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Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin (view source)
Revision as of 11:58, 4 December 2011
, 11:58, 4 December 2011no edit summary
However the feeling is that he took on far too punishing a schedule; hard work aged him prematurely, and undermined his health. In his last years he was a martyr to neuralgia and gout, and never really recovered from a stroke. Towards the end, he ''rejected and defied'' his illness with a spirit that would not flinch or budge. By the end he could barely walk, and at some of his last readings he had to be helped on and off the stage. This determination to continue to the bitter end undoubtedly contributed to his death from a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 58, leaving his last work unfinished.
We are also left clear from Tomalin’s penetrating portrait that he was not the most agreeable man to know. To some he could be witty, charming and good company, but to others he could also be implacable and vindictive. For a man whose writings extolled the joys of family life, he was hardly a kindly husband to his wife Catherine and ten children. After the marriage deteriorated, he publicly separated from her, treated her abominably, and set up house with a mistress, Ellen Ternan, nearly 30 years his junior. His biographer does not seek to make excuses for his obviously inexcusable behaviour, writing that the ''spectacle of a man famous for his goodness and his attachment to domestic virtues suddenly losing his moral compass is dismaying""''. She warns that the reader may wish to avert his or her eyes from ""''from a good deal of what happened during...1858'', when one of his daughters later said there was sheer misery at home and he was behaving like a madman. The friends who sided with him on the matter remained friends, unlike those who had the decency to speak up for the wronged Catherine. Yet at the same time he was working hard to raise money for the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. It was a shame that he forgot the old maxim, ""''charity begins at home""''.
His children were treated little better. He seemed keen enough to send his boys away from home at an early age, and towards the end of his life he lost patience with the spendthrift son Sydney, writing that he feared the young man was ""''much too far gone for recovery, and I begin to wish he were honestly dead""''. As Tomalin observes, once he had drawn a line, he was ''pitiless''.
This is a rich, vivid biography of the man, and to some extent the age in which he lived and ultimately became a part. She portrays the virtues and failings of a man who could be generous and compassionate yet deeply unpleasant. This is not necessarily a book for the reader who wants an analysis of Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and the rest, yet she gives crisp concise assessments of the worth of each one, as well as a thoroughly-researched account of how each came to be written. A very full read, it is admirably supplemented by three sections of black and white plates, on his journey from a fresh-faced long-haired youth to grizzled, premature old age, and in the hardback edition I am reviewing, colour endpapers with their contemporary illustrations of his most famous characters.