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Charles Dickens: life of the week
00:49:34
Peter Orford charts the life and work of the author who chronicled the Victorian age
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A
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Hello and welcome to Life of the Week, where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures. From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. Thank you so much for joining me, Pete. For our Life of the Week series, we're gonna be talking about Charles Dickens today. And in many ways, I think Charles Dickens is a man who needs no introduction. I'm imagining most people will have heard of him. But as someone who's spent many years studying Dickens and his work, I'm quite interested in your personal take to start us off about what makes Dickens so fascinating.
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C
Yeah, thank you, Ellie. I suppose with anyone who needs no introduction, often they're the ones who most need the introduction because we think we know them. And then you find out, well, I didn't know them as well, you know. And there's lots about Dickens that is probably surprising to people. I mean, for one thing, he was a terrific traveler and a Europile. He spoke fluent French and Italian and lived in French and Fanc as well. So, you know, he has this fascination beyond England, you know. And I think for those who think they know Dickens, they think of him as being the sort of the iconic English author, especially the iconic London author as well, you know. And certainly in terms of, you know, London, he is very much the muse of the city and he really captures the essence of that city. But the danger therein is that we can limit him to just that one figure as well, I suppose. Main things about Dickens that I really enjoy, personally speaking, I can always enjoy the books. Now, as an academic, that's rare. Often you spend all your days studying someone, you're like, I can't look at another novel. But I can always, just at the end of the day, enjoy reading it as literature too. And I think that's a real plus and a real skill to be able to write in that way in his own lifetime. And shortly after, he struggled with the idea of being labeled as a popular author and Therefore dismissed as not being someone worth studying at a scholar level. It was really only in the second half of the 20th century we started seeing him as more of a scholarly figure. But for the longest time, he was just Dickens, who you read for fun, you know, and we've kind of gone full circle on that now, where we see him more as somebody to be taught in schools and universities and less someone to be read for fun as well. So I'm keen to go back to that idea of him as a popular author. The other thing that always surprised me about Dickens is he works on a macro and micro level. So the scale of his works, the size of his works, I mean, literally in terms of, you know, the physical number of pages, but also the depth of them is amazing. But you can take any single paragraph it holds up to close reading, the level of detail and skill in each thing. There's never a dud page. As always, good to find each page as well page. And that, to me, is remarkable for any writer. And so there's always something new for me to find when I come to read a Dickens book again.
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B
Well, I think you've done a great job there at telling us why we should care about Dickens. I mean, I'm sold. So hopefully in this conversation, we can look at some of his works alongside his life. But let's start at the very beginning. What do we know for certain about Dickens early years and his upbringing?
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C
Well, this is a fascinating question, and if you ask anyone about Dickens childhood, the first thing they'll say is about Warren's blacking factory. Okay. Which is the big head. So the story goes that, you know, Dickens's father gets into debt. He is sent into a debtor's prison. And so poor Charles Dickens has to work in a factory. A life of poverty and shame awaits him until such time as his father is freed. There are several narratives at play here. Now, in Dickens's own lifetime, he hides this narrative. So he's asked for an autobiography as early as 1838, I think it is, when a few years after his first books come out and a German magazine asks him, who are you? What's your early life? And he says, well, okay, I was born and raised in London and Kent, and I moved around a lot because my father was working for the navy and I went to school and went straight from school into working in a solicitor's office. That's not true because he misses out the blacking factory. But then what happens is in David Copperfield, of course, he puts this story in There as a fictional adventure for his counterpart. And at the same time also he is disclosing to his close friend John Forster about his time in the factory as well. So he's as an older man now reflecting back on that. And so what you have here is Dickens rewriting his childhood because in his lifetime he has a sense of shame. And it is shame. I mean, the key thing about the blacking factory, it's not poverty, it's a job. There's money involved there as well. But for Dickens, he has been taken out of school to do this. This is his career. He knows that his life over and he's ashamed by it. There's a shame he feels as a child, there's also the shame he feels as an adult looking back. And one of the questions really is, had Dickens not left the factory, had he stayed there, worked up, become a manager, would there be that shame? So we need to look also not what Dickens is remembering, but also when he's remembering it and how he feels remembering it as an adult as well. And for Charles Dickens authority to remember his time in the blacking factory is at that point embarrassing, especially because a lot of his friends, his literary peers would have done school and university, they'd be educated. Dickens was not. So he feels the absence that maybe he didn't feel before as well. So we have to be very careful how we look about Dickens early life and how as an adult, he maybe remembers it in a more negative way than he would do as a child.
