There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love. “He told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his novels.
I’d trade a whole pile of biographies for a video clip of the young Dickens, while courting Catherine Hogarth, his wife-to-be, leaping unannounced through the French windows of her family’s house in a sailor suit, dancing a hornpipe, leaping out again, then walking in at the door “as sedately as though quite innocent of the prank.” And I’d trade that clip, plus the biographies, for footage of Dickens’s face-to-face interview with his admirer Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1862.
Still, in all these books, the most memorable moments come from the accounts of those who saw him in person. Given his uncanny genius and the vivid complexity of his life, that’s not a complaint. The Dickens biographies published just in the past 25 years make an impressive stack. The first volume of the biography he’d wanted Forster to write - which made the blacking-factory episode public - appeared in 1872, two years after Dickens died at the age of 58, and its successors keep coming. In 1849 he showed a short account of his early years to his close friend John Forster, revealing a story he never told his own family: the shame-inducing months he spent, while his father was in a debtor’s prison, as a 12-year-old “laboring hind” in a factory that bottled shoe-blacking. Robert DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST, the Oxford scholar who is one of Charles Dickens’s two new biographers, rightly calls his subject “at once the most central and most eccentric literary figure” of his age, and the investigations into the dark corners of that eccentric life began with Dickens himself.
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