I never questioned the literature I read in my high school English classes. I respected it, I appreciated it (so much as a teenage girl can appreciate stories written by dead white men with primarily male characters at their center), but I never questioned it. There was, I assumed, a reason those particular pieces had been chosen; that the knowledge I would obtain from the study of them would provide the greatest benefit to my education both as a reader and writer and as a member of society. This is, after all, why we read novels.
I wondered, of course, at the shocking lack of female authors in the curriculum when there were plenty in the classical literary canon, but I never questioned the wisdom of my teachers for excluding them. I was a very different person then. Needless to say, I pissed off far fewer people than I do today and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Like most high schools in the United States, Twain, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Dickens were required reading in my classrooms, and the likes of Austen and Bronte (any of them – take your pick) were relegated to a sad, dusty shelf in the library labeled “You’ve Seen The Movie, Now Read The Book!” William Hurt had just starred as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility had just won an Oscar, and a year later, Gwyneth Paltrow donned her first fake English accent to play Emma, so comedies of manner and Gothic romance were enjoying a modicum of popularity on the silver screen, though exactly three people in my high school rented these films from Blockbuster Video and it was me all three times.
Had my mother not been a voracious reader and a great admirer of Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian literature, I never would’ve heard of Wuthering Heights or Middlemarch. They lessened the sting of being forced to write essay after essay about the moral quandaries and hardships of men during my formative years when I could immerse myself in stories that spoke to the struggles I endured every day as a woman once class was over.
Now to say I never read another Victorian novel written by a man after graduation would be a demonstrable falsehood. I devoured everything by Thomas Hardy and loved to hate Becky Sharp in William Thackary’s Vanity Fair. I also read a number of Charles Dickens’s novels, specifically those rarely taught in high school or college classes; Little Dorrit and Bleak House remain my favorite. And while I arguably had more knowledge of the private lives of these venerated, influential authors than the average reader, most of the offenses laid against them by historians were that many of these men were racist. Really racist. Just so incredibly racist. After all, we’re talking about a period in which British Colonialism was at its peak.
But something about Charles Dickens’s racism always wounded me more than his contemporaries. Perhaps it was that I’d come to view him as a champion for the marginalized and downtrodden and expected his sympathy for the poor and unfortunate to extend to those oppressed by their race. But his support of imperialism and the Southern United States during the Civil War and his belief that native cultures were “primitive” were too egregious to overlook. I still enjoyed his intricate plots and whimsical character names, (Peggotty! Trotwood! Fezziwig!) but his belief that those who did not hold the same middle-class moral ideals as himself were inferior eventually led to a “conscious uncoupling” between Dickens and me. Except it was really just me, because Dickens was, you know, super dead.
Then, many years later, I decided to pursue a Masters Degree in English Education and chose gender equality in high school literary curriculums as my focus where I spent a great deal of time with dear old Charles Dickens as he is still as widely read in high school classrooms today as he was when I suffered my way a through Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities as a freshman and sophomore, respectively. And what I subsequently discovered about his personal life destroyed any goodwill I still had for the problematic author of so many beloved novels.
Now, I will pause here to discuss rage. Specifically, my rage. At some point between the age of twenty-two and thirty-five, (it’s a wide range, I know) I discovered that the world is unjust. It is cruel, thoughtless, and greedy. It devours, and its prey, its favorite prey, is women. I can’t say with certainty what it was that finally thrust me over the edge. Likely it was a series of seemingly insignificant ways that men seemed to keep their feet firmly planted on my neck as I struggled to rise. It also may have been the boss I had when I was a department director at the age of twenty-eight who told my male colleagues in private that he knew how to “deal with me” because he had teenage daughters. Seriously, that guy sucked so hard and had the worst mustache.
Whatever the catalyst, I got angry, and I stayed angry, specifically at men who were the absolute worst. Even Leslie Knope’s trick of counting backward from one thousand by sevens and thinking of warm brownies wasn’t enough to quell the hate-fire raging within me.
And so when I read about what Charles Dickens did to his wife of twenty-two years, I became so enraged, I turned into the Hulk. But not She-Hulk, because come on – that’s like calling someone a lady lawyer or a female doctor. My Hulkness has no gender.
Allow me to set the scene: The year was 1858 and according to Dickens, Catherine had grown old and fat, as one does when one gives birth to ten children and lives well-fed in goddamned Victorian England; although by all accounts the early years of the Dickens’ marriage were happy ones, Catherine spent most of it pregnant. Or recovering from being pregnant. And once she recovered, her horn dog husband wasted no time impregnating her again, and then had the audacity to blame Catherine for having burdened him with so many mouths to feed. To add insult to injury, he also claimed she was an alcoholic (she wasn’t), an unfit mother (nope), and belittled her housekeeping skills even though she published a book on household tasks and menus (seriously?).