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B
Another story that is often connected with Dickens's childhood is that of the debtors prison. And this is an idea that turns up in his later book, Little Dorrit in the form of Marshalsea Prison there. Tell us about that debtors prison story and whether it's true.
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C
Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. So it still strikes me as one of those bizarre legal wranglings that make no sense. But yes, in those days if you couldn't pay debt, you're put in debtors prison and you think, well, how are you going to pay your debts if you're in prison? But they did this, okay, so Dickens father got into debt and was put into debtors prison at that point. Dickens mother chose to live in the prison with him, as you could do at that time as well. Dickens older sister was going to the Royal Academy and they maintained her lessons there because she was their hope for the future. She carried on in her education, working in singing and so forth as well. And Dickens was at point taken out of school and put in the factory. So there you have the shame there. The father in debtors prisoners, the sister being invested in and the son working in a factory. Now again, this is where you have to be careful because the narrative that Dickens told and that was then shared in Forster's biography of Dickens says that his father went into prison and then Dickens goes into the factory. Now we know that's not true. Actually Dickens was working the factory before his father went into prison. So again, the factory is more about a preemptive move of, look, we're on hard times here, we need to all pull our weight. And now the father's gone in prison as well. But no, certainly the father was in there. He was eventually released because his mother died and he claimed an inheritance from that and use it to come out from there. But even after that, both Dickens father and mother were keen for Dickens to stay in the factory, because again, it's a job, it's employment. It was only when Dickens father saw his son in the window of the factory to being displayed as this that the pride came in and Dickens father tried to take him out. So pride and shame again come in as key things. But the debtors prison meant that Dickens had experienced that style of life. And you, so you do see, come up again in Little Dorrit and in Pickwick as well. And so it doesn't form his later.
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B
Writings there too, he's got this interesting insight into the world that he's going to write about later. But how did he get into the world of writing? What was his entry again?
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C
This is where you can thank the father, actually. So, I mean, his early career is working as a solicitor's clerk, so he's working in two offices. And then his father gets a job at doing reporting. And so younger Dickens also goes into the same line. And the reporting initially is reporting in the doctor's commons. Doctor's commons are not anything to do with medical profession at all, but it's a court for small proceedings. So it's like, you know, somebody took someone's dog or the fence has gone too far. These kind of small, minor things that are of utmost importance to those who are involved in it. And every day Dickens would have to sit in the courtroom and take everything down in shorthand. And that was how we started to learn to write. And there's been really fascinating research done on this recently by a scholar called Hugo Bowles that looked at the way Dickens learned shorthand. And it's revolutionary because the shorthand that he learned is fiendish. It was Called bracha, gaffry, brachiography, let's call that. It was as hard to pronounce as it was to learn, basically. But the way it worked is that you would only note down consonants, not vowels, of each word, and each consonant had its own symbol. And so rather than drawing separate symbols, you did combine those into one symbol for the whole word. So let's say you're writing the word cat, and let's say the symbol for C is a circle and symbol for T is a tick. You draw a circle of a tick going through it, and that is cat. And then you go home and you write up your notes. Now, what this means is lots of things. Firstly, it means that Dickens learned to think in consonant clusters. It also meant that he learned to put vowels back into words. So you go back home and go, c. T. What's that? Is it? Is it cat? Is it cut? What is it? And you start doing that. So when you look at Dickens's writing, and this is what Hugo found out, firstly, you see unusual consonant clusters coming up. T.R. is in his names a lot, Tommy Traddles and so forth as well. You know, names where you get these clusters coming up. But you also get a lot of examples where Dickens plays around with words and constructions of words and puts in new vowel sounds as well. So there's one major input there, but equally on a more creative level. At the same time, Dickens is interested in theatre, so he's doing amateur dramatics at home. And again, famous anecdote is he applies to go to audition at Covent Garden Theatre, and on the day of the audition he gets a cold or says he has a cold and so doesn't go along. And so eventually what happens? Instead, he never goes for acting again in that way, but rather he submits a short story to a magazine, it gets picked up and it gets published under the pseudonym of Boz. And from that he starts writing more and more short pieces until eventually he can quit the day job and do this exclusively and start writing longer pieces as well. So it's an organic process of working as a clerk, doing the reporting, doing the theatre, and eventually getting more creative means there too.
