24 KNOWING DICKENS
may have been partially fabricated from the tissue of Dickens’s own writing;
in his letter he refers to “the feeling of utter desolation and wretchedness
which has succeeded our former correspondence.” It is clear, however, that
Dickens felt himself to be passionately in love, and that he was hurt and
humiliated by Maria’s indifference to his feeling. The letter begins with
two formal and ludicrously extended sentences which show Dickens riding
a high horse with minimal control of the reins—a very different kind of
writing from the easy, informal, verbally playful addresses to his male friends
of the time. The letter professes only generosity to Maria’s feelings, pretend-
ing that “Your own feelings will enable you to imagine far better than any
attempt of mine to describe the painful struggle it has cost me to make up
my mind to adopt the course which I now take”; insisting that he has not
“the most remote idea of hurting your feelings” by writing these lines; and
declaring a sincere and heartfelt wish for her happiness.
What the language performs, however, is quite thoroughly punitive.
Declaring that he has always “acted fairly, intelligibly and honorably,” Dick-
ens goes on to list all the mean things he has not done—and that she, by
implication, has: “I have ever acted without reserve. I have never held out
encouragement which I knew I never meant: I have never indirectly sanc-
tioned hopes which I well knew I did not intend to fulfill.” As he goes
along, Maria becomes a deliberate and calculating hypocrite, one who would
“encourage one dangler as a useful shield for—an excellent set-off against—
others more fortunate and doubtless more deserving.” The young man is not
just suffering from unrequited love; he feels he has been rooked.
The correspondence did not end here; Dickens became caught up in a
series of letters defending himself against the accusation that he made a con-
fidant of a certain Mary Ann Leigh who had somehow insinuated herself
into his relationship with Maria. The notion that he would have desecrated
the purity of his love by confiding it in this unworthy vessel arouses immense
indignation, perhaps because it was partially true: again Dickens’s feelings had
been toyed with by others, and he found it necessary to protest in force. This
rather absurd coda allows us a glimpse of Maria’s response to his initial letter,
which she had returned to Dickens with some comment about his anger.
“Even now,” he responded, “I do think it was written ‘more in sorrow than
in anger’, and to my mind—I had almost said to your better judgment—it
must appear to breathe anything but an unkind or bitter feeling” (1.25).
Unable to recognize or admit to his attack on Maria, Dickens writes three
days later with a final offer to forget the past and to reconcile: “the Love
I now tender you is as pure, and as lasting as at any period of our former
correspondence” (1.29). Having deflected his rage onto Mary Ann Leigh, he