In March 1870 Dickens’s friend Sir Arthur Helps, Clerk to the Privy Council told Queen Victoria when briefing her for her
meeting with Dickens, that
David Copperfield was believed ‘to give a hint of the author’s early life’.
1 This was a widespread and very natural belief, given the novel’s autobiographical format, Dickens’s frequently expressed
special fondness for it, certain details of the hero’s young manhood and his situation as a successful novelist and family
man at the end of the book. As far as the child David’s degradation in the bottling warehouse was concerned, and his familiarity
with the inside of a debtor’s prison, readers presumably imagined these passages to be entirely fictitious, another powerful
exposé of the abuse of children in contemporary society by the large-hearted author of
Oliver Twist.
That, shortly before he began writing
Copperfield, or perhaps earlier, Dickens had been, intermittently, working on an actual autobiography, in which his childhood suffering
and the bitter feelings to which it had given rise were laid bare, was known only to his wife and to his intimate friend John
Forster. The version of his early life known to the general public during his lifetime was decidedly different and conformed
generally to the information supplied by Dickens himself on the rare occasions when he consented to supply any.
2 This version did not disguise the fact that he came from a modest background and had been educated at the sort of private
academy usually attended by boys from the lower and middle middle classes. Such schooling did not normally extend beyond the
age of 15 or 16, by which time boys needed to ‘begin the world’, as the phrase went, and Dickens was known to have worked
for a while in his early teens as a junior clerk in an attorney’s office, leaving it to carve out for himself a successful
career in parliamentary journalism. Soon afterwards he soared to ever-increasing fame on the coat tails of Mr Pickwick and
made an upwardly mobile marriage. This was the kind of Smilesian success story the Victorians relished, and clearly Dickens
was happy to
be seen in this light whilst keeping to himself the knowledge that his life story was, in fact, a good deal more dramatic
and heroic than his admiring and adoring public could possibly have imagined. In
Copperfield, however, he found a way to dramatise his traumatic Warren’s experience and thus share it with his beloved readers while
keeping the literal truth a secret still.
Shortly after he died several catchpenny biographies appeared, including one by Dr R. Shelton Mackenzie published in Philadelphia
in August 1870. Like the others, Mackenzie’s biography conformed, as did all the obituaries, to the received version of the
story of Dickens’s early life. But the author had been a London journalist for many years before emigrating to America and
he used some inside knowledge: ‘It was a constant joke, among newspaper-men, that Charles Dickens had drawn upon his father’s
actual character, when he was writing
David Copperfield, and put him into that story as Micawber.’ John Dickens, he added, ‘considered himself rather complimented in thus being
converted into literary “capital” by his son’.
3 There is, of course, no mention of John’s time in the Marshalsea, about which his ‘newspaper-men’ colleagues seem to have
known nothing. When the first volume of
The Life of Charles Dickens written by John Forster, his close friend and literary adviser for over thirty years, appeared, the truth about what Forster
called Dickens’s ‘hard experiences in boyhood’ – or rather, the truth about them as perceived by Dickens himself some twenty
years after the event – became public knowledge, and one of the great legends of English literary history took shape. So powerful,
moving and eloquent is Dickens’s description, as quoted by Forster, of the intense misery and shame of his time at Warren’s
that few biographers since have been able to resist shaping their chronicle of his early years around extensive quotations
from this document. Indelibly stamped upon the public imagination was the image of the delicate, bright little boy devastated
by his apparent abandonment by his parents but heroically taking charge of his own existence, speaking to no one of his inner
misery and priding himself on doing his work well, bitterly degrading though he felt it to be.
This greatly helped to strengthen the heroic image of Dickens that Forster wanted to build in his biography, a biography that,
as Carlyle noted, sometimes verges on autobiography because, in addition to presenting Dickens’s own account of his boyhood
sufferings, Forster also quotes copiously from his letters. In his antepenultimate chapter, ‘Personal Characteristics 1836–1870’,
Forster puts the finishing touches to his portrait, stressing among other things how, throughout his whole career,
Dickens worked for all ‘practical social reforms’ to benefit the poor and to help alleviate class divisions, as well as to
raise the status of professional writers. When he published a revised two-volume version of his
Life of Dickens (1876), he set the seal on his work by dividing it into twelve books, like a Classical epic, as though Dickens were some
Virgilian hero.