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B
So what kind of stuff was he writing about in those early years under the pseudonym Boz?
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C
So sketches by Boz, as they came to be known. They are reports on the world around him and they take two kinds of forms. There are those that are purely journalistic and looking at the world around him. So pieces like Monmouth street or Seven Dials, Scotland Yard, you know, exploring the world around him, but equally imbuing it with a kind of a magic. There's almost a magic realism. So Monmouth street famously, is going down the street, looking at the shops, and he imagines, as he looks at a secondhand clothes store, the people who are in those clothes, imagines them animated as well. So he gives a life to it in this way. But then also he starts to do is he writes short stories as well in the same style, the sketches by Boss. So you have these observational pieces, these walks around the London streets. And then you have short character sketches as well, mini farces, really, you know, dinner parties gone wrong and so forth too. And so between those two, you've got the ingredients for his later comic novels that combine those elements of, you know, satirical observations of life and then these close character studies as well.
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B
And were they political? Can you tell us much about Dickens political outlook?
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C
I can, yes. They're not explicitly political in terms of, you know, he's not in any one singling out a single party to attack. They are political in terms of. They are attacking class and society as well and pointing out issues there. That said, in later life does come out as anti Tory. Now, again, you have to remember in these days you have. There's no labor, it's Tories and wigs. So when we say, you know, he's not Tory, the Whigs are Tory light, really. So still, you know, much of a muchness. But he writes a poem called the Final Gentleman, and the poem explicitly attacks the Tories for their nostalgia and this idea of the good old days. And he attacks the idea of always harking on how things used to be and the good old days and the dangers of trying to reclaim that past. And actually, Dickens was a progressive. He liked the idea of new technology and new ideas coming in here and reform as well. And so he warned against the idea of harking back for nostalgia.
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B
So when did Dickens transition from a journalist, a reporter, to a novelist? What was his first book?
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C
I mean, first of all, the transition away never fully happened that he carried on with journalism throughout his life. But the first proper book as such is the Pickwick Papers. And this is the Meteoric Rise of Dickens. And it starts in the most unassuming of way. So he's done sketches by Boz, these short pieces, and he's asked if he could write accompanying text for a new series of comic illustrations by Robert Seymour. And at the time of writing, Robert Seymour is the big name. And Dickens, who is he? He's had one success. He's an upcoming guy, but he can help Robert Seymour. And this is the era in which you'd have serialized stories. And this, this is a huge push for literacy. The Victorians made a big impact on the way we read today, so they were proactive in trying to increase literacy. But as part of that, you have to increase access to literature. So rather than having just fully bound books that cost a lot of money and can only be bought by your rich and business class, you would start to get these monthly weekly pamphlets coming out as well. And literature would be published in installments. So you could buy it once a month and save up and buy a book that way. So this is what happened with Dickens. Now, Dickens wanted to do the big prestigious volumes because that's what the big popular authors are doing. But he got offered to do a monthly number called the Pickwick Papers about these, these comic sporting stereotypes. After the first numbers published, Robert Seymour commits suicide. And suddenly the whole thing is in chaos because the illustrator's gone. The sales figures aren't that good. So the publishers, Chapman and Hall, think, well, should we just abandon the whole thing? And Dickens says, give me chance, okay? And he says, reduce the illustrations rather than four each time, just do two. That'll be cheaper and I'll fill the space up of extra pages of text. And they get a new illustrator in called Havelot Knight Brown, who takes pseudonym of Fizz. So now you've got Boz and Fizz working together. And from that point forward, Dickens starts writing and taking control of the Pickle papers. And this is where you see the joy of the reactivity of CR's publication. Now, in recent years we've seen this again because for all of your influx of streaming services, there is a recognition that the way to really get ratings in for TV shows is to do it by weekly installments. So things like Line of Duty or the Bodyguard were on front page news because people were talking about it. Same for Victorian literature. You would publish an installment and then have a month to talk about it, share it out. It's only a small pamphlet. You can share it out, you can read it aloud. There's anecdotes of fathers who come home, read it themselves first, and then read it aloud to their children. So everyone's getting involved in the stories here. And what that means is you get feedback. So shortly after Dickens takes the reign of Pickled papers, he introduces a servant called Sam Weller who's working in an inn. And Pickwick meets him and the character is popular. So suddenly, next month, Weller becomes a Permanent character. And the whole story shifts from this focus on four comic stereotypes to just on Pickwick and his servant Samuel. And it becomes really Jeeves and Worcester, before Jeeves and Worcester exists. It becomes that kind of narrative. And so the other thing that Dickens does very well with this, because it's being published monthly, is each month relates to the months just happened. So in March, you can buy the last month's adventure, Pickwick, involving Valentine's Day, you know, and January. You see what Pickwick is doing over Christmas as well. So you get a way in which the. The work is living and breathing with you, the reader, as you're going through. And what that means, of course, is you get all the speculation, the discussion, the growing fan numbers. You get merchandise. People are making Pickwick badges and canes and cards, and they're Pickwick clubs forming as well. So by the time he gets the final one, eight months later, everyone's talking about Pickwick. And so before Pickwick's even finished, he's writing Oliver Twist. And that's coming out at the same time that Pickwick is finishing. And suddenly he's got this momentum going, and that's how he really makes his name as a novelist.
