BIOGRAPHY: ANNA CAREYreviews Charles Dickens: A LifeBy Claire Tomalin Penguin, 527pp. £14.99
‘IT WILL NOT DO,” wrote John Forster in the 1870s, “to draw round any part of such a man too hard a line.” He was writing about Charles Dickens, his closest friend and a man whose life, full of drama and contradictions, has captivated biographers for well over a century. Claire Tomalin’s superb new book is the latest attempt to draw a line around this extraordinary man, and she wisely follows Forster’s advice, acknowledging that aspects of his personality and work defy definition.
Tomalin’s book is an early volley in the barrage of attention Dickens will be receiving in the run-up to the bicentenary of his birth, on February 7th next year.
He was born in 1812, the son of a clerk in the navy pay office. His father’s inability to live within his means led to his imprisonment for debt and meant that Charles was sent at the age of 12 to work in a shoe-blacking factory. The influence of Dickens’s childhood on his fiction is so well known to modern readers it’s surprising to discover that most of his friends, let alone the general public, had no idea how traumatic his early years were. It wasn’t until Forster’s biography was published in 1872 that the world realised how much the great man had in common with David Copperfield and Amy Dorrit.
Eventually his parents sent him to school, where he thrived, and he went on to work as a newspaper reporter. Fiction – and fame – followed. This is among the most gripping parts of Tomalin’s book, which becomes a skilfully told rags-to-riches story. Within a few years the former child-labourer was married, a father and a literary sensation, surrounded by a like-minded gang of literary and theatrical friends.
Tomalin reminds us that, inevitably in one so prolific (and this book shows how astonishingly prolific he was), the quality of his work varied wildly; she’s particularly good on the weakness of his young female characters. But she also points out that even his least successful novels contain moments of greatness. And she gives us a perfect description of his writing: “A touch of ham certainly, but alongside it the dazzling jokes, the Shakespearean characterisation, the delicacy and profundity of imagination, the weirdness and brilliance of his descriptive powers.”
It’s the ham and sentimentality that most grate with modern readers, but this book constantly reminds us that both were balanced by the red-hot anger that runs through almost all of the novels, a raging against injustice and cruelty and those who allow them to happen. When writing about brutality, Dickens writes, as Tomalin says, “from head as well as heart”.
His social activism continued throughout his life. He championed, as he put it, “the rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten, and too often misused” both in fiction and through his support of various progressive causes, including prison reform and education. With the heiress Angela Coutts, he established a hostel that aimed to rehabilitate “fallen” women, not by preaching at them but by teaching them the skills to earn a respectable living.
Tomalin clearly admires Dickens’s humour, kindness and progressive zeal. But this is no hagiography, and she doesn’t gloss over the less admirable aspects of his complex personality. He was prone to dark moods and made his dissatisfaction with his ineffectual sons painfully clear. And then there’s his marriage. In the late 1850S he became closely involved with a young actor called Nelly Tiernan, and although the exact nature of their relationship has never been known (Peter Ackroyd believed it was not “consummated”, though Tomalin makes a very convincing case that it was), what is undeniable is that shortly after it began, Dickens’s marriage finally collapsed.
Although he had earlier acknowledged that the problems in his marriage were caused by simple incompatibility, when he finally left his wife he did so with the sort of cruelty one would more likely associate with the villains in his novels, publicly claiming that she had never loved her children and trying, with some success, to turn them against her. His behaviour is upsetting; until then he comes across as such a likeable man that to see him treat his family so cruelly feels almost like a betrayal.
Was he really a callous person? He acknowledged a coldness in himself, and an inability properly to show love to his children. But the picture that ultimately emerges from Tomalin’s book is of a man who couldn’t bear to be the bad guy; even when he wanted to break his contract with his publisher he managed to present the case as though he were the injured party. And when he left his wife, he had to recast her as the villain of the piece.
For a major Dickens biography, Tomalins book is relatively short, and she manages to tell a great story and give a strong sense of the man at the heart of it without falling into the biographer’s trap of cramming in pointless detail in order not to waste research. And yet the book does feel slightly rushed at times; Dickens lost both his father (whom he loved, despite the latter’s irresponsibility) and a baby daughter in the space of a few weeks, but the impact is hardly felt as the book races on.
But for the most part, this is a very satisfying biography. It ends with an exuberant summing up of Dickens’s life and character, from “the child-victim” to “the angry son, the good friend, the bad husband”, from “the irreplaceable and unrepeatable Boz” to “above and beyond every other description, simply the great hard-working writer, who set 19th-century London before our eyes and noticed and celebrated the small people living on the margins of society”. I finished reading it with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Which is, I suspect, just what its glorious, complicated subject would have wanted.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca, was published earlier this year by the O'Brien Press
Claire Tomalin will speak during the Belfast Festival, at the Elmwood Hall, on Monday, October 24th, at 6.30pm (belfastfestival.com). She will also speak at Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday, October 25th, at 7pm. Tickets free; reservations on 01-6617695 or info@penguin.ie
