Inimitable Charles Dickens By James Nathan Miller Many critics rankDickenss novels with Shakespeares plays as the greatest works of fiction in the English language. He has probably given more pleasure to more people than any other writer. His career has been called one of the greatest success stories in all history. It started, appropriately, with a joyful comedy team he dreamed up one day in 1836. A new publishing company was looking for a writer who could knock out an amusing text for some sporting prints it planned to sell for a shilling apiece. Someone recommended a London Chronicle reporter named Charles Dickens, a larky 24-year-old with a wild sense of humour. Dickens quickly accepted. But since he was a city boy from an impoverished family (he had worked as a 12-year-old labourer in a London warehouse, and his father had served a term in debtors prison), he didnt know anything about hunting. So he suggested changing the theme to the adventures of a bunch of bumbling gentlemen who wander round England getting into scrapes of one sort or another. The first three instalments of the series, starring little, fat, retired businessman Samuel Pickwick, were a dismal failure. Then Dickens introduced a ragged but jaunty young Cockney called Sam Weller, who could hardly read or write and had trouble pronouncing his vs (wery good thing is weal pie). From that moment, the whole series-and with it Dickenss career-turned to pure gold. In Pickwick and Weller, Dickens had created what is probably the greatest comedy team in literature. No sooner did the saucy Cockney become servant and guardian angel to innocent old Samuel Pickwick than reviewers started taking notice and buyers flocked to the stands. Within a few months, each instalment was selling 40,000 copies. A Pickwick craze was sweeping over England. There were Pickwick cigars, Pickwick hats and canes, Weller trousers and hordes of Pickwick imitators. In poor neighbourhoods, people pooled their pennies to buy issues and pass them round. It is doubtful if any single work of letters before or since has ever aroused such wild and widespread enthusiasm, writes Edgar Johnson in his massive, delightful and definitive biography, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. In only a few months, the little-known reporter was transformed into the most popular writer in England. Energetic Genius. What did it was simple: Dickens had a sparkling imagination like a soap-bubble pipe. People and situation endlessly bubbled up in his head (he said he could literally hear what his characters said before he wrote it down). If, in The Pickwick Papers, Sam Wellers conversation got the loudest laughter (Hows Mother? Tell her I want to speak to her, my hinfant fernomenon), it was Dickenss supporting cast of more than 300 fantastic bit players who floated out of that bubble pipe that gave the work its immortality. There was the man known as the Zephyr, who could imitate a wheelbarrow full of cats; the insatiably hungry Fat Boy, who slept as he ran errands; and the wildly inventive conversation of Sam Wellers father - such as his judgement on Sams way with a glass of ale: Wery good power o suction, Sammy. Youd ha made an uncommon fine oyster if youd been born in that station o life. What kind of man was behind this unique brand of nuttiness that was too real to be called whimsy, too whimsical to be called real? Dickens was an original, a character straight out of one of his own novels. (Indeed, he later put himself into one of them, reversing his initials and calling himself David Copperfield.) One friend recalled accompanying him on a walk through London slums, in which Dickens followed along behind the big red face of a baby slung over his fathers shoulder, popping cherries into the childs gaping mouth as the father walked on, oblivious. At a dinner, when he was seated next to the young wife of a prominent American doctor and heard her address her husband by the then unheard-of endearment of darling, he found it so funny that he laughed until he fell of his chair and wound up on the floor, with only his feet visible to the diners, kicking in helpless hysterics. Behind the buffoonery lay the mind of a genius driven by the energy of a dynamo. When the BBC Brains Trust was asked to name the worlds two greatest novels, they unanimously picked War and Peace and The Pickwick Papers. Yet while the young Dickens was creating this monumental work, he was also taking on the full-time editorship of a new literary magazine, writing the libretto for an operetta, and setting to work to satisfy the clamour for more Dickens by starting a second novel, Oliver Twist. For the rest of his life he was always working on two or three major projects at once. Before he had finished Oliver he started on Nicholas Nickleby, and before he was done with Nicholas he was making preparation for The Old Curiosity Shop. All the time he was writing for and editing the magazine, doing odds and ends of play-writing, carrying on an enormous correspondence, and indulging in his favourite hobby of acting in amateur theatricals. His public readings of his work became the most popular stage attractions of the day. A brilliant actor, he made these readings so vivid that he was criticized for his performance of the most famous of them - Sikess brutal murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, in which a screaming, snarling Dickens played both murderer and victim-because of the large number of women who fainted at each session. Incredibly, his career never had a pinnacle. It was all pinnacle. From the appearance of Sam Weller in 1836 to the day in 1870 when Dickens died writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his career was like a Roman candle that went straight up and then just hung there, shooting off one brilliant shower after another. As soon as Oliver Twist was finished, three stage versions were simultaneously presented in London. The Old Curiosity Shop sold an unprecedented 100,000 copies, and when the ship carrying one key instalment arrived in New York, its crew was greeted by a crowd shouting, Is Little Nell dead? Great Expectations. In 34 years, Dickens