Dickens and sexuality is a relatively recent conceptual combination. For many years the sex in Dickens’s own life and in his
fiction and journalism was disavowed in a widespread sanitising of his public image neatly symbolised by the use of Dickens
and Catherine’s bedroom at their house in Broadstairs for a display of Victorian christening gowns.
1 A timeline of scholarly and popular perceptions of Dickens’s presentation of the erotic presents a pronounced, magnified
form of the broader critical trajectory of thinking about the Victorians and sex. Shortly after Dickens’s death, Wilkie Collins
voiced his dissent to the already powerful image of Dickensian piety, repudiating the idea, still propounded to some extent
today, that Dickens’s fiction entirely avoids discussion of adult sexuality. Collins responded angrily in the margins of his
copy of John Forster’s influential biography of Dickens to Forster’s statement that there is scarcely a page of Dickens’s
work that ‘might not be put into the hand of a child’:
If it is true, which it is not, it would imply the condemnation of Dickens’s books as works of art, it would declare him to
be guilty of deliberately presenting to his readers a false reflection of human life. If this wretched English claptrap means
anything it means the novelist is forbidden to touch on the sexual relations which literally swarm about him, and influence
the lives of millions of his fellow creatures [, restricting fiction to] those relations licensed by … the ceremony called
marriage.
2
Despite Collins’s resistance to this view, and Dickens’s own earlier lambasting of the pompous hypocrisy of Podsnap’s constant
question ‘would it bring a blush into the cheek of a young person?’ (
Our Mutual Friend, ch. 11), the idea of Dickensian prudery maintained its currency for at least the next century. In a series of articles in
the Book Monthly exploring the question ‘Why is Dickens so abidingly and powerfully Popular?’ in the run up to the fiftieth anniversary of
his death, Marie Corelli provided this answer: ‘Why? Because he is sane, pure and wholesome. Because
he never soiled the pen with degrading “sex problems”’ (February 1920). By the time of Dickens’s centenary it was possible
for Pamela Hansford Johnson to write: ‘It is due, perhaps in part, to Dickens that so many people believe that the Victorians
were totally ignorant about the by-ways of sexual behaviour.’
3Such insistences were somewhat challenged by a growing awareness of Dickens’s own sexual behaviour; his cruel treatment of
his wife, erecting a partition down the centre of their bedroom before very publicly separating from her in 1858, rumours
of the propriety of his relationship with his surviving sister-in-law, who remained with him after this separation up until
his death, and his affair with actress Ellen Ternan, twenty-seven years his junior. There was public outrage when accounts
of their relationship first emerged in the 1930s, after a remarkable cover-up operation by Dickens, Ellen, their circles,
including Dickens’s closest friend and first biographer John Forster, and many Dickensians since, determined, as Claire Tomalin
has shown in her brilliant account, ‘to maintain the version of Dickens they regard as acceptable, even – as in Forster’s
case – when they knew it to be untrue’.
4 In a 2008 Channel 4 documentary,
Dickens’s Secret Lover, the shock of this scandal was likened to ‘finding Father Christmas had been to a brothel’. At the Charles Dickens Museum
in London, the centre for Dickens heritage in the United Kingdom, a label explaining Ellen’s probable romantic connection
to the author was finally attached to a previously unnamed (apparently unnameable) portrait in 2003.
This unquestionably important aspect of the author’s biography did not do much, though, to dispel Dickens’s association with
a repressive hypothesis of the Victorians as a people who hypocritically put their passions (and, apocryphally, table legs)
under wraps, for them to break out in a hydraulic model of uncontained, aberrant desire. This version of the epoch is most
fully elaborated in Steven Marcus’s
The Other Victorians, a survey of what he saw as the dark sexual underworld of this culture as revealed by the (now regarded as unrepresentative)
medical writings of William Acton and the thriving trade in pornography. Though Dickens’s repeated appearances in this book
are mainly as a point of contrast to the pornographic materials covered – with the exception of Major Bagstock in
Dombey and Son, who illustrates the explicitness with which Dickens sometimes approached sexual content – Marcus places his Dickensian credentials
as central to the genesis of the book: ‘It did not take a dialectician’s cunning to make out that Dickens plus Freud might
conceivably add up to an interest in writings about sex and sexuality
in mid-nineteenth-century England.’
5 This model informed early psychoanalytic readings such as Arthur Washburn Brown’s
Sexual Analysis of Dickens’s Props (1971), which includes chapters entitled ‘A Hundred Thousand Games: Why Cribbage Represents Sexual Intercourse’ and ‘The
Oldest Lettuce: Erotic Umbrellas and Sexually Suggestive Food’ and directed critical attention to the presence of ‘a great
deal more sadism and related perversities in Dickens than we might suppose … Healthy sexuality is not dramatised or is mentioned
only to be condemned, whereas perverse sexuality is extensively dramatised’.
