Contingent Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s new work on Dickens is too agile and supple to be called anything as stuffy as ‘masterful’, but it is certainly very welcome as an important and original contribution to the already monumental library of books about Dickens. Even at a time when we have perhaps all heard a little too much about Dickens, this book manages to arrive fresh, as if Dickens were indeed a young writer just efflorescing onto the literary scene and this was our first view of him. Becoming Dickens is both readable and scholarly. It represents the fruits of a long and intimate acquaintance with the life and works of ‘Boz’, both in the library and, perhaps even more vitally, in the tutorial. That Dickens is funny and a playful writer seems to have entirely escaped many literary critics, and it is one of the pleasures of Becoming Dickens that it never escapes Douglas-Fairhurst. But even as it celebrates the gleeful energy of Dickens’s writing, this book also reveals the risk and the fear that fuelled the novelist’s mercurial facility with words.

At times the tutorial atmosphere intensifies, as when Douglas-Fairhurst tells us that ‘The word “verse” comes from the Latin vertere, meaning “to turn”, and this provides a helpful way of thinking about the possible uses of line-endings, because although a poet can apply them as mechanically as the carriage return on a typewriter, they can also be used to think about other kinds of “turning”’ (p. 280). But the didacticism is not unwelcome. There is an enjoyment of Dickens here which seems shared and sociable – one can imagine Douglas-Fairhurst and his students giggling over Mr Micawber’s orotundity or Flora Flinching’s gush, just as one can imagine Dickens himself chuckling at his own jokes as he wrote them. Douglas-Fairhurst is particularly attuned to Dickens’s saturation in the London theatre and finds the source of much of Dickens’s humour there. He suggests convincing models for Dickens’s early characterisation in Charles Mathews’s ‘At Home’ residencies at Covent Garden and the Adelphi, and in the popular theatrical act, Paul Pry, in whose comic catch-phrases he hears a clear precursor to Sam Weller’s ‘Wellerisms’ in Pickwick. One of the book’s subtler successes is in its careful contextualisation of the self-nominated ‘Inimitable’, showing that in fact imitation played a large part in Dickens’s early development as a writer, thus tightening the book’s central contention that Dickens was not always Dickens but spent a great deal of time and energy in learning to be an author.

The structure of Becoming Dickens is cleverly counterfactual. Only suppose, suggests Douglas-Fairhurst, that Dickens had never become Dickens at all, but had failed as a writer, or done something else instead: stayed in the law, for example, or become an actor. The book takes us back to early Dickens: Dickens the attorney’s clerk, the parliamentary reporter, the dramatist, the sketch writer, the hack. Douglas-Fairhurst reminds us that Dickens retained his rooms in Chambers long after he had become a successful novelist (p. 67). Although it takes in much of Dickens’s later work in its examination of the importance of contingency in his writings, the book ends by leaving Dickens on the brink of fame in 1838. It tracks the stuttering start of a career, demanding that we too inhabit the uncertain present of that time. ‘Dickens’s fall was a temporary one’, says Douglas-Fairhurst of the young Dickens’s famously miserable stint labelling bottles in Warren’s Blacking Factory, ‘but’, he reminds us, ‘it would not have seemed so at the time’ (p. 34). Nevertheless he is also aware of the dangers of such an approach, ‘Of course, reading Dickens’s early sketches as windows that open onto his future risks falling into a form of critical doublethink, in which the early writing is praised as promising, but only because we know that its...