Charles Dickens: A Life

"Yes, absolutely. She is such a good biographer. I would read anything by her. She’s so intelligent. She is sympathetic to him but she is not blind to him. She had already written a book called The Invisible Woman about Dickens’s affair with Nelly Ternan, a young actress. In this book she writes about his whole life brilliantly, to my way of thinking. There are other biographies — I do think Michael Slater’s huge one , which is about Dickens’s writing life, is absolutely superb. But Claire’s is shorter and she opens it out more. “People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was.” She gets his energy, his ferocity. He could be callous. People always say, ‘Oh, he was horrible to his wife.’ Well he was. He chucked her out of the family home when the youngest child was only 6. He said she was a terrible mother, but we have no evidence of that, at all. So he did behave badly. I’m afraid that when marriages break down, people do. She doesn’t blink that, but, at the same time, she does have this sense of a man who wants to do good, who believes that he can do good, and who, above all, is committed to his writing — which he absolutely was. She ends the book with this wonderful image of him writing late into the night. Sometimes he would ask the office boy to bring a bucket of water and he would put his hands and his head in it and then go on writing. That was his focus. He’d always loved stories. There’s a wonderful bit in David Copperfield about his childhood reading — all the characters who came to join him in his solitude after his mother made this horrible remarriage. He was always that bookish child. I suppose I think—and Claire Tomalin does as well—that there’s this thing called genius. You don’t really know where it comes from, but it just alights. Definitely, that sense of, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I.’ If he hadn’t been yanked out of it, he could have been one of those children on the streets. He was a compulsive walker, and knew the streets of London like nobody else, he says. And he would see those children, those young people on his walks. He often walked at night. He knew that it was a very precarious thing. It’s that sense of precariousness—I could be on the streets, I could be in prison—that led him to help the women at Urania Cottage, which he helped set up. That sense of, ‘Yes, that could be me.’ And also, that you could help them, that it’s not irrevocable, they can be brought back. His big ally in all this was Angela Burdett-Coutts. She was a philanthropist and inherited a share of Coutts bank, so she was very wealthy. They were friends. They joined forces on her causes, like the Ragged Schools, which were schools for the very poor. She was his partner in Urania Cottage. How much influence he had, you can never tell, but people said that he was one of the great influences of the time. “He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people.” If you think how popular A Christmas Carol was, and still is. That’s about helping the poor and the ‘worthy poor’ as they were known then. You should be decent. Exactly so. And the idea of instant conversion, of New Year’s resolutions, that we can turn ourselves around. It’s a hugely popular book. He was a Christian, in a non-doctrinaire sense. He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people, really. Yes, there’s a bit about Christmas because he is so associated with Christmas. When he died, a girl who worked in Covent Garden asked, “Will Father Christmas die too?” Even now you’ll find productions of A Christmas Carol everywhere at Christmas. There’s a wonderful muppets version. Yes, partly. It also coincided with Christmas becoming more commercialised. Christmas trees came in in the 1840s. Prince Albert, who came from Germany, brought some Christmas traditions with him — like Christmas cards. There had always been a Christmas holiday, but a lot of the rituals we associate with Christmas really start to build up at that time. He did Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and other people did too. I don’t think there was much of a tradition of it before then. He gives you characters who are very welcoming to inhabit. They are very big. With Scrooge, you can inhabit the miser and he is melodramatic. His characters have that hugeness of melodrama, that emotional affect — because melodrama is very emotional. You root for people: the goody and the baddy. He deliberately embraces that popular form. It goes back a long way doesn’t it? I saw A Tale of Two Cities with Dirk Bogarde when I was at school. That was so exciting."