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When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune. Yet like his heroes, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. His young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh factory work--but this led to his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. This biography gives full measure to Dickens's stature--his virtues both as a writer and as a human being--while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
As someone who’s read all of Dickens finished novels and is currently rereading them in publication order, I found it fascinating to read about Dickens’ life, and it helped me get a better understanding of his books. Some points, like his father’s imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea and Dickens’ first job in a blacking factory at the age of twelve, I was already aware of but I didn’t know about the arguments he’d had with his publishers or that it was the periodicals Dickens edited which first published stories by other Victorian writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot.
As always, Tomalin is a sympathetic biographer although she doesn’t gloss over Dickens’ flaws and failings, whether in his life or in his books. It’s hard to excuse or justify his behaviour to his wife during and after their separation as anything other than appalling. And yet he was also capable of great generosity, setting up a home for prostitutes or women thought likely to be at risk of becoming prostitutes so that they could be educated and then start new lives in the colonies. Tomalin reconciles these extremes of behaviour by quoting from a discussion Dickens had with Dostoevsky which Dostoevsky recorded in his diary:
“He [Dickens] told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.”
Tomalin also includes her theories on Dickens’ relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan after his separation from his wife (which I believe she goes into in more detail in her earlier book, The Invisible Woman). I know that this is an area where other biographers disagree with Tomalin and given the lack of evidence I think it’s ultimately impossible to conclude either way. Having said that, Tomalin’s theory fits the available facts and she makes it clear that this is educated speculation and that other biographers disagree. I found her theory interesting to read about even if we can never know what really happened between Dickens and Nelly Ternan.
The overall impression I got from the biography was that Dickens was truly a larger than life character. After experiencing poverty as a child he was never able to feel he could rest on his laurels, even once he’d reached a secure financial position with the publication of Dombey and Son. He was always busy with projects, with plays, with travelling or with writing:
“Dickens kept going by taking on too much. He knew no other way to live, and no day went by in which he did not stretch himself, physically, socially and emotionally.”
A fascinating biography of a fascinating man, I was left feeling that Dickens truly was ‘the inimitable’. If this book doesn’t win some kind of award I will be very disappointed.
Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man, but he had one ordinary fault: He always thought he was right and everybody else was wrong. He could be blind to his own failings, and
He kept his wife, Catherine, almost constantly pregnant, and after she had given birth to 10 children, most of whom (especially the sons) he didn't want, he abandoned her and took up with an actress, Ellen Ternan. Even while still living with Catherine he preferred the company of her sisters, one of whom managed his household affairs for the rest of his life. When another sister died young, he was so heartbroken he openly declared he wanted someday to be buried beside her.
Dickens had other failings as well. He would break contracts and friendships while blaming the other party. If a friend stayed friends with his former friends (or his wife) he no longer considered them his friends. He sent his sons, at a young age, to faraway places, including India and Australia, seemingly just to be rid of them. Yet he was not altogether blind to his sins, for he once said he saw himself in all of his characters, the bad ones as well as the noble ones.
For all his weaknesses, Dickens worked for good to an amazing degree. In his fiction he campaigned on behalf of orphans, child workers, fallen women, the poor and the sick. Social betterment was also his goal as a journalist and as a citizen. For several years, with the help of a wealthy donor, he ran a home to rehabilitate young prostitutes.
Except for his youngest son, who became a successful lawyer, his many sons proved to be failures. For all his impatience with them, Dickens paid their debts and tried to find jobs for them. He also supported his wife and her sisters, his daughters, Ellen Ternan and her sisters and various servants besides. That he worked so hard as a novelist, as a journalist and as a public speaker, giving readings of his work, had to do not just with his personality but also with his need to pay his bills.
Tomalin's book, published in 2011 in time for the bicentennial of Dickens's birth in 2012, covers in detail each of the author's major books, most of which were serialized in magazines, including his own magazines. She writes of his extraordinary friendships, including with Wilkie Collins and many other major literary figures of the time, his love of the theater (he could have been a successful actor had not writing proved more lucrative), his annual Christmas stories, his travels (including two trips to the United States) and the many other aspects of his short but full life.
