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| Robert Gottlieb on Dickensworld — the Great Novelist’s Grand Universe | Robert Gottlieb on Dickensworld — the Great Novelist’s Grand Universe |
| (10 days later) | |
| THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENSBy A. N. Wilson | THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENSBy A. N. Wilson |
| This year is the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens — Dickens, who as time goes by emerges ever more conclusively as England’s greatest novelist and the literary figure who has come to govern our sense of the Victorian era; to embody it, really. And who also happens, in all likelihood, to be the most popular novelist who ever lived. (Apologies to Agatha Christie.) | This year is the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens — Dickens, who as time goes by emerges ever more conclusively as England’s greatest novelist and the literary figure who has come to govern our sense of the Victorian era; to embody it, really. And who also happens, in all likelihood, to be the most popular novelist who ever lived. (Apologies to Agatha Christie.) |
| After he died, in 1870, his reputation — though not his popularity — dipped. Yes, he was a supreme entertainer, but the author of “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities” couldn’t really be considered a serious writer in a world of Hardy and Meredith and Conrad and James. And other popular writers had come along and won large readerships — Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and, of course, Kipling, the most talented of them all, whose reputation has fluctuated even more than Dickens’s, given his fatal identification with imperialism. | After he died, in 1870, his reputation — though not his popularity — dipped. Yes, he was a supreme entertainer, but the author of “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities” couldn’t really be considered a serious writer in a world of Hardy and Meredith and Conrad and James. And other popular writers had come along and won large readerships — Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and, of course, Kipling, the most talented of them all, whose reputation has fluctuated even more than Dickens’s, given his fatal identification with imperialism. |
| But, as these things happen, before the end of the century the tide had begun to turn. A reconsideration of Dickens by the impressive novelist and critic George Gissing, published in 1898, made large claims for his art, and then, in 1906, the prodigious young G. K. Chesterton (long before his “Father Brown” mysteries made him, too, a popular writer) published a reconsideration of such wit, sympathy and sheer brilliance that Dickens was back in play as a major literary force. Meanwhile, of course, the world had gone on reading him, happily ignorant that he was a has-been. | But, as these things happen, before the end of the century the tide had begun to turn. A reconsideration of Dickens by the impressive novelist and critic George Gissing, published in 1898, made large claims for his art, and then, in 1906, the prodigious young G. K. Chesterton (long before his “Father Brown” mysteries made him, too, a popular writer) published a reconsideration of such wit, sympathy and sheer brilliance that Dickens was back in play as a major literary force. Meanwhile, of course, the world had gone on reading him, happily ignorant that he was a has-been. |
| Chesterton celebrated him as the comic genius that he was, and as the creator of the greatest collection of unforgettable characters since Shakespeare. Pickwick (and his sidekick Sam Weller) and Fagin and Scrooge (boo!) and Miss Havisham and Little Nell (sob!) and Tiny Tim (more sobs) and Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Micawber — “Mr. Micawber (whom I will never desert)” — and creepy Uriah Heep and Sairey Gamp (and her imaginary friend, Mrs. Harris) and scores and scores of others were as familiar to a vast reading public around the world as, a decade post-Chesterton, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford would be: recognized and cherished everywhere. Dickens may have remained even more popular in America than in Britain — in countless households like mine when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was likely to be found a complete (inexpensive) set of his novels, alongside the inevitable Encyclopaedia Britannica. And he went on being widely read on the Continent, as well as in Russia, where he had exerted a profound influence on both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. | Chesterton celebrated him as the comic genius that he was, and as the creator of the greatest collection of unforgettable characters since Shakespeare. Pickwick (and his sidekick Sam Weller) and Fagin and Scrooge (boo!) and Miss Havisham and Little Nell (sob!) and Tiny Tim (more sobs) and Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Micawber — “Mr. Micawber (whom I will never desert)” — and creepy Uriah Heep and Sairey Gamp (and her imaginary friend, Mrs. Harris) and scores and scores of others were as familiar to a vast reading public around the world as, a decade post-Chesterton, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford would be: recognized and cherished everywhere. Dickens may have remained even more popular in America than in Britain — in countless households like mine when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was likely to be found a complete (inexpensive) set of his novels, alongside the inevitable Encyclopaedia Britannica. And he went on being widely read on the Continent, as well as in Russia, where he had exerted a profound influence on both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. |
| During the first half of the 20th century the critical perception of Dickens kept changing, as exemplified by a pair of magnificent essays that appeared in 1940: one by George Orwell and one by Edmund Wilson. (Lionel Trilling on “Little Dorrit” would follow.) Orwell, although naturally more concerned with Dickens’s political and social stances — Dickens, after all, was famous for his savage attacks on institutions like Parliament — was also responsive to the genius of the writing, while Wilson focused more on the emotional, or psychic, duality of Dickens’s vision of life. Both critics, however, writing 70 years after his death, were not merely proclaiming but assuming his greatness. “It is the purpose of this essay,” Wilson wrote, “to show that we may find in Dickens’s work today a complexity and a depth … an intellectual and artistic interest which makes Dickens loom very large in the whole perspective of the literature of the West.” Here is a judgment that would have bewildered the grandees of the not so distant Bloomsbury generation, authorities like E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, both of whom found Dickens characters of no psychological interest — although Woolf did confess to a weakness for “David Copperfield.” Indeed, she reluctantly acknowledged that “we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens.” | During