wrote 15 books (plus hundreds of stories and articles), and every one became a best-seller. Even when he changed from humour to the angry social protest of his greed-and-evil novels like Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, the public gobbled them up. Some of his characters, of course, became household words-Fagin, Uriah Heep, Micawber, Pecksniff, Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Little Nell. But as in The Pickwick Papers, these featured players were just the tip of the iceberg. What gave his books their tremendous depth and power were the thousands of bit players whom Dickens was constantly thrusting on stage to interact with the stars. Indeed, in richness and subtlety, a Dickens novel is like a Gothic cathedral. Viewed from afar, its outlines look simple enough; it is only when you get up close-and see that it is actually an intricate interweaving of hundreds of magnificently detailed vignettes, gargoyles and grotesques-that you realize the genius behind it. Dickens never had the slightest doubt of how good he was. He referred to himself, only half facetiously, as The Inimitable, or The National Sparkler, and in dealings with his publishers he always insisted that the lions share of the income from his work went to the genius that produced it. It made him rich: when he died, he left an estate of £ 93,000. But it never made him cross the line from self-confidence to self-worship. Even when he had become a wealthy international celebrity with a staff of servants and a country estate, he never forgot the horrors of his own impoverished boyhood or ceased fighting the Establishment (he called it the Circumlocution Office). To the end he remained a radical crusader against the abuses suffered by the poor in the courts, the slums, the prisons and the factories of Victorian England. Indeed, the single personal quality that runs like a bright thread through the fabric of Dickenss life and writings is the basic decency of the man. Unknown writers who sent him their works got detailed critiques, and when he found a writer with talent, he went to endless lengths to promote his work. Once, he discovered a long-standing servant had been stealing from him. Knowing the man would never get another job, Dickens let him off by setting him up in a small business. But he could be tough, too, and in his feuds with critics and publishers he didnt hesitate to lash out publicly - and sometimes unwisely. At 46, after 22 years of marriage, he became infatuated with a 19-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan, and separated from his wife, Kate, who had borne him ten children. When gossip began circulating that the separation had been caused by his love for his wifes sister (the secret of the Ternan liaison didnt leak out until the 1930s), he published a long, too-personal rebuttal that simply added fuel to the scandal and generated nasty feuds with old associates. Hard Times. But his biggest feud was the one he carried on with the United States. In 1842, Dickens went to America on a lecture tour. What he found appalled him. Adoring mobs, following him everywhere, snipped pieces off his coat for souvenirs, crowded round his table to gape when he ate, peered at him and his wife through the window of his canal-boat stateroom-and horrified him by spitting and picking their teeth in public. When he denounced the piratical American practice of publishing his books without paying him royalties, the Press misquoted his statements and attacked him as a money-grubber. Back in England, he let the Americans have it: first by publishing a scathing series or articles about his trip, then by an even more devastating fictional attack in his new novel, Martin Chuzzlezvit. So vicious did the feud become that a quarter of a century later, when American promoters invited him back for a reading tour, he first sent a friend to see whether he would be mobbed as friend or foe. (It turned out to be the former. America had mellowed, and the tour was like a triumphal procession. Dickens went home from the five-month visit £ 20,000 richer. When Dickens died in 1870, he was only 58, and it is generally agreed that he worked himself to death. Some observers feel he did it knowingly-a slow suicide caused by an unhappy marriage and his growing despair with the inequities of society. Whatever its cause, to the British people it was a staggering loss. Refusing to abide by his wish for a simple burial, they interred him at Westminster Abbey, and for three days, while his coffin lay in the open grave, they lined up by the thousands to file past. They knew there never had been, and never would be, another writer like him. Sign Language [A Dickens Vignette One leading authority estimates that Dickens created some 3,000 named characters. The following brief vignette involves a character so obscure that hardly anyone but a Dickens scholar would be able to identify her: a 13-year-old orphan girl called Charley (the nickname for Charlotte Neckett), one of scores of characters in Bleak House. Here is how Charley explains why she keeps her baby brother and sister locked in their attic room while she works as a washerwoman: To keep emsafe, sir, dont you see? said Charley. And they can play, you know, and Tom ant afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom? No-o, said Tom, stoutly. When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright-almost quite bright. Dont they, Tom? Yes, Charley, said Tom. Almost quite bright. Then hes as good as gold, said the little creature-O! in such a motherly, womanly way. And when Emmas tired, he puts her to bed. And when hes tired, he goes to bed himself. And when I come home and light the candle, and has a bit of supper, he sits up again and has it with me. Dont you, Tom? Oh, yes, Charley, said Tom. That I do! And either in this glimpse of the great pleasure of his life, or in gratitude and love for Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face among the scanty folds of her frock, and passed from laughing into crying.]
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 01:41:26 +0000
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