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B
It strikes me that Dickens would have been great at social media. You know, that algorithm, that feedback, that growing popularity. What was it that made his writing, his stories so popular? If we look at Pickwick and perhaps the novels that followed it as well.
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C
Yeah, so I mean, traditionally, we've sort of looked at Dickens writing career in two halves of the early comic novels and later sort of more social satirical novels. Now, that's a broad generalization. There's some truth to it. But equally, we can kind of point out where the early ones become more social, satirical as well, later on, comedy as well. But for now, let's have that generalization in mind. The early ones, then, what they do well is they're funny, they are diverting, they are easy to read. On the one hand, they emulate Dickens's authors, like the great satirists of the 18th century. But also, being new, they are easier to access and to read as well. He's holding a mirror up to the world, so people are seeing their own lives reflected, and that's great fun as well. But also, there is this world of characters he creates and going back to merchandise, that works really well, because with the illustrations, for example, a lot of booksellers will put the illustrations in the window. So you're seeing the pictures as a way into the story. You get theaters adapting the novels as well. You get shows involving the characters where they'll dress up as the characters. You get playing cards, all these things that rely on the imagery of the characters. So, again, in terms of modern sensibility, think about, you know, how many lunchboxes you can buy with Iron man and Captain America on that kind of thing. We have a recognizable character. Dickens is doing that. And so we have a lot of materials from the Victorian era as a playing cards, cigarette cards that focus on recognizable figures from the illustrations as much as from Dickens novels, too. But in that way, the characters become beloved, and so the books become rereadable. You want to go back and visit them again, you know, and talk about, you know, those favorite characters, too. So a lot of the early novels work much more in the way we think of sitcoms, really, that kind of thing, where you want to just, you know, relax and watch just a nice sitcom and switch off. And so it's interesting that when Dickens starts to become more satirical and to come angrier, a lot of the initial reaction with fans is, oh, we missed the old comic Dickens. We missed the fun bits as well, you know, and some people think he should just stick to that bit and stay away from all the broader sweeps as well. But, yeah, so a lot of it comes down to the popularity of the characters and the ease of transmission of how they can be shared along. And everyone knows what Pickwick is or Weller is, and they talk about them as almost as real people as much as the books in which they're into.
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B
So it strikes me we've talked a lot about Dickens world, his work, but we haven't really got to Grips with Dickens the man himself yet. So I wonder if you can turn to that now, what kind of man was he?
