The Irish National Caucus is deeply sorry about the death of Norman Houston, former Director of the NI Bureau in Washington, DC.
Norman was a good and dedicated diplomat and public servant.
I guess the most important thing we say about others is not what we say on their death, but what we say to them while they are living.
So, let me quote what I wrote to Norman on January 12, 2018, thanking him for the ‘safe place/ambiance’ you have fostered and made bloom at the NI Bureau— defusing controversy and tension…. A real diplomatic achievement, of which you can be proud.”
In particular, I was very grateful to Norman for the respect and solidarity he showed to Raymond McCord, Sr. He met with
with Raymond and me when the Irish national Caucus brought Raymond to Washington in May 2009,to lobby for a Congressional Hearing on the 1997 murder and cover-up of his son Raymond, Jr. We achieved the Hearing which was later held in October 2009. And he met with Raymond, Barbara Flaherty, and me on Saturday, February 15, 2020, when we brought Raymond back to Washington—after Norman had retired from the NI Bureau.
To conclude on a lighter note —as Norman, despite his professional seriousness, liked to laugh— I made a point privately and publicly of addressing him as “Ambassador” (even though he was not) on the grounds that anyone who officially represented County Fermanagh had to be an Ambassador.
He would laugh heartedly at that.
Norman always reciprocated my solidarity, writing on September 12, 2019, “Dear Father Mc Manus: Thanks for all your support over the years. You have always been a gentleman and not afraid to tell the truth.”
God rest you, Norman, and God comfort your family and loved ones.
Those of us who oppose colonialism and imperialism—and their twin-evils of racism and sectarianism—will appreciate this letter by a reader in the Irish Times of Dublin. And, it can be added, of course, sectarianism is exponentially fostered and condoned when enshrined to this moment in a State’s constitution—as in the British constitution, which in effect justifies the anti-Catholic discrimination on which Northern Ireland was founded one hundred years ago. Remember, to this day, all Orange leaders have affirmed their loyalty is not just to the British Crown but to “Protestant succession” to the English throne. Can, therefore, any rational person claim that the sectarian anti-CatholicBritish constitution has no bearing on sectarianism in Northern Ireland?—Fr. Sean McManus.
Ireland – an imperial past?
Alan Titley. Letters to Editor. Irish Ties.
Dublin. Wednesday January 6, 2021.
Sir, – Jane Ohlmeyer’s piece “Ireland has yet to come to terms with its imperial past” (Opinion & Analysis, (December 29th) was interesting insofar as it illustrated Ireland’s involvement in the British imperial project. She did not contend that this was a good or a bad thing, just that it happened. This is not in any way wondrously strange as all conquered people readily delivered up cannon fodder when demanded. Young Irishmen often fought for foreign armies, although we don’t query any longer their support for the French or the Austrian empires.The point about being implicated in the conquests of the British empire is that the Irish at home did not easily support these ventures. Nearly all (and I must be careful here as somebody might pluck up a few exceptions) of the ballads, songs and poems of the ordinary people laughed and mocked at the attempts to recruit the gullible for the slaughter of others or themselves. There are many determinedly anti-recruiting songs from Mrs McGrath to Arthur McBride by way of Johnny, I Hardly Knew You. You would search long and hard for songs of the ordinary people which glorified our participation in the British conquests.One of the more fascinating features of this entangled imperial story is how even though maybe a quarter or even a third of Wellington’s army were Irish mercenaries, many, or even most of our ballads, songs and poetry were in support of Napoleon – The Green Linnet, Welcome Napoleon to Erin, or Ráiteachas na Tairngreacht. Ditto and the same for the pointless Crimean War. While many unfortunate Irishmen were press-ganged into fighting for the British empire either physically, financially or culturally, it happened that the people at home disdained this loyalty with some passion and often with necessary humour.The salient point is that we haven’t forgotten about our participation in Britain’s imperial wars at all, as Prof Ohlmeyerseems to imply. A central plank of the Irish liberation struggles is that we didn’t wish to be part of foreign conquests anymore. We never forgot our enforced imperial participation. We remembered it all too well, hopefully with shame. We just wanted to reject it, once and for all.In a world of old empires dying and new ones being born it would be good if our rulers remembered that, now that we are members of the UN Security Council thanks to our rejection of that imperial past. – Yours, etc,
Women’s Christmas is known by many names, including the Epiphany, Three Kings’ Day, Little Christmas or the 12th Day of Christmas. January 6th was first celebrated as a feast day in the 4th century to commemorate Jesus’ introduction in human form. Here in Ireland the day is used to celebrate the women who have worked so hard to make the holiday season memorable for their families and communities.
