The long and the short of it
Laurence Lerner
INTRODUCTION TO DICKENS by Peter Ackroyd Sinclair-Stevenson, £15.95, pp.177 Literary biographers are naturally com- mitted to the view that an author's life pro- vides the best context for understanding his work; and Peter Ackroyd has followed his huge biography of Dickens with a short vol- ume that claims to be both a condensed version of it and also a genuine original, and to put forward the argument for 'con- necting the life and the work'. What, we may ask, does this fine phrase mean? We have long known that Dickens courted Doia Spenlow and met her years later to find she had become Flora Finching, whom he left a lily and who had turned into a peony; or that both Mr Micawber and Mr Dorritt were based on his father. The huge difference between these figures shows how little we learn when we observe that an author has based a character on a known original. Sometimes the work/life link can mean that the work provides an explanatory grid for the life, and Mr Ack- royd has one or two good examples of this, as when he remarks, in discussing the break-up of Dickens's marriage: neglectful mothers play so large a part in his novels that it seems to have been for him the simplest act of transference to accuse his own wife of a similar fault.
Sometimes it means little more than a tau- tology, and Mr Ackroyd is occasionally guilty of such banalities as telling us that the melancholy atmosphere of Edwin Drood can be ascribed to Dickens's own moods of sadness. What it ought not to mean is that you need to know about the author's life in order to understand or appreciate the fiction: for the very nature `Let's face it, we've grown apart . of literature is that if a novel is any good it shakes free of the person who produced it, and speaks to those who neither know nor care whom the author maligned, slept with, or adored.
Dickens was an obsessively tidy man. It is interesting to know this, and, yes, it may be `some reflection of the squalor and even disorder which invaded his early homes', as long as we remember that squalid homes can equally well produce squalid children; but what is the interest of this for the read- er of his novels? They contain fascinated descriptions of neat and tidy interiors, or delighted accounts of how clerks like Nicholas Nickleby 'dot all their small i's and cross every t as they write it'; but there are equally fascinated and exuberant descriptions of energy, abundance and even violence, most famously in the exhila- rated descriptions of the riots in Barnaby Budge. John Carey did not need very much biographical study to show, in his brilliant book on Dickens, that his imagination is gloriously full of contradictions, and that attempts to impose a moral schema on it, whether by Dickens himself or by morally concerned critics, reduce a great novelist to a purveyor of Sunday school precepts something which Mr Ackroyd occasionally slips into, as when he assures us that Dick- ens's philosophy of 'Never say die, never give up' successfully steered him through life while others clung to the wreckage of their hopes'.
The introductory essay is followed by a set of brief introductions to the novels, which are lucid and jargon-free, and some- times illuminating. They are liveliest when recalling the actual language of the books, reminding us that Mrs Wilfer ate her din- ner 'as if she were feeding somebody else on high public grounds'. They are also sur- prisingly uncritical, lavishing as much praise on Dickens's sentimentality and uplift as on his linguistic fertility and grotesque comedy: there cannot be many critics around nowadays who feel as warmly as Mr Ackroyd does towards the conclu- sion of Dombey and Son, with its solemn invocation of 'that higher Father who does not reject his children's love, or spurn their tried and broken hearts'.
Inevitably, this book will mean most to those who have read the big biography. The brief assertion that in the affair with Ellen Ternan Dickens
acted out one of the enduring fantasies of his fiction — that of an idealised marriage with a young and sexless virgin
must remain just that, an assertion, to those who have not followed Mr Ackroyd through his careful, scholarly and (to me, finally) unconvincing argument that the affair was never consummated sexually. Just as Dickens needed nearly half a million words to create a full-scale novel, so his biographer needs as much to re- create the wonderful supporting characters of his life.
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