the first half of the 20th century the critical perception of Dickens kept changing, as exemplified by a pair of magnificent essays that appeared in 1940: one by George Orwell and one by Edmund Wilson. (Lionel Trilling on “Little Dorrit” would follow.) Orwell, although naturally more concerned with Dickens’s political and social stances — Dickens, after all, was famous for his savage attacks on institutions like Parliament — was also responsive to the genius of the writing, while Wilson focused more on the emotional, or psychic, duality of Dickens’s vision of life. Both critics, however, writing 70 years after his death, were not merely proclaiming but assuming his greatness. “It is the purpose of this essay,” Wilson wrote, “to show that we may find in Dickens’s work today a complexity and a depth … an intellectual and artistic interest which makes Dickens loom very large in the whole perspective of the literature of the West.” Here is a judgment that would have bewildered the grandees of the not so distant Bloomsbury generation, authorities like E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, both of whom found Dickens characters of no psychological interest — although Woolf did confess to a weakness for “David Copperfield.” Indeed, she reluctantly acknowledged that “we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens.” |
| Meanwhile, interest in Dickens’s life was growing. The standard biography, in three volumes, had been written shortly after his death by his lifelong intimate friend John Forster, who incorporated into it a fragment of an unpublished (and never completed) autobiographical narrative. These pages revealed to the world, and to his astonished family, that the traumatic episode in “David Copperfield” recounting how at the age of 10 David was sent to labor in a wine and spirits bottling warehouse was actually inspired by Dickens’s own story (at 12 he had been sent to work in a boot-blacking factory); that David’s sufferings of blasted pride and abject loneliness, and of despair at the loss of the kind of gentleman’s future for which he yearned, were in fact Dickens’s own sufferings. His parents and siblings were for some months rather comfortably immured in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison (which would become the background of “Little Dorrit”), but the boy Charles, all on his own, friendless, was boarded out with an unsympathetic landlady. “No words can express the secret agony of my soul … the deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless. … My whole nature was … penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations.” | |
| Since Forster, there have been many excellent biographies. Edgar Johnson’s scrupulously researched and compellingly written two-volume work of 1952 was, astonishingly, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, selling some 250,000 copies. Later came notable biographies by Fred Kaplan, Michael Slater and — longest, fullest and most impressive — Peter Ackroyd, whose achievement is marred only by his perverse determination, in the face of all the evidence (and common sense), to have us believe that Dickens and the young actress with whom he fell in love, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, never consummated their relationship. They had met in 1857, when she was 18 and he was 45, and they were together whenever possible until his death, Dickens stowing her away in a series of hide-outs in both England and France. He had banished Catherine, his wife of 22 years and the mother of his 10 children, in a great public scandal of his own making. | Since Forster, there have been many excellent biographies. Edgar Johnson’s scrupulously researched and compellingly written two-volume work of 1952 was, astonishingly, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, selling some 250,000 copies. Later came notable biographies by Fred Kaplan, Michael Slater and — longest, fullest and most impressive — Peter Ackroyd, whose achievement is marred only by his perverse determination, in the face of all the evidence (and common sense), to have us believe that Dickens and the young actress with whom he fell in love, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, never consummated their relationship. They had met in 1857, when she was 18 and he was 45, and they were together whenever possible until his death, Dickens stowing her away in a series of hide-outs in both England and France. He had banished Catherine, his wife of 22 years and the mother of his 10 children, in a great public scandal of his own making. |
| Ternan, however, remained a well-guarded secret, although there were those (Forster and the older Dickens children among them) who were in the know — in fact, she was often with the family at Gad’s Hill, their home in Kent. But Dickens, his banished wife and his invisible mistress never wrote or spoke publicly about what had happened — unless you think that his placing Ternan’s name first among the beneficiaries in his will was a public statement. (Her story leaked out slowly until it was fully revealed in Claire Tomalin’s superb book “The Invisible Woman” — a more remarkable achievement than her later, and somewhat redundant, book on Dickens himself.) | Ternan, however, remained a well-guarded secret, although there were those (Forster and the older Dickens children among them) who were in the know — in fact, she was often with the family at Gad’s Hill, their home in Kent. But Dickens, his banished wife and his invisible mistress never wrote or spoke publicly about what had happened — unless you think that his placing Ternan’s name first among the beneficiaries in his will was a public statement. (Her story leaked out slowly until it was fully revealed in Claire Tomalin’s superb book “The Invisible Woman” — a more remarkable achievement than her later, and somewhat redundant, book on Dickens himself.) |
| In the last half-century, biographical approaches to Dickens have frequently focused on highly specific areas of his life and accomplishments — his relation to the theater, to crime, to charity — but the most trenchant work has been done in exploring his convoluted psyche. Dickens, not only in the 15 novels but in his marvelous journalism and unerring editorship of two immensely popular magazines, seemed to know and understand everything and everyone — except himself. He lacked not only a talent for self-knowledge but the impulse toward it: We can recognize today that the thrilling driven quality that animates both his writing and his progress through life served not only to conceal but to smother — in relentless, almost frantic activity — a profoundly conflicted nature. No matter how much he accomplished by day, no matter how many miles he strode through the streets of London at night, no matter that he was probably the most famous and beloved man in England, he could not escape the buried anguish of his early history or deal with the unresolved issues that were to explode in what we now casually term a midlife crisis but which had no such convenient label