All over the world, people celebrate some kind of festival at the end of the year. For Christians the celebration is known as Christmas it is both a sacred religious holiday and a worldwide cultural and commercial phenomenon. In Ireland, Christmas is a family affair and it is celebrated throughout the country with all of its traditions being honoured. After the traditional Christmas celebrations on the 25th, the Irish celebrate Nollaig na mBan or Women’s Christmas.
Throughout Ireland, the 6th of January is the day that all the decorations come down and are put away for another year. The old tales say it is bad luck for anything to be displayed after this date.
Epiphany is the Christian celebration of the day on which the Magi arrived with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to honour the newborn Saviour – Jesus. Epiphany is one of the oldest Christian holy days that was adopted by the Western church in the 4th century. ‘Little Christmas’ got its name because, under the Julian Calendar, Christmas day celebrations were held in January, whereas under the Gregorian calendar, Christmas day falls on December 25.
The middle of winter has long been a time of celebration around the world. Centuries before the arrival of the man called Jesus, early Europeans celebrated light and birth in the darkest days of winter. Many peoples rejoiced during the winter solstice when the worst of the winter was behind them and they could look forward to longer days and extended hours of sunlight.
Twelfth Night, which coincides with Epiphany, has been celebrated as the end of the Christmas season for centuries. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, Twelfth Night was one of the most important days in the Christian calendar. Twelfth Night parties were common where participants enjoyed food, drink, and games. A special Twelfth Night cake was always baked and was the highlight of the party, with a slice offered to all members of the household, above and below stairs
In many areas of Ireland, you will see hotels, pubs and bars filled with women and not a man to be seen. This long-standing tradition (particularly in Cork and Kerry) is when women get to celebrate the end of Christmas and the men stay at home. All over Ireland, the ladies get together with friends and family to have a celebration meal and a bit of wine and company.https://297a5cbc48830c9858886824932e84b9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Little Christmas is sometimes celebrated in areas that have strong Irish ties like Newfoundland in Canada and some US states. In the Highlands of Scotland, it is New Year’s Day, which is known as Little Christmas.https://297a5cbc48830c9858886824932e84b9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
In some areas of England, January 6th is referred to as Old Christmas Day referring to the Julian calendar. In the Isle of Man, January 1st was known as Laa Nolick in Manx (or Little Christmas) but it is also found in other parts of the world including Slovakia, Galicia and Ukraine. In Scandinavia, for example, the evening of 23 December is called Little Christmas, in Norway and Sweden Little Christmas falls on January 13th.https://297a5cbc48830c9858886824932e84b9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Some traditions around Ireland’s Women’s Christmas
Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, which is when the three wise men arrived to present their gifts to the baby Jesus on the date of January 6th.
Ireland appears to be the only country where January 6 is celebrated as Women’s Christmas. The tradition became popular as a way for women to recuperate after all the work of Christmas.
In his book The Year in Ireland: A Calendar, Kevin Danaher wrote that while Christmas Day “was marked by beef and whiskey, men’s fare”, on Women’s Christmas ” the dainties preferred by women – cake, tea, wine – were more in evidence”.
The day can be variously referred to as Little Christmas, Women’s Christmas or – especially in Cork and Kerry – Women’s Little Christmas.
January 6th has become the day that the decorations come down and are put away for another year – it is considered bad luck to keep them up after this date.
The tradition of holding a get-together with women friends may descend from the rural tradition of women raising a few turkeys, collecting eggs or creating Christmas fancies to sell off for Christmas. Historians suggest that the small earnings gained by the women selling their products would be used to buy Christmas gifts and food and any leftover monies were spent on themselves on January 6th.
On this night there is a tradition of lighting candles in every room of the house to banish the old year and bring in the new with the light.
Many hotels and restaurants have special offerings for the ladies on this day so they can get together over high tea or a gourmet dinner, relax and enjoy the company of their women friends.