In the midst of this domestic disillusionment, Dickens staged a production of The Frozen Deep with his protégé, Wilkie Collins, where he met and fell madly in lust love with Ellen Ternan, an actress. A much, much younger actress. Seriously, I cannot overstate how much younger she was than Dickens: eighteen years to his forty-five.
In Victorian England, divorce was almost unheard of and Dickens, a wildly popular public figure, was desperate to avoid spending the rest of his life as a social pariah – an almost certain fate, were he to leave Catherine and take Ellen as his mistress. Now, he could’ve accomplished this by staying with his goddamned wife, but he really, really wanted to wanted bang this actress. Dickens found himself in a bit of a pickle, and it was all the fault of his…pickle. So naturally he did what any self-respecting literary genius would do: conspired to have his wife sent to a mental asylum so that he and Ellen could smash with impunity.
Unfortunately for him (and very fortunately for Catherine), he did not count on the medical professional at Manor House Asylum in Chiswick, Dr. Thomas Harrington Tuke, refusing to commit Catherine based on the fact that there was zero evidence that she was insane. Dickens later described the dear old doctor as a “medical donkey” and a “wretched being” because haven’t you been paying attention to anything I’ve written about him here? I mean really. Oh, and in case you were wondering what happened to the ten children Catherine bore Charles, when he kicked her to the curb she was only allowed to take one with her, their son, Charles Jr. The rest remained at Dickens’s house, Tavistock House, to be raised by Georgina Hogarth, Catherine’s sister, who managed his household. Catherine’s sister.
The best (worst?) part of this whole sordid saga is that while scholars long suspected that Dickens plotted his wife’s removal to an asylum, they did not have physical proof until a cache of 98 letters from Catherine’s friend, Edward Dutton Cooke, to his friend, William May Thomas, were unearthed just this past February at Harvard University where they had been stored, but not transcribed or analyzed, providing concrete proof that Charles Dickens was a dumpster fire and all-around garbage human.
And so, in this glorious age of powerful, licentious men getting their comeuppance for their rampant oppression and abuse of women, should Charles Dickens’s novels still be venerated, still be worshipped as the pinnacle of 19th century innovation despite his heinous behavior? Should students be compelled to study his work while their teachers wax poetic about his support of children’s rights, the poor, education, and other social reforms and ignore his ghastly treatment of a woman whom he blamed for getting knocked up when he himself did the, uh, up-knocking?
The answer is…complicated.
Charles Dickens’s novels are some of the greatest ever written.
But so are those of George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Anne Evans), Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell.
And while Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are taught in almost every high school freshman and sophomore English Language Arts class in the United States, students are rarely exposed to Eliot, the Bronte sisters, and Gaskell until they take a British Literature class in college, which means the majority of students never learn of the accomplishments of these extraordinary women who did not (as far as we know) attempt to have their wives sent to Bedlam so they could bone other women half their age.
Now before you literary scholars reading this get your pantaloons in a bunch, allow me to state unequivocally that Dickens’s novels are absolutely worth studying from a historical perspective alone if not for their brilliant plot lines, endearing characters, and blistering social commentary that brought awareness to the many injustices the poor endured in Victorian England.
But like the legions of disenchanted music lovers deleting all of the Michael Jackson songs off of their iTunes playlists in light of the recent documentary on HBO detailing his sexual abuse of children, it is high time that educators confront the problematic nature of venerating a man who was a real crap sack and continuing to allow his literature to monopolize their classrooms when plenty of other worthy examples of Victorian novels exist. George Eliot couldn’t publish her novels under her real name for fear that, because they were authored by a woman in what was decidedly a man’s world, they would never reach a wide audience. It is high time to rectify that egregious slight. Why not teach The Mill on the Floss and simultaneously analyze a brilliant example of the Victorian novel while giving a female author a chance to shine in classrooms where, on average, only twenty percent of the literature taught is authored by women? Eliot’s novel, which explores coming of age, falling in love, and free will, is bound to captivate students experiencing the very same in their own adolescent lives (though not, perhaps, the botched elopement.)
Eliot not to your taste? How about Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece, Jane Eyre, which has the added benefit of facilitating discussions on the complex role of women in the nineteenth century: feminism, the Madonna/whore complex, and attic wives and the concept of mental illness. Or perhaps North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which examines themes of labor relations, the conditions of the working poor, feminine and masculine roles, and progress vs. traditionalism. The possibilities are endless! And every one of these extraordinary women are far more deserving of a place in today’s classrooms where young men and women are discovering their consciences, their voices, and their places in society than a dude with seriously dubious morals.
So the next time someone lavishes praise on Charles Dickens, even if they do acknowledge his truly terrible treatment of his long-suffering wife, recommend they read a Victorian novel written by a woman. And if you’re a student in a class where Dickens is being taught, question it! Change rarely comes about when we sit quietly and read what we are told, and it is high time for a change in today’s classrooms.
If you enjoyed this piece, please follow Jamie Thomas on Twitter @thatjamiethomas.