The Turning Point: with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Dominic is joined by Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst to discuss his extraordinary biography of Dickens The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World ...

The year is 1851 and London's Hyde Park is centre stage with the opening of The Great Exhibition. It is also the year that Dickens sits down to write his masterpiece: Bleak House ...

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd / Original cover headshot of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst © John Cairns / Background image of Charles Dickens (1850) Antoine Francois Jean Claudet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire, a series that digs deep into the life and works of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Hi everyone. Today's guest is a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, a fellow of Mordlin College and the Royal Society of Literature. He was recently a historical consultant on the film Enola Holmes and the BBC series Dickensian. His latest book, The Turning Point, which I'm holding in my hand, is an immersive journey through Dickens' daily life in a year of huge personal triumph and shattering loss. Our guest is, of course, the inimitable Robert Douglas Fairhurst. But before we invite him in, let me prepare the scene for you. London. High above their heads, higher than the tree's tallest branches, is a domed roof made of glass. Sun everywhere, pouring through the clear walls and ceilings. Sun slanting down in generous beams upon statues, plants, and machinery. Here there are visitors from all corners of the earth, every race and class jostling one another. It's as if some form of alien abduction has lifted people from their palaces, mansions, farms, slums, and they all rub shoulders as fellow passengers, and for a while no longer appear to be bound on other journeys. Inside this glass cathedral, this temple of peace, there is talk of love and ready assistance between individuals and the nations of the earth. The year is 1851. Seventy-four miles away, there is a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. There is discussion on the phenomena of luminous meteors and earthquakes, the quality of air and water in town. There is also a deeply worrying report about the destruction of tropical rainforests, where trees are being indiscriminately cut down without regard to future supply, which these scientists warned will be calamitous to future generations. The year is 1851. Back in Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace still sits like a mothership from the future. The trees and plants inside it might call to mind a somewhat obscure film from the 1970s called Silent Running, where all the remaining plant life on Earth has been gathered into glass domed enclosures and is being transported through space until it can return and be reforested. Right. The year is now 2022, and it's time to invite Robert in. Hello, Robert. Welcome to the podcast. No, I've just read your extraordinary book, The Turning Point, 1851. And I suppose that's going to be the main focus of our chat today. But um something jumped out at me reading it that I've not detected from other biographies of Dickens, which is um well, I wanted to begin. I'm going to read you a little quote from the Holly Tree, first of all. Just the opening lines where Dickens writes in the first person, he says, I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful man. Nobody would suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is the secret which I have never breathed until now. And I remember reading the Holly Tree thinking, well, that's that's not him being him, is it? That's him imagining himself as somebody else. And yet in your book, you you pick up on loads of instances where he has this shyness, which I thought would be an interesting place to start from.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yes, I mean we tend to think of Dickens, as you say, as someone who is a performer, and we tend to think of performers as people who enjoy uh displaying themselves to the public. And in some ways, that is the Dickens uh that his friends knew and that strangers got to know as well. Uh the flashy waistcoats and the uh the loud voice and all the things you might expect to find in a performer. But actually, I think that that sense of performing for him was as much about self-protection as it was about self-projection. Uh, the that the that the flashy clothes were like a shield that he could hide behind, while the real Dickens could get on quietly with his own imaginative business. The uh the version that the people uh saw in the streets was um the public personality, uh, or what was at the time called a public character uh of Dickens, which was um uh not just a novelist, but uh the philanthropist and the entertainer and the conjurer and all the other kind of public dimensions to Dickens. But yes, I think you're right. I think the real Dickens, though, was still that um shy and um self-protective and uh rather insecure figure that we know from his childhood.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Yes, and you put it in your book, you're talking about how he transforms his natural shyness into a form of showmanship. So he's able to sort of channel and redirect that that flight response to situations where he wants to run away and hide into this most extraordinary kind of presence.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, no, it's it's it's a really interesting parallel that. Um, not least because it's not just that he enjoys performing different roles by uh famously, according to his daughter Katie, uh, when writing, going up to his mirror in his study and acting out all the different characters before rushing back to his desk and writing down the kind of gesticulations and the grimaces that he'd been sort of putting forward um in real life. Um, but but also through his uh his theatrical performances, through his love of directing uh other actors, through, yeah, I suppose a sense of theatricality that follows through um everything that he does in his life, even down to organizing dinner parties and creating a home that looks a little bit like a stage set.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

