Becoming Dickens deals with the novelist’s first 26 years, during which time the future Victorian patriarch was a skinny, hyperactive youth with the pent-up energy of the newly invented steam engine. In an age of comic pseudonyms such as Phiz or Elia, he was Boz, and his first book, published when he was 24, was Sketches by Boz, a collection of London scenes observed with an eye for comedy and melodrama.
London, with its sociability and its loneliness, remained at the center of Dickens’ novels. By the end of the century it was twice the size of New York, with a population bigger than the next 10 UK cities put together. It was home to every imaginable occupation, from the “mud larks” who picked over the mud uncovered by the Thames at low-tide, to the sham-genteel newly-rich, such as the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend. Murderers jostled with prostitutes in the dirty, dangerous streets, and one of Dickens’ first jobs was as newspaper reporter, going everywhere in the city and seeing what he could find.
He’d tried out other work, such as parliamentary reporting (for which he learned shorthand), clerking in a lawyer’s office and acting. The first was well paid, but only for the 142 days annually when parliament was sitting. The last you might even have to lay out money yourself for — there were theaters where you had to pay for the chance of acting a famous role. So Dickens also tried his hand at scripting plays, something he continued to do into middle age.
But this inveterate freelancer always had more than one task in hand, continuing to turn out penny-a-line articles while in the middle of his second book, Pickwick Papers. But half of London’s struggling writers were much the same, sketching out stage versions of Oliver Twist even before the printed monthly installments had come to an end. They simply imagined ingenious endings, challenging the real author, of course, to come up with one even more ingenious of his own.
FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
It was all hand-to-mouth and the survival of the fittest. Copyright laws, like the police, were in short supply, and, as the rural unemployed crowded into London, everyone did what they could to make ends meet. Sometimes it wasn’t enough, and when Dickens’ father had to take up residence in a debtors’ prison, the Marshalsea (later to feature in Little Dorrit), the 11-year-old boy famously worked sticking labels onto jars of black shoe-polish. Very early on he saw what happened if you couldn’t pay your bills, and plenty of such unfortunates were later to populate his pages.
Dickens, however, was soon managing more than just well. By 26, when this book ends, he had been elected a member of London’s very prestigious Athenaeum Club, and in addition owned a four-floor house where his brother and his wife’s sister also lived. Pickwick Papers had been hugely successful, with the first installment having a print run of 400, but the last ones something approaching 40,000.
This, then, is the world described in Becoming Dickens. The book ends with the coronation of Queen Victoria (who, though no great novel-reader, found Oliver Twist “excessively interesting”). Some have considered the years up to 1838 a mere extension of the 18th century, with the great Victorian themes of industry, empire, evangelicalism, reform and railways still to get properly in their stride. Dickens was to be the greatest chronicler of those coming decades, calmly and modestly (as his rival Thackeray was to note) taking his place “at the head of English literature.”
But he hasn’t always enjoyed such an elevated estimation. During the middle decades of the 20th century it was fashionable to consider him too much the entertainer, and inferior as a novelist to George Eliot. This downgrading, later to be reversed, was the work of the Cambridge University critic F.R. Leavis. Those days seem far off now, as the plethora of new books timed to coincide with the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth in 1812, this one included, testifies. The consensus now is that, despite many failings, Dickens really was the pre-eminent novelist of the age.
UNIVERSITY OF LIFE
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a young academic from Oxford University’s Magdalen College, often gets it right. From his time toying with the theater, Dickens learnt to produce “the hammy dialogue and melodramatic posturing he openly satirized but secretly thrilled to.” That balances Dickens’ strengths and weaknesses to perfection. He was no George Eliot, translating a skeptical Life of Jesus from the German and effectively editing the intellectual Westminster Review. Instead, he was the boyish-looking reporter jotting down in shorthand the complaints of a cheerful Cockney street-sweeper. He did his research, joining the British Library immediately after his 18th birthday (presumably it was the minimum age for membership). Barnaby Rudge was to display a knowledge of London’s Gordon Riots of 1780, and there’s no ignorance of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Then there was that famous ending, added at the printer’s after the novel had supposedly been finished.
That ending — “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done …” — is at the heart of Dickens’ genius. Always in a hurry, and putting his finger on true greatness almost by chance, he found fame by an over-prodigal use of his many talents. Henry James (at 22) was to call him “the greatest of superficial novelists,” but Dickens’ stock will always stand higher than his. He knew how to touch people, and knew that he knew it. Douglas-Fairhurst quotes him writing to his wife, “If you could have seen [the actor] Macready last night — undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read [The Chimes] — you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power.” There are embarrassingly bad things in Dickens, but power, however much he watered it down with sentimentality and caricature, was always at his disposal.
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