6 Hansford Johnson similarly argued that ‘the sexual by-way most persistently, if tentatively, explored in the novels is sadism’,
seeing almost all of Dickens’s positively represented couples as ‘beyond coupling’.
7Since Foucault’s momentous work on the socially constructed nature of sexuality and the shared fascination in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century western culture with the rendering of sex in respectable and popular as well as obscene discourse, more
moderate accounts have been able to emerge. Most significantly, Michael Mason and Matthew Sweet have explored the modern investments
at stake in our favourite rendering of the prudish Victorians, with Mason offering a nuanced historical account of what he
sees as a general ‘anti-sensualism’ in the period, attributable not primarily, as we might expect, to the rise in evangelicalism,
but to a range of secular impulses including a reaction against Regency debauchery and the far-reaching influences of Malthus’s
theory of overpopulation. Through ‘widespread discussions of the birthrate, deathrate, life expectancy and fertility in the
statistical forays of the century’ and ‘urgent controversies over public health, housing, birth control, and prostitution’,
sex was hardly silenced, but rather, as Jeffrey Weeks puts it, ‘sexuality became a major social issue in Victorian social
and political practice’.
8Though never unchallenged, this was a period, as feminist scholars have shown, that enshrined a sexual double standard, apparent
in legislation such as the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which required the exacerbation of adultery by other offences in
a husband while adultery alone was sufficient infringement by a wife, and the notorious Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s,
which aimed to deal with rife venereal disease in the armed forces by the forcible medical examination of women prostitutes
in garrison towns. Dickens was involved with philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts in the establishment of a ‘Home for Homeless
Women’ that admitted prostitutes as well as petty criminals and destitute women on the condition that after a period of reformation
they would emigrate as Em’ly and Martha do at the end of
David Copperfield. Such a venture
demonstrates Dickens’s often complex response to contemporary sexual attitudes. He was attentive and sympathetic to the personal
histories of such women, treating them as, to an extent, redeemable individuals, but he did not envisage a space for them
in British society. More emphatically he campaigned against the stigma surrounding illegitimacy throughout his career, presenting
moving arguments against a dominant model of inherited sin through characters such as Oliver Twist and
Bleak House’s Esther Summerson.
Dickens’s family audience and the respectability of English, in comparison to continental, literature are given as reasons
why the Victorian explosion of sexual discourse does not more explicitly enter his work. Readers have long been alert to the
possibilities offered by coded expressions, literary borrowings and significant silence. Contemporary reviewers pointed to
the erotic work performed by food in Dickens’s novels, but recent criticism has exposed important strategies of sexual representation.
Joss Lutz Marsh, for example, makes a convincing case for Dickens’s borrowings from John Cleland’s pornographic novella
Fanny Hill, showing him to be part of a circle with interests in obscenity, while William Cohen provides a persuasive reading of the
autoerotic and homoerotic dynamics of
Great Expectations. Cohen’s reading caused consternation in the British literary press, provoking this health warning in the
Observer: ‘Early risers reading this over tea and toast be warned – the next sentence may make you choke. Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations is a masturbatory fantasy.’
9 Recent developments in gender and queer theory and approaches to the history of sexuality have shown that the sexual, particularly
same-sex desire, that we might most expect to find presented as aberrant in a period that legislated against intercourse between
men, does not always register as stifled deviance, but rather can appear as perfectly consonant with the major Victorian institutions
of marriage and domesticity. Sharon Marcus’s important book,
Between Women, follows a recent turn in queer theory in which queer is no longer equated with subversion and the antisocial, to show how
overt sexual relations between women and relationships described as ‘female marriages’ were part of respectable Victorian
culture. Rather than reading for the repressed, marginal and invisible, Marcus looks for what is presented quite blatantly
on the texts’ surfaces, and yet has been critically overlooked, to reveal the critical purloined letters of Victorian literature
and culture.
Marcus’s chapter on
Great Expectations, however, which persuasively records the often explicitly homoerotic elements in the relationship between Miss Havisham and
Estella by demonstrating its resonance with
popular contemporary tales of the treatment and abuse of dolls, is more with the grain of previous sexual readings of Dickens.