Women’s Little Christmas is now being marked around the country for different reasons: it has become more a celebration of friendship and sisterhood, rather than a customary break from a long period of hard work.
A round-up of the state papers released so far in Dublin, London and Belfast in the annual release of declassified documents.
A top Irish diplomat warned of “deep British anxiety” about the IRA’s capacity to escalate its campaign of violence at the time in 1990.
“The British clearly take the view that the Provisionals can continue their campaign of violence indefinitely at the present, or even at an increased levels,” Brendan McMahon wrote in a memo to the taoiseach.
Mr McMahon said the Tories had “privately” emphasised during a meeting in London how “shaken” they had been by the IRA assassination of Tory MP (and notorious warmonger) Ian Gow in July of that year.
The RUC police chief at the time, Hugh Annesley, had also warned that “5,000 troops could be swallowed up in any one area of the Border”.
McMahon said that from his contacts he suspected the British realised the IRA could “bring down any new political structures in the North which exclude them”.The Dublin government refused to assist the wrongly convicted Birmingham Six when they appealed against their convictions in 1990 for fear of “embarrassment,” according to newly declassified state files.The documents prove that the concern of the Fianna Fáil government throughout the Birmingham Six appeal was for its own potential embarrassment, rather than the welfare of its wrongly convicted citizens.Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, John Walker, Hugh Callaghan, Richard McIlkenny and Billy Power served 17 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of involvement in IRA attacks in Birmingham, England in 1974.Their lawyer, Gareth Peirce, found evidence proving their innocence. An appeal against conviction was launched and she asked the Dublin government to fund their bail to which they were entitled, but they refused.Ms Peirce made the request in late 1990, just months before the men walked free from prison after their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in London.The papers reveal that the “embarrassment” which Dublin feared included the possibility of a refusal of the British government to accept Dublin’s bail guarantee; as well as the possible failure of the men’s appeal against conviction, despite the new evidence.
US president-elect Joe Biden argued in the US Senate 30 years ago for the release of the Birmingham Six.
Newly released files include a Department of Foreign Affairs briefing about political manoeuvring on Capitol Hill in support of the jailed Irishmen.
A year before they were eventually freed, after 16 years in prison for a crime they did not commit, Massachusetts representative Brian Donnelly tabled a motion in Congress demanding their release.
The January 1990 motion called for quashing of convictions of the six, and for then US president George Bush Snr to raise the case with then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
The motion, tabled days after Donnelly visited Hill in prison, had 109 co-sponsors, the Department of Foreign Affairs memo notes.
“It is understood the British embassy has actively lobbied against the motion,” it noted.
The newly declassified file states that then senator Joseph Biden, as second ranking Democrat in the Senate Foreign Relations committee, “introduced a broadly similar motion in the Senate on March 9”.The UVF insisted that the UDA be excluded from a proposal to forge peace talks between loyalists and the IRA, state papers have revealed.The papers recount an attempt by two chaplains inside Long Kesh to persuade both sides of the sectarian conflict to engage in talks began in July 1988 with separate engagements with the leaderships of the UVF and IRA.The loyalist grouping claimed its rival, the UDA would derail the process due to the fact it was “corrupt and riddled with informers”, the 1990 Irish government communique reported.
US Congressmen raised concerns in 1997 about the case of three Belfast men sentenced to life imprisonment for the IRA killing of two British soldiers.
A British memo noted that Congressman Ben Gilman and two other Congressmen, Peter King and James Walsh, had raised concerns about the men’s case with the head of the British government in Ireland.
In March 1988, mourners responded angrily to the incursion into a republican funeral in west Belfast by two plain clothes British soldiers. The men were taken from their car and subsequently executed by the Provisional IRA.
Some mourners faced prosecution on very serious charges despite having no involvement in the IRA action.
The prosecutions amounted to one of the most intensive police and legal operations ever mounted in Britain or Ireland, with a large team of detectives and huge resources devoted to the inquiry.
Three men were handed life sentences despite taking no part in the killings and were not even present when it happened. The convictions were widely seen internationally as an attempt to inflict community punishment on republican west Belfast.
