In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
  • Deirdre David (bio)
Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin; pp. xlvii + 527. New York: Penguin Press, 2011, $36.00, $18.00 paper.

At the beginning of her biography, Claire Tomalin takes us to a day in January 1840 when an inquest is being held at Marylebone Workhouse. Among the twelve jurors is a jaunty, slight, and smartly dressed man with dark curly hair who has just moved into a splendid house at No. 1 Devonshire Terrace. Drawn as we are by this image of a confident Charles Dickens, we wonder, inevitably, whether there is anything more to be said about a life so familiar, so amply analyzed from divergent critical perspectives. Our reservations, however, are quickly dispelled by Tomalin’s vivid sense of historical time and place and her empathetic grasp of Dickens’s complex personality. The Marylebone Workhouse case concerns a maid-of-all-work who has given birth under her skirts, to an infant born dead according to her testimony. Deeply moved by her plight, Dickens forcefully argues against his fellow jurors who urge a verdict of infanticide, and he prevails. Two months later Eliza Burgess is tried at the Old Bailey, convicted of concealment, and nothing more is heard of her.

As Tomalin notes, this “is a very small episode in the life of Dickens, but it allows us to see him in action. … He is at his best as a man, determined in argument, generous in giving help, following through the case, motivated purely by his profound sense that it was wrong that she should be victimized further.” The sustained power of Tomalin’s biography is her insistence that we see Dickens first and always “as a man,” as an extraordinarily complex human being (xliii). We encounter someone both kind and brutal, a fearless agitator on behalf of the unfortunate, yet also an adamant foe of his rejected wife and a disappointed father to his many children. Afresh, we see a man whose [End Page 548] boundless ambition led him to become England’s entertainer and whose insatiable desire for applause (and for money) drove him to spend the final months of his life in frantic travel from one provincial city to another as he delivered his electrifying readings.

Tomalin admits that her attitude toward her subject is both admiring and uneasy—an attitude derived from Dickens’s own frank confessions about himself and his behavior—and she quotes at length from an account of a visit supposedly made by Fyodor Dostoevsky to Dickens in 1862 when Dickens confessed that there “were two people in him, … one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite” (322). Dostoevsky’s account, however, has recently been revealed as fraudulent, and when queried in 2012 about her claim, Tomalin admitted that “she might have been the victim of a hoax,” that she had found the account “irresistible,” and that she had relied on “the scholarship of others” (Eric Naiman, “When Dickens Met Dostoevsky,” The Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 2013. Web). Hoax or not, however, in a frank letter written to his wife in December 1853, Dickens elaborates the qualities that make him different from other men: “sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil” (253). Tomalin’s sustained and subtle emphasis on those “two people” in Dickens, of the “good” and the “evil” in her subject, distinguishes her biography from others that have sought to explain exactly what made Dickens tick.

Inevitably, the irresponsible parents who sent him out to pawn his precious books, stunted his education, and placed him in the blacking factory at the age of eleven, feature prominently in the first third of Tomalin’s narrative. Yet she invests her discussion of these familiar episodes with a vivid sense of the sheer joy he felt as a fifteen-year-old clerk in Gray’s Inn, becoming Boz as he felt the pulse of the city that became his enduring subject. By the age of twenty-five he was enmeshed in a marriage generated by a need for domestic stability and sexual order (a need Tomalin sensitively explores), he was the...

pdf

Share