Clearly, Tomalin admires him greatly, especially when she can ignore the women.
Ms Tomalin provides much circumstantial evidence on his long-term affair with youthful actress Ellen Ternan....the desperate need for secrecy, given his fame...the short-lived illegitimate son, born in France...
A memorable and very human man.
"...He left a trail like a meteor and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker, the radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican, the hater and the lover of America, the giver of parties, the magician, the traveler, the satirist, the surrealist, the mesmerist, the angry son, the good friend, the bad husband, the quarreler, the sentimentalist, the secret lover, the despairing father, the Francophile, the player of games, the lover of circuses, the maker of punch, the country squire, the editor, the chief, the smoker, the drinker, the dancer of reels and hornpipes, the actor, the ham, too mixed to be a gentleman, but wonderful,the irreplaceable and unrepeatable Boz, the brilliance in the room, the inimitable, and --above and beyond every other description -- simply the great hardworking writer who sets 19th century London before our eyes, and who noticed and celebrated the small people living on the margins of society."
Tomalin's magisterial work raises up each of these aspects of the man. The man accomplished a great deal in his 68 years and perforce this books may seem exahustive in covering his many comings and goings. In addition to covering the details of his personal and professional life, Tomalin does a remarkable job of presenting and reflecting on his many literary efforts.
A few random thoughts: I never thought I would feel sorry for a publisher, but Dickens treated his many publishers horribly, reneging on contracts, selling the same work to multiple parties, constantly dropping one for another.
What a small world 19th century England was -- Dickens seemed to have met and interacted with just about everyone worth knowing at the time.
Tomalin is good at explicating the special authorial challenges in writing in serial form. Dickens was still writing the later chapters of a book when the first were being published. He had to have the plot and characters well thought out before he started because there was little chance to going back to change. Tom Wolfe, who serialized Bonfire of the Vanities in Rolling Stone Magazine some 100 years later spoke of similar issues.
I've never been a fan of Dickens treatment of his female litarary characters. On one hand are the vapid, one-dimensional helpless lasses, on the other are the more intersting but largely venal characters. Dickens similarly treated the women in his real life. His cruel dismissal of his wife Catherine is particularly distressing.
A closely guarded secret during and immediately after his lifetime, Dicken's affair with the shockingly youg actress, Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, has become largely accepted as fact. Tomalin goes a step further in hypothesizing Dickens fathered a child with Ternan. This is more controversial, but Tomalin does a fine job in setting forth the basis of this hypothesis for the reader's own judgment.
Well worth the effort to read. I will happily read more of Ms. Tomalin's work.
I hadn't appreciated the extent to which, for the grater part of his life, he was so desperately driven by the need to keep earning. Of course, everyone knows of his poor upbringing, and his stint in the blacking family to help support the family while his father was incarcerated in Marshalsea Prison as a consequence of his debts, and one can perfectly understand how that would give Charles a terror of finding himself poor again. However, I was amazed to read of the constant and relentless financial demands he placed upon his publishers as she struggled to maintain not just the various spendthrift members of his family but also a selection of properties around London and the south east of England.
His father was a particularly dreadful character, continually running up debts and seemingly quite happy either to forge his son's name or just to have bills sent to his son's publisher. This profligacy was passed on to Charles's brothers, and seems also to have been inherited by a couple of his sons.
Still, essentially it is his writing that really counts and Claire Tomalin handles this very sympathetically and clearly. The novels are summarised with great simplicity and clarity, and their context within Dickens's life is comprehensively mapped.
As with her 2003 biography of Samuel Pepys Tomalin has taken someone about most people think that they know a fair amount, and managed to engae the reader's attention with a startling illumination of their life.
