Fame came early to Charles Dickens, and friends and enemies alike recorded
their memories and hoarded his letters, so that we now have one of the
richest and most alluring of literary archives to mine. Most of his
manuscripts and proofs survive, as do more than 15,000 letters, many of
incomparable wit and vivacity. We know the games Dickens played as a boy,
what he wore (bright colours, flashy waistcoats), what he liked to drink
(the cellar-book survives), the cases he reported as a young lawyer’s clerk,
the names of his father’s creditors and the books he read at the British
Museum Reading Room. In later life, he couldn’t buy a pair of silk stockings
in Hull without the fact being recorded for posterity and scholars deducing
whose legs they were intended for.
None of this came ready packaged, of course, and it has taken more than a
century of work to dig out and order the vast amounts of material that
survived the inevitable destructions and willed distortions. Although in the
Charles Dickens Museum we can see the breeches of his court dress and the
little window he peered through as a boy, what remains is for the most part
a written archive, the first custodian of which was Dickens himself, who
often seemed as astonished by his own gifts as those who knew him.
Biographers have fought hard to balance the complexities those writings
reveal against the powerfully idealized self-images – the magnificent Boz,
the Inimitable, the Sparkler of Albion – that Dickens projected in his
lifetime.
Writing and print were there almost from the start: his maternal uncle was an
unsuccessful novelist (the author of Emir Malek, Prince of the Assassins)
and the successful editor of Hansard’s great rival, The Mirror of
Parliament; his father, John, had journalistic ambitions and was at one time
chief reporter on the Daily News, which his son briefly edited; Dickens’s
first surviving letter was written when he was eight, his first published
sketch, “A Sunday out of Town”, at twenty-one. Michael Slater's new Life has
at its heart the ambition to see that written record steadily and whole. It
is twenty years since the last major biography, by Peter Ackroyd, so this is
the first to draw on all of Dickens’s surviving letters, the final volume of
which appeared in 2000, as well as Slater’s own invaluable edition of the
journalism: a total of sixteen fat new volumes to sit alongside the novels
and other writings, the work of an even bigger writer than before, but also
a more scattered, contradictory and deceptive one.
We think of Dickens primarily as a novelist, but it is striking how
miscellaneous a writer he always was, how willing to turn from Pickwick
Papers or Little Dorrit to add another item to the “truly prodigious amount
of other writing . . . short stories, topical journalism, essays, travel
writings and writings for children, polemical pieces in verse as well as
prose” that accompanied them. Of his first six books, from Sketches by Boz
to Barnaby Rudge, it is only the latter that began life as a through-plotted
novel, and that had several false starts. In the early years, both genesis
and execution were often a mess: Pickwick was intended as a kind of magazine
or miscellany, Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop seem to have begun as
short stories. Throughout his working life, the great novels are interwoven
with a mass of other writings, which sometimes distracted their author but
more often spurred him to greater inventiveness. The gift for multitasking
never left him and, in the middle of working on his last complete novel, he
could still turn with seemingly effortless ease to that year’s Christmas
story. “Tired with Our Mutual, I sat down to cast about for an idea, with a
depressing notion that I was, for the moment, overworked. Suddenly, the
little character [Dr Marigold, the Cheap Jack] . . . and all belonging to it
came flashing up in the most cheerful manner, and I had only to look on and
leisurely describe it.”
The miscellaneousness applies to the life too. As in the “side of streaky
bacon” which he took as emblematic of his art in Oliver Twist, “violent
transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling” were its keynotes. He
usually managed these well, thriving on the sociability that sustained his
artistic creation, a born editor and master of ceremonies. He must have been
an exhausting companion to those who could not keep up with what his friend
and biographer, John Forster, called “his animal spirits, unresting and
supreme”. At times, it seems as if every page of his life could be a
chapter, every chapter a book, so passionately did he enter into all he did,
taking a persistent delight in his own being, “radiant with happiness and
health and looking like an airy Cornet just vaulted out of a cavalry
saddle”, as his “Critic Laureate”, Lord Jeffrey, described him. A typical
relaxation would be a fifteen- or twenty-mile walk “to the great terrors of
Finchley, Neasdon [sic], Willesden, and the adjacent country” while he
thought out the next instalment of a novel or prepared his latest role.
Fascinated by the transformations that accompanied travel – “Surrounded by
strange and perfectly novel circumstances, I feel as if I had a new head on
side by side with my old one” – he was always scheming to go abroad and, a
lifelong Francophile, he spent long periods in France and Italy, Switzerland
and America. As a young man, he had seriously considered emigrating to the
colony of British Guiana, where his friend James Roney was later to become
Chief Justice. As Slater remarks, “the idea of the young Dickens . . . among
the swamps and tropical forests . . . is certainly a fascinating one”. The
wandering impulse started early: in his childhood, his family moved house
more than twenty times in as many years, the root both of his lifelong
fascination with domestic life and his equally strong attachment to “amateur
vagrancy”, his non-negotiable need to “wander about in my own queer way”. If
biographers don’t quite need to follow Dickens into “every brothel, thieves’
house, murdering hovel, sailors dancing place, and abode of villainny [sic],
both black and white” that he claimed to have visited one evening in New
York, it is still a massive task to track the movements of this most
restless, driven and inquisitive of authors.
