Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing by Michael Slater
Yale University Press, £25
Modern publishing technology, marketing and production have not been altogether beneficial to the art of biography. An agent will suggest to the writer with a modest biographical work already to his credit: “Well, your biography of Lord Asquith (say) has been rather successful, who do you think you might tackle next? There hasn’t been a biography of Joseph Chamberlain for some years, why don’t you try and come up with some angle on him? See what you can do, and I’ll try and place it…”
Away goes our aspiring man of letters to tinker away on his PC, Google a few ideas, scan Wikipedia, access the DNB and run his eye over the shelves of The London Library. And, in no time, contracts are signed and our writer is daily toiling away at his screen, preparing briefly to exhume a long buried reputation in numerous well edited pages. To this industrialised output there are all manner of useful isms a biographer can employ by way of justifying yet another worthy tome, for there to hand – in expectant array – lie the temptations of Freudian and post-Freudian analysis, feminism, Marxism (in its various French revisionist distortions), colonialism, racism, historicism, structuralism and other deployable lunacies. It reminds me of the way mechanically reclaimed meat is turned into sausages and pies for consumers.
Charles Dickens has not altogether escaped unscathed. And, unfortunately, his life story offers very fruitful material for such processing. We might well be grateful for the novelist’s personal burning of much private correspondence and the sensitive withholding of much personal evidence by his first great biographer, his lifelong friend John Forster.
From our viewpoint at the beginning of the 21st century, Dickens seems quintessentially Victorian. Indeed, it is hard to think of Victorian England without thinking of Dickens and without seeing Victorian England through his eyes. His vision is part of the way we actually define Victorianism. And there he has tended to stay.
Modern critical evaluation of our greatest novelist probably starts with FR Leavis, albeit grudgingly. In The Great Tradition in 1948 he argued that all roads led to DH Lawrence, implying that the work of Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad had been in the nature of the ancient prophets preparing the way for the master, who finally arrived to manifest himself with Sons and Lovers. Leavis proclaimed life was too short to spend any time reading Fielding and JB Priestley and Dickens, whose Hard Times alone was spared the flames, and who was shoved into the obscurity of an appendix. Apart from Hard Times, the mullah of Downing College asserted, Dickens’ novels lacked “total significance of a profoundly serious kind”. He admitted that Dickens’ works continued to be read, but believed his genius “was that of a great entertainer”.
Leavis eventually had to eat his own words. For in 1970 he published Dickens the Novelist, written in collaboration with his wife Queenie, declaring “as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers”. Since then there has been a voracious appetite for biographical and critical works on Boz. Modern pickings have not been all that rich. Only Christopher Hibbert, John Carey, Peter Ackroyd, Malcolm Andrews and Claire Tomalin have proved truly valuable. But now comes a masterpiece.
Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing is obviously the work of a man who has devoted his entire life to Dickens, as indeed the Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College, London, certainly has. He is a past president of the International Dickens Fellowship, editor of The Dickensian and trustee of the Charles Dickens Museum. He has lived and breathed Dickens over the years and, wherever he’s gone, he has spread his infectious enthusiasm.
Charles Dickens is a delightful read and Professor Slater carries his immense learning lightly. The book is wholly free from analytic bunkum and there is mercifully no attempt to mix biographical matters with literary critical evaluations of any sort. The whole focus of this splendid book is concentrated on recounting Dickens’ professional life as one of our most active, vigorous and impressive writers – his short stories, sketches, journalism, travel writing, writings for children, superlative letters, speeches and polemical pieces – the volume and the range is dazzling.
Boz is here constantly presented in the context of the period’s publishing developments as he emerges as a professional man of letters. We seem to breathe the same air as Dickens as we read these pages, and we are constantly at his shoulder, looking over the pages as the lines of writing appear from the nib of his pen. He writes to John Forster on April 13 1856, and we are there as we are throughout this glorious book: “How strange it is to be never at rest, and never satisfied, and ever trying after something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and that one is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out! It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. As to repose – for some men there’s no such thing in this life… The old days – the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then?”
Robert Giddings