Tomalin expertly follows Dickens through his life, his friends, his tumultuous marriage to Catherine, his many children, his connection with other artists of that period and of course his books, which she gives a detailed account. My only regret is that I had not read more of his work, so I could have made a better connection with her spot-on analysis of each title. My goal is to read one or two of this books a year until I catch up. Love him or hate him, this is a highly recommended bio!
But that should not be a turn off. The biography feels definitive. It focuses on the life, especially Dickens' manic travel, but also includes a thoughtful few pages on each of Dickens' novels. It is less focused on the process of writing and editing than Michael Slater's Charles Dickens. And it is less creative than Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens. And less vast than Ackroyd's Dickens. But at about 400 pages of text (not counting the extensive notes, etc.), for most people this would be the best biography to read.
Claire Tomalin is especially strong on the women in Dickens' life, including his horrendous treatment of his wife Kate, his likely affair with Nelly Ternan (Tomalin has a chapter speculating, reasonably convincingly, that Dickens fathered a child who subsequently died with her), as well as the sister-in-law and subsequently daughter who managed his household.
Tomalin, however, states that Great Expectations is his greatest novel, because apparently anyone discussing Dickens is contractually obligated to say so, but my lack of interest in GE is precisely because it is so deficient in the fantastic supporting casts and the sprawling multiples of improbably interlocking plots which his other books feature. Why would you push GE as his best if you agree that his gift lay not in heroes, heroines, or even main villains? And yes, GE is the most tightly-plotted and compact of his books, but some of us read Dickens for the sprawl and the spectacle. Why say that the best of his books is the one that is nothing like the others, and yet still claim that he is an amazing writer? I have never understood this, and was disappointed that Tomalin bought into it.
(If you want my opinion, which of course you do, it's Bleak House, with Our Mutual Friend a very close second. And everyone in the world should read Jack Maggs, Peter Carey's astonishing spin-off of Great Expectations.)
A good deal of this book is devoted to Dickens' affair with Ellen Ternan and his appalling treatment of his wife (Tomalin previously wrote a entire book just about the affair). I was surprised but pleased to learn that even contemporary critics tore into Dickens for his inability to write female characters. As they should have - I remember once trying to think of a single verb attributed to Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities which isn't some variation of "faint" or "weep", and couldn't do it.
What Tomalin brings up but cannot explain is the fact that Dickens married a woman who was as close to his heroines as could probably have been found in real life, almost immediately regretted the marriage, and yet kept this type of woman firmly in mind as the ideal object of desire. After he killed off Dora and gave David Copperfield someone more mature and competent (albeit still unrealistically saintly), one might have expected him to change his stock heroine. But he kept writing self-sacrificing girls with wide eyes, tiny hands, and fluttering hearts. He kept writing Doras, though he usually made them slightly less "near-imbecile", as Tomalin puts it (not by a lot; Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend is a fairly dim bulb). And yet his marriage to a docile, self-sacrificing woman who let him have all the spotlight he could have wished made him miserable and vicious. Tomalin cannot reconcile this, and perhaps no one could. (Dickens also, puzzlingly, was upfront about only wanting three children and yet had ten, though methods of birth control were not unknown at the time and he had many friends who practiced them.)
He treated his wife abominably when he fell in love with another woman, and to an extent before that. No one can deny that; even his most sycophantic friends tried to talk him out of the viciousness he exhibited toward Catherine. He made her pay a social call on his mistress' family in an attempt to quell rumors; once they had finally separated he took out advertisements in the papers explaining how wretched she had made him until he had no choice but to leave; he spoke nastily of her the rest of his life and told everyone he knew that their children had never loved her, nor she them.
These are the actions of an entitled man, who has let his bitterness over his childhood and the later adoration of strangers convince him that he deserves everything he wants and that anything which stands in his way does so out of spite. Thus, his wife's existence as such is a situation she has created out of pure spite to keep him from his true love, even though she became his wife three years before said true love was even born. And she must be punished for it.