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C
Well, I mean, one thing that I think ties it together is his idea of brand as well. There is a Dickens brand and Dickens encourages this. So with those early works, Dickens becomes the friendly, popular man of the people kind of writer. And you see it in his prefaces that he writes, because when he gets to the end of each series, he'll publish the book and there'll be a short preface where go thanks for all of you. Join me on the way. And I bid you now farewell to you and all these characters. And it's all very sort of convivial and communal as well. He thrives on that, on the idea of being one of the people he loves initially at least that sort of attention he gets of being one of the people as well, now that's gonna cause issues for all celebrities. That moment of which you become Mr. Popular Sentiment, as Trollope called him. You have to uphold that. And so of course for Dickens there's a few crisis points. I mean, the first time he goes to America and in America they adore him, which is great for the ego, but also at some point gets a little bit too much attention. You know, they're bursting into a hotel room to come and say hello. So this is too much, I want my privacy now as well. So you have the conflict there of how to balance this celebrity lifestyle and privacy. You've also then got the crisis later on when he separates from his wife. Now before we get to that, Dickens as a man, I would say a control freak easily somebody who likes to be in control and organizing things. He has a very set way of how to do things. He and his wife, they have 10 children in total, which eye watering but fairly typical for the time you have in a lot of his early life again linked to this idea of his brand and his shame from the blacking factory, this sort of desire to prove himself a gentleman. And this is where you get both the David Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations. A desire to be a gentleman. So one of my students has been doing some excellent work on Dickens accounts and looking at what Dickens was spending. And one thing he found is that Dickens spent an awful lot of money on wine each year. You know, equivalent about £7,000 in modern currency per year on wine and you think non alcoholic, but that is on entertaining, on dinner parties and guests and the appearance of the gentleman in life. On the one hand you have a supremely confident, self assured writer who knows what he's doing and believes in his own abilities best, coupled with the insecurity of somebody who is desperate to be proven a gentleman. Worried about money failing, he inherits his father's ability to spend money. But thankfully, he also has the ability to make enough money to cover those costs as well. So he's making more than he's spending, but he's still spending a lot as well. So this is building into the kind of the person that he is as he tries to be the man of the people. Very confident writer, but also trying to be a gentleman as well. And I'd say the crisis point then is when his marriage breaks down with his wife. Because at that moment, you've got to think about how does he, on the one hand, protect his own interests, but also, as importantly, protect his brand. Protect the name of Charles Dickens, too.
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B
Well, can you tell us a bit more about the Dickens marriage?
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C
Yes, absolutely. The great irony is the actual story itself is not controversial in modern standards. Okay. He and his wife grow apart. He meets someone else. He leaves his wife for her. Now, by modern stance, I would be, oh, okay. Well, these things happen and so forth. Obviously, at the time, this is not great. And for Dickens especially, it's an absolute, you know, would destroy his reputation. So Dickens goes completely of the way and works very hard to try to identify his wife as the villain of the piece. And this is why, as historians, we have to be very careful how we read the documents, because we have to look through and read between the lines to work out why Dickens is saying what he's saying. So around the time when his marriage breaks up, he writes a lot about how his wife has always been a bad mother. Never really involved as well. They never really got on. That's not true. That's not true. Okay. The early letters we have from Dickens and his wife, the way he talks about her, clearly, to begin with, it's a loving marriage, but they do grow apart. And there is a sense of Dickens getting bored, frustrated, looking around. He has a meeting with a former lover, Maria Beadnell, who originally courted before he married Catherine. She turned them down at the time because he wasn't rich enough. Basically, now he's Charles Dickens. She gets in touch, and he's thrilled to go see her. Whoa, Maria. Yeah. Let's go. See you. Maria's gotten older. She's gotten fatter. Dickens is like, oh, it's not quite the same. But he's looking at that moment for. For maybe somebody else. And then he meets the ternan family. So this is where he's performing now, in amateur dramatics again. Now, when I say amateur dramatics, you know, that invokes ideas of a village hall, you know, and Mrs. Johnson down the road being third spear carrier. These were lavish productions, okay? He'd be doing them over in his home, or in one case in the Duke of Devonshire's home. His cast would be other literary figures. So in some places of him, Wookie Collins, Bulwell Lytton, you'd have Augustus Egg, Mark Lemonade had a punch. A lot of big names coming into this. But this was the strange thing where as amateur dramatics you could do these performances for charity, but you wouldn't be compromising your status as a gentleman because you're doing it for charity, not for the money as well. However, these private performances were so popular that they decided to do some more of them around the country. And whereas for the private performances he had got his sister in law and his daughters to play the female roles, now they're going public, that would not be appropriate. So they hired some actresses to play the parts instead. And amongst these is Ellen Turner. Here you have a young actress, much younger than Dickens at the time as well. And so scandal already forming here. And for the longest time people denied any knowledge of this, you know, because Dickens suppressed himself in his lifetime too. I don't think there's any controversy in that. There is a relationship there. We know that Dickens lives with her. He arranges a house for her both here and in France as well. There is even speculation they may have had a child who would have died. But that is growing in credibility as an idea not proved still. But less and less people are being offended by the idea that might have happened. But again, more research shows that actually in the early days, Dickens may have been more interested in Ellen's sister rather than Ellen. And actually Ellen would have been second choice. So when we're looking at how and why this happened, it's not likely to be the case that Ellen swoops into a happy marriage and steals Dickens away. Rather, Dickens is unhappy in the marriage, is looking around, find someone else, and then starts this new relationship and he stays with Ellen until he's deaf. So it's by all accounts a happy relationship, but as I say, that in itself mild scandal, but nothing that would be hugely detrimental in modern society. But the way in which he publishes letter by his wife and really attacks his wife as being awful and terrible, which he's doing to protect the brand, that ironically is what we now have most trouble with trying to reconcile with. It's a really poor decision on his part.
