Great Expectations

A new biography of Charles Dickens, the man who could never rest.

He started Oliver Twist halfway through writing The Pickwick Papers, and halfway through writing Twist he began Nicholas Nickleby, shooting off a constant volley of journalistic fireworks the while. Nor did he confine himself to literature. From the beginning, he took up cudgels on behalf of the socially disadvantaged. He flung himself into social life – dancing, horse-riding, performing conjuring tricks, and putting on shows for his family and friends. He walked 10, 12, 15 miles a day, communing with his imagination, but also seeking out the hidden truths of his society, throwing himself into the darkest recesses of human life. On holiday in Italy, he climbed up Vesuvius in full eruption, then witnessed a public execution, getting as close as possible to the severed head. No wonder he observed, when planning the alterations to his new house on Tavistock Square, that "a Cold Shower of the best quality, always charged to an unlimited extent, has become a necessary of life to me."
The force of his will is alarming, and often annihilating: he swept up the young actress Ellen Ternan and, because of the necessary secrecy of their life together, made her in effect a prisoner of love, robbing her of her youth and her autonomy; not for nothing did he call her The Patient in his letters. Sometimes his willpower is almost comic: when his friend Douglas Jerrold died, he whipped up a huge fund-raising campaign to provide for his widow and children, despite their protests that they were perfectly well-off. The story of his relationship with his wife Catherine, on the contrary, makes ugly reading: her one jealous reproach of him, when he practised hypnotism on the wife of a friend, is clearly the root of his increasingly savage rejection of her ("he wrote her out of his life," says Slater), while his children, especially his sons, were the subject of brutally expressed disappointment: "they have," he wrote, "the curse of limpness on them."
His feeling for his readers was, by contrast, entirely positive. His connection with them was like that of no other writer before or since. The famous public readings were the consummation of this relationship, making him the most celebrated and best loved man of his time. "To stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate feeling that this must not be", he unleashed electrifying assaults on poverty, ignorance and injustice, "sledge-hammer blows" delivered in print and in person against government, business interests, moralists. His warnings to charitable organisations about spending their money on the people they were supposed to benefit, his hatred of statistical manipulation, his denunciation of the incompetent prosecution of military campaigns to the detriment of soldiers, his loathing of the profiteering convolutions of lawyers, his contempt for bankers ("slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle")...