By TIM PARKS [London Review of Books] – In the following years all the children at some point wrote about their father [Charles Dickens] or did public readings from his works. Some isolated themselves in distant parts; the others went looking for them, or rejected them. Henry, all of whose seven children’s names, boys and girls, included a Charles immediately before the Dickens, became involved in setting up the Boz Club and the Dickens Fellowship, whose purpose was ‘to knit together in a common bond of friendship lovers of the great master of humour and pathos’. The Inimitable had become a focus of community and belonging. Mamie wrote a memoir and edited her father’s letters (another book from ‘the dear dead hand’). Alfred, who spent much of his life rearing sheep in the Australian outback, eventually gave a series of successful lectures and readings in England and the US. ‘I never forget my father for a moment,’ he said. Henry omits to mention these readings in his family memoirs. Mamie said she held her father ‘in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings’. Charley’s elder son disgraced himself by marrying a barmaid and was disowned and excluded by the entire family.
‘I’m glad my father never wrote anything that was harmful for young or old to read,’ Frank Dickens said shortly before he died. Frank had been one of the more melancholy children, abandoning his army career in India and squandering the money he inherited from his father. Rescued after a long search by Georgina, he allowed himself to be banished abroad again, this time to serve with the Mounties in the Canadian wilds. It was a curious thing to say of his celebrated father. Did it mean that he thought Dickens had done harm in life, but not in his writing? Or that writers can do harm and he was glad his father hadn’t? Shortly before Dickens died, he worked up the scene from Oliver Twist where Sikes kills Nancy; he wanted to terrify his audiences, he said. First he read the part where Nancy meets the benefactor Brownlow on a remote foggy river bridge and tells him she will never denounce Fagin, however evil, because their lives are bound together. In the version edited for the readings she says the same of her lover Sikes. She is ‘chained’ to her past, bound to her community. Brownlow tells her that ‘you put yourself beyond its pale,’ suggesting that society is still ready to welcome her as it has welcomed Oliver if only she would stop isolating herself. Later, Sikes is not impressed when she protests that she has been loyal to him and clubs her to death. Having killed his woman, he wanders alone out of London, but is oppressed by solitariness. At least if he returns there will be ‘somebody to speak to’. Trapped in an accomplice’s house surrounded by his pursuers, he dies trying to escape.
Dickens read the piece with frightening energy. He expressed the pathos of isolation, he made the gestures of the murderer. His heartbeat (which he counted afterwards) raced. There was collective hysteria in the air. Perhaps reading Dickens’s novels quietly alone doesn’t have this immediate effect, but great writing initiates a real relationship that urges us to think and feel as the author does. It is in this sense that it can indeed do harm.
Continued at the London Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.
