Not such a cheerful Charlie (From The Northern Echo)

Not such a cheerful Charlie

6:18pm Monday 12th December 2011 in Features By Sharon Griffiths

Charles Dickens – the celebrity superstar of his day – has many links with the North-East and virtually invented the jolly family Christmas, but what was the man really like? Sharon Griffiths is entranced by a new biography.

CHARLES Dickens was the writer who virtually invented the jolly family Christmas – huge turkey, steaming pud, feasting and drinking, a special time and, above all, parents and children, aunts and uncles gathered round for games and good humour and harmony. We knew Scrooge was a changed man as soon as we were told that he really knew how to keep a good Christmas.

Yet the author’s own youngest sons were sent to boarding school in France from the age of eight and often were left exiled from the family and didn’t get home for Christmas at all – or any time in between one summer holiday and the next.

Dickens’ daughter Katey even told Bernard Shaw that she wished someone would correct the general view of Dickens as “a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch”, as the reality was very different.

And a lot more intriguing – if not always quite as likeable – as a new biography vividly reveals.

Dickens is beyond doubt one of England’s greatest and most popular writers. Nearly 200 years after he was born, the characters he invented still live on almost as real people – Oliver Twist, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Pickwick, Miss Havisham, Tiny Tim, Mr Micawber, David Copperfield and a host of others, as vivid as if they really existed.

Dickens was the celebrity superstar of his day. People queued to buy his books when they came out in serial form. They flocked to his public readings. In America, he was mobbed.

The great and the good, including Queen Victoria, wanted his company.

And he worked furiously to keep them all happy. He often wrote two books at a time, as well as editing and contributing to magazines and travelogues and constantly falling out with publishers. He supported various members of his feckless family and friends’ dependants, took on charity cases – and not only gave money but took an active interest in their lives and welfare. He founded a home for prostitutes who wanted to change their lives and did so in a very understanding and humane way.

He kept up close friendships, travelling all over the country for dinners and visits, wrote long letters and often walked 12 miles a day as be overflowed with furious energy. He dressed ostentatiously in lots of bright colours. He moved house often, packed his large family into huge coaches and took them on holidays at home and aboard. He filled his house with friends and relations, gave great parties, entertained the children, played conjuring tricks, organised theatricals, was the life and soul of every party and entertainment.

When he gave dramatic readings of his works, he would reduce grown men to tears and himself to exhaustion as he stirred up a frenzy of energy, excitement and emotion.

Annie Thackeray, daughter of the novelist and a great friend of the family wrote: “My sister and I first realised Mr Dickens as a sort of brilliance in the room... I remember how everything lighted up when he entered.”

He was great company, a good friend, a conscientious citizen, the kindest, most concerned, most generous man. And yet...

When he decided he no longer loved his wife, Catherine – after they’d had ten children together – he simply ordered the servants to put a partition across their bedroom so that he would sleep in the dressing room. When they divorced, he took not only his daughters with him, but also his wife’s younger sister, who was devoted to him.

Another of his wife’s sisters, Mary, had died suddenly at the age of 17 and Dickens’ reaction to that was strange and extreme. He even removed a ring from her finger and wore it to the end of his life. He could be excessively sentimental, and not just in his writings.

He said he had wanted only three children and seemed to consider his younger sons as little more than trouble, unwanted bodies to be fed and educated and sometimes couldn’t bear to see them sitting around his table. Hence, no doubt, their virtual banishment to France.

And when he was in his mid-40s he started an affair with a teenage actress younger than his daughters, an affair that lasted until the end of his life and in whose house he might have died. Biographer Claire Tomalin comes up with a convincing theory that mistress and Dickens’ sister-in-law colluded in getting him back to his family home before the death was announced.

His early life explains some at least of the contradictions.. His father – the model for Mr Micawber – was loving but hopeless, spent time in a debtors’ prison, which meant that as a 12-year-old, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in a rat-infested blacking factory.

A year later, family fortunes slightly improved, he was removed from the factory and allowed to go back to school. Amazingly, his parents never mentioned that year of his life to him again.

Although he was born in Portsmouth and had lived in Kent, he was very much a child of London, where the family moved when he was ten years old. He walked all over the city, knew its streets and his people, almost as if he were making notes for the future novels.

And, possibly because of the debtors’ prison and the blacking factory he identified always with the poor and the down-and-outs, the abandoned children, the young girls driven to prostitution or the families struggling to survive. He later put them into his books and at the same time tried to make their lives better.

His own family was incorrigible. He was supporting his father and clearing his debts right to the very end. But when he cast people off, he did so quite finally.

HE did it with Catherine, his apparently devoted wife for 20 years. And he did it to his younger brother, Fred, who’d once been his favourites and had been very much part of Dickens’ early married life – looking after the children during Dickens’ first trip to America, joining them for holidays in England and Italy.

But Fred died penniless in Darlington. He’d been in prison and was bankrupt. Living on “a penny bun and a glass of ginger beer” for his breakfast, and otherwise mostly on gin. But Dickens had refused to help out anymore and did not go to his brother’s funeral.

Tomalin is a gifted and knowledgeable biographer and she races through Dickens’ life with almost as much energy as the man himself. He leaps from the pages as vividly as a larger than life character from one of his own books and just as fascinating.

Some of the snobbier literary critics did not care for Dickens’ work – too hasty, written in monthly chapters without chance of revision, too popular and populist. But the public loved him. His riches came, said a contemporary, “from thousands and thousands of individuals putting down their shillings month after month is exchange for another 32 pages of tightly-packed letterpress”.

The person who knew him as well as any was his daughter Katey.

“My father was like a madman,” she said about the time of her parents’ separation and Dickens’ affair with Nelly Ternan, “I know things about my father’s character that no one else knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man,” she said in later years, “but he was wonderful!”

• Charles Dickens, A Life by Claire Tomalin (Viking, £30)