then. | In the last half-century, biographical approaches to Dickens have frequently focused on highly specific areas of his life and accomplishments — his relation to the theater, to crime, to charity — but the most trenchant work has been done in exploring his convoluted psyche. Dickens, not only in the 15 novels but in his marvelous journalism and unerring editorship of two immensely popular magazines, seemed to know and understand everything and everyone — except himself. He lacked not only a talent for self-knowledge but the impulse toward it: We can recognize today that the thrilling driven quality that animates both his writing and his progress through life served not only to conceal but to smother — in relentless, almost frantic activity — a profoundly conflicted nature. No matter how much he accomplished by day, no matter how many miles he strode through the streets of London at night, no matter that he was probably the most famous and beloved man in England, he could not escape the buried anguish of his early history or deal with the unresolved issues that were to explode in what we now casually term a midlife crisis but which had no such convenient label then. |
| The pain he inflicted on those around him was a devastation. “My father was like a madman,” his daughter Katey — his favorite child, and always very close to him — would reveal to a confidante decades later. “He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.” This of a man who to his millions of readers stood for family life; who more or less invented Christmas as we know it; and for whom kindliness was the most cherished human virtue. | The pain he inflicted on those around him was a devastation. “My father was like a madman,” his daughter Katey — his favorite child, and always very close to him — would reveal to a confidante decades later. “He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.” This of a man who to his millions of readers stood for family life; who more or less invented Christmas as we know it; and for whom kindliness was the most cherished human virtue. |
| A.N. Wilson has been for many years one of England’s most formidable biographers, as well as an amazingly productive novelist — 23 novels under his belt, to match nearly the same number of nonfiction considerations of subjects ranging from Jesus and St. Paul to Milton, Darwin, Hitler, C. S. Lewis and the queen. (Along the way he spent seven years lecturing on medieval literature at Oxford.) His knowledge is wide, his writing fluent — one can only wonder why his name and reputation haven’t flourished here in America the way they have in his own country, where he is something of a Figure. Alas, I don’t believe that this is going to change with his latest book, “The Mystery of Charles Dickens,” which is appearing just in time for the Dickens anniversary. Here, to put it bluntly, is a highly peculiar biography — peculiar not for what it says about Dickens but for what it says about Wilson himself. | A.N. Wilson has been for many years one of England’s most formidable biographers, as well as an amazingly productive novelist — 23 novels under his belt, to match nearly the same number of nonfiction considerations of subjects ranging from Jesus and St. Paul to Milton, Darwin, Hitler, C. S. Lewis and the queen. (Along the way he spent seven years lecturing on medieval literature at Oxford.) His knowledge is wide, his writing fluent — one can only wonder why his name and reputation haven’t flourished here in America the way they have in his own country, where he is something of a Figure. Alas, I don’t believe that this is going to change with his latest book, “The Mystery of Charles Dickens,” which is appearing just in time for the Dickens anniversary. Here, to put it bluntly, is a highly peculiar biography — peculiar not for what it says about Dickens but for what it says about Wilson himself. |
| He is a strong presence throughout his book. We learn that as a young man teaching at Oxford, he would cycle past the house where Ellen Ternan spent many of her later years. “The fantasy question would flit in and out of my brain: What would it have been like to teach Nelly? She was the same age, wasn’t she, when she lived in that house as the undergraduates with whom I was about to read medieval poetry. Would I have fallen secretly in love with her, as Dickens did?” In London, he’s lived for more than 20 years in a house that overlooks the garden of 70 Gloucester Crescent, the house in which Catherine Dickens lived after her husband “dumped” her. (During the last dozen years of his life, she had only three brief communications from him. He did not go to see her, or write to her, when their son Walter died in India; he even left her name off Walter’s tombstone, as though he had been born of only one parent.) At one point Wilson informs us that as he is writing the page we are reading, he is looking down into the drawing room where Katey Dickens, having rushed to London from Gad’s Hill, informed her mother that Charles — still her husband, still loved by her — was dying, so that she would not hear the news from strangers. | He is a strong presence throughout his book. We learn that as a young man teaching at Oxford, he would cycle past the house where Ellen Ternan spent many of her later years. “The fantasy question would flit in and out of my brain: What would it have been like to teach Nelly? She was the same age, wasn’t she, when she lived in that house as the undergraduates with whom I was about to read medieval poetry. Would I have fallen secretly in love with her, as Dickens did?” In London, he’s lived for more than 20 years in a house that overlooks the garden of 70 Gloucester Crescent, the house in which Catherine Dickens lived after her husband “dumped” her. (During the last dozen years of his life, she had only three brief communications from him. He did not go to see her, or write to her, when their son Walter died in India; he even left her name off Walter’s tombstone, as though he had been born of only one parent.) At one point Wilson informs us that as he is writing the page we are reading, he is looking down into the drawing room where Katey Dickens, having rushed to London from Gad’s Hill, informed her mother that Charles — still her husband, still loved by her — was dying, so that she would not hear the news from strangers. |