There's something else that you mentioned, talking about the idea that when he has his portrait painted, often it's as if the life, his energy, has been sucked out of him. So is that something again about that you in the portraits perhaps you see the quieter, more intimate person and a big extravagance is kind of missing.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I think that's right. And another another reason perhaps why he loved writing fiction was that it's not just that fiction by its nature is always on the move. You have to make sense of it by reading as a process. So therefore, you're having to bring it to life in order to make sense of it. It's the fact that by um choosing serial fiction, by inventing this new form, it meant that the story itself was, as it were, growing up and moving and changing, almost like a living being, a living organism. So rather than thinking about a novel as something which you write and you print and it's fixed and it's dead, thinking about a novel as something which um uh lives and breathes and changes along with its its readership.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Yes, I I find that very interesting because you mentioned also about the manuscript for Bleak House. You describe it, I think, as indistinct as fog or something like that, but it's got loads of words in the margins and everything, and yet earlier, some earlier novels flow much more easily on the page. Do you think that's Dickens exercising more control or less control in all those revisions?

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Oh, I I think a lot more control. Um I think that as he becomes more self-consciously a novelist rather than someone who tells funny stories to entertain uh a group of friends who then expands to involve the whole reading public, um, he becomes much more uh aware of not just his own image, but of the power of his stories and the need to sharpen and uh shape those stories so that they are artistic, so that they are, as he describes um famously uh like uh the storyteller at his loom, you know, weaving these um these threads where every bit uh is linked to every other bit, rather than it just being a sort of incremental um picaresque progress in which it's like kind of balls on a pinball machine kind of bashing against each other in order to make the thing move. This is much more about um creating an interwoven, uh kind of interconnected set of relationships at the level of language, which of course is also increasingly what he's interested in doing in the way that he depicts society as something which is equally interconnected and where you tug on one loose thread, like the death of Joe the Crossing Sweeper, and um the entire fabric starts to unravel before your eyes.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Yes. And and it is widely considered Bleakhouse's Dickens' greatest novel. Um does that encompass everything? Is it his therefore his best novel, or is it his most epic, or is it his most experimental? How do you how do you feel towards it?

SPEAKER_01 9:28

It's very interesting. I mean, I would say that his his best novel is probably something um shorter and punchier like Great Expectations, uh, where not a word is out of place, there is no fat, nothing is wasted. Um a big novel like Bleak House, there is the potential for more um opportunity for excursions and for I wouldn't say wastage, but um he can fly kite without having to follow them to see where they all go. It is, though, I think his greatest novel in terms of uh multi-plot um full-scale fiction, and it's also perhaps his most experimental novel with the double narrators, with his attempt to um bring on board the brand new genre of detective fiction, with his attempts to put a female narrator at the heart of things, and indeed with his first serious attempt, more serious than something like Dombian's Son, I think, to try and capture the full array of human life that he saw around him and think about its fullest implications as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

The book is so much about the turning points in Dickens' life, but also in the wider world. Was there a clear turning point in your life when you realized that Charles Dickens was going to be such a prominent feature in your career and in your in your writing?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

You know, I I can give you two uh answers to that. The first answer is one I didn't realise at the time, uh, was that when I was about seven or eight, my family moved to a new street of houses that was called Dickens Drive. This is absolutely true. Uh, and Pickwick Close was around the corner, and so was Copperfield Way, and it was a series of uh kind of mock Georgian houses uh in Kent. Um, I don't know, uh it wasn't exactly fate, it was town planning, but but it but it said something about the long reach, the impact, the aftershocks of Dickens' writing, not only in Kent, but on the kind of the wider culture. And I suppose as I grew older I started to become a bit more aware of that. As I noticed his face staring out from the £10 note, I um noticed the costume dramas, I started to pick up on the catchphrases. Um, and then when I was about 17, I was given a school prize and I was given £50 to spend on any books I wanted. Uh, and I went to a second-hand bookshop and noticed there was about a metre and a half of Dickens uh there for £50, and it was one of these um faux leather kind of bound collected kind of works. Uh, so I bought it and dutifully stuck it on my shelves and didn't think too much more about it. And then I read a book by John Carey called The Violent Effigy about Dickens' imagination, which utterly changed what I thought literary criticism could do and be. Um, and for a year or so after that, I started modeling my pro style on John Carey's style in that book. But also I then started reading up on the um the novels that he was writing about. Uh, and because of that, I started reading more Dickens, and then after that, I started writing about him as an undergraduate. Uh, and I never really stopped.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Do you very much live and breathe your subject? I mean, I love the way Turning Point opens in the fog, right at the start, and you think, ah, well, this is the year of bleak house starting. And um is there a single Dickens story that doesn't involve special fog at some point?

