Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts

I can freely confess to a love affair that has gone on for the better part of six decades. It will stir up no problems because it is with a dead man now 200 years old: Charles Dickens.

It happened like a bolt of thunder when I roared with laughter reading The Pickwick Papers for the first time. It continued when I wept for joy at the roses and honeysuckle ending of Oliver Twist, (it would make me puke now!), wept with sorrow at the death of Little Nell and Paul Dombey (ditto!). A Tale of Two Cities was a school text and I can still recite most of it by heart; it became such a close friend of a text. Extracts in early school texts always dragged me to the original and I thought the world of him, each new novel that I read making our relationship a solid lasting one. Unlike young people nowadays I love large fat novels so their length was never a problem. The affair continued even through 40 years of teaching him!

At college, one became more discriminating. The best of his critics, Humphrey House, had actually written his wonderful account of Dickens’s world sitting in Calcutta, which with its palaces and slums, its cholera epidemics and lively stag addas would have seemed much like the London of Dickens’s time. Dickens’s one-liners, that brilliantly encapsulated a character, his irony, his amazingly varied world, his concern about social issues and his thoroughly memorable characters continued to charm and absorb.

Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers

I thought collecting a PhD on him would be a breeze since I had already read all his novels by the time getting those tiresome three letters behind one’s name became as necessary as a trade union card. I was wrong. I soon discovered he had in print two journals that he edited, a thick volume of speeches, another of plays and as for the letters: they run into several large tomes and were being put together in a handsome scholarly collection at the time, a project initiated by Humphrey House and his wife, Madeleine House. I had the good fortune to see some of this scholarship in progress at a gorgeous 15th century coaching inn on the outskirts of Cambridge. The man hand-wrote each one like the rest of us make phone calls or send texts and each was a beauty, full of genial witticisms, remarks about the weather, the progress or otherwise of the novel he was currently working on, his frustrations, his anger. The list of his correspondents reads like a Who’s Who of his times. I understand there is quite a market even for fake letters purported to be written by him.

Mr Micawber from David Copperfield, who was modelled on Dickens’s father

People like us (i.e. aging people) know that the canker of disillusionment creeps into every long-term relationship: mine with Dickens was no exception. I found over time that he was an arriviste: that he cultivated people because they were rich or famous (Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, for example, the richest woman in the land). Champion of the underdog he may have been but he was often unbearably condescending about people not so well off. This mix is very evident in the strange responses to the correspondence in The Times from prostitutes cited in The Telegraph the other day, a correspondence very familiar to me from thesis days. He actually ran a Home to rehabilitate fallen women from off the streets on behalf of Miss Burdett-Coutts but had no idea what to do with the defiant ones. He is so thoughtful about Miss Burdett-Coutts reading the letters (‘so difficult for a woman to understand’) and rather less worried about a ‘woman’ actually living such a life and able to speak of it challenging the society that makes her role in it. I had discovered he was something of a hypocrite himself: the man who had sketched a hundred unforgettable ones.

He was a Male Chauvinist Pig in his relationship to the easy-going Catherine who was his wife of many years and the mother of his brood of 10 children. He preferred to have younger sisters-in-law keep house for him. When he fell in love with a young actress in his twilight years he was very cruel to Catherine, prompted by the fear that her revelations about his extra-marital affair would lose him his status as the great ‘family’ novelist of his time, one who could be read aloud at the fireplace with aged parents, children, grandchildren, maids and valets. [A toffee-box scene of (fake) togetherness much like it used to be when we watched the Ramayan and the Mahabharat in the early years of TV in this country.]

He never forgave his mother because she had wanted him to retain the factory job he was forced into as a child, during the years his father was in debtors’ prison. He went to see her when she was dying and described her as ‘covered in shrouds like a female Hamlet”. Even in that condition she apparently revived long enough to ask him for a pound.

Why, he mourned, had he never inherited anything except grasping relatives? Her speech style became that of Mrs Wititterly in Nicholas Nickleby. His father, frequently bankrupt and always optimistic became Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. Dora in the same novel was modelled on the sweetheart of his youth. Her frivolous rejection caused him cruelly to recreate her as the fat and frumpy Flora Finching in Little Dorrit when she coyly reminded him of those early days in middle age. It made me glad my love affair with him was imaginary! MCP, yes but he also gave us that wonderful phrase: ‘old ladies of both sexes!’

An illustration from Oliver Twist

He was also anti-Semite: remember the Jew (Fagin) in Oliver Twist. A series of letters from a petulant Jewish reader forced him to create a more sympathetic if somewhat uninspired Jew in Our Mutual Friend.

Fagin the Jew from Oliver Twist

Unlike contemporary Chartists, he never doubted the rightness of empire: articles, speeches and letters written around 1857 show a man jingoistic in the extreme. There is a Calcutta connection from those days. His son (who died here, not in battle but of stomach problems) was buried in the Park Street cemetery. Perhaps the ferocity of his reactions to what we call the First Indian War of Independence stems from this event coupled with the gathering storm of his failing marriage. The patriotic Indian in me hated him when I researched this portion of his life.

Despite all this, love sometimes survives disillusionment. Mine for Dickens certainly does: he has given me some great gifts: laughter, a love of the bizarre and entertainment for life.