- [28:23]
B
Well, that does lead me onto my next question. It doesn't paint Dickens in a good light, does it there? But were there any other less admirable sides of him? We don't want to, you know, do just a hagiography.
- [28:34]
C
The controlling nature of the ego, you know, would be annoying, I would say. So there's a lovely story from Dickens friend. So as he goes on in life, he sets up two journals where he is the conductor, all under his name and has all these other writers who are writing for him as well. So again, Dickens becomes center of a literary network here. And amongst these are those that become known as Dickens. Young men where young authors who are now being taken under his wing. And he's helping them. Now this suits Dickens ego no end because he's now the founder of the feast. He's helping them as well. And I should say that all of them are grateful to him and they all speak glowingly of him after he's deaf, how he helped him along. But there is often that kind of slight butting of horns as well. So there's one example where George Salo adjourns for the time and Wilkie Collins and Edmund Yates are there and Dickens insists they all come round every Sunday to work. They sure work on a Sunday, because that's what he does. He's a workaholic. And you get the story where basically they're trying to look busy because Dickens is on one again. So Salah's in doing a crossword and Colin's trying to have a snooze in the library and so forth as well. There's really this reluctant tolerance of Dickens traits. So yeah, workaholic as a quite egotistical on his own abilities as well. What he can do, I mean, one thing about Dickens is he takes on a lot of projects, lots of mini projects over his lifetime. He tries his hand at stage magic, hypnotism, acting, all these things. And every time he goes, I'm really good at this. I better be. If I did this real quick, I'd be really good at this, you know, so that element there. And again, in fairness with the acting, his friend who is William Charles Macready, a famous actor at the time, he's very positive because actually Dickens really can do good acting. So it's not all invented. But at the same time, if Dickens is good, then he knows it, you know, he has that confidence there as well to do that too. Other things I suppose. Definitely a workaholic. And expects that other people too can be a bit hard handed with the editing of other people's work for that purpose as well. You know, there's one woman with Wilkie Collins who is writing the Moonstone and, you know, he's ill one week. Dickens goes, if you're ill this week, I can write for you. They won't know the difference. It's fine, I can write your style, anything. That's quite the ego, Charles, quite the ego there. So if we were to have dinner with Dickens for a night, it would be a great night out, but I think by the end of it, you would be feeling like it's a bit much.
- [30:56]
B
Sounds like it to me. To take us on to something completely different. Something that people might not know about Dickens is that he was actually involved in a deadly train crash.
- [31:07]
C
Absolutely, yeah. So this is the Sapelhurst railroad crash of 1865. So this is five years before Dickens's death. And he's on the train crash because he's on his way back from France with Ellen Turner and her mother. So immediately for the Dickens is an awkward situation because he's there with his, his mistress because he never gets divorced. And then the train crashes, just comes off the rails completely. Now, a few interesting things happen with this. Number one, obviously he has to, you know, hide the fact that Ellen is there, but also he acts courageously. He is there on the field, helping out, helping others out of the wreckage as well, going around offerings of branding, so forth to. People say he's a real help on the field. So in that moment he acts brilliantly, but it leaves an impact on him, like a real impact. And if I can offer a contrast, when Dickens is younger, this is about the point when he's writing Oliver Twist and he's living with his wife, his wife's sister comes to stay with him. Mary Hogarth. Mary Hogarth, a young girl, 18 years old, and she dies at the home in Dickens's arms. And this becomes another key moment in his biography. It's a really weird one because it's his, it's his wife's sister. But the way Dickens talks about it, it's like it's his personal loss. And she dies in Dickens arms. And he writes to everyone going, oh my God, Mary died in my arms. Oh, have you heard? Mary died in my arms. And it's almost a weird ownership. This is my tragedy that's happening here as well. So he sort of co opts that and he uses it in a number of tragic heroines deaths as well. In his literature, he says he wants to be buried next to Mary in the grave, you know, and he dreams of her in Niagara Falls. And it's a quite weird assumption on his part that this is his tragedy rather than his wife's tragedy as well. Now compare that to Staplehurst crash. He barely talks about her. He's genuinely shaken by it. So there's almost a performative nature to his reaction to Mary Hogarth's death. With Staplehurst, he says, I can barely write, my hands shaking too much. You know, it's really terrified me. At the time of that happening, he is doing what will eventually become a world tour of public reading. So he's going around England and then America as well. A lot of train travel. And it becomes very stressful for him as well. So there's that impact on him there. He's never quite the same on training after that as well. So it does have a big impact on him and it does shake him to the core. And again, the dangers where we mythologize, because he dies five years later on the anniversary of the train crash, we go, well, it meant to happen. It's like, I think they find that's coincidence. But, you know, people like the idea of this impact on him or the idea, I think, which is more convincing, that it was a brush for death. And from that point forward, Dickens is a little bit more aware of his mortality. You see it in his publishing contracts where suddenly for from that point forward, for our mutual friend and Edwin Drood, he includes clause that will happen in the event of his death in those contracts as well. So it is something that does make him suddenly realize, you know, he's not going around forever and has that more significant, profound impact on him there as well.