| Wilson has a number of persuasive ideas about Dickens, whom he sees as not only a conflicted personality but a tragic one, despite his genius for comedy. He gives us a Dickens whose novels “pulsate” with sexual feeling — sexual feeling, however, that is Dickens’s, not that of “Kate Nickleby, Dora Copperfield, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and the gallery of submissive sexless-seeming wifelets and nymphs and half-child-brides, who tiptoe through his pages.” Think, for instance, of Lucie Manette, the pallid heroine of “A Tale of Two Cities” whose outstanding (only?) characteristic is her magnificent golden hair. “Where,” Wilson justly asks, “is a Rosalind, or a Juliet, or a Hermione, or a Portia, or a Beatrice?” Only toward the end, in “Great Expectations” and “Our Mutual Friend,” do we find believable young women — Estella, in the former, Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam, in the latter — who are neither blanks nor passive nor caricatures, although Lizzie, the uneducated daughter of a wharf rat who makes his living by plucking dead bodies from the Thames, speaks perfect English, which she is unlikely to have acquired while patrolling the river in search of corpses. | Wilson has a number of persuasive ideas about Dickens, whom he sees as not only a conflicted personality but a tragic one, despite his genius for comedy. He gives us a Dickens whose novels “pulsate” with sexual feeling — sexual feeling, however, that is Dickens’s, not that of “Kate Nickleby, Dora Copperfield, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and the gallery of submissive sexless-seeming wifelets and nymphs and half-child-brides, who tiptoe through his pages.” Think, for instance, of Lucie Manette, the pallid heroine of “A Tale of Two Cities” whose outstanding (only?) characteristic is her magnificent golden hair. “Where,” Wilson justly asks, “is a Rosalind, or a Juliet, or a Hermione, or a Portia, or a Beatrice?” Only toward the end, in “Great Expectations” and “Our Mutual Friend,” do we find believable young women — Estella, in the former, Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam, in the latter — who are neither blanks nor passive nor caricatures, although Lizzie, the uneducated daughter of a wharf rat who makes his living by plucking dead bodies from the Thames, speaks perfect English, which she is unlikely to have acquired while patrolling the river in search of corpses. |
| Nor do we find in the novels fulfilled mother-child relationships. There are parody mothers like the philanthropic Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby in “Bleak House,” and cruel mothers like Mrs. Clennam in “Little Dorrit” and Mrs. Joe, Pip’s mother-substitute sister in “Great Expectations,” and selfish, self-absorbed mothers like Mrs. Nickleby, and absent mothers, like Edith Dombey and “Bleak House”’s Lady Dedlock, and dead mothers, like David Copperfield’s and Oliver Twist’s. There are, as well, a few benign mother-figures like Peggotty, David’s loving nurse, and his formidable Aunt Betsey Trotwood, and there are twisted mother-figures like Miss Havisham. But except among the poor, whom Dickens celebrates but with whom he never identifies, it would seem that he simply cannot imagine a mother he (and we) could love. | Nor do we find in the novels fulfilled mother-child relationships. There are parody mothers like the philanthropic Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby in “Bleak House,” and cruel mothers like Mrs. Clennam in “Little Dorrit” and Mrs. Joe, Pip’s mother-substitute sister in “Great Expectations,” and selfish, self-absorbed mothers like Mrs. Nickleby, and absent mothers, like Edith Dombey and “Bleak House”’s Lady Dedlock, and dead mothers, like David Copperfield’s and Oliver Twist’s. There are, as well, a few benign mother-figures like Peggotty, David’s loving nurse, and his formidable Aunt Betsey Trotwood, and there are twisted mother-figures like Miss Havisham. But except among the poor, whom Dickens celebrates but with whom he never identifies, it would seem that he simply cannot imagine a mother he (and we) could love. |
| In a deeply probing book, “Dickens in Search of Himself” (1983), Gwen Watkins applies her knowledge of psychiatry to provide us with the key. The trauma from which Dickens could not recover and which he reimagined in book after book was not, as he needed to believe it was, his mother’s complicity in the boot-blacking nightmare but, far more basic, that he had never received from her what every child deserves: the feeling “that what he is, his self, is valuable and worthy of respect, and that he is loved because this self is lovable.” That self, Watkins suggests, “did its best to help him by sending up to his imagination those themes that recur so constantly in his novels: the death of a child, the empty heart, the double self, the murder of the self.” | In a deeply probing book, “Dickens in Search of Himself” (1983), Gwen Watkins applies her knowledge of psychiatry to provide us with the key. The trauma from which Dickens could not recover and which he reimagined in book after book was not, as he needed to believe it was, his mother’s complicity in the boot-blacking nightmare but, far more basic, that he had never received from her what every child deserves: the feeling “that what he is, his self, is valuable and worthy of respect, and that he is loved because this self is lovable.” That self, Watkins suggests, “did its best to help him by sending up to his imagination those themes that recur so constantly in his novels: the death of a child, the empty heart, the double self, the murder of the self.” |
| Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth, appears to have been a bright, lively woman who loved to dance and was a wonderful mimic (like her son). She had taught little Charles his letters and numbers, she had done her best to steer him into a secure career through relatives and connections, and Forster mentions, although Dickens does not, that she visited him several times in the blacking factory. But none of that mattered: Through the years, Dickens came to appreciate his feckless Micawber-like father, but until Elizabeth’s death, only seven years before his own, he never overcame or tried to overcome the cold dislike that was the best he could do for the woman who had created what, Watkins reminds us, David Copperfield termed “a vacancy in my heart.” | Dickens’s mother, Elizabeth, appears to have been a bright, lively woman who loved to dance and was a wonderful mimic (like her son). She had taught little Charles his letters and numbers, she had done her best to steer him into a secure career through relatives and connections, and Forster mentions, although Dickens does not, that she visited him several times in the blacking factory. But none of that mattered: Through the years, Dickens came to appreciate his feckless Micawber-like father, but until Elizabeth’s death, only seven years before his own, he never overcame or tried to overcome the cold dislike that was the best he could do for the woman who had created what, Watkins reminds us, David Copperfield termed “a vacancy in my heart.” |
| Wilson begins “The Mystery of Charles Dickens” with Dickens’s death, and he is very focused on the final novel, the half-completed “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” whose central character, John Jasper, the choirmaster of “Cloisterham” cathedral, has presumably murdered Drood, who is his nephew. Jasper is in love with the standard Dickens ingénue, Rosa Bud, whom Drood is engaged to marry. Can it be an accident that as Dickens was approaching death — as he sensed he was — he created in Jasper the most psychically turbulent of all his protagonists, the one whose “divided self” is most tormentedly on display? | Wilson begins “The Mystery of Charles Dickens” with Dickens’s death, and he is very focused on the final novel, the half-completed “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” whose central character, John Jasper, the choirmaster of “Cloisterham” cathedral, has presumably murdered Drood, who is his nephew. Jasper is in love with the standard Dickens ingénue, Rosa Bud, whom Drood is engaged to marry. Can it be an accident that as Dickens was approaching death — as he sensed he was — he created in Jasper the most psychically turbulent of all his protagonists, the one whose “divided self” is most tormentedly on display? |
