as possible, and there was some question about whether it could go on without him. But the crisis passed, and John Forster became the editor for about nine months. After that, the paper grew and established itself andcontinued to publish into the twentieth century. The contradictions in Dickens’s character—his impulsiveness, his energy, his resistance to being the least bit fettered, and his readiness to blame others—all emerged in this battle, and the partners complained both that he was not doing his job well and that he didn’t want to do it any longer. Clearly, however, editing a daily newspaper, while it appealed to the commercial, social, and political sides of Dickens’s character, did not appeal to his deeper need to make art.
    Dickens decided to relocate to the Continent again, and this time he chose Lausanne, Switzerland. He and Catherine now had still another son, Alfred, born at the end of October 1845, the sixth child and fourth son. Dickens was thirty-four. In ten years, he had written six full-length novels and three novellas, not to mention any number of occasional pieces. He had fathered six children. He was still working with Angela Burdett-Coutts on charitable projects, most notably the home for reformed prostitutes, Urania Cottage. He was directing, producing, and performing in ambitious amateur plays (in 1845, Dickens and some friends did a production of Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour ). His energy, sociability, and liveliness still struck everyone, including, now, his children, who recalled later how much fun he had been in their early childhoods, playing with them, chatting with them, charming them, attending to them with particular affectionate concentration that caused them to adore him in return.
    Lausanne was clean, quiet, and pretty. Shortly after arriving there, at the end of June 1846, Dickens went back tohis real work and began to write Dombey and Son . As with Martin Chuzzlewit, he had been planning the structure of Dombey and Son carefully and as a whole. He also, from the beginning, intended to introduce some autobiographical material and based the establishment of Paul’s “caretaker,” Mrs. Pipchin, on a woman he had stayed with as a boy. But Dombey is different from earlier novels in that the protagonist, the character to be transformed, is an already mature man who bears some resemblance to Scrooge rather than to the many youthful heroes of earlier works. This choice immediately gives the novel more structural coherence—Dombey is an established man with a household, a mode of life, a set of acquaintances, and a very particular agenda. It is his certainty and pride that form the world of the other characters.
    Dombey and Son, like several other nineteenth-century works ( Vanity Fair, for example, which was published at the same time, and A Doll’s House, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”) concerns the commodification of familial relationships. Dickens is explicit—of Dombey’s estimation of his daughter Florence, he writes in the first