Charles Dickens, who died 150 years ago, was loved for storytelling that embraced justice, compassion and redemption. He was also a brute to his loyal wife. The author of a new biography suggests that great holiness and artistic genius might both be sometimes driven by a divided personality

There is an old ballad in Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, in which twin brothers are separated at birth. One boy, Valentine, is taken to the court of King Pepin and becomes a model of knightly chivalry. The other boy, Orson, or Ursine, or the bearlike one, grows up in the woods, is cared for by bears and becomes a wild thing.

In the version in Percy’s Reliques, Valentine comes upon his hairy, wild brother and tames him, but the story is popular in folk tale, and is of course a parable of the divided self. It used to obsess that very divided self Charles Dickens, who alludes to the story of Valentine and Orson over and over again.

Born so soon after his sister Fanny to a young, pleasure-loving mother, Dickens felt unwanted long before she insisted on his going out to work for six or seven shillings a week at the age of 12. Dickens’ hatred of the woman he had been programmed by nature to love, his mother, was the defining fact of his entire life and, of course, it is a wonderful recipe for a great creative dramatist or novelist. Dickens’ good and evil selves were scarefully compartmentalised and fictionalised and almost certainly he was scarcely aware of them. Woe betide the composed, or integrated, self who tries to form a relationship with such a person!