These are also the actions of a man who doesn't like women. Dickens exerted a mysterious control over many women with whom there are no indications of any inappropriate behavior: the things going on with Catherine's sisters, one of whom stayed with him after the separation as his housekeeper / hostess and did not speak to her sister again until after Dickens' death, are weird. No one ever believed that there was a sexual relationship with anyone but Ellen Ternan, but he clearly enjoyed having women in his thrall. And yet, as Catherine found to her grief, there was a delicate line to be walked in terms of compliance and obedience, though we will never know exactly what he wanted or why she couldn't provide it.
In one line, Tomalin gave me more of Catherine than I have ever encountered before, by saying that her contributions to the family merriment were deliberately terrible puns, delivered completely deadpan. This made her suddenly a real person to me, and the treatment of her that followed was therefore all the more wrenching.
Tomalin leaves us with a deeply troubled, egotistical, and often cruel man who preferred to do good works for strangers rather than show love to family members, whose writing was flawed and sentimental and amazing, and who may not be lovable to us but who created characters we cannot help but love. It's an impressively researched, infuriating, and excellent biography.
For readers who imagine
Dickens's life was extremely eventful and busy, as he wrote very many novels, and was engaged in many other projects ranging from charity, the theatre to journalism and running a newspaper. Part of the struggle of young authors is the modest to low income as at that time copyright was either not protected or publishers would benefit most from cooperation with their authors. Fortunately, Dickens was able to negotiate better deals with his publishers over the years in England, but often lamented piracy of his works in the United States, where the Copyright Act was not concluded until the final decades of the century, and Tauchnitz (Leipzig) brough out pirated editions of his works.
Claire Tomalin has struck a very good balance between writing about Dickens life and his novels. With so much to write about, the novels are never described with too much detail, and neither are the novels analysed. There is also a very good balance between Tomalin comments and use of the novels as illustrative material and contemporary criticism, showing how Victorian critics felt about Dickens's work.
Although there a footnotes for some of the facts, Charles Dickens. A life does not feel like a scholarly work. The biography is very well-written and very readable. A short but very useful bibliography with suggestions for further reading shows that scholarly interest in Dickens is far from rounded off with a number of major publications of Dickens's Letters in 12 vols. only completely published failrly recently between 1965 - 2002 (in The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, and his collected journalism in miscellaneous writing in four vols. (1894-2000) in The Dent Uniform Edition of Dicken's Journalism.
In particular, she contrasts the genuine sympathy that Dickens felt for suffering humanity (which led him to generous acts of individual philanthropy and attention) with the cruel treatment of his wife Catherine, and his dismissive attitude to most of the males among his offspring, whom he considered as feckless as his own parents. Tomalin is illuminating too on Dickens's egocentricity which lies at the centre both of his triumphs (his greatest characters, such as David Copperfield and Pip, carved from his own image; the huge success of his staged readings) and his failings (intolerance of those who would not bend to his will, obsessive acts of passion, revenge and pettiness). We see in Tomalin's book the many shapes and faces of Dickens, but she also helps us make them whole.
She is at her most interesting and forensic in tracking the development and progress of Dickens's long affair with the actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. Tomalin also drops tantalising hints about other possible sexual secrets - was Dickens a user as well as a protector of prostitutes? did he have a sexual relationship with his wife's devoted younger sister, Georgina, or even with the youngest sister Mary Hogarth whose early death brought him an excess of grief and a long-held, strange desire to be buried alongside her? None of these hints is stretched beyond the limits of evidence, but lie glistening in the narrative. Tomalin is less revealing about wife Catherine after her separation from Dickens, which may be from paucity of evidence; it would seem that the deserted Catherine retreated into characteristic blandness without the flame of Dickens nearby.
It is sometimes said that "a biographer is an artist under oath". Claire Tomalin never strays far into the realm of speculation, much less creative invention, but using only the material won by hard research that is nevertheless worked with a sure lightness of touch she keeps us engaged and unwearied, never feelng the weight of the patient hours she has spent creating a rich tapestry, one we are able to appreciate as much for its craft as its truth in the weft.