- [34:08]
B
So let's move on to Dickens death. What do we know about it?
- [34:12]
C
Okay, so Dickens died in 1870. He was living at the time in his home in Gad's Hill. He had up until a few months earlier been doing these public reading tours and traveling around, I say America and the UK doing readings of his works, which for the time was quite a new idea for an author to do these readings as well. And again, it was straddling that line between respectability and profitability. You know, should a literary person be in front of people on the stage like this? Well, it's a reading, it's not a place. Therefore it's still respectable, but more importantly, very, very lucrative. Equally importantly, very, very good for Dickens's ego. You know, again, the man who wants to popular sentiment. A lot of them could coincide after this. There's very public support from his wife as well. So he's doing this partly for the money, but also partly to to see his audience, to take ownership of his works again. His works being dramatized a lot. So now he can go in and read Pickwick as it should be read and have that as well. So it's addictive, ultimately. And in the last few months, he's taken on a new reading from Oliver Twist, which is the death of Nancy. Up to this point, all the readings have been either Christmas stories or comic scenes. And now it is this very violent, dark, but compelling reading of Bill Sykes brutally murdering Nancy. And we're told that his heart rate would be racing after each performance, that he had a doctor on side to make sure he was okay. The audience would be watching in horror, but again, compelled to watch as well. And for Dickens, he feels the power of this. And it feeds into that ego again, that the power of holding an audience's attention to something so horrific. But the combination of that of travel, of stress, it's getting too much for him. And so the doctors say, you've got to stop. So he stops the reading tours and goes back to Gad's Hill where he starts to write again. And it's been the longest gap in his career between novels. Five years since the last one. He starts writing a new one as well. And within a few months of starting his last story, the Mystery editor in Druid, he writes that installment at his home, feels unwell that night, collapses, and the next day he dies. Like some kind of aneurysm or heart attack or something like that.
- [36:27]
B
How old was he?
- [36:28]
C
58 years old when he died. So I mean, not old, not young. I mean, again, there's temptation to go, well, that's good for the age. People lived older in those days. He probably would have lived longer had he not done the reading tours. Now this is where you get the trade off, because the reading tours really popularized him, more so than his novels. Once again, merchandise. But this time he's going around the uk, in America, and they're selling photographs of him as merchandise. Yeah, and he's making a lot of money. But when we think of Dickens now, you think of the guy with the beard, right? Well, that's who he was during the reading tours. We don't think of the clean shaven young man who are a Pickwick. We don't think of the guy going through the mustache phase, which was a mistake. We think of the guy with the beard, okay, because that's what everyone saw. So what the reading tours did is they secured his legacy. They secured the impression he had on the world and that image of him, the man with the beard, and these great novels and the idea of reading a Dickens novel rather than reading Pickwick, all of a twist. When we read a Dickens story, we see the author's name there, front and center as part of the experience. The reading tours kind of cemented that, but they shortened his life. So had he not done them, he'd live longer, be write more. But would he have the same legacy that he has now? That's the big question.
- [37:46]
B
And it's fascinating to me how many times we've talked about the idea of brand Dickens in this conversation. I mean, it's been something that's run throughout. A big part of brand Dickens today is Christmas, you can't deny. How did Dickens become so cemented with.