In a note to Congressman Gilman, dated January 10, 1997, the congressmen were told that their representations would be taken into account by the Life Sentence Review Board. However, the men were subsequently released under the Good Friday Agreement.Then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher launched a bitter attack on Ireland’s Supreme Court during a private meeting with Taoiseach Charlie Haughey, weeks after it refused to extradite two IRA Volunteers who had escaped from Long Kesh prison in the North.“Your Supreme Court is really something,” she complained to Haughey, during a tetchy encounter in a drawing room in 10 Downing Street in April 1990, newly declassified files disclose.“Really, your Supreme Court is something!” she repeated. “These are not political offences. They are criminal acts.”Some weeks before, Dermot Finucane and James Pius Clarke, who were among 38 prisoners who escaped from Long Kesh in 1983, were released by a court in Dublin after Ireland’s highest court upheld their appeals against extradition.Both had been serving 18-year sentences. The Supreme Court cited “the probable risk” that the pair would be attacked in prison in the North.
One 1997 file of more than a thousand pages released at the Public Record Office in Belfast deals solely with a strategic plan to “re-image” the old Stormont parliament to appeal to Catholics and young people.
The documents reveal not only that new Prime Minister Tony Blair was heavily involved in the plan, but that it was given an exceptionally high priority in order to alter its “perception as a symbol of unionist domination”.
The effort came as Sinn Féin continued to insist on “no return to Stormont” in talks and alternatives to devolution, such as Joint Authority by London and Dublin, were being discussed.
But British plans were well advanced to rebrand the notorious site in the eyes of nationalists. Plans involved “controlled access to public areas by tourists and schoolchildren”, functions for visiting VIPs, charities, and public bodies, and a “carefully-designed permanent historical exhibition”.
In the grounds, classical and popular musical events were planned to include an Elton John concert and the hosting of international cricket matches, both of which subsequently went ahead.Proposals to mark the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine with an ecumenical service in Liverpool to coincide with President Mary Robinson’s first visit to Britain were vetoed in 1996 by British Prime Minister John Major.Newly-released files show the service had been considered for several years. The possibility of a British event to mark the Famine was first raised by British officials in 1994.One felt warned that such a service could “stir up more emotion than it spent”, while a colleague wrote that “it would be necessary to strike a balance”.In a heavily-censored memo in 1996, senior official Peter Bell informed colleagues that he regarded the proposal with “dismay”. He wrote that by hosting such a service, the British government risked “perpetuating the Republican view of Irish history that the great problem is Britain’s relationship with Ireland whereas, in fact, it is the relations between the two communities within Northern Ireland”.Bell’s concerns were shared by the then British foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, who feared “provoking recriminations against Britain from Irish Nationalists”.The final decision to veto the event by Mr Major followed the breakdown of the peace process in February 1996.
Files on dozens of republicans who were interned shortly before, or during, the Second World War have been declassified after more than 80 years.
The first file, dated December 22, 1938, includes details of 34 men interned by Stormont home affairs minister Dawson Bates, a founder of the original UVF.
The files reveal the internees’ names, addresses, occupations and ‘suspected rank’ in the IRA, including Frank McGrogan of North Queen Street in north Belfast, a window-cleaner and listed as ‘Officer, G Company, Belfast Battalion’.
The internees’ occupations range from labourers to clerks and electricians. Among those interned were several veterans of the War of Independence.
Joseph Cullen of Rockmore Road in west Belfast, was listed as President of the Old IRA Association.
John (Sean) McNally of Ardilea Street in the city – later a Nationalist Party Senator at Stormont and secretary of the Anti-Partition League in the 1950s – is described as a principal leader in the IRA.
The internment orders were issued under the notorious 1922 Special Powers Act.
The files also show that 45 people were later arrested following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939.
Among those arrested was Jimmy Drumm, the future husband of leading Belfast republican, Maire Drumm, who was killed by the UDA in Belfast’s Mater Hospital in 1976; veteran Derry republican, Neil Gillespie, and Portaferry journalist Liam MacReachtain.