| Jasper is not only a choirmaster, he is an opium addict, and we are taken into a macabre London opium den — the kind of place that Dickens and his great friend Wilkie Collins used to explore on their night crawls through London. In fact, in 1868 Dickens had serialized, in his periodical All the Year Round, Collins’s “The Moonstone,” the plot of which hangs on the use of laudanum, a tincture of opium. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” may well be a projection of Dickens’s state of mind, yet I also see it as a failed attempt to outdo Collins at his own game. There are many characters and many (unlikely) twists to the plot, and the quality of the writing, as Wilson acknowledges, is uneven. (George Bernard Shaw called the novel “only a gesture by a man three-quarters dead.”) A sign of how internal pressures are rising to the surface is the name he gave the book’s heroine, Helena Landless. Nelly Ternan’s given name was Ellen Lawless. | Jasper is not only a choirmaster, he is an opium addict, and we are taken into a macabre London opium den — the kind of place that Dickens and his great friend Wilkie Collins used to explore on their night crawls through London. In fact, in 1868 Dickens had serialized, in his periodical All the Year Round, Collins’s “The Moonstone,” the plot of which hangs on the use of laudanum, a tincture of opium. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” may well be a projection of Dickens’s state of mind, yet I also see it as a failed attempt to outdo Collins at his own game. There are many characters and many (unlikely) twists to the plot, and the quality of the writing, as Wilson acknowledges, is uneven. (George Bernard Shaw called the novel “only a gesture by a man three-quarters dead.”) A sign of how internal pressures are rising to the surface is the name he gave the book’s heroine, Helena Landless. Nelly Ternan’s given name was Ellen Lawless. |
| “The Mystery of Charles Dickens” has judicious things to say about Dickens, but then, suddenly, Wilson veers into autobiography, as his own internal pressures rise to the surface. “I am looking once again at my 8- or 9-year-old self, painfully thin, my bottom and back covered in the bruises and welts inflicted by a sadist teacher, sitting in a classroom with 20 or so other little boys. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that these children are sitting there in the 1960s. John F. Kennedy is president of the United States, and the Beatles have told the world that ‘All You Need Is Love.’” (Actually, it will be a few years before the Beatles tell that to the world.) | “The Mystery of Charles Dickens” has judicious things to say about Dickens, but then, suddenly, Wilson veers into autobiography, as his own internal pressures rise to the surface. “I am looking once again at my 8- or 9-year-old self, painfully thin, my bottom and back covered in the bruises and welts inflicted by a sadist teacher, sitting in a classroom with 20 or so other little boys. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that these children are sitting there in the 1960s. John F. Kennedy is president of the United States, and the Beatles have told the world that ‘All You Need Is Love.’” (Actually, it will be a few years before the Beatles tell that to the world.) |
| “We had been taken away from our families aged 7,” he goes on, “and for the last few years had been living in what was in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts.” We hear “of the many occasions when I was thrashed, by a headmaster who was visibly masturbating, usually inside his trousers, but not always inside, as he did it.” We hear of enduring “persecution from the man’s wife and daughter”; of the torture of their “discovering your least-favorite dish, making you eat it until you vomited, and then making you eat the vomit”; of their “locking you in a cage and, after a few hours, assembling an audience of the other boys to wait until you wet yourself.” | “We had been taken away from our families aged 7,” he goes on, “and for the last few years had been living in what was in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts.” We hear “of the many occasions when I was thrashed, by a headmaster who was visibly masturbating, usually inside his trousers, but not always inside, as he did it.” We hear of enduring “persecution from the man’s wife and daughter”; of the torture of their “discovering your least-favorite dish, making you eat it until you vomited, and then making you eat the vomit”; of their “locking you in a cage and, after a few hours, assembling an audience of the other boys to wait until you wet yourself.” |
| Wilson’s professed justification for inflicting these horrifying recollections on us, his readers, is to propose that without the passages of Dickens the boys were given to read, “my spirit would have gone under. … I survived my own childhood traumas by realizing that my tormentors were not only figures of pure horror, but also that they were as comic as Wackford Squeers” — the schoolmaster of Dotheboys Hall in “Nicholas Nickleby” — “as grotesque as Fagin, though as cruel as Mr. Murdstone,” David Copperfield’s coldhearted stepfather. This all constitutes a brave and moving tribute to the genius of Charles Dickens, but surely it functions here more as therapy for A. N. Wilson than as revelation about his book’s ostensible subject. | Wilson’s professed justification for inflicting these horrifying recollections on us, his readers, is to propose that without the passages of Dickens the boys were given to read, “my spirit would have gone under. … I survived my own childhood traumas by realizing that my tormentors were not only figures of pure horror, but also that they were as comic as Wackford Squeers” — the schoolmaster of Dotheboys Hall in “Nicholas Nickleby” — “as grotesque as Fagin, though as cruel as Mr. Murdstone,” David Copperfield’s coldhearted stepfather. This all constitutes a brave and moving tribute to the genius of Charles Dickens, but surely it functions here more as therapy for A. N. Wilson than as revelation about his book’s ostensible subject. |