- [38:04]
C
The idea of Christmas time and energy? No, he did not invent Christmas, okay? The Christmas tree came along before, you know, robins were around. All these things that we think of as being quintessentially Dickens, they're not Dickens. But you know what he does do? He, he captures that moment and he puts them all together as well. So he doesn't invent it, but he does crystallize it in that moment as well. A Christmas Carol, really, that is the, the key Christmas scene we think of now. You know, snow, Victorian streets, chestnuts roasting, open fire. All these things as well. Now, McDickens writes a Christmas Carol. A number of reasons. One is as a social crusade, because he wants to kind of make a cause of the poor. But another one equally is money. Again, at the time of writing, he's also writing Martin Chuzzlewit. And sales aren't good. They're not making much money. So A Christmas Carol is a way to make more money as well. The irony is he spends so much money on the illustration, which are all color illustrations, and he does these gold edged pages as well, that the profits get eaten up by the production costs. So it doesn't make that much money to begin with. But the idea takes off. People love the idea. It's strange, isn't it? Because as a Dickens scholar, you want to recommend all the other Dickens texts too. But I cannot deny that Christmas Cowl, in many ways is his most perfect story because structurally it is. It feels emblematic. It feels like a fairy tale. It's so easy to retell and adapt. Been adapted so many times as well. So that idea takes off. Now, again, Dickens is not blind to this. So the next year he does another one. He writes the chimes, another Christmas book, and he writes three more. Over the next five years, he'll write five Christmas books same time of year, and he develops again a brand as the Christmas Guy. And after that, by that point, he set up his journal. So now every December, they'll do a Christmas special where he'll get other authors to come along and contribute short stories. They create a framework around it. So the first one, very imaginative, is called A Round of Stories by the Christmas Special Fire. And it's about a family all telling different stories. That. That's it. They get more inventive as it goes on. And more things like the Wreck of the Golden Mary, where it is survivors from a shipwreck telling stories to each other, you know, to. To pass the time and this sort of thing as well. But in doing this means every year you've got a Dickens Christmas special coming out with the Dickens name attached to it. So from 1843 up to 1870, pretty much apart from, I think one would be two years every year there was a Dickens Christmas event happening, either a book or a collection of stories as well coming out. So, yeah, time, time building that up and that reputation as well. At the same time, the reading tours, I'd say the Christmas books are really popular there. So Christmas Cowl is the one he comes back to again and again as a nice, short, easy story to read. So in all these ways, he's constantly reaffirming himself as Mr. Christmas.
- [40:54]
B
He knew what the people wanted and he knew how to give it to them. Pete, I wonder if I could finish with what I'm sure is going to be a pretty impossible question for you. But we're talking in January, so you can't choose A Christmas Carol to answer this question. But for anybody who's listening, who maybe has never read anything by Dickens but has thought, you know what? These sound good. I want to get involved. Where would you recommend starting if you had to give one or two of Dickens books?
- [41:21]
C
I'm going to cheat and give three. Okay, all right, I'll allow it. Firstly, my two favorites, and they are two joint favorites are Pickwick Papers and Dombey and Son. And they're two very different ones. Okay, I mentioned there are two halves Dickens career. These are the two that start those two halves. So Dombey and Son is when he first starts to really plan his stories ahead of time. He has a monthly plan ahead and he's Got an overarching framework. It's a fantastic story. It's really a proto feminist work. It's got a lot of interesting ideas, a lot of great characters, and it's got a broad sweep. It's a really great and profound story. Pickwick Papers. No plan, no roadmap. Absolute chaos. But it has, like so many of the early stories, is this frenetic energy, this weirdness where he's writing as he goes along and making it up and going back. And it's very episodic, really episodic. And if I give any advice on any Dickens, it's that if you're going to read it, get an addition. And the best ones will have this noted in the. In the contents that tells you where the original installments began and ended. Read it as was first meant to be read in installments, with an awareness of where each episode begins and ends. Imagine trying to watch an entire TV series as a box set with no idea where each episode begins or ends. It would become just a mess. Impossible. You need to have that. That sense of rhythm to it. The other one I'd recommend, though, as a starting point, which is probably already read by many, it would have to be Great Expectations, because while it's not my personal favorite, again, objectively, I would say it's probably Dickens at the top of his game. The writing is perfect, the structure is perfect. It's a really good, solid Titan all. And. And it's shorter as well, which is always a good start for new readers as well. But if you want to really have some fun, Pickwick Papers is the one to go.
- [43:26]
B
Thanks for listening to today's Life of the Week. Be sure to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.