Reading a life of Dickens is like cheering a winning team. You feel buoyed up
by the sheer extravagance of his success. By the time he was 30 he was the
most famous writer in the world. When he went to America in 1842 he was
fêted by joyous crowds, as (he exulted) “no king or emperor upon the earth”
had been before. It was a spectacular turnaround, for his early life had
touched a depth so dreadful that he never revealed it, even to his wife and
children. In 1824, two days after his 12th birthday, his chronically
incompetent parents had sent him to work in a blacking factory, housed in a
rat-infested tenement overlooking the Thames, where his job was to stick
labels on pots of boot polish for 10 hours a day. At about the same time,
his father was interned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. It used to be
thought that Dickens’s ordeal in Warren’s Blacking lasted for only a few
weeks, but Michael Slater notes that recent research suggests he was there
for 13 or 14 months, an eternity for a 12-year-old. He had been a bright,
precocious child, and done well at school. Now, it seemed, he had been
forgotten by everyone, and was destined to drag out his days as a “little
labouring hind”.
He built his art around this trauma. The vulnerable child in a threatening
place (Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Little Dorrit) became a staple ingredient
of his fiction, and they were all versions of himself. The sinister villain
who entraps Oliver was named after his (actually friendly and helpful)
workmate in the blacking factory, Bob Fagin. Having to fend for himself in
the turmoil of London’s streets provided him with his education as a
novelist. It was here that he developed what the actor William Macready
called his “clutching eye” for people’s oddities and mannerisms, as well as
his ability to mimic the voices of street life — loafers, fruit-sellers,
cheap-jacks. He made his name writing journalistic snatches of London life,
Sketches by Boz. The streets, he said, were his “magic lantern”, and he
could not work without them. Trying to start Dombey and Son in Lausanne in
1846 he complained to his friend John Forster that, away from London’s
crowds, his creativity stagnated.
The blacking-factory nightmare determined not just the kind of fiction he
would write, but his reason for writing. He wanted to be loved by his
readers, to make them laugh and cry and to enter their hearts, and this was
because those who should have loved him as a child had, he felt, cast him
out. The pain of being unloved was sharpened during adolescence by Maria
Beadnell, a banker’s daughter, way beyond his income level, who flirted with
him and threw him over. “Whatever of fancy, romance, passion, aspiration and
determination belong to me,” he later told her, “I have never separated and
never shall separate from the hardhearted little woman — you.” He married
his wife Catherine on the rebound and (ominously for the future) his letters
suggest that he was never really in love with her. His true love affair was
always to be with his public, and its consummation were his tours of Britain
and America, giving readings from the novels to rapturous audiences.
There have been many lives of Dickens, so what makes Slater’s stand out?
First, he has a matchless knowledge of all things Dickensian, and, second,
having edited four superbly informative volumes of Dickens’s journalism, he
is ideally equipped to enrich his biography by dipping into the ocean of
Dickens’s writings aside from the novels — the travelogues, short stories,
essays, speeches, polemical tirades and the 15,000 letters in the
magnificent Pilgrim
edition, which took a team of scholars 37 years to complete. Aspects of
Dickens that might not be guessed from the fiction show up in these other
writings, his boundless vitality, for example, his ruthlessness in business
matters, his brilliance as a foreign correspondent, whether describing the
crumbling grandeurs of Venice or noticing, in Rome, the electric telegraph
wires piercing “like a sunbeam through the cruel old heart of the coliseum”.
Abroad, he was able to glut his fascination with murder and the macabre in
ways not readily available in Britain. Whenever he was in Paris he found
himself “dragged by an invisible force” into the morgue, where bodies fished
from the Seine were put on show. He even went there on Christmas day to see
the corpse of an old grey-haired man with water dripping off the corner of
his mouth, making him look “sly”. In Rome he went to see a man guillotined
and inspected the body with interest afterwards, noting “the apparent
annihilation of the neck”. The head was “taken off so close, that it seemed
as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw”, yet the body “looked
as if there were nothing left above the shoulder”.
Slater does not mention these details, perhaps thinking them unseemly, which
of course they are. But unseemliness is vital to Dickens’s power, especially
when roused. Slater quotes his description of diners at a city banquet —
“sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle”. How
good it would be, you feel, to read Dickens on bankers’ bonuses. But current
political commentary is mealy-mouthed by comparison. Who would dare,
nowadays, to describe children at a school for the poor as “low-browed,
vicious, cunning, wicked and unutterably ignorant”?
Dickens depicts poverty’s effects honestly because he wants to convince his
readers that poverty must be eliminated. Slater’s emphasis on the life
beyond the novels brings out how tirelessly he flung his weight behind good
causes. He edited a weekly magazine, supervising every issue and writing
scores of articles himself; he ran a home for destitute women, funded by a
wealthy heiress; he organised “amateur” dramatics (actually of a rigorously
professional standard) for various charities; he agitated to make it illegal
for women and children to work underground in mines; he campaigned for Great
Ormond Street hospital for children; he accompanied the police detective
branch on night-time forays into thieves’ dens. And still he had energy left
over to “walk my 15 miles a day constantly at a great pace”, without which,
he said, “I should just explode”.
His dynamism did not make him easy to live with. Almost never ill himself, he
disapproved of illness in others. When Catherine was expecting their fifth
child in 1844, he grumbled that she was nervous and dull: “I am sure she
might rally, if she would.” The young actress Ellen Ternan was clearly
preferable in many respects, but Slater scrupulously insists that there is
no evidence she became Dickens’s mistress (let alone, as some believe, bore
him a son). In the fracas that surrounded his marriage break-up, Dickens
defiantly insisted that she was as pure as his own daughters, which may be
true. A platonic guardianship might have appealed to the chivalric strain in
his nature, and Slater points out that, from the time he met Ellen, a man
passionately in love with a woman he cannot have is at the heart of his
fiction — A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. It
is an intriguing idea, and typical of the watchfulness with which this fine
biography aligns life and works.
Charles Dickens by Michael Slater
Yale £25 pp696
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