Dickens the Mixed

I’ve been wanting to read a recent biography of Charles Dickens (more recent than the nineteenth century, anyway) for quite a while now, but I’ve hesitated because the descriptions of these biographies always warn that the reader will find his hero indelibly tarnished. I’ve known that this warning could mean one of three things. (1) It could mean that the author, not having recovered from the twentieth century and thus unable to believe that Dickens’s sentimentalism has anything to do with any real life, just wants to expose Dickens as a fraud for believing in love and joy when such things do not in fact exist. (2) It could mean that Dickens was a horrible person and that I’ll have to find a way to live with the knowledge every day of my life after reading the biography. (3) Or it could mean that Dickens was a human and that I will learn of flaws that his early biographers kept quiet.

I don’t see how option (2) could be true. Dickens had to have in him something genuine in order to bless us with Mr Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby, Captain Cuttle, Bob Cratchit, and Betsey Trotwood. So that narrows down the possibilities to just two. I have known and spoken with a Dickensian scholar whose views lay somewhere in the vicinity of option (1), so I knew I wanted to try to avoid any biography on those lines. But option (3) I wasn’t worried about. I already knew that the Great Promoter of Domestic Harmony separated from his wife in later years and had a relationship with an actress named Nelly Ternan. My love for Dickens had survived my discovery of Nelly, and the truth couldn’t reasonably get much worse than that, so I got ready to swallow the red pill and settled on Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. And I’m so glad I did!

OK. Nelly Ternan first. Dickens’s affair with her isn’t the ideal story for a Christian life, I know. But having a second relationship after separation is not distinctly worse than divorcing and remarrying, and, although that sequence of events is no one’s Plan A, I’ve known people with that life story whose Christianity I respect. For extenuating (not exonerating) circumstances, I may point out that all but the oldest of Dickens’s children went with him in the separation, as did his wife’s sister. Perhaps Katherine Hogarth Dickens was intolerable to live with, and can’t we all find pity for the family who has to live with an impossible personality?

Tomalin points out other faults, of course, because Dickens was human and because “more recent” biographers have no incentive to keep his skeletons hidden in the closet. He demanded that publishers break old contracts when they no longer seemed fair. He always needed his friends to believe him in the right when any argument arose. He lost all patience with those of his sons (all but Henry Fielding Dickens, sadly) who constantly fell into debt and asked their famous father for a bailout.

But Tomalin also provided a lot of detail on aspects of Dickens’s life I hadn’t read much about before: aspects that, far from making him look more like a monster, made him seem even more funny and fascinating and pitiable than before. A biographer can concentrate on any threads in the fabric that she finds especially interesting, and my interests seemed to run parallel with Tomalin’s. She talked about Dickens’s frequent severe colds. She talked about several girls he fell in love with before marrying Catherine. She had a great deal to say about his interest in mesmerism and about one family friend, Madame de la Rue, who depended on Dickens’s therapeutic applications of his skill. Best of all, Tomalin gave a prolonged account of twelve-year-old Kate Wiggin finding Dickens on a train, worming her way into the seat beside him, and telling him, to his great delight, about all the dull parts in his books. Just after finishing the biography, I read Kate Wiggin’s own beautiful rendition of the encounter, and now I find that I must read this eventually successful author’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. My current guess is that the reputation of that book that I’ve received from culture is the result of a lot of option-(1) critics and that I will find it quite enjoyable.

And, of course, Tomalin confirmed several of the things I knew about Dickens that make him truly heroic, in spite of his failings. Besides having blessed the world with fourteen and a half beautiful novels and the second greatest Christmas story of all time (surpassed only by the original history), Dickens helped young, penitent prostitutes get educated and move abroad to start a new life, he aided and saved many fellow passengers on a train that suffered a horrific accident on a bridge, and he regularly went out of his way to speak to the homeless, the asylum patient, and the prisoner and to treat them with dignity and grace.

After Dickens’s death, his daughter Katey told her view of his life to a writer named Gladys Storey, who, after Katey’s own death, wrote from her notes and published Dickens and Daughter. In that book, Katey, who thought the time right to tell the adoring world that her father had his dark side, summed it all up by saying, “My father was . . . too mixed to be a gentleman.” Tomalin, recalling that line, sums up her biography by saying that Dickens was “too mixed to be a gentleman – but wonderful.” Amen, Claire Tomalin. Amen.