BOOKS OF THE DAY
Dickens
Charles Dickens. By Una Pope-Hennessy. (Chatto and Windus. 21s.)
A NEW assessment of Dickens was wanted. In spite of all that has been written about him, he has been enigmatic, uneasily poised in in his gallery among humours and caricatures, unreal sentimentalities, social protests, catch phrases, facetious button-holings, and terrific intrusions of vivid, often sinister, life, as if a sentimental comedian had suddenly stepped into a nightmare land of ogres and made him- self magnificently at home among them, their master in a grim and haunted land. He was a genius ; he could create atmosphere, situa- tions, humours, characters (but not character) ; he was a man of restless mental activity, for ever on the fidget, as responsive to praise and blame as a prima donna, full of eager naivetes, gay fun, vanities, human pity and sympathy, domestic unkindnesses, sex passions, and deep, frightened repressions of a childhood that haunted him so badly that he could scarcely even mention it. This is the Dickens that Dame Una Pope-Hennessy makes alive for us in this long, scholarly, careful study, full and exact in detail, imaginative in inter- pretation, drawing the man from his sensitive, unhappy childhood, with his parents in and out of debt, in and out of the Marshalsea, while he himself was enslaved at twelve into a blacking factory.
This new biography is a rich, detailed study in the psychology of a man haunted by his past, assimilating it, regurgitating its various experiences as imaginative triumphs, building up through them the personalities and adventures of his gallery of actors. On his peculiar stage, some of the actors are ventriloquist's dummies, some wax puppets, others living creations ; why, not he himself could have told us. An eager, restless, impatient man, he could make some personali- ties his own, others (and often those over which he and his great public sobbed loudest) remained insubstantial, smug shades. Out of young Maria Beadnell, whom he had adored, he created the living little idiot Dora ; out of another woman the meaningless, non-existent saint Agnes ; his genius blew fitfully on his acquaintances, breathing life into their portraits or merely puffing them into empty wraiths. Could he discern character? Why did he love and marry his dull and uncongenial wife, and only weary of her (suddenly) after twenty years? Of the separation, disingenuously slurred over by John Forster in his biography, Dame Una, with the aid of the Nonesuch Letters, sheds new lignt. It is not a creditable story ; Dickens, carried away by his passion for a little actress, and dominated by Georgy, his intriguing sister-in-law, turned his torpid Kate out of his house. Few great writers have been entirely faithful to their wives ; but Dickens showed the most cruel ill-manners, first writing to the maid_ when away from home to have the door between bedroom and dressing-room blocked up (why could he not have put a table against it quietly himself?), then throwing poor Kate out with a great fuss, and writing to the papers declaring that all the imputations on his moral character were false. Ill-breeding could go no further. His relations with Georgy are not clear, except that he much pre- ferred her to his wife. Indeed, she was a better companion and a more efficient hostess ; he had picked the dullest of the Hogarth sisters, and life and the continual child-bearing to which he sentenced her made her worse ; her husband became, as Dame Una puts it, " desperately tired of the babies he seemed to think she alone was responsible for." The male ones he shipped off to the outskirts of empire directly this was feasible ; he did not really want them about, and would have hated it had they started writing. There was some- thing unbalanced about him ; he had a morbid passion for starting newspapers and for reading his works aloud, which excited him like drugs. He remained to the end (and no wonder) deeply uneducated ; his reactions to the great cities and monuments of the world were, as Dame Una comments, sometimes silly and often shallow ; he described an execution he was at pains to see in Rome with far more interest and detail than any buildings or pictures ; perhaps he needed, to touch his emotions, as his biographer suggests, human joy or tears. He was profoundly sentimental ; Tennyson found this so irritating that he refused to share a house with him at Lausanne for the summer ; he knew they would quarrel. Leaping from pub- lisher to publisher, earning and spending fabulous sums, dyeing his hair as he aged, making bonfires of his old letters and spurning his past, talking brilliantly, enthralling great audiences, extravagantly feted over two continents, he hurried hectically through his last years, and was struck down in the middle of what might well have been his greatest book ; the dark, imaginative power which had shown itself fitfully in the others seems in Edwin Drood to take control. Had he been content to lead a quieter, less public and excited life (but probably he could not), who can say to what heights of tragic power he might have attained? He lay in Westminster Abbey, the idol of a huge populace for whose wrongs he had persistently fought.
Through the amazing mass of material here assembled, which makes an almost complete sequence of his external life, his latest biographer has drawn a vivid and convincing portrait of genius, brilliant, emotion-drugged, crowd-intoxicated, restless, compassionate, ruthless, egotistic, limited, a little vulgar. Dame Una's book will be a rich storehouse for any future commentators on this extraordinary man and his times. One reads it with interest, admiration and absorption as it tracks its subject through the tangled, restless drama
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