A VICTORIAN CONJUROR’S ACT – THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS
THE LIFE & LIES OF CHARLES DICKENS by Helena Kelly
Icon Books Limited 2023
ISBN: 978 183773 104 6
RRP: $59.99 (hb)
Reviewed by Anne Henderson
In a beautifully arranged four paragraph opening to her new book The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, Helena Kelly describes a Christmas party of 1843 where Dickens is the entertainment as conjurer, pulling coins from behind ears, retrieving a burning handkerchief from a wine bottle unsinged, turning raw eggs and flour into a hot plum pudding in a saucepan over a hat on fire only to hold up the hat undamaged. It is quite a show, the audience thrilled. And his assistant John Forster, also his agent and (in time) biographer, packs away the props. It is all a metaphor for what is to come in this engrossing study of a giant of English fiction who would leave behind not just the fiction of his writing but the fiction he allowed to be told of his life.
In a forensic examination of documents that trace Dickens’ childhood, Kelly demonstrates that the story in David Copperfield, for many years seen as quasi autobiographical, is not the story of the book’s author. In an age where a public figure’s name and reputation could be damaged by such matters as inherited medical conditions, a parent’s time in a debtors prison or origins in the poorer end of a neighbourhood, it could be said Dickens carefully massaged his life’s details, especially for his lifetime confidant John Forster who would publish a three volume biography of Dickens after his death.
As Kelly picks away at evidence of where and how Dickens was raised, she discovers a dysfunctional growing up, the family moving from Portsmouth, where Dickens was born, to Chatham in the docklands area on the River Medway and London. At times the picture Dickens left was romanced up – such as implying he was familiar with acceptable Rochester but never mentioning down market Chatham where he had lived as a boy. On other occasions, it is suggested that he was never given opportunities like his older sister Fanny who studied at the Royal Academy of Music paid for by her parents while Charles was sticking labels on tins in a boot polish factory. In fact, Dickens spent some years in private schools and his time in the factory, owned by a family contact, quite possibly was where he learned much of his writing skills in the factory’s advertising department. Dickens’ experience of debtors prisons in fact came from his father, a Navy clerk who was a spendthrift and got into debt. Charles’ father was also closely associated with a colleague found to have stolen Navy funds and who subsequently killed himself.
What Helena Kelly does discover in her searches is the world of atmosphere and characters Dickens came upon in his unsettled life while making a living in central London. As she imagines it:
We can see glimpses of a taller boy, nearly but not quite a man, crossing the New Road, which ran between Islington and the Edgware Road, strap hanging on the coaches, dodging between the carts and drays and, as time went on, admiring, perhaps, one of the new omnibuses which started to ply their trade at the end of the 1920s. Glimpses of him bored and daydreaming in a lawyer’s office, struggling over shorthand, ploughing through improving books at the British museum. Glimpses of him sitting on the press benches in the House of Commons or, in the House of Lords, standing in a “preposterous pen” where reporters “used to be huddled together like so many sheep”. Glimpses of him tumbling into love – or at least what he thought was love.
This young Charles Dickens, pictured by Kelly, rose to fame quickly as a magazine writer, even more so when asked to write “entertaining copy” for The Pickwick Papers drawn by the famous illustrator John Seymour. This was a project he was involved with around the time of his marriage, in April 1836, to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth who was a lawyer and journalist. Kelly argues with a good deal of evidence that the match was a sound one for the up-and-coming young Dickens and suggests his ardour was not especially demonstrative. Her younger sisters also attracted his attention. He would benefit from a socially acceptable match, a step up from his own family.
It would be Seymour’s sudden suicide in April 1836 that overshadowed Dickens’ rise momentarily but, more importantly for Kelly, which began Dickens’ serious attempts to control his public image. Just prior to his illustrator’s suicide, Dickens had written to Seymour, a man who had suffered depression for years, criticising one of Seymour’s illustrations. This would become grist for a mill of rumours that Dickens had “some responsibility for the illustrator’s death”. Moreover, rumours persisted that Dickens had not shared credit with his illustrator for the inspiration behind the successful Pickwick Papers. The illustrations were an important part of Dickens’ success. In time, other accusations would emerge as to certain magpie picking from other publications by Dickens for plots and themes in his stories.
Against this backdrop and left to rationalise his growing success as a comic writer, Dickens continued to emphasise in his correspondence to friends and colleagues how he had achieved his fame by his very own efforts. He avoided reference to those who helped him on his way – such as an uncle who owned the Mirror of Parliament where he had scored a position, or a father-in-law who was a senior employee of the newspaper that had promoted his Sketches by Boz. As Kelly writes: “If Dickens’ early life had offered the perfect training for a liar, it’s here as fame swept him away, that he began to put his training to serious practical use.”