| A telling reflection of Wilson’s intense interest in, even identification with, Dickens emerges in his novel “The Vicar of Sorrows,” published more than 25 years ago — a very readable book, reminiscent of the solid old-fashioned fiction, even then outdated, of J. B. Priestley and minor Galsworthy. The vicar is a well-meaning, weak-willed man in his mid-40s, with a wife he can’t bear to look at or speak to. Into town comes an entrancing, free-spirited girl in her late teens, though unlike Dickens’s Nelly Ternan she’s a promising violinist, not actress. Falling desperately in love with her, the vicar abandons wife, daughter and vocation to follow her — to her bewilderment, his family’s despair and his own destruction. Unlike novelists who refigure their own tumultuous romantic history in their work, Wilson has kidnapped Dickens’s. | A telling reflection of Wilson’s intense interest in, even identification with, Dickens emerges in his novel “The Vicar of Sorrows,” published more than 25 years ago — a very readable book, reminiscent of the solid old-fashioned fiction, even then outdated, of J. B. Priestley and minor Galsworthy. The vicar is a well-meaning, weak-willed man in his mid-40s, with a wife he can’t bear to look at or speak to. Into town comes an entrancing, free-spirited girl in her late teens, though unlike Dickens’s Nelly Ternan she’s a promising violinist, not actress. Falling desperately in love with her, the vicar abandons wife, daughter and vocation to follow her — to her bewilderment, his family’s despair and his own destruction. Unlike novelists who refigure their own tumultuous romantic history in their work, Wilson has kidnapped Dickens’s. |
| In his 1988 biography of Tolstoy, probably Wilson’s most admired book, Dickens plays a large role — not Dickens the man but Dickens the writer, and in particular “David Copperfield.” Tolstoy, and Wilson, are almost fixated on David’s passionate admiration for the handsome young villain Steerforth. Typical of Wilson at his most coolly astute is his verdict: “What happens in Dickens … is that rampant sexuality when seen from the male point of view is passionately attractive; but seen from the female point of view it is destructive. Copperfield adores Steerforth, and all in Steerforth which will cause the ‘ruin’ of Little Em’ly. But when Little Em’ly loses her purity, all readers are meant to agree that it would be better if the waters could close over above her head.” Think “Anna Karenina.” | In his 1988 biography of Tolstoy, probably Wilson’s most admired book, Dickens plays a large role — not Dickens the man but Dickens the writer, and in particular “David Copperfield.” Tolstoy, and Wilson, are almost fixated on David’s passionate admiration for the handsome young villain Steerforth. Typical of Wilson at his most coolly astute is his verdict: “What happens in Dickens … is that rampant sexuality when seen from the male point of view is passionately attractive; but seen from the female point of view it is destructive. Copperfield adores Steerforth, and all in Steerforth which will cause the ‘ruin’ of Little Em’ly. But when Little Em’ly loses her purity, all readers are meant to agree that it would be better if the waters could close over above her head.” Think “Anna Karenina.” |
| “Tolstoy” is an impressive achievement that is flawed by a kind of slapdash writing whose flippant tone grates. “It was no skin off Tolstoy’s nose.” “Russia, as far as the Tolstoys were concerned, had had it.” “Tolstoy got it in the neck from all sides.” And there is confused history — Napoleon III is referred to as “writing in the shadow of his distinguished grandfather,” although he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, not grandson. (He was the grandson of the Empress Josephine.) But all this only reflects a kind of hurried carelessness — 50 or so books in 40-odd years! And whatever Wilson’s flaws, his understanding is so large that you frequently feel enlightened, as when he writes: “There is a sort of exhausted anachronism about the conclusion of ‘War and Peace.’ Pierre is not a man of 1812 preparing to grow into a man of 1825. He is much more a man of 1869, preparing to grow into he knows not what.” | “Tolstoy” is an impressive achievement that is flawed by a kind of slapdash writing whose flippant tone grates. “It was no skin off Tolstoy’s nose.” “Russia, as far as the Tolstoys were concerned, had had it.” “Tolstoy got it in the neck from all sides.” And there is confused history — Napoleon III is referred to as “writing in the shadow of his distinguished grandfather,” although he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, not grandson. (He was the grandson of the Empress Josephine.) But all this only reflects a kind of hurried carelessness — 50 or so books in 40-odd years! And whatever Wilson’s flaws, his understanding is so large that you frequently feel enlightened, as when he writes: “There is a sort of exhausted anachronism about the conclusion of ‘War and Peace.’ Pierre is not a man of 1812 preparing to grow into a man of 1825. He is much more a man of 1869, preparing to grow into he knows not what.” |
| The kind of carelessness that blemishes “Tolstoy” is also on display in “The Mystery of Charles Dickens.” And there is at least one serious error, the statement that Dickens forbade his and Catherine’s children to see her after she was banished. Katey Dickens made it very clear that this was not the case, although she did tell her friend and eventual biographer Gladys Storey that for almost two years after the separation, her father “would scarcely speak to [her] because she visited her mother.” Her sister, Mamie, did stay away — from first to last she was besotted with her father, and would never have gone against his will. But the oldest child, Charley, who at 21 was emancipated, chose to live with Catherine, not his father. | The kind of carelessness that blemishes “Tolstoy” is also on display in “The Mystery of Charles Dickens.” And there is at least one serious error, the statement that Dickens forbade his and Catherine’s children to see her after she was banished. Katey Dickens made it very clear that this was not the case, although she did tell her friend and eventual biographer Gladys Storey that for almost two years after the separation, her father “would scarcely speak to [her] because she visited her mother.” Her sister, Mamie, did stay away — from first to last she was besotted with her father, and would never have gone against his will. But the oldest child, Charley, who at 21 was emancipated, chose to live with Catherine, not his father. |
| Perhaps the ugliest aspect of Dickens’s behavior toward the wife he had abandoned was his public imputation that she had been an unloving mother and that her children did not love her. (We remember who it was who had the unloving mother.) But Dickens at this point had lost all restraints, was unable to bear any real disagreement and was ruthless in expunging from his life those who stood by Catherine. His old and trusted friend Mrs. Lynn Linton said of him, “He was one of the kind to whom whims are laws, and self-control in contrary circumstances was simply an impossibility.” He would not, for instance, attend Charley’s wedding to his childhood sweetheart because her father, his onetime publisher, hadn’t proved ardent enough in his rejection of Catherine after the break. (As a result, Catherine was permitted to attend her firstborn’s wedding.) | Perhaps the ugliest aspect of Dickens’s behavior toward the wife he had abandoned was his public imputation that she had been an unloving mother and that her children did not love her. (We remember who it was who had the unloving mother.) But Dickens at this point had lost all restraints, was unable to bear any real disagreement and was ruthless in expunging from his life those who stood by Catherine. His old and trusted friend Mrs. Lynn Linton said of him, “He was one of the kind to whom whims are laws, and self-control in contrary circumstances was simply an impossibility.” He would not, for instance, attend Charley’s wedding to his childhood sweetheart because her father, his onetime publisher, hadn’t proved ardent enough in his rejection of Catherine after the break. (As a result, Catherine was permitted to attend her firstborn’s wedding.) |