At around 400 pages this is quite a short biography of a man who packed so much into his 58 years, and inevitably some things are dealt with more briskly than others. I would have liked more on his friendship with Wilkie Collins who had a big effect on his life and art in Dickens later years. However I thought that Ms Tomalin provided some really fresh insights into his friendship with John Forster, more like a brother really.
I found that the book sagged a bit at times with endless lists of activities and dates which meant little, and I sensed the author's boredom here. It was noticeable that the book gathered energy once she reached the period of Dickens separation from his wife and relationship with Ellen Ternan. This is familiar territory of course, covered in depth in her previous book, "The Invisible Woman."
I did not always feel that she liked the books, and one has sympathy with her impatience for women in Dickens who are frequently one- dimensional and colourless. She does mention Rosa Dartle from "David Copperfield," but I would have liked some appreciation for the complex Miss Wade in "Little Dorrit." She is a biographer who takes an objective approach and while I missed the specialist insights of those who have written extensively on Dickens, I eventually decided that Claire Tomalin's cooler approach has it's merits., allowing one the distance to see her subject in the round. The relative brevity of the book gives it a satisfying shapeliness and her concluding comments on this extraordinary man could hardly be bettered:
"Too mixed to be a gentleman-but wonderful. The irreplaceableand unrepeatable Boz. The brilliance in the room. The inimitable."
Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen has been on my bookshelf for what seems like 20 years, although the Goodreads editions roundup has 1997 as the earliest date. Whatever. I'm quite surprised, seeing how much I enjoyed that biography, that Charles
From this very limited sample I would say that you go to Tomalin for the close-up, human portrait of your subject. In 417 pages of narrative, Tomalin displays Dickens in all his contradictions: generous yet selfish, open-handed but capable of great secretiveness, a man of enormous warmth yet able to turn ice-cold on a friend or family member once he decided he was done with them.
My strongest impression was of Dickens' vast reserves of energy; he strides about the pages as he would walk the London streets, always immersed in action, always moving. Tomalin's narrative moves forward at a fast clip, eating up the years chronologically, although there are occasional irritating bursts of foretelling (to keep us reading? As if I wouldn't.)
I would say that Tomalin comes down on the side of Catherine Dickens in the story of the couple's doomed marriage, and on behalf of plump wives everywhere, I thank her. On the whole Dickens gets a poor rating as a husband, father, friend and even occasionally as a writer (it's certainly true that he wasn't always on top form in his books, but considering he wrote for serialization these were pretty much first drafts, an astounding thing when you think about it.)
Good bibliography and index, and lots of interesting photos including a very arresting one of the mature Dickens, clean-shaven. It is the clearest glimpse I've ever had of Dickens the businessman, and Dickens the man of susceptibility to the ladies. It's a shame they were inevitably such young ladies, but he clearly had a very Victorian ideal of womanhood and it wasn't his wife. Hmm, do you think Tomalin's sympathies were persuasive?
Reading this in a relentless spree, I was helpless but to observe similarities to the recent Bob Dylan biography
My favorite aspect of the biography was surprisingly Dickens first trip to the United States, especially his two meeting with Poe, the possibilities of such I imagine to be dizzying. I was also struck by a casual omission: when one crosses the Ohio River from Indiana to Louisville, Kentucky there is plaque which notes that Charles Dickens once spent the night at a hotel on that site. This "flyover moment" didn't merit mention in the chapter on America. I don't find that as interesting as the fact that it is difficult to locate acknowledgement in Louisville as to its past as a hub for the slave trade.
Great read
London: Penguin, 2012.
Lynn
Lynn chose the book because “she really has a thing about biographies” but she was generally disappointed in it.
The small print was unfortunate because of the effort required to keep reading. Too much detail made reading the
Claire Tomalin is obviously an excellent researcher but that doesn’t necessarily make for an interesting read.
The book is thorough and very detailed and she prides herself in her meticulous research.