Before Forster had finished his labours, however, new biographical information about Dickens was emerging. And over the next
forty years or so more and more of it came to light; hardly surprising given that Dickens was the most famous writer of his
day, who for over three decades had lived very much in the limelight and had touched his age at so many points. He appeared
in numerous memoirs, quite apart from all the family ones, and his elder daughter Mamie and his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth,
self-constituted ‘guardian of the beloved memory’, produced successive heavily edited selections of his personal letters (1879,
1881, 1882).
4 Meanwhile, detailed researches into many aspects of his life were carried on by enthusiasts such as Robert Langton (
The Childhood and Youth of Dickens, 1891), William Hughes (
A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land, 1891) and, above all, F. G. Kitton, whose rather plodding
Charles Dickens. His Life, Writings and Personality appeared in 1902.
Dickens’s peculiar status as not simply a great writer but also a great and good man was endorsed by the founding in 1902
of the International Dickens Fellowship, which aimed ‘to spread the love of humanity’, considered to be the ‘keynote’ of all
his work. The Fellowship’s magazine, The Dickensian, regularly published new discoveries about his life and work, all invariably of a highly creditable nature. Thus there gradually
accumulated in the public domain a mass of detailed information, well leavened with unsubstantiated gossip and suspect or
far-flown reminiscences, about Dickens’s personal habits, opinions, likes and dislikes, tastes and fancies, homes and haunts,
literary and domestic relationships, friendships, dogs, travels, passion for amateur theatricals, charitable activities, etc.,
etc., all of it broadly conforming to Forster’s portrait of him.
Leslie Stephen’s entry for Dickens in the Dictionary of National Biography (1888) expressed another view, however, one that was more common among the upper classes and proponents of high culture.
Stephen’s Dickens is a half-educated, feverishly energetic man of great natural genius and ‘exuberant animal spirits’ who
yet carried in his heart much bitterness about his early years. In his later years he is described as pursuing money and distracting
activity and eventually killing himself with his public readings, ‘an enterprise not worthy of his best powers’ (here at least
Forster would have agreed with Stephen).
Meanwhile, the ‘Dickensians’ beavered away to create what Stephen would have called an ‘exhaustive museum’ of their hero’s
life in general.
5 But when it came to his love life there was a resounding silence – apart from an occasional flutter of speculation about
the nature of his feelings for his young sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, who had died in his arms aged only 17. Once his anguished
letters to Maria Beadnell had been privately published in Boston (1908), however, it was only a matter of time before the
story of his unrequited youthful passion, and his middle-aged serio-comic disillusionment with the object of that passion,
became, to the distress of the Dickens family, standard elements in Dickensian biography. In 1928, for example, J. W. T. Ley
included a full account of the affair in his annotated edition of Forster’s
Life (still the standard scholarly edition, amazingly), which collected together all the really noteworthy biographical information
about Dickens that had come to light since 1876. No need seemed to be felt for any new biography that might offer a fresh
interpretation of its subject. Ralph Straus in his
Dickens: A Portrait in Pencil (1928) might use the Beadnell letters, and revive speculation about Mary Hogarth, but it was still very much Forster’s Dickens
that he presented.
Presumably, the main reason for the Dickens family’s anxiety about any probing into Dickens’s love life was the fear that
it might lead to the exposure of his twelve-year liaison with a woman twenty-seven years his junior, Ellen Ternan, who gave
up her efforts to develop a theatrical career (both her parents had been on the stage) soon after meeting Dickens. She is
mentioned
en passant by Straus, but only as someone who became ‘a very great friend’ of Dickens. The Dickenses were nervously aware that Thomas
Wright, a biographer with a penchant for discovering the sexual peccadilloes of famous literary figures, had got on to Ellen’s
trail in 1893. It was not, however, until 1934, shortly after the death of Dickens’s last child and with Ellen herself having
died in 1914, that Wright first published his Ternan discoveries. He claimed that in the 1870s Ellen (by then the highly respectable
wife of the owner/headmaster of a school in Margate) had confessed to her local vicar, the literary Canon Benham, also now
deceased, that she had been reluctantly persuaded by Dickens to become his mistress, but now ‘loathed the very thought of
the intimacy’. A startlingly different Dickens from Forster’s promptly appeared in a new biography
The Sentimental Journey: A Life of Charles Dickens (1934) by ‘Hugh Kingsmill’ (H. K. Lunn). In this fundamental reassessment Dickens received something comparable to a Lytton
Strachey-style makeover, for which he had perhaps been overdue. For Kingsmill, he became an ‘incurable emotional hypochondriac’
after his rejection by Maria
Beadnell, and Ellen, whom he had at first idealised, became merely ‘the object of the sensuality with which he tried to drug
the unhappiness of his later years’.