| As for Wilson’s judgments of the novels themselves, I can’t agree with him that “Drood” is the “most ambitious” of them, “the one that killed him,” or that “Hard Times” is a novel of “overpowering greatness” along with “Bleak House” and “Little Dorrit.” But, yes, “Our Mutual Friend” is a wonderful book, and “Great Expectations” is “perhaps … the apogee” of Dickens’s achievement, although I would eliminate the “perhaps.” “It is the only novel,” Wilson writes, “in which there is no wasted paragraph, no waffle, no padding, no dud or redundant characters and no illustrations. It did not need illustrations because it is the most devastating and the most inward of all his psychodramas. Every page hits you like a heart attack.” Well, maybe not, but in this case I can cut Wilson some slack. | As for Wilson’s judgments of the novels themselves, I can’t agree with him that “Drood” is the “most ambitious” of them, “the one that killed him,” or that “Hard Times” is a novel of “overpowering greatness” along with “Bleak House” and “Little Dorrit.” But, yes, “Our Mutual Friend” is a wonderful book, and “Great Expectations” is “perhaps … the apogee” of Dickens’s achievement, although I would eliminate the “perhaps.” “It is the only novel,” Wilson writes, “in which there is no wasted paragraph, no waffle, no padding, no dud or redundant characters and no illustrations. It did not need illustrations because it is the most devastating and the most inward of all his psychodramas. Every page hits you like a heart attack.” Well, maybe not, but in this case I can cut Wilson some slack. |
| The crucial thing in considering Dickens is deciding how best to read him. If we apply the usual standards by which we judge novels — unity of tone and believability of character and story, for instance — he all too often stumbles. When we read “Nicholas Nickleby,” for instance, written when Dickens was at the height of his dazzling early powers, do we really care just how villainous Uncle Ralph arrives at his downfall, or whom Nicholas and his sister, Kate, end up marrying? Can we even remember? What we remember is the great cascade of unlikely characters who erupt from Dickens’s imagination — the monstrous Squeers family, the irrepressible Crummles theater troupe featuring the lovely Miss Snevellici and the Infant Phenomenon, the too-good-to-be-true Cheeryble brothers, the Mantolinis, Miss La Creevy, Newman Noggs and that slander of Dickens’s mother, the slothful and muddle-headed Mrs. Nickleby. But all these threads, plus the undoing of Dotheboys Hall, had to be tied up, which is why “Nicholas Nickleby” eventually succumbs to its plot — or plots. Although the plot of “A Tale of Two Cities” is managed perfectly, I find that despite its worked-up excitements — the terrifying Madame Defarge relentlessly knitting as the guillotine goes about its work — the book remains hermetic and resistible. As for “The Pickwick Papers,” the masterpiece that made him, overnight, the most famous writer in England, it has no plot at all. | The crucial thing in considering Dickens is deciding how best to read him. If we apply the usual standards by which we judge novels — unity of tone and believability of character and story, for instance — he all too often stumbles. When we read “Nicholas Nickleby,” for instance, written when Dickens was at the height of his dazzling early powers, do we really care just how villainous Uncle Ralph arrives at his downfall, or whom Nicholas and his sister, Kate, end up marrying? Can we even remember? What we remember is the great cascade of unlikely characters who erupt from Dickens’s imagination — the monstrous Squeers family, the irrepressible Crummles theater troupe featuring the lovely Miss Snevellici and the Infant Phenomenon, the too-good-to-be-true Cheeryble brothers, the Mantolinis, Miss La Creevy, Newman Noggs and that slander of Dickens’s mother, the slothful and muddle-headed Mrs. Nickleby. But all these threads, plus the undoing of Dotheboys Hall, had to be tied up, which is why “Nicholas Nickleby” eventually succumbs to its plot — or plots. Although the plot of “A Tale of Two Cities” is managed perfectly, I find that despite its worked-up excitements — the terrifying Madame Defarge relentlessly knitting as the guillotine goes about its work — the book remains hermetic and resistible. As for “The Pickwick Papers,” the masterpiece that made him, overnight, the most famous writer in England, it has no plot at all. |
| One way to read Dickens is to think of his books, with obvious exceptions, as being set in one great universe or mythology — Dickensworld. Chesterton put it this way: “You cannot discuss whether ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ is a good novel, or whether ‘Our Mutual Friend’ is a bad novel. They are simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance called Dickens.” Chesterton points to a secondary character called Mr. Toots in “Dombey and Son”: “The very parasites that live on him despise him. But Dickens does not despise him. … Without altering one fact … he makes us not only like, but love, not only love, but reverence this little dunce and cad. The power to do this is a power truly and literally to be called divine. For this is the very wholesome point. Dickens does not alter Toots in any vital point. The thing he does alter is us.” And yet although Toots is painstakingly woven into the plot of “Dombey,” Dickens could just as easily have deployed him in “Martin Chuzzlewit” or “Little Dorrit” or some other corner of Dickensworld. | One way to read Dickens is to think of his books, with obvious exceptions, as being set in one great universe or mythology — Dickensworld. Chesterton put it this way: “You cannot discuss whether ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ is a good novel, or whether ‘Our Mutual Friend’ is a bad novel. They are simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance called Dickens.” Chesterton points to a secondary character called Mr. Toots in “Dombey and Son”: “The very parasites that live on him despise him. But Dickens does not despise him. … Without altering one fact … he makes us not only like, but love, not only love, but reverence this little dunce and cad. The power to do this is a power truly and literally to be called divine. For this is the very wholesome point. Dickens does not alter Toots in any vital point. The thing he does alter is us.” And yet although Toots is painstakingly woven into the plot of “Dombey,” Dickens could just as easily have deployed him in “Martin Chuzzlewit” or “Little Dorrit” or some other corner of Dickensworld. |