Lynn has enjoyed the Dickens novels she has read. The profile has been raised by 2012 being the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth.
He appears to be a complex man who both worked and played hard: a prolific writer who was money driven. His commitment to social causes and his theatre work counterpoints his lack of commitment to his wife and family
Writing a novel-length story in serial form on a weekly basis would have been difficult to achieve.
An interesting point is his parents’ interest in fostering his sister Fanny’s musical career at the expense of Dickens’ education – highly unusual for the time to prefer a daughter over a son. 7/10
Jenny A
Commented that she felt the book needed a good editing to reduce the amount of detail and help emphasise important points.
Dickens is full of his own importance in spite of (or perhaps because of) receiving no support from his parents.
Agreed the research was meticulous but it the book is not readable. 2/10
Pam
Pam agreed it was well researched but difficult to read. She was grateful to discover the wide raft of talents which Dickens had. He appears to be a genius and dogged by the failings of genius. Dickens obviously had great failings.
All male writers of the time had a core group of male friends with whom to discuss ideas.
Claire Tomalin is highly thought of as a biographer in Britain.
Pam was glad she had read the book in spite of the difficulties. No score
Noriel
There was more information than she could cope with at present. No score as hadn’t read it. Same from Barbara.
Sheena
Not a book for over the summer holidays. Too much detail. Read reviews and selections of the text.
More than she ever wanted to know about Dickens. 3/10
Enid
Had read every 10th page or so. Agreed too much detail and information. Like a text book rather than a book to read for pleasure.
Will choose the Bible for Lynn to read next time. 1/10
Robyn
Dickens was very self-indulgent. She would finish the book but can’t yet. 7/10
Ros
Read ½ of it. Agreed that he was a very difficult man and on the difficulties involved in reading the book.
Astonished at the amount of travel done by people in the book.
The mesmerism episode with Mrs De La Rue is astonishing in that someone would allow a friend without medical training to treat his wife. 7/10
Wendy
The biography is a good insight into the man. He was certainly not socially inept but highly sociable.
The backtracking in the book is irritating and adds to the difficulty of reading it.
She enjoyed the accurate descriptions of areas around Rochester as this is where her family come from. 4/10
Lorita
Fantastic research. Will dip into it. 9/10
Jenny Mac
Couldn’t be read as a novel, more as a text book.
As a Book Club Book, gives it 0/10: For author’s efforts gives it 7/10.
General
The book can be judged on 2 levels:
As a popular book
As a contribution to the literary market.
Could be that the 200th anniversary meant that literary works were released into the popular market that wouldn’t normally have been.
Score
2 members did not score it.
Average score 4.5/10.
This is a much more readable biography than Peter Ackroyd's monumental 1144 page book that I read over a period of two and a half months in 2009. That was too detailed and both exhaustively and exhaustingly long winded, whereas Tomalin covers the many facets of Dickens's life and literary career very effectively in just over 400 pages. The book comes with useful lists of family members (a genealogy might have been useful) and associates, and places in London and Kent connected with his life. The hardback has lovely illustrations in the inside front and back covers and is an hardback with an illustrated cover but without a dust jacket, not often seen these days. In sum, for lots of reasons, a great reading experience. (Thanks for lending it to me, Ian!)
But that should not be a turn off. The biography feels definitive. It focuses on the life, especially Dickens' manic travel, but also includes a thoughtful few pages on each of Dickens' novels. It is less focused on the process of writing and editing than Michael Slater's Charles Dickens. And it is less creative than Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens. And less vast than Ackroyd's Dickens. But at about 400 pages of text (not counting the extensive notes, etc.), for most people this would be the best biography to read.
Claire Tomalin is especially strong on the women in Dickens' life, including his horrendous treatment of his wife Kate, his likely affair with Nelly Ternan (Tomalin has a chapter speculating, reasonably convincingly, that Dickens fathered a child who subsequently died with her), as well as the sister-in-law and subsequently daughter who managed his household.