Simply Dickens by Paul Schlicke (review)

“In his art and in his life, it was […] as if Dickens led multiple lives” (xix). Thus Paul Schlicke concludes his preface to Simply Dickens, a short biography of the Inimitable in Simply Charly’s Great Lives Series. And thus the book proceeds, offering up twelve brief but densely packed chapters representative of the various characters Dickens played over the course of his life, from vagabond child to novice sketch-writer to celebrity novelist, journalist and editor-at-large. The dramatic framework that undergirds this study – the thesis-driven focus on “the essentially theatrical nature” of the life and work of Charles Dickens (xviii) – is accentuated at the outset by a cheeky model playbill introducing the cast of characters Schlicke’s readers will encounter, including the following:

The Dandy Lover – Mr. Charles Dickens!
Boz – Mr. Charles Dickens!
The Playwright – Mr. Charles Dickens!
The Editor – Mr. Charles Dickens!
The Novelist – Mr. Charles Dickens!
Father Christmas – Mr. Charles Dickens!

(xxi)

That we begin a biography of Dickens with a dramatis personae – enumerating seventeen characters in total, seventeen iterations of the same man – is at once familiar and odd. Readers of the Dickens canon appreciate, and at times even require, a reference guide to the characters who crowd the expansive worlds of his fiction. But that the same narrative diligence is required to record the history and personality of the author himself – to capture the brilliantly miscellaneous pursuits, influences, and ideological themes that underwrite his colossal career – cuts to the heart of this biography. The dramatic trope that punctuates Simply Dickens stresses not only the importance of theater to the imagination of our novelist, but also the sparkling versatility of his genius and the nearly impossible range of his professional pursuits.

The slimness of this volume, then, echoes other abbreviated histories of the author, including Michael Slater’s Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens (1999), also intended for popular audiences seeking quick access to the primary plot-points of Dickens’s life and work; but the Schlicke book in some ways resonates more tellingly with much lengthier biographies that read the life of Dickens as a dramatic narrative, often stressing the relations among the author, his readership and his characters as forcefully as they do those that defined his private world (as Edgar Johnson’s Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph [1952] and Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens [1990] both do). As such, readers of Simply Dickens should expect to meet with limited personal material in this book, an editorial pose foreshadowed by the virtual absence of avatars in the dramatis personae reflective of the family life of our author. Of the seventeen faces of Dickens that Schlicke introduces in his opening list, only three offer insight into the intimate corners of Dickens’s world – and none of them speaks to his twenty-two-year relationship with his wife Catherine Hogarth or to his role as parent to ten children. “Father Christmas – Mr. Charles Dickens!” we get; “Father – Mr. Charles Dickens!” we do not. And references to his romantic life – “The Dandy Lover,” “The Mature Lover” – point to the passionate engagements of his early and later years (Maria Beadnell, Ellen Ternan) rather than to the domestic experiences that informed two of his most prolific decades, the 1840s and 1850s. While the marriage plot of Charles and Catherine is tucked inconspicuously into a chapter on journalism, The Pickwick Papers, and the birth of Boz (11), for instance, Nelly Ternan captures the attention of an entire chapter (“New love”).

This seeming imbalance in the representation of Dickens’s domestic affairs ultimately serves two important theoretical purposes, both of which direct our attention to his professional achievements rather than to his personal interests. First, the heightened attention to Ternan, by stressing a radical dimension in Dickens’s private life, also stresses the radical dimension of his writing. Schlicke recounts how the critical reception of Dickens altered in the 1930s when news of his extra-marital exploits went public, inviting literary scholars to understand Dickens “as a radically complex writer and...