DR LEE JACKSON ON WHY CHARLES DICKENS REMAINS RELEVANT TODAY
Why do so many people still find Charles Dickens fascinating, more than 150 years after his death? For a start, the echoes of his own life in his work continue to intrigue us. Mapping biography to fiction has its dangers – Dickens is never simply telling us his life story. Nonetheless, as one early 20th-century critic put it, “the secret of Dickens’s sympathy with neglected childhood is to be found in the story of his own early days”. Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Pip – a host of orphaned children – speak to something deep in his psyche, a feeling of abandonment and shame, associated with his childhood experience at Warren’s Blacking Factory, and his father’s imprisonment for debt. He is a writer about whom we know so much – a lively, sociable, dynamic self-made man, whose surviving letters run to 12 volumes. Nonetheless, new connections, new correspondence, new portraits, are still being uncovered. There will always be scope for another biography, another attempt to understand the genius of a boy who came from humble beginnings to scale the heights of Victorian society.
Of course, Dickens’s personal reputation has taken some knocks. He was revered in the early 20th century as a ‘great man’ in every respect, a thoroughly moral author whose life and works were exemplary – not least his interest in the lives of the poor, and his concern for neglected children. But his affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan – first made public in the 1930s – and the consequent brutal separation from his wife Catherine – have entered the public consciousness and darkened his image. His works, too, have never been without their critics. He has been lambasted as sentimental – think of Oscar Wilde’s famous barb, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing”. He has been praised for creating vivid characters, but also mocked for sketching impossible caricatures. Feminist critics have rightly