The greatest challenge for his biographers is that, in writing about the key
episodes of his life – particularly his year as a child labourer at Warren’s
Blacking Warehouse, where his bitterly resentful adult testimony is all the
evidence we have – Dickens got there first. Everyone since has had to
contend with his strategic weeding of the archives (most famously, a great
bonfire of his letters) and try to redescribe what has already been told by
an incomparable master of English prose, with a very particular viewpoint
and immense arts of persuasion. Dickens was tempted more than once by the
idea of autobiography, and seems to have got quite far with one in his
mid-thirties before abandoning it (fragments survive in David Copperfield
and Forster’s posthumous Life of Charles Dickens). But like the diary he
gave up after a fortnight – “I grow sad over this checking off of days, and
can’t do it” – such a form of writing was never really right for him.
Fiction always intruded, and instead he came to specialize in tantalizingly
evocative, semi-fictional autobiographical essays, vividly studded with
childhood recollections, elephant traps for unwary biographers, each one
impossible to ignore, impossible to take straight. Many of his letters are
similarly creative documents, often marked by deep ambivalence: sending
Wilkie Collins a (highly selective) account of his childhood, he adds: “This
is the first time I ever set down even these particulars, and, glancing them
over, I feel like a Wild Beast in a Caravan, describing himself in the
keeper’s absence”. Slater makes a telling vignette from an early letter in
which the young Charles, idealistic but controlling, tries to keep his
father out of trouble by settling him in a cottage in Devon, “a jewel of a
place” with a “splendid garden” and “the finest old countrywoman
conceivable” living next door. “Dickens” writes Slater, “had . . . written
the (idyllic) end of their story for his parents, complete with a cast of
comic extras . . . and it only remained for them to conform”.
Characteristically, John Dickens did nothing of the sort, and was quickly
back in London running up yet more debts.
At nearly 700 pages, this is a lightweight next to many of its precursors,
several of which easily break the thousand-page barrier. But it is a triumph
of compression, and immediately takes its place as the most authoritative,
fair-minded and navigable of modern biographies. Slater, the most
distinguished of modern Dickens scholars, is a master of detail and a
stickler for dates (there are a dozen or so on the first page) and the book
gives a vivid sense of the day-to-day, week-by-week bustle and productivity
of Dickens’s life, its polymorphous inventiveness, its relentless juggling.
If you want to know what Dickens did, where, with whom, on what day, and
what he wrote about it, Slater is indispensable. It is, however, hard to
give priority to Dickens’s writing without at the same time being crushed or
dominated by it, particularly when there is so much to tell in a relatively
confined space. Slater doesn’t try to match Dickens’s own rhetorical
fireworks or the identificatory swagger of Ackroyd’s Life; he has a more
contained, at times rather flattening, idiom. When he tells us, for example,
that Dickens’s time in Italy was “much enlivened by the comical behaviour of
some of the English tourists”, you need to turn back to Pictures from Italy
to find Mr Davis who “always had a snuff-coloured great-coat on, and carried
a great green umbrella in his hand, and had a slow curiosity constantly
devouring him, which prompted him to do extraordinary things, such as taking
the covers off urns in tombs, and looking in at the ashes as if they were
pickles”. As if reacting against Dickens’s affective overdrive, Slater’s
descriptive palette can be rather restrictive: the notorious – if complex –
satire on the idea of “The Noble Savage” simply shows the “limitations of
Dickens’s sympathies in certain respects”.
Biographical hazards are most thickly clustered in dealing with Dickens’s
childhood and erotic life. He was the first novelist in the language to give
child protagonists such prominence, and his own childhood was a continual
inspiration to his writing. Slater strategically distances himself from the
seductive power of Dickens’s retrospectives by beginning with the two chance
survivals of his early writing – a party invitation from 1820, when he was
eight (“Master and Miss Dickens will be pleased to have the company of
Master and Miss Tribe to spend the Evening on . . .”) and a schoolboy letter
returning a dictionary when he was thirteen or fourteen. The message is
clear: there will be no Freudian (or Dickensian) tarrying here, and no
filching from the fiction. We are through his childhood by page 30, about
the same space that is given to the six months of his first American trip.
