Of Charles Dickens’s many archetypal creations perhaps none has exercised a more persistent fascination than Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. She has become, in Angus Calder’s memorable formulation, “as much part of the permanent furniture of the public and private rooms of the Western mind as Ulysses and Sinbad”.

Much discussion has arisen over Miss Havisham’s genesis. The numerous sources proposed – including, most frequently, a theatrical skit by Charles Mathews, articles in Household Words and The Household Narrative of Current Events, and Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White – have been ably surveyed by both Peter Ackroyd and Harry Stone. Although a good case can be made for Miss Havisham’s evolution from a mix of these sources, none of them contains anything like the intense psychological dynamic that develops between Miss Havisham and Estella. One work in which Dickens might have found the germ of that dynamic is Disraeli’s seventh novel, Venetia (1837), a thinly disguised fictionalization of various episodes in the lives of Byron and Shelley.

Venetia rearranges the biographical elements in a way that Disraeli evidently felt would enhance the dramatic possibilities of his story. Byron (who figures as Cadurcis) thus becomes a generation younger than Shelley and falls in love, while still a boy, with Venetia, Shelley’s daughter – who corresponds to Byron’s actual daughter Ada and whose mother (Lady Annabel) corresponds to the estranged Lady Byron. That Disraeli is writing about Byron, in whom he had been keenly interested since his youth, is announced in the lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage printed on the title page:

“Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child?”
“The child of love, though born in bitterness,
And nurtured in convulsion.”

As for Shelley, Disraeli had become interested in The Cenci on the eve of his departure for Spain in 1830, and, as Richard Garnett has shown, in The Revolutionary Epick he owed much to “Queen Mab”, “Alastor”, “The Revolt of Islam” and Prometheus Unbound.

While at work on Venetia early in 1837, Disraeli spent several weeks discussing the project with Lady Blessington, whose Conversations of Lord Byron had been published three years earlier. “I do not think”, Disraeli later wrote to her, “that you will find any golden hint of our musing strolls has been thrown away upon me.” He must also have learned something of both Byron and Shelley from E. J. Trelawny, whom he met in the summer of 1836, and of course “Tita”, Byron’s gondolier, whom Disraeli had brought back to the family house at Bradenham. Prominent among his printed sources, as Herbert Bruce Hamilton and R. A. Duerksen have shown, were Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), Thomas Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron (1824) and Medwin’s Shelley Papers (1833).

From all of these works Disraeli took phrases as well as facts and ideas. But perhaps the most important was Moore’s Byron. The essential facts about Byron’s career – and especially his childhood – were given by Moore, and Disraeli followed him assiduously. Some readers of Venetia, for instance, may have wondered at the name “Herbert” for Shelley and “Cherbury” for the country house to which Venetia and her mother have retired at the beginning of the novel; Moore, remarking that Byron and his mother spent the summer vacation of 1804 at Southwell, gives us the answer:

"The gentleman, from whom the house where they resided was rented, possesses a library of some extent, which the young poet, he says, ransacked with much eagerness on his first coming to Southwell; and one of the books that most particularly engaged and interested him was, as may be easily believed, the life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury."

It is typical of the mixing up of biographical details in Venetia that Disraeli should have taken his fictional name for Shelley from a Cavalier poet admired by the young Byron.

As has often been remarked, the best part of Venetia is the description of Cadurcis’s miserable childhood in the first book. The emotional trials of a sensitive child were a subject that Disraeli had tackled before, but he was never to handle it better than in Venetia. The rows between Cadurcis and his mother described in Chapters Six and Thirteen of Book One were entirely the author’s own invention – but they were based on an attentive and imaginative reading of Moore. Marmion Herbert (Disraeli’s version of Shelley) does not enter the action until Book Five, but in Book Two Venetia discovers a protrait of him which her mother, Lady Annabel, has kept locked away at Cherbury. Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron provided the source for this incident:

“I am told [said Byron] that Ada is a little termagant; I hope not. I hear that my name is not mentioned in her presence; that a green curtain is always kept over my portrait, as over something forbidden; and that she is not to know that she has a father, till she comes of age. Of course she will be taught to hate me; she will be brought up to it.”

This – even down to the colour of the curtain – exactly fits Venetia’s situation. The description of the portrait itself Disraeli takes from Shelley’s own words, in a fragment entitled “The Coliseum”, reproduced in Medwin’s Shelley Papers with the note, “There never was drawn a more perfect portrait of Shelley himself”. When Herbert finally appears towards the end of the novel, he engages Cadurcis in some literary and philosophical conversations for which Medwin’s Shelley Papers was again the source – though Disraeli, as elsewhere, adds much animation.

