Dickens and Bohemia

I'm looking again through Barzun's book, FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE.

Today's index-driven idleness takes us to a discussion of the sexual mores of Victorian England (pp. 575 - 577.)

While certain strata of society sought to retain "respectability," -- those in business, politics, the professions -- other strata, specifically artists and literary folk, created Bohemia in the middle of the 19th century. "It afforded cheap living, enforced no moral code, allowed modes of dress as singular as desired, and required no sustained solvency." Though first established in the Latin Quarter in Paris -- as two operas tell us -- Bohemia spontaneously developed branches.

Yet when a man of letters becomes as prominent as Dickens, he is by definition not a Bohemian, and the Victorians' attitudes toward his personal life, his "indiscretions," were ambiguous.

In 1857, after all, Dickens was much smitten by the actress Ellen Ternan. Rumors of adultery began to circulate. Dickens was sufficiently concerned with respectability that he felt it necessary to deny this emphatically, and against advice he put out a press release and published a statement in his own paper doing so. Later, as Barzun phrases it, "the young woman did become his mistress -- without his advertising the news -- but both felt guilty ever after."

These matters, scandalous though they were, did nothing to reduce the admiration in which Dickens was held by his public. Barzun cites them -- and other incidents in high-profile sexual mores in what he calls a "motley of arrangements and outcomes," as evidence of the waning of Romanticism, and the approach of "the low spirits, a resigned acceptance of the second best, that belong to the mood of Realism."