The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly (Pegasus Books, 2023).
I might be a better judge of this book if I could figure out the point of it.
Helena Kelly (also the author of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical) has based an entire book on the idea that Charles Dickens routinely lied about his life, both through the things he told others about himself, and through his novels. She has set out to debunk those lies and reveal the truth. She's put a great deal of research into this effort ... and even more imagination.
"For example," Kelly writes, "Dickens often used to claim that he had spent his boyhood in the cathedral city of Rochester, rather than where he had actually lived, in the neighbouring and notably rougher dockyard town of Chatham." She gives a few instances of his mentioning that he had been a boy in Rochester, and makes a big deal of Rochester getting lots more mention in his novels than Chatham. And this alleged evasion is apparently evidence of Dickens's being too snobbish to ever admit having lived in Chatham.
Was he, though? If we turn to the first page of John Forster's biography of Dickens -- which Kelly frequently cites as being filled with Dickens's lies, given that Forster got most if not all of his information from Dickens himself -- we find the following:
Their home, shortly after, was again changed, on the elder Dickens being placed upon duty in Chatham dockyard; and the house where he lived in Chatham, which had a plain-looking whitewashed plaster front and a small garden before and behind, was in St. Mary's Place, otherwise called the Brook, and next door to a Baptist meeting-house called Providence Chapel, of which a Mr. Giles, to be presently mentioned, was minister.
And what if we take out Forster, the middleman, and go directly to the source? In My Early Times, a collection of Dickens's autobiographical writings that were unpublished during his lifetime, Chatham figures prominently in his account of his childhood. The whole preface, titled "Chatham Revisited (and Rochester Too)," deals with a visit he made as an adult to his old childhood haunts there. Incidentally, the title of that preface signals the connection with Rochester that Kelly professes to be so puzzled over: The two towns are just a mile apart and so closely connected that they're often considered to run into one another, meaning that any inhabitant of the one town has probably spent a good deal of time in the other.
"If anybody present knows to a nicety where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, it is more than I do," wrote none other than Charles Dickens in The Seven Poor Travellers. And in a famous anecdote from The Uncommercial Traveller, he wrote of his former self as a "very queer small boy" who announces, when asked, that he lives "at Chatham," but is a great admirer of Gad's Hill Place in Rochester.
Anyone interested in the subject might have found all this out in short order. Which makes one wonder why Kelly, who was writing a whole book about Dickens, didn't.
But this pattern, and variations on it, continue throughout Kelly's book. She posits that Dickens purposely hid how old his sister Harriet was when she died ... but there's no evidence that he did. She discovers that Dickens never says anything about having seen a play at the Adelphi Theatre that included a scene at the blacking warehouse where he worked, and this leads her to question whether he actually worked at the warehouse. I'm not kidding, she actually writes this. I'm a little overwhelmed both by the amount of work she did on research and the amount of energy she spent trying to twist her research into something new and daring and utterly unsubstantiated. There are times when she unearths some genuinely interesting chronologies and details. On the other hand, there are times where her research skills seem to have failed her completely. For instance, she writes, "One or two recent critics have floated the idea that the compiler [of the book What Shall We Have for Dinner?] was Catherine Dickens," when in fact all reputable scholars agree, and always have agreed, that the book was by Catherine.
Many of the things Kelly gets annoyed with Dickens for not having mentioned -- I say "annoyed" because she seems to take it all personally -- are things that he might never have even thought to mention, or didn't think would be of interest to anyone, or just didn't consider anyone else's business. You could pick practically any author or other well-known figure and give them the same treatment: Why didn't he ever talk about this? Why did she get this date wrong? If every omission or faulty remembrance is to be taken as a baldfaced lie, then we're all shameless liars.
On the other hand, many things that Dickens does mention, Kelly tries to read as if they were tarot cards. Because his Pickwick Papers collaborator Robert Seymour committed suicide in a summerhouse, Kelly combs Dickens's works for any and all references to summerhouses and deduces that they mean Dickens felt guilty about the suicide. She notes some of his wrongdoings and suggests that they were merely cover-ups for even greater, secret wrongdoings. She reads sinister motives into the most innocuous words and gestures and then proclaims that he's been lying to us all along!
But as I've shown, some of the book's claims just aren't true. And some of the conclusions Kelly tries to draw from them show a complete misunderstanding of how fiction works. A novelist is not obligated to write extensively in his novels about, say, the town where he grew up. And if he doesn't do so, it's not a lie, it's simply an artistic choice. The biographical fallacy -- the idea that a work of art can be taken as a direct representation of its creator's life -- is common these days, but I've rarely seen it worked as hard as it is here. Kelly constructs elaborate theories about Dickens's personal life and attitudes based on what is or isn't in his novels, and then gets angry at him based on things he likely never did or thought, or things she thinks he should have done or thought.
She does occasionally acknowledge that some of her findings or imaginings could be taken more positively. "If we are charitably inclined," Kelly writes at one point, "we could explain away the odd behaviour Dickens displayed around Mary [Hogarth]'s death as motivated not by illicit love but by delayed grief for his real sister [Harriet], unprocessed emotions rising to the surface." But for the most part, Kelly is not charitably inclined.
I've said this before: Charles Dickens was a flawed man. I adore his writing and I appreciate his good qualities, but I recognize that he had bad qualities as well. And yes, he even lied sometimes, though probably not nearly as often as Kelly argues he did. (I'm not sure any human being actually could, at least not without taking some time for bathroom breaks.)
If you want to get mad at him, he's given you reasons to do that. If you want to write a whole book about his sins, you can easily do that. What I don't understand, and never will understand, is why people make up things to get mad at him about.
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