A total of 827 internment orders were made during World War Two. Most internees were released in July 1945 following the end of the war in Europe in May.Britain complained that the 26 County authorities were being “too pernickety” about British Army and RAF incursions into Dublin;s jurisdiction.A September 1990 exchange, which has been released after 30 years, revealed British petulance that the Irish authorities complained about “every” incursion.The official said there had “always been a feeling on the part of the northern authorities that we should not be too pernickety about incursions”.The Irish official noted that they felt a need to explain to their British counterpart why they raised concerns about each incident. A number of reasons were outlined, including the potential risk of attack on British Crown forces while they were in the South.“Furthermore, if we did not protest all incursions we ran the risk that the Northern security forces would take it that we are willing to tolerate at least some incursions,” the official said.
The Orange Order suggested in 1996 that a new commission intended to rule on contentious marches in the north Ireland should be used to reroute traffic outside Gaelic sports events in order “to redress the balance”.
The apparently serious proposal was intended to address complaints that the new Parades Commission would concentrate on the Protestant marching season and other unionist events, and fail to limit activities by nationalists.* A further review of state papers will be published in our next regular edition on Friday, 8 January.
Dickens’s obsession with prisons appeared in his first novel and continued to haunt him through the years.Photograph from Alamy
In February of 1824, Charles Dickens watched in anguish as his father was arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison, just south of the Thames, in London. “I really believed at the time,” Dickens told his friend and biographer, John Forster, “that they had broken my heart.” Soon, Dickens’s mother and his younger siblings joined the father at Marshalsea, while a resentful Dickens earned money at a blacking factory, labelling pots of polish for shoes and boots. Although his father would be released within months, Dickens would never fully outrun the memory of his family’s incarceration. In her 2011 biography, Claire Tomalin notes that, in adulthood, Dickens became “an obsessive visitor of prisons.” In the autobiographical essay, “Night Walks,” he describes halting in the shadows of Newgate Prison, “touching its rough stone” and lingering “by that wicked little Debtors’ Door – shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw.” While touring America as a famous author, he made sure to go and see the prisons in Boston, New York, and Baltimore, among others.
Dickens’s obsession appeared in his first novel, “The Pickwick Papers,” and would continue to haunt his imagination through the years. In “Great Expectations,” the provincial hero Pip visits Newgate and thinks “how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime . . . starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.” Newgate isn’t just the setting of Pip’s queasy tour. It waits to enclose Fagin at the end of “Oliver Twist,” and, in “Barnaby Rudge,” the historical novel about the Gordon Riots of 1780, a mob breaks into the prison and burns it down. “A Tale of Two Cities” begins with the return of a Bastille prisoner to his family, and ends in La Force, where the French revolutionaries hold those condemned to die by guillotine. And “Little Dorrit,” which was serialized between 1855 and 1857, is set in the Marshalsea, an imagined return to the place where Dickens’s father was kept from him.
“Little Dorrit” is Dickens’s most harrowing prison novel, a plangent study of the costs of confinement. The Dorrits, like the Dickenses, are released when someone else pays their debts, but Dickens shows how Little Dorrit, who was born in the Marshalsea, has trouble distinguishing freedom from captivity. The Dorrits stamp their return to respectability with an ostentatious tour of Italy, but Little Dorrit can’t accept the truth of her liberty. She moves from one ornate lodging to the next, all passing before her vision as a procession of “unrealities.” She muses cynically on the similarities between prisoners and tourists: “They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner.” From the balcony of her Venice apartment, she looks down over the dark water as if “it might run dry, and show her the prison again, and herself, and the old room, and the old inmates, and the old visitors: all lasting realities that had never changed.”2020 in Review
Flinging open a door, Dickens suggests, isn’t always enough to free someone. In fact, the prison is even more prevalent in his work as a metaphor than it is as a setting. Coketown, the fictional industrial locale of “Hard Times,” is a place “where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in.” “A Tale of Two Cities” is packed with actual prisons, but even the novel’s bank, Tellson’s, is described as a dank oubliette. There are iron bars and a perpetual “dismal twilight,” and when a young man goes to work there, “they hid him somewhere till he was old.” Dickens, influenced by his days in the blacking factory, passionately exposed how employers entrap their workers, but he also sprinkled his prison-yard dust over his characters’ homes. In “Great Expectations,” Miss Havisham’s “dismal” dwelling, Satis House, has all the key features: “Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred.”
