There will be numerous publications and celebrations to mark the bicentennial of Charles Dickens – he is often described as our greatest novelist – but these weighty books set a very high standard. Each has original insights and observations to add to our knowledge of the “Great Inimitable”. But Dickens is more – much more – than the sum of his parts. He personifies something very significant about not just the British but about us all, about our very humanity.
Dickens was able to launch himself successfully on the swelling tide of popular printing and publishing and the increase in literacy. Long before the Education Act of 1870, people were taught to read in very large numbers by the Sunday school movement. There were developments, too, in technology and transport. Dickens possessed an ability to exploit the trends in taste and fashion. Thus, right from the start, he was more that just a literary phenomenon. His stories were adapted for the stage as soon as they appeared in print. He was a public figure, associated with social and political reform – poor relief, education, fallen women, ragged schools, the treatment of lunatics – who personally took part by speaking on public platforms.
He was a journalist and public performer of his work. His image, as well as characters from his novels, and jokes and puns about his name were absorbed into popular discourse, advertising copy and iconography. “Blow me if that ain’t Charles Dickens”, shouted a young boy on spotting him in a crowd in rural Wales. Change that name to another popular writer – Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, JPR James, Harrison Ainsworth – and you see the point. Dickens entered the bloodstream of our national culture long before newspapers turned people into celebrities. His death eclipsed the “harmless gaiety of nations”.
This supra-literary immortality continued into the 20th century with Bransby Williams’ music hall characterisations, Emlyn Williams’ readings, stage productions, radio versions and films, BBC classic serials and an RSC adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, Christmas cards and cigarette cards, a splendid one-man show by Simon Callow and the face of the author on our currency. Nevertheless, Dickens’ genius is essentially literary and his mastery of the English language is at the root of his enduring stature.
There’s a current controversy about the authorship of the plays of William Shakespeare. It might be interesting to know more about Shakespeare. We know nothing about Homer. Who cares? We have the Iliad and the Odyssey. Who needs anything more? But Dickens is an exception to the general rule that an author’s life is not as interesting as his work. His life story is absolutely fascinating and Claire Tomalin’s invigorating book brings us face to face with the man and his relatives, friends, colleagues and associates. We actually get to live in his world in these wonderful pages.
Tomalin has already served the cause with her landmark study of Dickens and his affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan. Now she has focused her formidable biographical abilities on Boz himself. Behind these immensely readable pages is a vast hinterland of scholarship and applied patience. I had two immediate impressions on reading Charles Dickens: A Life. There was the overwhelming awareness that I’d learned so much and learned to see things more clearly and often from a different angle. The second was an indelible sense of the unstoppable and unstopping vital energy. His was a life lived at every moment. He never stopped until he dropped dead on June 9 1870.
This gives the book an energetic tone quite unlike her other biographies, so much has she thrown herself into this task. In the face of the huge array of biographical details she unearths she commendably resists easeful temptations of tracing sources for his fiction among the facts of his life. The complexities and dynamics of his family are well handled, and Tomalin is especially revealing in her careful examination of the close friendship between Boz and John Forster who, I think, had some considerable influence on him, not always so well explored as here. She does, though, shy away from actions that display less likeable aspects of his character, such as his treatment of various family members and, above all, his shocking and shabby treatment of his wife Catherine.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s book concentrates on the early years of his writing life that shaped and textured the kind of novels he would write. It’s quite convincing. And although I’m here bound to assert my belief that The Pickwick Papers is one of the glories of our literature, nothing in this book will persuade me that there’s anything in these early years that could possibly prepare readers for novels such as Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. The essential truth that Douglas-Fairhurst almost, but not quite, asserts is that each novel was a fresh attempt to reform, reshape and remake in physical and practical form the idea of the novel. It’s a great puzzle that although Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop and Bleak House are
all unmistakably different and uniquely different, they are all equally unmistakably novels by Dickens.
Lucinda Hawksley is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Dickens and her book, produced in association with the Charles Dickens Museum in London, is an enjoyable read that comes replete with an impressive collection of archive documents including correspondence, legal documents, visiting cards, photographs and serial parts of the novels (together with their advertisements) that will give you the feel of those Dickens years. With these wonderful publications, dear reader, you are there.
