Much of what I already knew about Dickens (his father was a financial disaster, he was traumatised by being taken from school and sent to work in a factory with lower class children, he was an instantly successful novelist, he worked hard and wrote copiously, he loved amateur theatricals, he rejected his wife of twenty years and ten children in favour of a young actress) is repeated in this biography. It is all part of the myth. It must be difficult to write a Life of Dickens without repeating the same old stuff.
What surprised me was the emphasis on the spare-time activities of the novelist. Kaplan gives us chapter and verse of his holidays, his friendships, his business arrangements, his amateur theatricals etc. There is much less about the activity that dominated his life: his writing.
The book is far more interested in the later works. For example, there is no plot summary of Nickleby or Martin Chuzzelwit but more than three pages are devoted to the plot of Great Expectations. Not only is this manifestly unfair, but I would argue that the first two books are far less well known that the last, so Kaplan seems to be telling the reader what the reader already knows.
I suppose that Kaplan's biographer's instinct seeks to uncover the links between reality and fiction. For the later books, say from Bleak House onwards, Kaplan explains where the theme comes from (eg Hard Times which is about the conditions of the industrial revolution is inspired by a strike in Preston) and the model for many of the characters (Leigh Hunt for Horace Skimpole in Bleak House) but it would appear that the earlier books (Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby) were spontaneously generated.
What interests me, as an author, is how Dickens honed his craft. Kaplan tells us: "In the novels that were to follow [David Copperfield] ... he was to use autobiographical tonalities for more subjective portraiture and psychological dramatization than in his earlier work." (7.3) He also reveals that , in the run up to writing Little Dorrit, "Dickens had begun to jot down ideas for stories and character sketches and lists of titles and names for characters in a small notebook ... He had never before kept a working notebook." (10.2) But, again, these considersations are dwarfed by discussion of Dickens travelling in Paris.
As for specifically technique-based discussion, all I could find was that Kaplan talks about the use of dual narrators (omniscient and first person) in Bleak House (but doesn't tell us how or why Dickens chose that difficult technique) and that "Collins' major objection to Dickens' fiction ... was that he did not tell his audience enough. For Collins, the art of fiction demanded a series of self-conscious signposts directing the reader toward an unraveling of a well-constructed plot. For Dickens, plot revelations needed to rise organically from the interaction of characters in a narrative pattern in which suggestion and symbol appealed to the reader's intuition." (12.3).
Perhaps I was hoping for too much. Perhaps biography can't deliver a connection between an author's life and the development of his craft; perhaps this link is too subtle to leave traces. But there were moments in this biography when I wondered whether writing was part of what Dickens did.
As for the person, he certainly emerges as a rather unpleasant man. His vindictiveness when he ditched his wife was horrid: he ditched his long-standing publishers, his partners in a magazine, to their great cost, when they refused to print a self-serving statement about his marriage in Punch, the humorous magazine, which they owned, on the grounds that it wasn't humour. He was determined to squash the rumours that he was separating from his faithful wife to have an affair with a much younger woman because he was fearful that allegations of impropriety would damage the Dickens 'family values' brand. He demanded his children (except for his eldest son) stayed with him and never saw their mother. His daughter, Kate, is reprted in this biography as saying: "My father was like a madman when my mother left home ... The affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us." (11.3)
He was hugely money-motivated. He took on far more work than a normal person could cope with because he was desperate for money. He couldn't resist the lure of reading tours, although he was advised against them as they made him very ill and perhaps shortened his life, because of the huge incomes they generated even when he was already hugely rich. I suppose he was haunted by the memories of his debt-ridden childhood.
He was ashamed of his sons. "Having been born to neither wealth nor title, his sons, Dickens assumed, should go out, as he had, into the world, and make their fortune. ... Whatever the mixture of motives, after 1858 he promoted their early departure, even when it pained him to see them leave." (12.1) It is not unusual that self-made men take the attitude that 'if I can make it, everyone can' without realising that their success is due to the fact that they are highly unusual (or very lucky). It is a paradox that an author who championed the weak and the poor never recognised this fact about himself.
Selected Quotes:
- "From early on, he developed a performance personality, encouraged to believe that applause was approval." (1.3)
- "He cared more for his work than for her." (3.2)
- "The distortion of logic, reason, ethics, and the Bible by defenders of slavery seemed not only self-serving but also self-destructive." (5.3)
- "Individualism, in the marketplace, in politics. and now on the frontier, seemed to him anticommunal, intolerably lonely, brazenly selfish, inherently materialistic, and threateningly brutal." (3.5)
- "Having struggled out of the blacking factory to be a gentleman of the sort that America did not encourage, he identified with the upper middle class's assumption of aristocratic personal values and liberal middle-class politics." (3.5)
- "The widespread assertion that drunkenness was the cause of many evils rather than a result of already existing ones angered him, as if eradication a symptom in any way dealt with the disease." (6.4)
- "He thought 'total abstinence' nonsense, an attempt by the weak-willed to make the temperate suffer for their inability to drink moderately." (7.3)
There are many things about this biography that make it fascinating but the obsession with Dickens as a man rather than as a writer makes it flawed and unbalanced.
Other biographies of Dickens reviewed in this blog:
- 'Dickens' by Peter Ackroyd
- 'Charles Dickens: A Life' by Claire Tomalin
October 2021; 556 pages
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