The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

"He burned all the letters that were sent to him, but obviously you can’t burn letters that you’ve sent to other people — because you haven’t got them anymore. But he said he would have burned those too, if he could have. He had a huge bonfire in 1860, just after his marriage collapsed. One critic said it must have been the most expensive bonfire of all time. Just think of all the people who were writing to him. He knew everyone. He adored writing letters. He said he wrote about a dozen a day. To get a letter from him was like getting a gift and you would keep it. There are letters, in that collection, from chimney sweeps, from clock menders. They’re always funny, with jokes in them. We’ve got over 14,000 but there must have been many more. We know of whole collections that were destroyed, in things like the Blitz, for instance. Ones to his daughter Katey went up in a warehouse fire. “Other men in his circle kept mistresses but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values” The first letter is from when he’s gone back to school after the blacking warehouse. He’s only about 13, and it’s to a friend about borrowing a dictionary. It’s got a joke about a wooden leg. Dickens adored wooden legs. There are loads of joke about wooden legs in his letters and novels. We probably don’t find wooden leg jokes funny anymore because we’re too PC, but he just thought they were very funny. It’s a bit of your body but it is not you. Where are the boundaries of the body? That kind of thing intrigues him. They’ve got this letter at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. It’s just a tiny fragment, but it is amazing to me that it survived — a letter from a 13-year-old school boy. Why would you keep that? It’s just a note. But it survived and there it is. He was writing letters continually until his death. We’ve got letters that he wrote the day he died. Apart from that autobiographical fragment, he never wrote an autobiography. He said he would one day, but he never did. He was quite a secretive person. He didn’t tell his children about the blacking warehouse or the prison or anything like that. No, it was a secret. Well, I can see that if you’ve been in prison, you’re not keen to talk about it, necessarily. So his children didn’t know about it until after he died. He’d given that autobiographical fragment just to Forster, he didn’t give it to anybody else. I think his wife knew, but nobody else. So it’s through his letters that you are given these wonderful glimpses, it’s Dickens by Dickens, if you like. You’re really up close to his life, which is lived so intensely. The amount of invitations! You could have a selection which was just invitations. One of my favourite letters to Forster just says something like, ‘Come at 6, chops await you.’ He was such a convivial man. About his personal life. He kept Nelly, his mistress, secret. Other men in his circle kept mistresses, but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values. So he was living a double life, towards the end of his life. They had no idea. It was a novel, he’s just made it up. It only came out a couple of years after he died, when Forster wrote a biography of him. Dickens knew Forster was going to write it — he’d sort of appointed him. Forster says that now the world will know that behind this great genius lay this very precarious and difficult childhood. Also, in Dickens’s will, the first legacy is to Ellen Ternan. So he knew that that would come out too after he died. It doesn’t say ‘to my mistress’ but he leaves 1000 pounds to her. So people would ask, ‘who is she?’ For many years, Dickensians would say she was a ‘family friend’ or something like that, but gradually the evidence built up till it is, now, absolutely certain that she was his mistress. It was a secret life. He had this wonderful family house in Gadshill in Kent, which he’d always wanted to buy. When he was a child, they’d go past this house and his father said, ‘Oh one day you might earn enough to live there.’ This was the myth, anyway, that Dickens told. So he did buy this house and you can visit it in Kent. He also had a flat above the office in London. But he also had a series of houses that he rented under the name Charles Tringham for Nelly to live in and he would visit her. They were in Slough and in Peckham. He worked the railway timetables. He wanted quick journeys up and down from London. And they had trips to Paris. They had a house they lived in outside Boulogne. No, she was expelled in 1858. From then on, Dickens lived either above the office in Wellington Street in London or in Gadshill, where his children lived. They had had a big London house, which they gave up the lease of, in Tavistock Square. It was a very divided life. In the novel he wrote in 1859, A Tale of Two Cities , he talks about how we all have secret lives. He talks about how when he goes into a city, how amazing it is to think of all these secrets in every house. You bet! When you think how famous he was actually, he wasn’t honoured in the way that we would honour writers now. There’s a wonderful quote about Oliver Twist in her diary, she’s trying to get her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to read it and he says ‘Oh no, I don’t like such things.’ But much later, right towards the end of his life, her equerry arranges an audience with Queen Victoria. He’s such a radical, but, on the other hand, he was obviously very pleased to go. There seems to have been a suggestion that he would have been given some honour, but he died quite soon after. He loved them when they were little, and when they get older…it’s very difficult to have a famous father. He would say things like, ‘When I was your age, I had to earn my living.’ He obviously started work very early, as a solicitor’s clerk and a journalist. He sends a couple of them out to the colonies. They went to Australia. One of them was only 16 when he went. I think it was a great pressure on them, really. I think it was easier to be a daughter than a son. He was the one who went to sea. He writes about him so affectionately and so movingly when he was younger. People think he’s trying to write Sydney off but he had been ill. He did die soon after Dickens. He could be very callous. He was a dropper. He would drop his friends just like that. Particularly when there was trouble with Catherine, his wife. If you took Catherine’s side, you’d had it. And he dropped Thackeray, though they made up and became friends again. Thackeray was a rival, obviously."