As anyone in quarantine can tell you, a metaphoric prison needs a metaphoric prisoner. Dickens understood the ease with which we can become locked inside our own lives, whether through habit, circumstance, injustice, or the ever-tightening circuit of our obsessions. Several of his most memorable characters are in some way arrested. Miss Havisham, unable to forget being jilted at the altar, idles in her ruined mansion. (On meeting Pip, she asks: “You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?”) Then there’s Mrs. Clennam, from “Little Dorrit,” who, sitting in the standard-issue Gothic gloom, constantly broods on the past. Of these people, whose plight might seem familiar to us, Dickens writes: “To stop the clock of busy existence, at the hour when we were personally sequestered from it; to suppose mankind stricken motionless, when we were brought to a stand-still [. . .] is the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses.”VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERYo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax Discuss the Optimism in Beethoven’s Work
For Dickens, imprisonment wasn’t just a stain on society; it was an aspect of the self. His flamboyant character names suggest that personality itself is a kind of cage. There is the unyielding Mr. Gradgrind, the foolish Mr. Bumble, and the miserly “Scrooge,” whose name is drawn from “screw” and “gouge,” both alluding to ruthless financial practices. Scrooge, who is “grasping” in his pursuit of money, is trapped by his own fixations—“secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster”—and Dickens makes clear that we all share something of his padlocked heart. Early in “A Tale of Two Cities,” he meditates on how distant and unknowable we are to one another. He imagines a “great city” at night, but instead of touring its prisons he asks us to consider that “every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”
Dickens’s plots often depend on these secrets, which are variously withheld, traded, and revealed as the stories unfold. But they provide more than melodrama. The Dickensian secret, shut fast inside his characters’ chests, emphasizes our inherent separation from one another. There are, he proposes, always high walls between us.
This claustrophobic vision of selfhood is mirrored in Dickens’s broader social commentary. Although he wrote in the Victorian age, which saw the rise of advanced networks of communication and, via new railways, the improved circulation of people and goods, Dickens understood how the grand modernizing drive produced new kinds of imprisonment. Industrialization captured swaths of the population in repetitive factory work. The widening of London roads displaced the poor. Many of them lived in cramped, plagued slums like those in “Bleak House,” where “nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses, shut up and silent.”
All around him, Dickens saw sequestered lives, despite the liberating myth of progress. He placed much of the blame on the state, whose institutions, he felt, stifled citizens with bureaucracy. “Bleak House” is again a fine example, as it satirizes a legal system that pins people beneath its sluggish machinery. The novel’s central lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, has lasted for decades, and potential beneficiaries are born and die before it is resolved in the Court of Chancery. Old Miss Flite, who believes that she has a stake in the case, keeps birds caged in her room, to be released when judgment finally comes. She refers to both the birds and the claimants of Jarndyce when she says: “Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free!” Such confinements cause a sickness both spiritual and literal; multiple characters contract an unnamed contagion resembling smallpox. In Dickens’s choked society, only disease circulates freely.
In 2019, a trove of letters from Edward Dutton Cook, a confidant of Dickens’s wife, Catherine, made the news. In one of the letters, Cook contends that Dickens resented Catherine for losing her looks, and that “he even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!” It had long been known that Dickens was an unkind husband, even a cruel one, but the letters recast the author as a sinister would-be jailer. How could the man who dramatized so many injustices of his era—the atrocious conditions of workers, the marriage market’s harm to women’s lives, the moral hypocrisy of the establishment—be so brutal in his relationships? He was clearly attuned to the terrors of imprisonment. In an early nonfiction sketch, “A Visit to Newgate,” Dickens tenderly imagines the dream of a prisoner condemned to die the next morning. “The night is dark and cold,” he writes, “the gates have been left open, and in an instant he is in the street, flying from the scene of imprisonment like the wind.”
There’s an echo of the author himself in these lines. On the page, Dickens accessed empathy in a way he couldn’t in life. Writing fiction liberated him financially, but it also offered him an escape from the prison of his personality. He became, in the production of his works, hundreds of people. And yet, just like Little Dorrit, his imagination spent its liberty by continually flying back inside the penitentiary walls. If Dickens’s ghost is now in handcuffs, the novels themselves, for the expansiveness and seriousness of their moral vision, can be cleared of their author’s crimes. The best art is the wiliest of escape artists. Mysteriously forging its own keys, it frees itself, and flies.