By attending so scrupulously to Moore and Medwin, Disraeli was trying to ensure a note of authenticity – yet it is largely an authenticity of externals. The only character who is portrayed both movingly and in depth is the young Cadurcis. Herbert, when he finally appears, is a placid and worn-out version of Shelley, whose virtues are so conspicuous that the reader’s misgivings about Lady Annabel are confirmed. The monster that her insistence on a separation has led us to expect turns out to be nothing of the sort, with the result that what we had earlier taken as her discretion, integrity and good sense are revealed as priggishness. As the Countess Guiccioli remarked, “It is questionable whether the virtues and qualities which adorn Lady Annabel are compatible with the defects of her nature”.

Had Disraeli really wished to explore Shelley’s character he would have presented him in his prime and not as a fading radical. Cadurcis is a much better-realized figure, almost certainly closer to Byron than Herbert is to Shelley. The tranquil and affectionate scenes at Cherbury, where the young Venetia and Cadurcis become childhood friends, contrast, with an almost Brontëan pointedness, with the grim domestic situation at Cadurcis Abbey. But after Cadurcis grows up and goes to London he becomes a far less definite figure, and the interest shifts from character to incident. We thus have a series of events which roughly parallel the more conspicuous aspects of Byron’s career: the affair with Lady Monteagle (Lady Caroline Lamb), the duel with her husband, and – evoking some of the reasons for Byron’s disenchantment with England – the scene in which Cadurcis is attacked by a mob outside the House of Lords. What has already been said of Lady Annabel, however, brings us back to Miss Havisham and Estella.

Throughout 1836, Disraeli and Dickens, both young men of dandiacal habits, were making their way in the small world of literary and social London. They had numerous opportunities of meeting – at William Harrison Ainsworth’s home and at Gore House, where Lady Blessington and the Count D’Orsay established their famous salon, if not elsewhere – though they clearly did not develop a close friendship. But they had friends in common, among them Bulwer Lytton, the artist Daniel Maclise, D’Orsay, Lady Blessington and the publisher John Macrone. Indeed, it was Macrone who, in 1836, published both Sketches by “Boz” and Disraeli’s Letters of Runnymede. At a time when memories of Byron and Shelley were still strong, it seems incredible that Dickens should not have had a look at Venetia shortly after it appeared in May 1837. Whether he read it then, or later, or at all, we do know that he owned a set of Disraeli’s Novels and Tales, dated 1859 – probably a reprint of the 1853 Bryce edition. Dickens would not, however, have found much to please him in Venetia: the vaguely upper-class bias, the idealized treatment of Venetia and Herbert, and the general absence (Pauncefort and the Gipsy episode are exceptions) of scenes or characters from ordinary life would hardly have appealed to him. But one prominent feature of the book – the central incident upon which much of the plot turns – could hardly have been better calculated to elicit a response from Dickens, with his taste for the macabre and grotesque.

At the beginning of the novel, relations between Venetia and her mother are close to idyllic. Gradually, however, we become aware of Venetia’s perplexity at

"a subject which at intervals had haunted her even from her earliest childhood. Why had she only one parent? What mystery was this that enveloped that great tie? For that there was a mystery Venetia felt as assured as that she was a daughter. By a process which she could not analyse, her father had become a forbidden subject."

Cadurcis tells Venetia of seeing her mother pay a nocturnal visit to a locked room at Cherbury, and finally, when she is fifteen, her curiosity overpowers her. One day while her mother is away she steals the key and enters the room:

"For a moment she paused almost upon the threshold, and looked around her with a vague and misty vision. Anon she distinguished something of the character of the apartment. In the recess of a large oriel window, that looked upon the park, and of which the blinds were nearly drawn, was an old-fashioned yet sumptuous toilet-table of considerable size, arranged as if for use. Opposite this window, in a corresponding recess, was what might be deemed a bridal bed, its furniture being of white satin, richly embroidered; the curtains half closed; and suspended from the canopy was a wreath of roses, that had once emulated, or rather excelled, the lustrous purity of the hangings, but now were wan and withered. The centre of the inlaid and polished floor of the apartment was covered with a Tournay carpet, of brilliant, yet tasteful, decoration. An old cabinet of fanciful workmanship, some chairs of ebony, and some girandoles of silver, completed the furniture of the room, save that at its extreme end, exactly opposite to the door by which Venetia entered, covered with a curtain of green silk, was what she concluded must be a picture.

An awful stillness pervaded the apartment: Venetia herself, with a face paler even than the hangings of the mysterious bed, stood motionless with suppressed breath, gazing on the distant curtain, with a painful glance of agitated fascination. At length, summoning her energies as if for the achievement of some terrible yet inevitable enterprise, she crossed the room, and averting her face, and closing her eyes in a paroxysm of nervous excitement, she stretched forth her arm, and with a rapid motion withdrew the curtain. The harsh sound of the brass rings drawn quickly over the rod, the only noise that had yet met her ear in this mystical chamber, made her start and tremble. She looked up – she beheld, in a very broad and massy frame, the full-length portrait of a man. "

This passage is followed by the description of Shelley’s face which Disraeli adapted from the fragment entitled “The Coliseum” in Medwin’s Shelley Papers. Venetia at length realizes that the portrait is of her father. In the next chapter she muses upon her discovery:

"This chamber, then, was the temple of her mother’s woe – the tomb of her baffled affections and bleeding heart. No wonder that Lady Annabel, the desolate Lady Annabel, that almost the same spring must have witnessed the most favoured and the most disconsolate of women, should have fled from the world, that had awarded her at the same time a lot so dazzling and so full of despair . . . .