6In 1939 came a still worse blow for Dickensians. Gladys Storey published
Dickens and Daughter, which stated categorically, on the authority of Dickens’s younger daughter Kate Perugini, who had died in 1929 and whose
intimate friend Storey had been in the last years of her life, that Ellen had not only been Dickens’s mistress but that she
had borne him a child, which had died. An even more unForsterian Dickens makes his appearance in this book, in which Storey
quotes Mrs Perugini as saying things like, ‘My father was like a madman when my mother left home … He did not care one damn
what happened to any of us’ and ‘My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man’.
7 This last remark follows on from another quotation from Mrs Perugini, ‘I loved my father better than any man in the world
– in a different way of course … I loved him for his faults’. She had evidently become exasperated by the benign caricature
of her father adored by ‘Dickens lovers’ because it diminished the real, extraordinary, wonderful, frightening, lovable father
she had known, and had understood better, perhaps, than any other member of his family. She wanted the record set straight
– but after her death.
The most significant and influential response to the Wright/Storey revelations came not in the form of a new biography but
in a series of three magazine articles by the distinguished American critic Edmund Wilson collected together under the title
‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ in his
The Wound and the Bow (1941). Wilson argued that the experiences recalled by Dickens in the so-called ‘Autobiographical Fragment’ produced in him
‘a trauma from which he suffered all his life’ but which inspired his powerful studies – from the inside as it were – of antisocial
types like rebels and criminals, especially thieves and murderers.
8 In 1937 T. A. Jackson had offered readers a proto-Marxist ‘revolutionary’ Dickens in his
Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical, but Wilson sees Dickens as essentially emotionally unstable (‘capable of great hardness and cruelty’) and more anarchic
than revolutionary. The liaison with Ellen brought him much unhappiness, revealed by the ‘petulant, spoiled and proud’ heroines
of the later novels. In the last year of his life Dickens was ‘invoking his own death’ in his sensational public readings
of the murder of Nancy.
9 In his portrayal of Jasper in
Edwin Drood, Wilson saw Dickens’s final, desperate, attempt to grapple with the duality of his own nature.
Meanwhile, in 1938 three volumes of Dickens letters had appeared as part of a luxurious limited edition called the Nonesuch
Dickens. These
letters, including many hundreds now first published, revealed whole aspects of Dickens’s life and many important relationships,
skimmed over or wholly ignored by Forster, for example his work for Urania Cottage, his involvement with mesmerism and his
friendship with Wilkie Collins. They even provided a glimpse or two of Ellen. The first biographer to take advantage of all
this new material was Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, who also, of course, had to take on board the Wright/Storey revelations (her
view of the Dickens–Ellen relationship was that ‘it must have given him some pleasure as it was kept going till his death’).
10 She packs into her book so much new information about Dickens’s day-to-day life and multifarious activities that consideration
of his actual writings gets pretty much squeezed out. They are, however, central to Jack Lindsay’s Wilson-inspired psychological-Marxist
Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study (1950), which sees Dickens as essentially a ‘revolutionary’ and also unquestioningly accepts the Wright/Storey version of
Dickens’s relationship with Ellen and her influence on his later fiction.
Dickens’s writings also get full treatment in Edgar Johnson’s two-volume
Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), though, in the case of the novels at least, they are segregated from the biographical narrative in distinct ‘critical’
chapters. Johnson’s book, the first Dickens biography to appear with full scholarly apparatus, was based on prodigious researches
of over twenty years, during which time he had access to over three thousand ‘new’ Dickens letters and other documents unseen
by Dame Una. Like Forster, he quotes lavishly from Dickens’s letters throughout and, of course, draws heavily for the story
of Dickens’s early years on the ‘Autobiographical Fragment’ and other presumed autobiographical writings. Dickens is once
more the hero of his own life, but in Johnson’s case, as his title proclaims, Dickens is here very much a tragic hero, with
his life story revealing a ‘dark and fateful drift towards disillusion even in the midst of universal acclaim’.
11 Johnson’s Dickens is a man who gradually becomes profoundly and ‘unwaveringly’ hostile to the dominant socio-economic ethos
of his age. As for his private life, ‘all his fame had not brought him the things he most deeply wanted’, and there can be
no doubt, Johnson confidently asserts, that ‘in some way’ even Ellen ‘failed his need’.