| This is true as well of minor characters who have nothing whatsoever to do with the stories they purportedly serve but whom we can never forget. And who would want to forget, say, “Mr. F’s Aunt,” whose outbursts of demented rage at poor Arthur Clennam in “Little Dorrit” make no sense at all. “There’s milestones on the Dover Road!” “When we lived at Henley, Barnes’s gander was stole by tinkers.” “You can’t make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn’t do it when your Uncle George was living; much less when he’s dead.” Mr. F’s Aunt’s malign non sequiturs would be immortal in whatever book Dickens had chosen to insert them. | This is true as well of minor characters who have nothing whatsoever to do with the stories they purportedly serve but whom we can never forget. And who would want to forget, say, “Mr. F’s Aunt,” whose outbursts of demented rage at poor Arthur Clennam in “Little Dorrit” make no sense at all. “There’s milestones on the Dover Road!” “When we lived at Henley, Barnes’s gander was stole by tinkers.” “You can’t make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn’t do it when your Uncle George was living; much less when he’s dead.” Mr. F’s Aunt’s malign non sequiturs would be immortal in whatever book Dickens had chosen to insert them. |
| One hundred and fifty years after his death, Dickens is as omnipresent as ever. Only Shakespeare is more so. (As Shaw wrote to Katey Dickens in 1903, “All I can tell you is that your father was neither a storyteller like Scott, nor a tittle-tattler like Thackeray: He was really a perplexed and amused observer like Shakespeare.”) “Dickensian” is an adjective constantly in use — all too often inappropriately, like “Kafkaesque.” In a single week in August this newspaper reviewed a new film version of “David Copperfield,” ran a feature story about it, told us that a wall of hot, smoky air smacked Bay Area residents in the face “as if they were opening the cast-iron door of a furnace in a Dickens novel,” and gave us as a crossword-puzzle clue “Dickensian setting.” (Answer: slum.) Not yet available in America, the latest novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally (“Schindler’s List”) is called “The Dickens Boy” — the story of Plorn, the youngest, weakest and saddest of the Dickens children, whom Dickens adored and then, when he was 16, packed off, alone, to Australia, to make his way. | One hundred and fifty years after his death, Dickens is as omnipresent as ever. Only Shakespeare is more so. (As Shaw wrote to Katey Dickens in 1903, “All I can tell you is that your father was neither a storyteller like Scott, nor a tittle-tattler like Thackeray: He was really a perplexed and amused observer like Shakespeare.”) “Dickensian” is an adjective constantly in use — all too often inappropriately, like “Kafkaesque.” In a single week in August this newspaper reviewed a new film version of “David Copperfield,” ran a feature story about it, told us that a wall of hot, smoky air smacked Bay Area residents in the face “as if they were opening the cast-iron door of a furnace in a Dickens novel,” and gave us as a crossword-puzzle clue “Dickensian setting.” (Answer: slum.) Not yet available in America, the latest novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally (“Schindler’s List”) is called “The Dickens Boy” — the story of Plorn, the youngest, weakest and saddest of the Dickens children, whom Dickens adored and then, when he was 16, packed off, alone, to Australia, to make his way. |
| The new Copperfield movie can’t really compete with the classic version from the 1930s — the one with W. C. Fields as Micawber and Basil Rathbone as Murdstone — or with such other terrific Dickens films as David Lean’s magnificent “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” (Alec Guinness is Fagin) or “A Tale of Two Cities” (Ronald Colman, forgoing his mustache, as Sydney Carton) or, if you like, “Oliver!” It is a commonplace of Dickens criticism to say that he is the most cinematic of novelists. But then he is also the most readable. | The new Copperfield movie can’t really compete with the classic version from the 1930s — the one with W. C. Fields as Micawber and Basil Rathbone as Murdstone — or with such other terrific Dickens films as David Lean’s magnificent “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” (Alec Guinness is Fagin) or “A Tale of Two Cities” (Ronald Colman, forgoing his mustache, as Sydney Carton) or, if you like, “Oliver!” It is a commonplace of Dickens criticism to say that he is the most cinematic of novelists. But then he is also the most readable. |
| The greatest geniuses are inexplicable, but they share an amazing fecundity of invention. Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Rembrandt, Balanchine — concoct your own list — leave you feeling that if they hadn’t chosen to produce these masterpieces, they could just as easily have chosen to produce those. | The greatest geniuses are inexplicable, but they share an amazing fecundity of invention. Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Rembrandt, Balanchine — concoct your own list — leave you feeling that if they hadn’t chosen to produce these masterpieces, they could just as easily have chosen to produce those. |
| How to begin comprehending such a phenomenon? Alas, not through A. N. Wilson’s “Mystery of Charles Dickens.” John Carey’s “The Violent Effigy” provides far more penetrating criticism. Ackroyd gives us the full life. Lillian Nayder’s “The Other Dickens” triumphantly rescues Catherine Dickens from the slanders her husband inflicted on her. And, of course, the novels themselves endlessly evoke him. Once again Chesterton gets to the heart of things: “The power which he proceeded at once to exhibit was the one power in letters which literally cannot be imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative energy, the enormous prodigality of genius … an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence.” | How to begin comprehending such a phenomenon? Alas, not through A. N. Wilson’s “Mystery of Charles Dickens.” John Carey’s “The Violent Effigy” provides far more penetrating criticism. Ackroyd gives us the full life. Lillian Nayder’s “The Other Dickens” triumphantly rescues Catherine Dickens from the slanders her husband inflicted on her. And, of course, the novels themselves endlessly evoke him. Once again Chesterton gets to the heart of things: “The power which he proceeded at once to exhibit was the one power in letters which literally cannot be imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative energy, the enormous prodigality of genius … an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence.” |
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