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  • The Dickens Bicentennial
  • David Gervais (bio)
‘Dickens and London’ at the Museum of London, London Wall, 2012

It may seem churlish to criticise an exhibition as inventive and instructive as this one but, despite its persuasive expression of our love of the novels, one owes it to Dickens himself, to Dickens the writer rather than Dickens the journalist or Dickens the subject of numerous biographies, to resist the current temptation to identify him with his subject-matter. He belongs to the world, not just to London. It was good to have such a rich sense of the visual art that surrounded the novels and of the eagerness of his audience. (Especially moving were the manuscripts of Bleak House and Great Expectations, with their surprisingly neat and even handwriting.) What was most lacking was any sense of how the novels fitted into Victorian literature [End Page 470] in general. What was it like for Trollope and Thackeray to have him as their contemporary? How accurate did those he satirised think his satire was? Instead, we kept coming back to Dickens the phenomenon. The bicentennial has already produced a sensitive and readable biography by Claire Tomalin but, beyond a certain point, she is rehearsing material that is well known. Michael Slater’s longer biography of a few years ago is less colourful but more consequential (particularly on Dickens the journalist). In fact, a biography of Dickens does not need to be colourful if it is exact: Dickens’s life was so dramatic that its drama can be left to speak for itself.

Slater has the great merit of being honest about how little we actually know about Dickens and Ellen Ternan – we cannot even be absolutely sure that they slept with one another, even if we like to imagine that she was the original of Estella. She ended up married to a respectable doctor, and Dickens destroyed all the evidence of their relationship that he could lay his hands on. He did not like to talk about his art either – unlike Proust or Henry James or D. H. Lawrence. Daniel Doyce, the engineer in Little Dorrit, is as near as he ever got to a ‘self-portrait of the artist’. The essential biography is still that of John Forster, who had the advantage of being an intimate friend and colleague. Dickens chose him as a biographer because he knew he was discreet.

For many readers Dickens is our greatest writer since Shakespeare (as great as Chaucer or Milton and far more popular); they know his work with a unique intimacy and think of it not just as part of their literary history but as an index of their national past. The adjective ‘Dickensian’ sometimes refers to his exuberant imagination and sometimes to the world he described – baby farms, Chancery, dust heaps, and all the rest. We like to think that we can distinguish between the facts he began from and the fictions he turned them into but, in the end, they are all rolled together in our minds, just as they were in his. By seeing what the preface to Bleak House called ‘the Romantic side of familiar things’ we understand where we have come from better than from any more literal history. This is not to think of him as a journalist though; in his greatest novels ‘reality’ takes on a more metaphysical character than it has in a novel like Oliver Twist. Thus, in Little Dorrit, we are told of Mr Merdle’s Physician that ‘where he was, something real was’. It is this non-anecdotal reality that Dickens stands for himself.

The difference between our love of Shakespeare and our love of Dickens is that we know so much more about Dickens – perhaps too much. Henry James wondered at the mysterious inner life to which Prospero seemed to point, but Dickens’s inner life is written in capital letters: the blacking factory, Mary Hogarth, the divorce and Ellen Ternan, and so on. In a sense, he himself willed this exposure; he wanted his [End Page 471] public to see him as a friend and, in his final years, he virtually killed himself giving his public readings. No other...

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