12 Heroically, however, Johnson’s Dickens never gave in to despair, never lost his faith in humanity, but remained always a
great artist intent on pushing back the frontiers of his art. And it was in this that, in the end, his ‘triumph’ lay.
During the second half of the last century a number of intriguing new discoveries were made about Ellen, her family, and her
relations with
Dickens, though the central question of whether or not they had been lovers, and perhaps even – briefly – parents, remained
unresolved. In her meticulously researched and deftly written
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990), Claire Tomalin concluded that they had indeed been lovers. In the same year Peter Ackroyd, surveying the same evidence
in his
Dickens, concluded they had
not been, suggesting that the relationship may have ‘acted for Dickens as the realisation of one of his most enduring fictional
fantasies … that of sexless marriage to a young, idealised virgin’.
13 Another area in which significant new discoveries were made was Dickens’s childhood and young manhood. The extensive researches
of W. J. Carlton published in
The Dickensian and Michael Allen in his
Charles Dickens’s Childhood (
1988) added considerably to our knowledge here – most poignantly, perhaps, in Allen’s showing that Dickens’s employment at Warren’s
Blacking seems to have lasted quite a bit longer than had been previously supposed.
Between the 1950s and the turn of the century, too, our sense of the sheer fullness of Dickens’s life, the richness of his imaginative hinterland and the multifariousness of his interests and activities, was
constantly enlarged by numerous scholarly books in what we might call the ‘Dickens and’ genre: Dickens and Crime, Dickens and Education, Dickens, Money and Society, Dickens and Women, Dickens and Mesmerism, and so on. Above all, however, it has been the superlative Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens (12 vols, 1965–2002) that has so enormously increased our knowledge of all aspects of Dickens’s public, professional and
private life (rather more than of his inner life, it has to be said). It has done this not only through its presentation of
many hundreds of new letters and accurate texts of hundreds of others, but also through the extraordinary depth, scope and
density of the editors’ annotation. One outstanding feature of this has been the extent to which it has enabled us to see
Dickens through contemporary eyes, as does Philip Collins’s splendid two-volume Dickens: Interviews and Recollections (1981).
Dickens’s letters are, of course, hugely important primary material for his biography, as are the scholarly editions that
have appeared during the last half-century of his published work. Pre-eminent among the latter stands the Clarendon edition
of his novels (in progress; nine volumes so far published), offering detailed information about the genesis and the textual
and publishing history of the various books. There have also been scholarly editions of his other writings, including his
journalism, as well as of his speeches, public readings, ‘book of memoranda’ and the ‘working notes’ for his novels.
14 These materials have been the
basis for some fine biographical studies of Dickens focussing on different aspects of him as a professional author, notably
Robert L. Patten’s
Charles Dickens and his Publishers (
1978), Jane R. Cohen’s
Charles Dickens and his Original Illustrators (1980), Grahame Smith’s
Charles Dickens: A Literary Life (1996), and John L. Drew’s
Dickens the Journalist (
2003).
Several popular biographies of Dickens appeared during the thirty-five years following the appearance of Johnson’s
Dickens, but only one, Angus Wilson’s very well illustrated
The World of Charles Dickens (1970), can really be said, in its analysis of the workings of that ‘mixture of play and terror’ which Wilson sees as central
to Dickens’s fictional world, to have enhanced our understanding of Dickens both as a man and as an artist. Then, in the late
twentieth century two new full-scale biographies of Dickens appeared, Fred Kaplan’s (1988) and the second by Peter Ackroyd
(
1990). Kaplan seems mainly concerned to recapitulate and intensify Edmund Wilson’s psychoanalytical interpretation of Dickens,
but Ackroyd’s
Dickens has been well described by Malcolm Andrews as ‘an intensive study of character in action, and an effort to recover for the
modern reader the disturbing living presence of Dickens’.
15 Ackroyd piles detail upon detail to give us a headlong, vivid, crowded narrative of Dickens’s daily life in which the writing
of his great novels was achieved amid a welter of other activities. Himself pre-eminently a novelist of London, Ackroyd richly
evokes the London of Dickens and Dickens in London, both as child and man, more imaginatively and compellingly than any previous
biographer. Above all, he succeeds better than any biographer since Forster in conveying the sheer
oddity (a word that recurs again and again in his narrative) of Dickens, that intense individuality in which, as his letters make
clear, Dickens himself took such intense delight.