BOOKS OF THE DAY
Dickens Once More
Dickens: His Character, Comedy. and Career. By Hesketh Pearson. (Methuen. 18s.) BIOGRAPHERS may be divided, very roughly, into two clIsses. There are those whose great joy it is to "do" someone who has not been " done " already, and who are really only happy when they are reading yellowed diaries or exploring packets of old letters tied up with pink tape. The subjects they write about will necessarily be dictated by the material available, and, unless they arc exceptionally lucky, they will often be concerned with secondary figures. The other class consists of biographers who do not mind in the least that they are dealing with someone who has been written about dozens of times already so long as they can construct a readable book out of a career that is certain to remain of abiding interest. They will take their material largely from printed sources and will rely on the freshness of their approach—perhaps (torn " a new angle "—to give their book distinction. Neither class is to be rated above the other, provided that the work is seriously intended (sometimes, of course, they overlap) ; both are necessary to a healthy literature ; and in the second category Mr. Hesketh Pearson occupies a prominent and honourable place.
Now, for the competent biographer of the second category there are perhaps twenty or thirty available subjects upon which he can employ his talent with a permanent assurance of public support and, therefore, of proper financial reward. Mr. Pearson has graduated to Charles Dickens by way of such " safe bets " as Shakespeare, Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and always he has done his work of re-introduc- tion with spirit, presenting each new portrait in clear and stimulating colours. In approaching Dickens he will have been fully aware ti.at writing about his hero has become one of the major literary industries. Mrs. Pearson may even know more about this than he does, for he makes acknowledgement at the outset to " her work of many months in the British Museum reading room." She will have plunged bravely into those fifty or sixty pages in the great catalogue that record the steadily expanding, world-wide fame of the English novelist ; she will have mused over such strange-sounding titles as Pikvikovci, II Circolo Pickwick, As Aventuras do Sr. Pick- wick, and Le Club des Pickwistes ; she will have noticed the solemn German pamphlets estimating Der Einfluss von Charles Dickens on this or that, and the books on Carlo Dickens and L'lnimitable Boz, and others in still more outlandish tongues. At times she may even have been depressed at the thought that her husband's book was destined to join this vast and ever-widening stream, and that within a few months of its publication a museum official would be pasting its printed entry into one of the catalogue's few vacant spaces. But given Mr. Hcsketh Pearson's talent, popular success was hardly in doubt—and lo ! the book duly sails into view under the colours of the Book Society and the Daily Mail. For a critic, the question must be: how will it look, compared with all thes.' other books, in five years or even three years' time ?
I believe that Mr. Hesketh Pearson has had something to con- tribute to the study of Dickens that will earn for his book a lasting
importance. He sees, as an actor through and through, unique in this respect among the great novelists. Others hayc given the histrionic side of Dickens a prominent place in their conception of his_ character, but no one has hitherto marshalled the evidence as skilfully as Mr. Pearson in support of the thesis that the born actor in Dickens was the secret of his whole life. He was not " the ' straight ' actor who is only happy when appearing as himself," but " the 'character' actor who is only at ease when disguised as some- one else." Dickens alu>hys regretted that he had not made the stage his profession, and in later life he sought to atone for this, with brilliant success, by his readings and amateur performances. But, of course, as Mr. Pearson points out, his histrionic genius had already gone into the creation of his fictional figures ; bits of Dickens are to be found in widely dissimilar " parts " scattered throughout his novels, and the restlessness, vivacity, intensity and courage of their creator speak from the mouths of many different characters, pleasant and unpleasant.
This is a book both for the newcomer to Dickens and for the advanced student. Mr. Pearson tells the story largely in Dickens's own words, or in the words of his friends, selecting them from the mass of-published material—especially from the letters—with a keen eye for a telling sentence, and skilfully carpentering them into an easy flowing narrative. He has not attempted the work of scholarship that Dame Una Pope-Hennessy provided in her careful biography published in 1945, nor has he given the meticulous attention to the individual novels that she gave. But his book is certainly more exciting to read ; and he ticks off the well-known fictional characters as they arise in the real life of Dickens, and has an appropriate word to say about each novel as it appears.
The true story of Dickens's family life, which remained obscure for so long, has in recent years become increasingly familiar. The loyal verdicts of his last surviving children have been overtaken by the impartial hand of time. Mrs. Perugini's view that her parents' separation was " a subject with which the public has no concern" underestimated the strength of the public's curiosity in all that concerned her father. And Mr. Pearson would hardly accept Sir Llenry Fielding Dickens's statement that during his last years Charles Dickens lived " a very happy life." Mr. Pearson describes and explains the association with Ellen Ternan more convincingly than anyone else has done. There are features about the whole episode that must always be distressing to the Dickolaters, as Mr. Pearson calls them, but when .Dickens's faults and frailties are weighed against the good done and the pleasure given through the workings of that restless, emotional temperament, Dickens surely comes out of the ordeal very much better than most men of genius.
So far as it concerns Charles Dickens, Mr. Pearson's book is usually balanced and sensible. There are some strangely ingenuous obiter dicta, as when he writes of the suicide of Seymour " It was a tragedy that arose from the nature of things, and the responsibility must rest with the creator,of all things" ; or prints the odd sentence " Most men are more interested in women than in men, and so are most women "; or calls. Napoleon " a diseased and murderous imbecile." He appears to undervalue Great Expectations, a story with a good plot that has proved its worth in the cinema. But the major virtues of this new presentation outweigh its minor deficiencies, and our final judgement of Mr. Pearson's book harmonises with his _own conclusion on Dickens—" The virtue and vice in a man's work are the virtue and vice in himself, and the preponderating virtue in Dickens's work is the predominating virtue in Dickens: his inexhaustible comedy and vivacity." DEREK HUDSON.
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