Michael Slater - Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing

Nos 2, 14, 36 and 50 are taken from Robert Langton, The Childhood and Youth of Dickens (1891), nos 9 and 20 from Frederic G. Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil (188990), nos 12, 15, 24, 46, 51, 5356, 58 and 59 from B. W. Matz, ed., Dickens in Cartoon and Caricature (Boston Bibliophile Society, 1924); no. 40 is reproduced by courtesy of the Museums and Archives Service, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, NHS Trust, and no. 52 by courtesy of the Morgan Museum and Library, New York; the Claudet daguerreotype of Dickens is reproduced by courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia; all other images are reproduced by courtesy of the Charles Dickens Museum, London.

No. 16 is reproduced by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, no. 23 by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, no. 37 by permission of Martin Nason, no. 54 by permission of the Library of the University of Iowa, and no. 59 by permission of The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. All other images are reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Charles Dickens Museum, London. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders.

C HARLES D ICKENS was indeed, as he said himself, an amazing man. And for the last century and a half memoirists and biographers have written extensively about his extraordinary dynamism, his organisational genius and notable capacity for business, his lifelong concern for the poor, especially children, his multifarious and energetic charitable activities, his deep interest in crime and punishment, prisons and the detective police, his intense love/hate relationship with, and need for, London and its teeming streets, his passion for the theatre and his own histrionic brilliance, his love of Christmas, his obsession with order and fascination with disorder, his worship of the domestic hearth and his strong attraction towards what he called vagabondage, his complex family relationships and his secret connection for the last twelve years of his life with a woman twenty-seven years his junior.

Discussion of all these things will be found in this book too. But, mindful of Dickenss words in his will about resting his claims to the remembrance of his country upon his published work, I have focused primarily upon his career as a writer and professional author, and have been particularly concerned to place his novels in the context of the truly prodigious amount of other writing that he was constantly producing alongside the serial writing of those books, and to explore the web of connections between them and it, as well as connections with his superlative letters and his personal life. These other writings of Dickensshort stories, sketches, topical journalism, essays, travel writings and writings for children, polemical pieces in verse as well as prosecontain much fine work highly characteristic of him but are mostly known only to specialists and so will be given more attention here than they generally receive.

It is a propitious time for a new life of Dickens along the lines indicated. A four-volume edition of his journalism, the Dent Uniform Edition, was completed in 2000. The magnificent twelve-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickenss Letters was finished two years later. The latter work particularly, together with those scholarly editions of his novels so far published in the Oxford Clarendon Dickens and the Norton Critical Editions series, provides new insights into, and much new and detailed information about, Dickenss life and work on which I have been able to draw in this book, which appears as we prepare to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth in 2012.

I WISH TO THANK the following friends who read all or part of this book in manuscript (some of them in more than one version) and suggested innumerable improvements: Michael Allen, the late Richard D. Altick, the late Philip Collins, Edward Costigan, Ashby Bland Crowder, Jean Elliott, Beryl Gray, John Grigg, and Toru Sasaki. This book has benefited enormously from their close involvement with it and I am profoundly grateful to them all. I am likewise indebted to the reader appointed by Yale University Press for submitting so detailed and constructive a report on my final draft.

I have also received valuable help and advice in connection with this book from other friends and colleagues during the past six or seven years; and in several cases, as will be evident from my end-notes, I have greatly benefited from their published work. In this respect I would like specifically to thank the following: Malcolm Andrews, Rosemary Ashton, Robert Bledsoe, Laurel Brake, Margaret Brown, Duane DeVries, John M. L. Drew, Angus Easson, the late Kenneth J. Fielding, Barbara Hardy, the late Peer Hultberg, Leon Litvak, David Paroissien, Robert L. Patten, Andrew Sanders, Paul Schlicke, Fred Schwarzbach, Grahame Smith and Tony Williams. I am very grateful also to Michael Baron and Robina Barson, Joss Burton, Jan and Pia Lokin, Q Love, Chris Lungley and Ann Watkins for their continued interest in this book, and all their invaluable encouragement during the writing of it.

The idea of attempting a biography of Dickens was first mooted to me by Robert Baldock and Malcolm Gerratt of Yale University Press and it is a pleasure to record my appreciation of their help and support during my subsequent labours. I would also like to thank Michael Rogers for his meticulous proof-reading, and David Atkinson for once again providing a work of mine with an excellent index.

At the Charles Dickens Museum Florian Schweizer and Andrew Xavier have been unfailingly helpful and resourceful in supplying me with important material from the rich resources of the Museums collections, and their unflagging enthusiasm for the project, like that of the late Cedric Dickens, was a constant stimulus. I am also indebted to Dr Schweizer for his note on the history of the Guild of Literature and Art following chapter 14. Martin Nason has generously shared with me the riches of his fine Dickens Collection, and I have over the years received tremendous help from past and present members of staff of the Senate House Library, University of London (formerly the University of London Library), where most of the work for this book was carried out. I am especially grateful to Kate Gazzard of the Charles Dickens Museum and to Dave Jackson of the Senate House Library for their help in assembling the illustrations, and to Steve Kent of Yale University Press for his great care in the presentation of them.