Review of Charles Dickens

Authors

Michael Slater

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 41 (2010)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

On the first page of this splendid new biography, Dickens is cited referring to his own earliest writings as 'certain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight or ten and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries'. The genially tongue-in-cheek celebration of his own precociousness is entirely characteristic, with the final flourish of 'overflowing nurseries' an example of the kind of 'unnecessary detail' that Orwell identified as a typical device of Dickensian comedy. 'Overflowing' both transforms the brief recollection into a comic scene and indicates the essential quality of the creative imagination at work here. A very different writer from a later time and another culture who took inspiration from Dickens, Franz Kafka, described his work in similar terms as marked by 'heedless powerful overflowing'; and to read this biography is to be struck by how that same description could be applied to Dickens's life as a whole. His prodigious energy overflowed his work as a writer into an extraordinary range of activities, anyone of which would have been a full-time occupation for an ordinary mortal: editing weekly journals and corresponding at length with contributors and offering generous advice to would-be writers; writing articles and delivering speeches on social and political matters of public concern; setting up and running an asylum for homeless women; indulging his passion for amateur theatricals by producing, directing and acting in plays; and finally, and in a sense fatally, giving public readings from his works to packed houses in Britain, Ireland and North America. All this will be familiar to many readers, but what Michael Slater brings to it is a mastery of the novelist's lesser-known writings now available in definitive editions - journalism, essays, short stories, sketches, travel pieces, as well as the voluminous letters - so that what emerges is the overflowing multifariousness of his work as a writer and an illuminating account in particular of how the novelist was not, despite the immediate success of The Pickwick Papers, born all at once but developed slowly out of the writer of sketches, articles and occasional pieces.