Peter Ackroyd’s `Dickens’ a masterful biography

DICKENS, by Peter Ackroyd, HarperCollins, 1,195 pages, $35.

“Recalled to life.” This is the cryptic, foreboding message on which the plot of Charles Dickens’ classic thriller, “A Tale of Two Cities” turns. Now, 132 years later, Peter Ackroyd recalls the life and times of the author he calls “the greatest novelist ever to have written in the English language” in this just-out, Jovian biography.

Dickens was a genius whose legacy to the world was a blizzard of books in which he immortalized more than two thousand real-life characters lifted from the streets of London. Untold generations yet to come will flare with indignation over Scrooge, and feel the prick of tears when Tiny Tim says, “God Bless us every one!” in “A Christmas Carol.” They will smile, too, over the grave warning of the improvident Mr. Micawber to David Copperfield that if a man had 20 pounds a year and spent 19 pounds 19 shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. And they will shake their heads over the peculiar Mrs. Gradgrind who, on her deathbed in “Hard Times” said plaintively, “I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.”

Dickens died at 58 in June 1870. He suffered a stroke while dining at his Gad’s Hill estate near London. Carried to a narrow green sofa, he lay unconscious until 6 o’clock the following evening. In accordance with his wishes the simple oak coffin was covered with scarlet geraniums, his favorite flower. Dickens loved color. “Brighten it, brighten it!” he would cry. Fond of showy attire, he enjoyed looking at himself in the mirrors that lined the walls of his home. “I direct,” he wrote in his will, “that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity. … I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever.” The latter mandate was not followed. On June 14 Dickens was interred in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. For two days thousands filed past the casket, many with tear-dampened flowers, some with humble bouquets tied with strips of rags. They loved him because it was in his books that their own love and laughter, despair and grief, courage and cowardice, lived on.

Dickens, a jovial extrovert, was also a closet introvert who kept concealed from the world his two darkest secrets. The first concerned a happening that took place when he was 12, one that scarred him with shame and a terrible sense of disgrace. The parents of his father had been servants in a wealthy household where, by osmosis, the son had acquired a taste for the good life. Later on, as a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, the salary of Charles Dickens’ father was not sufficient to cover his spendthrift habits. Finally, Mr. Dickens’ debts ran so high he was incarcerated for 14 months in the Marshalsea Prison for Insolvent Debtors, to which he was accompanied by Mrs. Dickens and their younger children. At that time it was decided by the parents that the eldest son, Charles, should go to work in a boot blacking company in order to help them out with the 6 or 7 shillings he could earn there.

Daily, from the wretched garret where he slept, young Charles made the 10-mile round trip walk through the streets of London to the dark, rat-infested warehouse near the wharves. There, every day for 10 hours, he pasted on bottle labels and tied on the tops of the blacking bottles. “I looked at nothing that I know of, but saw everything,” Dickens was to write years later of those unhappy morning and evening walks to his destination of shame. Yet paradoxically, it was during this terrible slough of despond that his remarkable memory was imprinted with the olla-podrida of London’s street people and scenes, from whence sprang his fame.

His brown hair was long and lustrous, and his mouth firmly set; but his best feature was his beautiful hazel eyes whose hypnotic glow was soon to captivate the large audiences who were to attend his readings from his books. A clever mimic, he was also a quick study — an attribute of value in the theater where he was to spend much of his free time as an amateur actor. Restless to improve his lot, he taught himself shorthand in three months and became a parliamentary reporter. He soon gained a reputation for excellence. “By the time he was in his 20s,” writes Ackroyd, “he had already become involved in three occupations: the stage, the legal profession and journalism.” It was in this time frame that the young genius commenced to write a series of London sketches, published without pay under the pen name “Boz.”

At 24 he sold “The Pickwick Papers,” a book about the droll adventures (mostly misadventures) undertaken by a brave band of London characters whose leader is the bumbling, beaming Mr. Pickwick. Two days after it appeared, Dickens married the compliant, blue-eyed, 20-year-old Catherine Hogarth, daughter of a London newspaper editor. In the years that followed Dickens sired 10 children and wrote without pause — “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Old Curiosity Shop,” and “David Copperfield,” to name a few. Novels, sketches, short stories tumbled from his pen in a cascade of creativity. The public treated him like an Olympian god. Even Queen Victoria, whose first request to meet him was refused by Dickens, meekly sought the favor of an audience later on. Editor of two popular monthly magazines — where all his novels appeared serially in advance of their publication in book form — Dickens also gained additional wealth from his book reading tours on both sides of the Atlantic. However, his domestic life was far less successful. Mingled with boredom at home was his vexation over the failures and problems of his large flock of offspring. Then, unexpectedly, when he was 45, Dickens experienced the second secret happening in his life. He entered into an ongoing, clandestine relationship with Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress, and broke his wife’s heart by separating from her permanently.

Despite the fact that Dickens’ books are written in the fin-de-siecle of the 19th century, their relevance to today’s ills (faulty educational systems, unbridled crime, drug addiction, poverty, overpopulation, family malaise) is undeniable. Still, this high moral ground notwithstanding, it is the Dickensian land of Samuel Pickwick, Little Nell, Uriah Heep, Pip and Betsy Trotwood which beckons to generation after generation. The characters in his books are immortal. They are the fire in the opal of Dickens’ magic. And it is this magic that shimmers over Peter Ackroyd’s masterful biography of Dickens, worthy in every sense of being classified as a magnum opus. Ackroyd, who lives in London, holds the Whitbread Prize for his biography of T.S. Eliot, and is a joint winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column, and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”