Dickens Day-to-Day
Charles Dickens is a difficult subject for a biographer because his letters and journalism contain elegant fictions in the same way that his novels and stories contain lightly concealed facts. As John Bowen points out in the TLS this week, the former child factory worker from a family destroyed by debt gave up quickly on conventional autobiography and “came to specialize in tantalizingly evocative, semi-fictional autobiographical essays, vividly studded with childhood recollections, elephant traps for unwary biographers, each one impossible to ignore, impossible to take straight.” The book under review is Michael Slater’s excellent new biography, the first to draw on all of Dickens’ surviving letters (more than 15,000 of them) and on Slater’s own edition of Dickens’ journalism. Slater makes a telling vignette from an early letter in which the young Charles, idealistic but controlling, tries to keep his father out of trouble by settling him in a cottage in Devon, “a jewel of a place” with a “splendid garden” and “the finest old countrywoman conceivable” living next door. “Dickens,” writes Slater, “had...written the (idyllic) end of their story for his parents, complete with a cast of comic extras...and it only remained for them to conform.” Characteristically, John Dickens did nothing of the sort, and was quickly back in London running up yet more debts. Charles Dickens wanted words to change reality—in his own family as well as in the wider world. He was both the great reporter and great illusionist of his day. The magnificent Boz, the Inimitable, the Sparkler of Albion: These were just some of the self-images Dickens projected in his lifetime. Slater shows us an “even bigger writer than before, but also a more scattered, contradictory and deceptive one.”
The Real Brideshead
Evelyn Waugh also excelled in projection and lightly fictionalizing his peers, as he admitted to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon in 1944: “I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich people, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays.” The book was Brideshead Revisited, and the “beautiful, high born people” in it, the Flytes, were closely modeled on Lady Dorothy’s own family. Paula Byrne’s new book aims to “find the hidden key to Waugh’s great novel.”
Mud and Gold in Staffordshire
Readers of such diverse English works as Beowulf and Roald Dahl’s The Mildenhall Treasure will find literary reasons to visit Birmingham to see the vast hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold weaponry found in a Staffordshire field by an amateur metal-detectorist this year. The extraordinary pictures of the find have been shown all around the world, but the hard work of analysis, investigation, and imagination has barely begun. Alex Burghart joins the many historians trying to find the hidden key. “Anglo-Saxon history, now almost exclusively the preserve of university students, rarely excites the British public,” he writes, yet “the real treasure is perhaps to be found in the phenomenon represented by the snake-like queues which have curled around the Birmingham Museum since the free exhibition opened only three weeks ago.”
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Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes about ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
