Charles Dickens (review)

Michael Slater's wonderfully detailed biography of Charles Dickens has rightly been called magisterial. It presents a richly contextualised account of the author's life and work, illuminating the interconnectedness of Dickens's concurrent projects and providing new insights of a kind that would be unavailable to any less holistic account. The book captures the challenges Dickens faced in publishing fiction in instalments, working as travel-writer, editor, and (in the case of Master Humphrey's Clock [1840-41], sole) contributor, and interacting with his illustrators. Ever resourceful, Dickens soon found ways to make the competing demands of his projects work to his advantage—he had only one professional failure across his entire career with the Daily News. Slater shows how Dickens interweaved his tragic and comic writing to leave sufficient energy for each, as in the writings of the hilarities of Mr. Crummles and his theatrical family in Nicholas Nickleby (1837-39) alongside the grim world of Fagin's London and the vicious murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist (1837-38). Through attention to Dickens's work across genres, Slater continually reveals a form of "connection [that] shows itself between two disparate pieces of writing going on at the same time" (166), such as Dickens's 1852 letter to Angela Burdett Coutts portraying a starved child and horse in a Southwark slum and his apocalyptic depiction of the latter in the next number of Bleak House (1852-53). The chapter title, "Writing Little Dorrit—Among Other Things, 1855-1857" is an economical summary of Slater's approach throughout. Having worked closely in previous projects on Dickens's journalism, as well as on his fiction and travel-writing, Slater is particularly well placed to undertake this uniquely wide-ranging account of a man who has received so much biographical scrutiny. Attentive to the wealth of existing biographical and literary critical work, this book is also, in part, an appraisal of a field of scholarship, with Slater frequently identifying the most important existing work on a topic. With brilliantly economical endnotes for the amount of material involved, the scholarly apparatus is unobtrusive but will be indispensable to future researchers.

This book is at the same time a fascinating account of Victorian publishing practices; it will interest historians of the book with details of, for example, the increased extent of the "Pickwick Advertiser" as a measure of growing commercial success and of Dickens's careful revision and commercially canny reissuing of his own work for different audiences, "working the copyrights" as he called it (qtd. in Slater 434). It will also speak to theatre historians through its exploration of Dickens's lifelong attraction to the stage and his phenomenally successful career as public reader of his own works. I was particularly struck by the sensitive handling of Dickens's relationship with theatrical adaptations, or piracies, of his serialised novels. Though Dickens's frustration with such productions—memorably documented in Nicholas Nickleby's attack on the "literary gentleman" (qtd. in Slater 134)—is well known, Slater also notes a surprising reversal of the direction of inspiration: when Dickens was struggling to write the end of Little Dorrit (1855-57) "he seems to have looked back for help with the plotting to an unauthorised dramatisation of the first part of the novel by Frederick Fox Cooper that had run briefly at the Strand Theatre in November 1856" (420). Slater briefly notes the parallels in dénouement of these works, a tantalising point on which I was left wishing for more detail. I also wanted to know more about the perspectives of Dickens's significant others, which, for reasons of space, necessarily appear in brief. We learn in passing the fascinating detail, for example, that Burdett Coutts invited the newly separated Catherine Dickens to make her home with her.

I found the greatest strength of this book to lie in its treatment of Dickens as a writer, a focus indicated by the chapter titles, "America Brought to Book, 1842" and "Writing Off a Marriage, 1857...