Getting to grips with the incredible life and work of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens: A Life

CLAIRE TOMALIN is one of the most accomplished biographers. She has written acclaimed lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Pepys, the latter of which won a Whitbread prize in 2002. Tackling the life of Charles Dickens has been quite a different proposition, though. The man was a whirlwind.

“It’s like writing five lives in one,” she says. “He was doing all these different things at the same time. ‘Meanwhile’ is the word you need more than any other — meanwhile, he’s writing a book. Meanwhile, he’s editing a magazine. Meanwhile, his wife is having another baby. Meanwhile, he’s quarrelling with his publishers. Meanwhile, he’s setting up some theatricals to raise some money for the orphaned children of a friend.”

Dickens was born in 1812. He died in 1870 of a brain haemorrhage, aged 58. In between, he hardly ever let up. Each month in early 1837, for example, having just got married, he had to deliver instalments — 7,500 words each — of both his first serialised novels, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

He had to confer with illustrators on both works, work through proofs, and negotiate with publishers. (He was always shameless in re-negotiating contracts, as sales of his writings spiralled.) He also had to edit Bentley’s Miscellany, a monthly magazine.

At home, he had to contend with the usual flurry of, in Tomalin’s words, “domestic dramas and disasters”. His wife Catherine, having given birth to their first child, fell into depression and refused to feed herself and their baby.

Her 17-year-old sister Mary died in Dickens’s arms that May. Dickens was so attached to his deceased sister-in-law that he rather dramatically vowed to be buried in the same grave.

In the midst of these demands, Dickens enjoyed the conviviality of London’s famed social life and also made sure to get in his daily 12 to 15-mile walks around the city, mostly at night, if he couldn’t get out to the countryside. He was indefatigable, although the strain almost led to a breakdown several years later during one of his sojourns living abroad near Lausanne, Switzerland.

Tomalin draws a vivid portrait of the author. He started the day with a cold shower. He had a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder in arranging and re-arranging furniture. His grammar was shaky. He wore his hair long and dressed like a dandy, favouring coloured waistcoats, a bohemian streak that alarmed some of his conservative Bostonian hosts on his first visit to the United States. They thought he was vulgar or touched by “rowdyism”.

One dinner companion has recorded that he used to suck his tongue while preoccupied and that he comically raised one eyebrow before making a joke. And he made many jokes. He had huge charisma when not under the cloud of one of his dark moods. His humour was very unpredictable.

Dickens’s father, in unintentional ways, had a profound influence. John Dickens was a feckless character, possibly born, Tomalin surmises, as the illegitimate son of John Crewe, the husband of Irish writer Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s mistress. He was perpetually in debt, and later inspired Micawber in David Copperfield. He ended up in debtors’ prison, which meant Charles had to fend for himself, pretty much ending his education at 12 years of age. He was forced to get a job in a blacking factory. The period was the making of the young novelist, providing him with steeliness, self-reliance and an insight into the hardships of life.

“Even when he was alone in London,” says Tomalin, “with his family all in prison, and he was lodging with a woman he didn’t like, he had a tiny weekly salary. Each week he divided it into seven little piles and wrapped each pile into paper so that he knew that he would have enough to be able to buy something to eat on the last day of the week before he was paid again.

“Even as a small boy, he really knew what he was doing. He was able to take charge of things however awful they were.”

One thing Dickens struggled to control was his progeny, even though he avowed that he would only have three offspring. He had 10 children with his wife, and possibly, Tomalin argues based on circumstantial evidence, another with his mistress, Ellen Ternan. He preferred girls to boys. He despaired that many of his sons had inherited the passivity of his wife or worse the “imbecility” of his in-laws.

“My boys with a curse of limpness on them,” he wailed in one correspondence. “You don’t know what it is to look round the table and see reflected from every seat at it (where they sit) some horribly well remembered expression of inadaptability to anything.”

His anxiety about his children’s fate and his separation from his wife after two decades of marriage was the cause of great tension in his life. He had grown deeply unhappy with his poor wife, whose marriage to him was a procession of pregnancy and childbirth which stunted her own social development.

Dickens despised her lack of conviviality and was cutting about the fact she had grown fat. Writing to a friend about her overeating during a visit to his favourite Paris restaurant in the Palais Royal, he reported, “Mrs Dickens nearly killed herself”.

Yet, when the marriage dissolved and he took up with Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress, divorce was never an option. Their relationship remained clandestine.

“Dickens, in the eyes of the great British public, stood for domestic happiness and family life,” says Tomalin. “He ran this magazine called Household Words. He absolutely represented the perfect father of a family. He’d written A Christmas Carol. He felt he could not publicly have started again. Divorce was almost unthinkable. Even 50 years ago in England it was regarded as a terrible thing. He had to preserve appearances.”