CHRISTMAS BOOKS ANDREW LYCETT


COMPASSION AND DECEIT OF A GENIUS


Charles Dickens: a life Claire Tomalin PENGUIN, 527PP, £30 ■Tablet bookshop price £27


C Tel 01420 592974


laire Tomalin begins her colourful, authoritative and, given the mat - erial, amazingly concise biography of Charles Dickens with a vignette


about a young woman charged with infanti- cide. When her case comes to court, Dickens is on the jury and, touched by details of her background (she had been dismissed from service and sent to the workhouse), he lobbies for her acquittal. The compromise verdict, “found dead”, absolves her from the death penalty, but leaves her open to further charges of covering up the death of her child. Despite his busy schedule, Dickens arranges for a lead- ing barrister to defend her at the Old Bailey. This time the jury finds her guilty of conceal- ment but recommends leniency. With its resonances of two seminal episodes


in Dickens’ early life – his father’s incarceration as a debtor in the Marshalsea prison and his own harsh apprenticeship in Warren’s black- ing factory –this story emphasises how much he was driven by memories of his childhood, in his life as in his work. It helps illuminate two aspects of Dickens’ character – his lifelong concern with social justice and his interest in downtrodden girls which would lead him to help establish Urania Cottage, a home for the rehabilitation of “fallen women”, or prosti- tutes.


It also offers a good moment to take his pulse. At the time he was only 28 and at the height of his powers – married with three


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small children, an indefatigable journalist, and author of three hugely popular books, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Apart from that brief introduction, Tomalin


eschews modish alternative approaches to biography and offers an absorbing cradle-to- grave account of one of Britain’s greatest writers. It is a story full of drama and incident, encompassing all aspects of Dickens’ life and career, from that difficult childhood, through novels, readings and campaigns, to complex personal relationships.


At the centre was his family. Tomalin


expands on the expensive habits that landed his father in the Marshalsea. Dickens himself liked to live well and, as his wife, Catherine, bore him 10 children, he invested in large establishments in Tavistock Square and later the dream home of his childhood, Gad’s Hill, outside Rochester in Kent. However, he did not treat his children with great affection. He burdened them with the names of his favourite authors, such as Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens. With the help of his friend Angela Burdett Coutts, the banking heiress who funded Urania Cottage, he arranged for another son, Charley, to attend Eton. But just as the lad was finding his feet, he was removed, to prepare for an army com- mission, which was Dickens’ totally unsuitable choice for his career. His daughter Katey unwillingly took it upon herself to marry the lacklustre Charles Collins, brother of Wilkie, in order to escape her father’s dictatorial influ- ence. Since one of Tomalin’s earlier books is The Invisible Woman, about Dickens’ affair with the actress Ellen (or Nelly) Ternan, it is not surprising that she repeats the unedifying details here. As elsewhere, she does not seem to have turned up much new information. She persists in her thesis that Dickens not only conducted


‘The disjuncture between Dickens’ concern for humanity and his treatment of those closest to him remains extraordinary’


a full-scale affair with Nelly, but also fathered a boy by her who was born and soon died in France. This seems plausible and fits in with many other details, such as the frequency of his trips across the Channel. Although there is still no definitive evidence, corroboration of the birth came from Dickens’ daughter Katey who lived into the 1920s. Before her death she spoke about the episode to a friend who repeated it in a controversial book. There is no reason to disbelieve Katey who, 30 years earlier, had discussed the baby with George Bernard Shaw. Once infatuated with Nelly, Dickens cruelly


rejected Catherine. Before turfing out his wife, he ordered a partition to be built at Gad’s Hill between his sleeping quarters and hers. He tried to deny there were problems in his mar- riage. But when stories seeped out, usually blaming Georgina, Catherine’s sister, who had kept house at Gad’s Hill for many years, he took umbrage. When Thackeray dismissed these rumours in a clubland conversation, in which he asserted that Dickens’ girlfriend was just an actress, Dickens was furious and cut his fellow author from his life. He trusted few people, the most significant being John Forster whom he appointed his own biog - rapher when he was only 36. (Tomalin might have made more of the way Forster was usurped in Dickens’ affections by Wilkie Collins, but she has little interest in the latter, mistakenly describing the daughter of his mistress, Caroline Graves, as illegitimate.) The disjuncture between Dickens’ concern for humanity and his treatment of those closest to him remains extraordinary. Tomalin agrees with other critics that his portrayal of women is the least convincing aspect of his work. She has preferences in the novels, dismissing Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times and talking up Great Expectationsand David Copperfield, whose themes she describes as “attachment and loss, and the shaping of adult behaviour by early experience”. At every stage she empha- sises the personal influences on his work, most apparent in the Marshalsea scenes in Little Dorrit. However, Dickens’ genius is manifest in the way he soars above the mun- dane and touches on everlasting truths, as he vividly recreates the environment and charts the aspirations of a people coming to terms with the modern age.


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