Where the evidence is weak or non-existent, Slater does not speculate:
Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth, is simply “a more difficult figure than her
ebullient husband to bring into focus”. This unfortunately tends to diminish
the role of the women in Dickens’s life (about whom Slater has written well
elsewhere), for his many male friendships are much more fully documented. In
particular, Slater shows how strong Dickens’s admiration was for Bulwer
Lytton, who was, uniquely, able to persuade him to make a major change to
his mature fiction in the dramatically revised ending of Great Expectations.
On Dickens’s sexuality, Slater duly notes his extramarital attachments and
flirtations, from the eighteen-year-old Christiana Weller (”Good God what a
madman I would seem, if the incredible feeling I have conceived for that
girl could be made plain to anyone!”), to the unknown woman “of thirty or
so, in an Indian shawl” whom he saw in a Parisian dance hall. “Handsome,
regardless, brooding, and yet with some nobler qualities in her forehead. I
mean to walk about tonight, and look for her . . . . I have a fancy that I
should like to know more about her.” Slater offers no false certainty about
anyone’s feelings or motives at such points: about a particularly bossy
letter Dickens wrote to his wife, he comments: “In the absence of much
knowledge of how the relationship between husband and wife actually worked,
or failed to work, it is hard to know how Catherine would have felt about
receiving such a letter”. And Ellen Ternan, the most speculated-about figure
in the whole of Dickens’s life. Was she his mistress? Did they have a baby?
Some more fragments of evidence seem to support Claire Tomalin’s hypothesis
that he and Ellen had a child together in France sometime in the early
1860s, most markedly the repeated delays in beginning Our Mutual Friend, but
for Slater, unwilling to go an inch beyond the evidence, Ellen’s character
is still “a complete blank”, any baby “mere speculation”.
We can be more certain about Dickens and money, the lack of which sent his
father to prison and changed his son’s life for ever. Although we don’t know
exactly why John Dickens, in a secure job with a steady income, was so bad
at managing his cash, it is clear that his son inherited his love of living
beyond his means. To his friend Carlyle’s disapproval (“Such getting up of
the steam is unbecoming to a literary man”), Dickens quickly settled into a
luxurious way of life with several servants and regular grand parties; he
paid more for a dinner to celebrate the completion of Pickwick than he would
have earned in two years’ hard labour at the blacking warehouse. As late as
1846, mid-career, after half a dozen triumphant books, his finances were
still “rather shaky”. He was always determined to assert his gentility (even
as a schoolboy he had seemed “like a gentleman’s son, rather aristocratic
than otherwise”), and it was an expensive performance to keep up. A good
deal of the money must have gone on his generously inclusive hospitality:
Thackeray’s daughter remembered how other people’s Christmas parties “were
very nice but . . . not nearly so light, not nearly so shining, not nearly
so going round and round”. Slater is acute on the sensitivities of class
that haunted his subject’s remarkable social mobility and the wide range of
his friendships, noting both that his genuine help and encouragement to the
working-class poet John Overs was consistently accompanied by a “de haut en
bas tone” and the “elaborate kowtowing to the aristocracy that crops up so
disconcertingly from time to time in Dickens’s correspondence”. Dickens is a
good deal less deferential in a letter about a charity dinner he had
endured, full of City grandees, “who made such speeches, and expressed such
sentiments, as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through
his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched,
overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle”.
It is such moments of emotional and linguistic intensity that best
characterize Dickens’s life and writing; their energy, rhythmic
cross-cutting and tireless productivity make them both characteristic of the
age and able to project themselves far beyond it. Hyperbole was the element
in which he swam, the way he found value in the world. It could be a
dangerous gift, as those who crossed him soon found out. George Bentley, son
of one of the many publishers with whom he quarrelled, wrote that “Dickens
was a very clever man but he was not an honest man”, and that is a judgement
it is hard to quarrel with. This is most painfully clear in the sad story of
the break-up of the Dickenses’ long marriage, which entailed a violent
rewriting of its earlier, clearly affectionate, history. By the end of what
Slater calls his “writing off a marriage”, he could state with chilling
finality “that a page in my life which once had writing on it, has become
absolutely blank, and that it is not in my power to pretend that it has a
solitary word upon it”. As Thomas Idle, the Wilkie Collins character, says
to Francis Goodchild, the Dickens figure, in their co-authored
quasi-autobiographical fiction, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices:
"To me you are an absolutely terrible fellow. You do nothing like another
man. Where another fellow would fall into a footbath of action or emotion,
you fall into a mine. Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly,
you are a fiery dragon. Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake
your existence. If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for
Heaven; and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short
of the other place would content you . . . . A man who can do nothing by
halves appears to me to be a fearful man."
Michael Slater
CHARLES DICKENS
696pp. Yale University Press. £25.
978 0 300 11207 8
John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the
University of York. He is currently editing Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux
for Oxford World’s Classics.
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