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Adoring crowds swooned at his public appearances. Politicians and royals sought his acquaintance. He owned fine houses, summered in France, traveled often, entertained lavishly.
He made oodles of money but never enough. His children were mostly disappointments, his marriage a disaster, his very public life bracketed by secrets he did everything to hide.
Charles Dickens was the greatest writer of the Victorian Age, and, it can be argued, second only to Shakespeare as a beloved and influential British writer.
He was also perhaps the first superstar celebrity and the first to struggle to keep his private life private.
Tuesday was the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, which was celebrated with events all over the world.
Dickens’ 20 novels (the last, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” was left unfinished when he died of a stroke at age 58) have sold millions of copies and never been out of print. Even if you are not a lover of literature, you probably couldn’t graduate from high school without reading at least one of them. And you don’t even need to be literate to know his best-loved work, “A Christmas Carol,” which has been made into more than three dozen TV and movie versions.
Dickens dominated the literary world of his day; his admirers included Poe, Tolstoy and Freud, not to mention Queen Victoria. More than 140 years after his death in 1870, his influence on contemporary writers is everywhere, from literary lights such as John Irving, Thomas Pynchon and Jennifer Egan to popular authors like J.K. Rowling, Stephen King and Alexander McCall Smith.
Yet, although we may know “A Tale of Two Cities” and “David Copperfield” and “Great Expectations,” many of us don’t know much about the man beyond the image of the bewhiskered, waistcoated gent peering soberly at us from their book jackets.
A life, times two
Two biographies take very different approaches to introduce us to the man who called himself, only somewhat jokingly, the Inimitable.
“Charles Dickens: A Life by” Claire Tomalin is a full-fledged biography, basing its lively narrative of the author’s public and private life on a wide variety of sources. Tomalin, who is British, is a noted biographer of such writers as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy.
Jane Smiley’s book of the same title, “Charles Dickens: A Life,” was originally published a decade ago but has been reissued for the 200th anniversary. Smiley, an American, is best known as a novelist, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres” as well as “Moo,” “Horse Heaven” and “Ten Days in the Hills” — all books that reflect Dickens’ influence. Her book is a critical biography, focusing insightfully on Dickens’ novels and drawing connections between them and his life.
Both biographers emphasize the impact of Dickens’ unprecedented fame. “If we see him,” writes Smiley, “as a man whose work made him rich and famous, as close to a household name as any movie star is today then we can also see him as the first person to become a ‘name brand.’”
Early success
Dickens found that success quite early. After a few years as a journalist (a profession he would continue all his life), he published his first work of fiction, “Sketches by Boz,” in 1836, followed the same year by “The Pickwick Papers.” Both were first published, like all his novels, in serial form, and “Pickwick” became a phenomenon when he introduced the Cockney philosopher Sam Weller in the 10th chapter.
People stood in line to buy each new installment and passed them from hand to eager hand. Tomalin writes, “Judges and politicians, the middle class and the rich, bought them, read them, and applauded; and the ordinary people saw that he was on their side, and they loved him for it.”
Dickens was all of 24 years old. The next year, he published “Oliver Twist,” and his fame soared even higher. From the beginning, his fiction was a unique melding of comedy and drama, a rich exploration of every class of English society, a vehicle for passionate social and political critique, a vibrant combination of sharply observed realism and unfettered imagination.
Dickens shaped the novel in his own image, for he was as complex as any of his books. Tomalin and Smiley return, over and over, to his almost unbelievable energy. For example, he wrote “Pickwick” and “Oliver” at the same time — chapters of one in the morning, the other in the afternoon — while he was also working as the editor of a magazine, and becoming a husband and father.
He also led a prodigious social life. He adored performing and was frequently involved in amateur and professional plays as an actor, playwright or behind-the-scenes role.
That skill as an actor helped make him a star as an author. His appearances to read from his works drew audiences in the thousands.
Troubled childhood
But despite the public adulation he craved, Dickens strove to keep some of his life hidden. The first, and most formative in his fiction, was his childhood.
His early years were happy, but when Charles was 12, his father, John Dickens, was arrested for debts. John was sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison. The young Dickens was utterly humiliated by his circumstances and what he saw as his family’s rejection. It was an experience that marked him for life.
Dickens never spoke of the particulars of his childhood. He made millions weep with his descriptions of Oliver Twist, Tiny Tim, Little Nell and other misused and forlorn children his experience informed, but he wrote of himself as a child only in notes he passed along to his most trusted friend and future biographer, John Forster, to be used only after Dickens’ death.
Alternative endings
Catherine was pretty and passive when he married her, but soon he was grousing to friends in letters that she was fat and in poor health and not much fun — apparently not considering that having 10 babies and several miscarriages in 15 years might make a woman tired.
Dickens’ deeper secret was a young woman named Ellen Ternan, whom he met in 1857, when she performed with him in a play. Dickens was 45, Nelly 18, and she brought his dissatisfaction with his marriage to a boil. Soon, he was arranging a legal separation from the bewildered Catherine. Yet he never went public about his relationship with Nelly, even though, Tomalin writes, there is considerable evidence he lived with her off and on for the rest of his life.
But no one knows for certain. Smiley, who is less sure of Nelly’s role than Tomalin is, writes, “While the events are interesting, and would be even more so if we knew what they were, what is really interesting is how they brought out Dickens’ secretiveness, something that was in part imposed upon him by both celebrity and the nature of Victorian society.”
Tomalin posits that even the nature of Dickens’ death may have been kept secret. The standard version is that he died of a stroke at Gad’s Hill, his beloved country home. Or perhaps, Tomalin says, he collapsed several hours away, at Windsor Lodge, a house where he had installed Nelly. She, long taught to protect his legend and her own reputation, spirited him back to Gad’s Hill, where she came up with a respectable version.
It’s a good enough ending for a Dickens novel.