Fame came early and with it pressures as a newly-wed, soon with a new baby and others to follow in quick succession, new family digs as far away as Gravesend in Kent for a time in early married life, deadlines for publications – The Pickwick Papers and the serialised Oliver Twist just the most prominent. In the midst of which Dickens collapsed with extended grief when Catherine’s sister Mary died in his arms a year after their marriage. Kelly traces these events and then suggests Dickens was suffering a sort of mental illness – something she demonstrates at various stages of his professional and private life from there on: “There were multiple demands on him – professional, financial, psychological, physical. Mary’s death may simply have been the final straw, his unbalanced reaction not a sign of sexual rapaciousness or pathological narcissism, but rather a symptom of mental illness.”
It is Helena Kelly’s achievement to trace this mixture of keeping up appearances – so much a part of respectable Victorian life – a huge work load, the need to provide for a quickly growing family, writer’s block and inspiration for the next book, the next project, the need to stay famous, the need to manage the public image, the need to travel for opportunities and ideas for another book. Kelly points out that after 14 years of marriage, Catherine had spent half the time pregnant. There would in all be ten children. Family holidays were a routine exercise and Dickens spared no expense when his children needed medical treatment or care. Then there was his own father John Dickens whom he dutifully kept close, in spite of his father’s not so reputable life. Alongside were the serialised chapters of what later became novels – Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), shorter weekly instalments for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). At the same time, he wrote plays and edited a literary magazine. It was a packed operation.
Aside from Dickens’ unique ability to tell stories that captured his times in entertaining and imaginative ways for an educated and aspiring class in industrial Britain, enhanced by their adaptation in serialised form, there was clearly another Dickens somewhat haunted by the ghosts of his past, almost as effective as the Christmas ghosts in his novella A Christmas Carol. Underneath his image as the writer of his day is a Dickens compromised by any suggestion his name is not as respected as it should be.
Kelly highlights an incident, in May 1844, which illustrates something of this insecurity. A man by the name of John Walker was charged with obtaining money from Charles Dickens under false pretences. Dickens was called as a witness and the case clearly showed that Walker had stalked Dickens with threats of self harm to pressure him into giving him money. In spite of Dickens being the victim, when the accused was given a lenient punishment by the judge, Dickens came away from the trial feeling he was the accused. He wrote later that he had “left the court with a comfortable sense of being universally regarded as a sort of monster”. Such was his sensitivity to any notoriety attached to his name.
The strength of Helena Kelly’s portrait of Charles Dickens lies in her careful tracking of his moods, erratic decisions and indulgent behaviour. Yes, he was a celebrity, even for after dinner talks and spontaneous presentations, and he was a most celebrated social influencer to use the terminology of a couple of centuries later. But Kelly sketches in detail underlying flaws that tempt a crisis brewing. An early disappointing trip to the United States beginning in January 1842 with Catherine in tow left him aware that his fame did not especially cross the Atlantic at that time. What’s more, the United States turned out to be a much rawer society than the child of industrial London imagined. Likewise, a badly thought-out trip with the whole family to Genoa in 1844. This was a Dickens who was spontaneous without the required research. He was too familiar with easy success.
It is the final stages of The Life & Lies of Charles Dickens which bring the full story of Dickens to a climax and denouement in Kelly’s argument. Tired of his wife Catherine, whom he had decided was mentally defective having sent her to recuperative centres after her last years of childbirth, he went into hyperbolic mode, asking home staff to secure the door between his wife’s bedroom and his own. He then publicised – on the front pages of his magazine – the reasons for the collapse of his marriage blaming it on Catherine’s mental condition. The fact that he had developed a relationship with a certain 18-year old Ellen (Nelly) Ternan – daughter of an actress – is not part of the public account. In the public world, while many newspapers printed his account, others advised him to desist. Many were not convinced and the publicity only made the story more notorious.
The saga would split the family with Catherine’s sister Georgina staying with Dickens as housekeeper and risking her reputation, while Catherine’s other sister, Helen, and her mother were coerced into signing a statement professing his innocence in the marriage breakdown. It was all very Victorian. Ellen Ternan would become something of an “invisible woman” as she fell back from stage life and became Dickens’ mistress. He went on to write, among others, some of his best works – David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. His reputation as a speaker expanded.
It is in her last chapters that Kelly plays the real sleuth. There is circumstantial evidence that Ellen bore a child to Dickens who was adopted out. It is also possible Dickens relocated Ellen to northern France for some time. A train accident on the “fast tidal train” from Folkstone to London in June 1865, where Dickens was a passenger, came off the rails. Strangely, the teller of tales, often of dramatic events he was not present at, was on this occasion relatively silent. He was travelling with two ladies – one an older person, one a young woman. Kelly develops a theory that Ellen had been living in France and was returning with Dickens and her mother. It is all plausible and fills some gaps. And then there is the suggestion that Charles Dickens passed on syphilis to his family.
None of this is confirmed. But since Dickens burned a pile of his private correspondence and more besides it is quite possible Helena Kelly is on to something. Like the conjuror’s act in the opening of this book, nothing is quite what it seems with Charles Dickens.
Anne Henderson is Deputy Director of The Sydney Institute and author of Menzies at War, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History