Book Review

Trajectory of a literary dynamo

Charles Dickens

In the summer of 1862, the 50-year-old Dickens was interviewed in his editorial office at All the Year Round by the 41-year-old Dostoevsky: “surely speaking far more freely”, says Michael Slater, “to a visitor from the non-English-speaking world, than he would have done to a British or to an American one”. It was the period of the breakdown of his marriage, which alienated so many friends and turned them, in his view, into deadly enemies. He said, Dostoevsky wrote to a friend, that “his good and simple characters are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity … his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him … Only two? I asked.” A good question; this pair of imaginations could manage more than that.

The striking part of this “confession” by Dickens is its hint of fear: that his better self could be “used up in what he wrote”; as though the fertility of his own invention (which astonished him) might overwhelm him. In later years, with his increasingly frantic, and brilliant, acting of his own characters in public readings, this seemed to be happening. He became his books.

Aspects of Dickens’ life have been repeated so frequently that they have taken on the status of myth – the furious child in the blacking-factory, his father in the Marshalsea prison for debt, and so on. Perhaps the story told by his daughter Mamie, who came upon him in the act of writing, possibly in 1858, belongs in this well-worn category, but it is significant. “… He suddenly jumped up from his chair and rushed to a mirror nearby in which I could see the extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his chair, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward but evidently not seeing me, he began talking rapidly in a low voice …” You get the impression that her father frightened her.

Slater is a scholar, and takes us patiently, almost day by day, through Dickens’ life: this was so hectic that no account of it could be dull. Slater intervenes as little as ­possible, although occasionally he is stung out of his tact. For example, Dickens publicly defends his settlement on his wife, whom, after 20 years of marriage and her 10 pregnancies, he had more or less “put away”, by insisting that “the pecuniary part” (sounding like his own Mr Dorrit) was “as generous as if Mrs Dickens were a lady of distinction and I a man of fortune”. Slater deplores this “distressing vulgarity”.

His early success as a parliamentary and political reporter – “writing on the palm of my hand by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping”; contributing “Sketches” for several newspapers under the name of Boz – had left him little time to see, or even get to know, his under-aged betrothed Catherine Hogarth; nevertheless they were married in 1836, when Dickens was 24. Sketches by Boz appeared in book form, caught the ear of the town, and he was asked to write more sketches round a comic sporting club, to be illustrated by the famous Seymour. In Dickens’ hands this developed into The Pickwick Papers. Seymour shot himself. Dickens continued. His beloved sister-in-law, 16-year-old Mary, whom he never forgot, suddenly died, supported in his arms. Dickens continued. (If all this sounds breathless, it is because it was.) Pickwick became the rage: of Europe, of America. There were Pickwick chintzes in the shops, Sam Weller corduroys, the picture of “Boz” was on hansom cabs. He was 25.

At the same time as writing the rollicking Pickwick, he was also composing the desolate, almost unendurable, opening chapters of Oliver Twist. This almost became a formula, this alternating of the tragic and the comic, and he acknowledges it as such.

Novel after novel, success after success, editing magazines, devising and acting in complicated theatricals, he was in Slater’s words “a dynamo”. The beautiful boy of the 1830s became haggard; he feared exhaustion, failing powers: “ … I get up again with a forehead furrowed and gnarled as the oak tree outside the window, and find all the lines on my face that ought to be on the blank paper.” But he always seems to rally. When he wrote that letter he was in the throes of the brilliant, over-plotted Our Mutual Friend.

He began to discover the escape and lure of reading his work in public, which became an obsession. Oliver Twist – “I’m going to murder Nancy tonight!” (or, “I’m going to be Nancy murdered by Sikes!”) Audiences shrieked, fainted – then he made them laugh with “Bardell v. Pickwick”. Sometimes so ill and exhausted he had almost to be carried to the platform, performance revived him; for a while.

Dickens craved, before anything, public love, and here it was manifest. Peter Ackroyd, in his fine 1990 biography, allows himself a novelist’s privilege to speculate, tracing this need back to childhood acting for the family and to betrayal by the mother who had wanted to send him back to the blacking factory. Slater makes no comment, just patiently presents the facts. The tale they tell is heroic, yet also somehow terrible. To the sorrow of many but not to the surprise of those who knew him, at 58 he dropped dead. Edwin Drood was unfinished.

This book is like a cake, rich with fruit, appropriately for Dickens a Christmas cake, which will keep and be sliced into for years; or maybe, as he saw it, “the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon” – white for comedy – red for mortality.

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