Venetia turned and looked upon her parents’ bridal bed. Now that she had discovered her father’s portrait, every article in the room interested her, for her imagination connected everything with him. She touched the wreath of withered roses, and one instantly broke away from the circle, and fell; she knelt down and gathered up the scattered leaves, and placed them in her bosom. "

From this point on, Venetia’s consuming aim is to find her father (whom she had at first supposed dead) and effect a reconciliation between her parents, while Lady Annabel, “with all her sealed-up sorrows”, struggles to prevent anything of the sort – and to protect Venetia from what she regards as the ruinous influence of Herbert and his kind. The reasons for their separation, initiated by Lady Annabel, are never made clear but appear to centre on a diminution of Herbert’s ardour early in the marriage, and his growing radicalism. Going to the forbidden chamber, “where, with so much labour, she had created a room exactly imitative of their bridal apartment at her husband’s castle”, Lady Annabel exclaims before the portrait:

“Marmion, you seem to smile upon me; you seem to exult in your triumph over the heart of your child. But there is a power in a mother’s love that yet shall baffle you. Hitherto I have come here to deplore the past; hitherto I have come here to dwell upon the form that, in spite of all that has happened, I still was, perhaps, weak enough to love. Those feelings are past for ever. Yes! you would rob me of my child, you would tear from my heart the only consolation you have left me. But Venetia shall still be mine; and I, I am no longer yours. Our love, our still lingering love, has vanished. You have been my enemy; now I am yours. I gaze upon your portrait for the last time; and thus I prevent the magical fascination of that face again appealing to the sympathies of my child. Thus, and thus!” – She seized the ancient dagger that we have mentioned as lying on the volume [containing Herbert’s manuscript poem “On the Night Our Daughter Was Born”], and springing on the chair, she plunged it into the canvas; then tearing with unflinching resolution the severed parts, she scattered the fragments over the chamber, shook into a thousand leaves the melancholy garland, tore up the volume of his enamoured Muse, and then quitting the chamber, and locking and double locking the door, she descended the staircase, and, proceeding to the great well of Cherbury, hurled into it the fatal key.

Later in the novel, when Cadurcis, having fallen under the spell of Herbert’s writings and developed a streak of radicalism, appears likely to renew his childhood courtship of Venetia, Lady Annabel advises her daughter to “beware of such beings! They bear within them a spirit on which all the devotion of our sex is lavished in vain. A year – no! not a year, not one short year! – and all my hopes were blighted! O! Venetia, if your future should be like my bitter past! . . .”. She accordingly demands that Venetia promise “never to marry Lord Cadurcis”, arguing:

"He cannot have a heart. Spirits like him are heartless. It is another impulse that sways their existence. It is imagination; it is vanity; it is self, disguised with glittering qualities that dazzle our weak senses, but selfishness, the most entire, the most concentrated. We knew him as a child, – ah! what can women know! We are born to love, and to be deceived. We saw him young, helpless, abandoned; – he moved our pity. We knew not his nature; then he was ignorant of it himself. But the young tiger, though cradled at our hearts and fed on milk, will in good time retire to its jungle and prey on blood. You cannot change its nature; and the very hand that fostered it will be its first victim."

Venetia agrees never to marry without her mother’s approval, rejecting Cadurcis’s advances, as she tells him, because of Lady Annabel’s unrelenting opposition. At the very end of the novel, however, following a muted reconciliation between Herbert and Lady Annabel, and the drowning of Cadurcis and Herbert off the coast of Spezia, she does marry Cadurcis’s cousin.

Lady Annabel’s wounded and embittered nature – arising out of her sense of marital betrayal commemorated in the locked room at Cherbury, the “tomb of her baffled affections and bleeding heart” with its “white satin” bridal bed and its “wan and withered” roses – and the ferocious control she exercises over her daughter’s feelings, would have struck Dickens forcibly, and it is at least conceivable that, lingering in the back of his mind, they might have contributed to Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations. Dickens’s was very largely a submerged imagination, drawing on a multitude of shadowy associations. Peter Ackroyd is surely right in saying that a great range of “images, from the remote past of his childhood to the most recent fictional creation, come together in Miss Havisham – a figure made up of folk-tale, journalism, theatrical review and fiction”. What should perhaps be insisted on is that, unlike the sources that have previously been suggested, Venetia could have given Dickens the germ not just of Miss Havisham but also of Estella and the powerful psychological dynamic between them. If such was indeed the case, it is curious to reflect that one of Dickens’s most resonant creations may ultimately owe something to the careers of Byron and Shelley – as reconfigured in Venetia.

Charles C. Nickerson is Professor of English Emeritus at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now