DELVING INTO DICKENS' PAST

Two extracts from the Celebrating Dickens website

February 7th 2012 is the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth, and to celebrate, Knowledge Centre is featuring several pieces of content from the University of Warwick's Celebrating Dickens website. Here, experts discuss the extent to which Dickens’ childhood experiences of poverty, along with the terror of violence and crime that he saw on London’s streets, influenced his fiction and his personal life.

The fame that Charles Dickens achieved in his early 20s was a far cry from his poverty-stricken childhood. Forced out of school to work in a blacking factory at the age of 11, the author never forgot his family’s stint in London’s Marshalsea prison, and he would carry the shame of that period with him for the rest of his life.

Throughout this week, the University of Warwick will be marking Dickens' bicentenary by publishing daily content on the Celebrating Dickens website, including an interview with his great-great-great granddaughter; a discussion about Dickens’ interest in crime both inside and outside his fiction; Professor Jon Mee in conversation with Rice University’s Prof Robert L. Patten, current Scholar in Residence at the Charles Dickens Museum, London; and a full-length documentary celebrating Dickens’ life and work. You can find two highlights from this week's content below.

Dickens the Husband and Father

Despite being the great-great-great granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens, Lucinda Hawksley didn’t read her ancestor’s novels until she was in her late teens. It was then that she “really realised quite how important he is and how much he’s revered today,” she tells Professor Jon Mee.

Now an author, Hawksley's first biography of a Dickens family member was of the author’s maverick daughter Katey (Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter). It’s here that being a family member helped with writing about her forebears. “You just feel that you know and understand them because you recognise their personality traits... The interesting thing is having known people who knew not of Dickens, because he died in 1870, but his children, and hearing stories about them is always really fascinating.”

The breakdown of Dickens’ troubled marriage is well documented. After 22 years of marriage, Charles separated from Catherine, having fallen in love with a younger woman. “When I researched the Katey biography I looked at Dickens for the first time biographically and I looked at him completely as a father," says Hawksley. “In the early/mid 20th century Dickens is revered as a demi-god, he could do no wrong; he was this saintly figure, and there seems to have been this huge reverse. I have to say it's slightly annoying that it has gone so far in the opposite direction and people just forget that he was a normal human being.”

Whilst his treatment of his wife on their separation was unforgiveable, for most of his marriage, argues Hawksley, he was an extremely good husband by Victorian standards. In those days marital rape and domestic violence were commonplace. These never happened in the Dickens household. “People who say he was a terrible father are looking at it with a 21st-century perspective,” she says. However the cruellest thing he did to Catherine when they separated was to remove her from her social circle. “By making it a public and legal separation he took away her social standing and her rights... the law allowed him to do that and other women allowed him to do that by shunning her because she was the subject of a scandal, and not shunning him, because he was a man.”

His behaviour at this time, including falling out with many of his friends and his son Charlie (although they later reconciled) was, Hawksley believes, symptomatic of some kind of breakdown. “I do think that the celebrity culture made him believe that he could do whatever he liked.”

Hawksley has been much in demand as part of the bicentenary celebrations and she has found it frustrating that much of the focus is on Dickens’ personal life rather than his influence. “To me the most enduring legacy of Dickens is the brilliant work that he did, through his socially campaigning journalism.”

Despite referring to social ills and tormented childhoods in his novels, his challenging childhood and his family’s stint in Marshalsea Prison were something that he kept a secret all of his life. “It really was a shadow over his whole life... it was a deeply shaming thing in a very rigid Victorian society. It was something he always strove to overcome."

Dickens and Crime

Professor John Mee and Dr Pablo Mukherjee, both from the University’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, went to the Seven Dials area of London to discuss Dickens and crime. Nowadays Seven Dials is a fashionable shopping area in Covent Garden, whereas when Dickens was a boy it was a notorious slum and a den of thieves.

Dickens’ obsession with crime, says Dr Mukherjee, was typical of the Victorian period. “What is unusual about Dickens is the way he captures the whole range of debates and contradictions about crime... In the novels, if we are looking for characters such as detectives and so on, they appear in a much more complicated and contradictory way [than in Dickens’ non-fiction]."

The author was a fan of the new police force in London. In his novels, however, the theme is more nuanced. “If you look at a character like Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, for example, he’s presented to us as this very effective super detective, a kind of pre-Sherlock-Holmes Sherlock Holmes, and it turns out of course, his detection isn’t that effective. When he is trying to follow Lady Dedlock he completely fails to intercept her, with drastic consequences.”

Our current obsession with crime and policing, explains Dr Mukherjee, has strong Victorian origins. The police reform introduced by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 became “a question tied to civilization for Victorians”. For Dickens, when writing about detectives he focuses on their eyes – “the power of looking is what defined the new police”.

Seven Dials was a very rough area, full of Irish tenants who had come to London as migrant labourers and put in tall, decrepit buildings by absentee landlords. “In Dickens’ earlier writing the area is presented in terms of darkness, like a maze that’s very hard to penetrate and police – the key word that comes up again and again is ‘irregular’”. London is both an attractive place for all its possibilities, but is also disturbing “because areas such as Seven Dials wipe away all the social relations and the values Dickens holds dear, such as charity and education.”

For more indepth interviews and comment, see the University's Celebrating Dickens website.

Lucinda Hawksley is the great-great-great grandaughter of Charles Dickens. She is an author, art historian, public speaker and award-winning travel writer. Her biography of Charles Dickens’ daughter Katey was published in 2006. In 2011 she published Charles Dickens, a book to commemorate the bicentenary of the great writer’s birth.

Pablo Mukherjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. He received his PhD from Cambridge University. Dr Mukherjee's research includes Victorian to contemporary imperial/colonial and anti-imperial/colonial cultures; crime fiction; travel writing; environmental/eco theory and literatures; and comparative and world literary systems. His current project is on natural disasters and British imperial culture in the 19th century. He is hoping to produce a monograph as well as an exhibition from this research over the next three to four years.

Jon Mee is Professor of Romanticism Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. He came to Warwick in 2007 after over a decade in the English Faculty at Oxford. His published works include The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His book Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1832 (Oxford University Press, 2011) has been nominated for the Louis Gottschalk Prize.

By Penelope Jenkins