Little Dorrit’s Miss Wade has, for example, for some decades been recognised as Dickens’s most legible lesbian precisely because the sadomasochistic
elements of her relationship with Tattycoram are legible in their negative kinkiness
as sexual. This is registered in Mr Meagles’s dark interpretation of Miss Wade’s character: ‘If it should happen that you are
a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough
to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself’ (ch. 27). Indeed, readings that perceive
positive representations of same-sex intimacy as ‘much less tinged with the sexual’ than bonds expressed through persecution
and violence have been the dominant approach to Dickens since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational queer interpretation of
Our Mutual Friend: ‘Imagery of the sphincter, the girdle, the embrace, the ‘iron ring’ of the male grasp, was salient in those murderous attacks
on men by Bradley Headstone. By contrast it is absent from the tenderer love between Eugene and Mortimer. They live together
like Bert and Ernie of
Sesame Street – and who ever wonders what muppets do in bed?’
10 Important and influential as this reading has been, it shares certain key assumptions with earlier criticism that noted the
absence of ‘healthy’ opposite-sex coupling in Dickens and focussed on forms of ‘perverse’ heterosexuality, notably sadism.
This similarity in approach demonstrates the way that criticism of Victorian fiction, and of Dickens in particular, is locked
into its own ‘repressive hypothesis’ in which only the apparently aberrant appears as sexual. Efforts, then, positively to
represent physical desire and intimacy have become some of the most stubbornly purloined letters of this literature. Yet alongside
the undeniable sadism exerted in selected same- and opposite-sex relationships in Dickens’s fiction, there is also a clear
commitment to positive representations of eroticism.
Dickens’s many nursing romances provide just one instance of this. Drawing on a long literary tradition in which nursing is
eroticised, including, for example, Lawrence’s Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy, a work that Dickens enjoyed, and contemporary anxieties about intimate contact between practitioner and patient, Dickens
uses nursing scenes to convey a tender physical intimacy, often with a sexual component.
11 This is the case with the Marchioness’s care of Dick Swiveller in
The Old Curiosity Shop and Little Dorrit’s treatment of Arthur Clennam, both of which operate as a prelude to marriage, and with the mutual ministrations
of Mark Tapley and Martin Chuzzlewit, and with Herbert’s healing of Pip
in
Great Expectations.
12 Such encounters may also ask us to productively rethink what counts as the sexual, eschewing a narrow genital model in favour
of a wider spectrum of tactile and emotional intimacy. The many spaces for the frank celebration of same-sex contact in the
work of this eminently respectable author point to the degree of latitude experienced prior to the medico-legal classification
of a range of ‘perversions’ by
fin de siècle sexologists. Most notable of these was the new opposition of homo- sexuality and heterosexuality, categories which did not
simply denote sexual behaviour but were perceived as central to each individual’s identity.
Indeed, Dickens’s positive representations of sexuality have fallen beneath a post-sexological and post-Freudian critical
radar set to detect heterosexual coupling and/or ‘deviant’ desires. As Karen Chase and Michael Levenson have shown, the isolated
marital couple is a cause of narrative horror in Dickens’s fiction: ‘More than a marriage, it is a
household that Dickens’s novels come to seek, and the conditions of the flourishing household require at least three, at least that
additional one, to break the close-circuit of romantic love.’
13 This fiction regularly articulates male and female heterosexual aversion, in, for example, Mr Pickwick’s cold sweats when
propositioned by the many maritally inclined ladies of that novel, or Georgiana Podsnap’s desire to murder her dancing partner
rather than become courted in
Our Mutual Friend. In contrast, Dickens’s work celebrates single status, most notably in the congenital bachelorhood of Mr Lorry in
A Tale of Two Cities: ‘You were a bachelor in your cradle’ (ch. 18). The marriages that do occur often dramatise the significance of bonds beyond
that of the nuptial couple, displacing, as was common in the Victorian period, marriage and heterosexuality as the predominant
motivators of family formation. The neatest example of this is John Westlock’s marriage to Ruth Pinch, the physically and
temperamentally similar sister of his closest male friend, Tom, in
Martin Chuzzlewit. The participation of Tom is the predominant theme in John’s proposal: ‘Leave Tom! That would be a strange beginning. Leave
Tom, dear! If Tom and we be not inseparable, and Tom (God bless him) have not all honour and all love in our home, my little
wife, may that home never be!’ (ch. 53). This marriage ensures that the trio can cohabit in an aptly configured domestic unit
complete with ‘triangular parlour and … two small bed-rooms’ (ch. 39). Such a configuration, with its heteroerotic, homoerotic
and incestuous components, suggests the deep complexity of sexual representation in Dickens’s novels, which, as in this example,
regularly reject a distinction between the normative and deviant, instead celebrating a whole plethora of erotic attachments.
Dickens’s work, then, has much to
teach us in our stricter compartmentalising and evaluating of the sexual, about the surprising fluidity and
respectability of diverse forms of mid-Victorian sexuality.