The Inimitable

John Forster, Dickens’ best friend and appointed biographer, published the first volume of his Life in 1872, two years after Dickens’ death. Earl Russell wrote to him, ‘I shall have fresh grief when he dies in your volumes.’ Yesterday evening, approaching the end of Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens, A Life I got as far as the death and found myself in tears, just like the people who had known him when they read Forster’s great work of love and tribute. I often cite Middlemarch as my favourite book, I re-read some of Jane Austen’s novels each year, yet I still regard Dickens as our greatest novelist and am moved by the extinction of the spirit which produced books I love so much.

Next year will be the bi-centenary of Dickens' birth and we can expect further publishing flurries. The question is: how many biographies do we need? Hilary Mantel writes that ‘Claire Tomalin is the finest and most disinterested of biographers.’ For ‘disinterested’, read ‘cool’. According to Craig Brown she is ‘the most empathetic of biographers’, another judgement I disagree with. This biography is thoroughly researched and does justice to Dickens’ astonishing energy.
‘(he) packed so much into his life (from 1852-54) that it is hard to believe there is only one man writing novels, articles and letters, producing A Child’s History of England, editing, organizing his children’s education, advising Miss Coutts on good works, agitating on questions of political reform … travelling, acting, making speeches, raising money and working off his excess energy in his customary twelve-mile walks.’
Just to consider that by the time he was twenty five this scarcely educated man had published The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, bought a house and married gives some idea of the pace he was to live at. The wonder is not that he was burned out at fifty eight but that he lasted so long.
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