SPEAKER_01 12:50

It's it's funny, and these days we tend to think of fog as being a sort of hammer house sort of stage effect, don't we? We think of it as being something which is um deliberately artificial. But of course, for Dickens, it was just part of the air he breathed, literally. It was it it was it was all around him. It would be no more remarkable than writing about rain. But um it's an interesting question. Would you say a little bit earlier about living and breathing him in the way that I write? And I suppose in some ways that double narrative of Bleak House is a little bit like a model for what a good biography should do with one change. So, as you know and your listeners will know, there are two narrators in Bleak House. There is the ground level perspective of Esther, um, who doesn't quite know what's going on as she experiences events, and then we have the overview of a not quite omniscient narrator uh who makes connections and can sort of zip around all over the place. And what Dickens does is shuffle back and forth between these two narrative perspectives. What a biographer has to do is to both give you the reader a sense of kind of ground level confusion and uncertainty at the time, and simultaneously to give that sense of an overview and a structure and putting things in perspective. So you feel as if you are part of the world that's being described, and also you have some kind of vantage point or perspective on it. That's what I find such a kind of challenge, but also so thrilling uh when writing biography, trying to get that sense both of life as it was lived, but also life as it can be understood uh with hindsight.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Yes, I think I think that's something that really stands out in this book, um, Life as It Was Lived, because you use the term slow biography, I think. You're talking about how in other biographies years pass very rapidly as you turn the page, but here you've slowed it down to that one year with references scattered from years to come and past years as well. But something about kind of walking through that year and that calendar with a sense, something closer to the same length of time that it would take to experience it. So you do have that sense of uncertainty. I'm sort of reading it thinking, is he gonna start Bleak House? When's this gonna happen? You know, because it's so much happens before he gets to put pen to paper, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 15:15

That's right. And it's because real life and for all of us is full of uncertainty and cluster and loose ends. Uh, biography usually tries to give us something different. It gives us a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. It offers something like a redemption of contingency. And by doing that, it tidies up the normally shapeless business of living. It makes usually every event look like a stepping stone on the path to usually some kind of happy ending or success, uh, so that every um sentence becomes like an arrow winging its way towards a target. But that's not the way that life is experienced. It's certainly not how Dickens experienced his life in 1851. So I suppose what I was trying to do was to see whether it's possible to narrate his experience of that year without all the benefits of hindsight and without then all the pieces seeming to fall neatly into place like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And to get that sense of walking beside him and realizing that each one of the paths he took was full of kind of forks that weren't taken and decisions that weren't made, and even at the level of individual sentences in his writing, realizing just how easily they can go in different directions.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yes, and that's a very Dickensian theme, isn't it? Anyway, what we would call possibly sliding doors or parallel universes today, he's very attuned to the ghosts of what could have been and what never were. What was it that drew you to the year 1851 then? If you were going to pick a specific year for him, what was it about that?

SPEAKER_01 16:53

It's a really good, it's a good question. And and I have and I got quite a lot of stick from um from critics and reviewers uh who have said, you know, quite justifiably, yes, but what about? And then they've given a series of, you know, what about 1848? What about the year he met Nellan Ternan? What about uh the year that he publishes um the Pickwick Papers and so on? Um and yes, and Dickens was perfectly aware that every life is full of smaller turning points, and that life is a road that is, as I say in the book, bristling with finger posts, pointing in all sorts of different directions. But this particular year seemed to me to be a really strange conjunction of his own life and the nation's life equally coming to a moment of uncertainty and trying to work out what the future was going to hold and how they'd be able to direct it and to think about their own place in it. And for Dickens, it's changing, I think, uh, subtly but decisively, the kind of stories that he writes and his own sense of social responsibility for those stories and in those stories. Um for the nation as a whole, it's about um declaring itself as the leading industrial power in the world and thinking about itself as being at the heart of uh a kind of pulsing, interconnected uh industrial world. And it's about the lines of communication drawn between the individual and the world, which of course is what Dickens then goes on to try and do in his fiction. So that's what interested me about this particular year.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

A key feature in the book is Crystal Palace, which kind of gleams over it, and what an extraordinary oh, those are wonderful sections as well, just to sort of soak up and try and live it in real time. And of course, you have the cynics and the people that can't stand the place as well as the people that are in raptures over it. But I think that's interesting what you're saying about the individual and the nation, and I suppose Dickens and the nation, is that in reading your book, you get a sense of that shaky ground that he's on, that actually everything could collapse under him. And it's actually the same with the nation as well, because I imagined, you know, in my reading of Britannia and Victorian history, that by 1851 Britain would have a very strong sense of its place in the world as the predominant power, you know, because Victor Hugo describes the Battle of Waterloo as the gateway to the 19th century. You think it's settled in 1815, but actually it turns out that not necessarily, that there is there is still risk and it can go in other directions.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Absolutely. I mean, the the European revolutions of 1848 never quite took hold um in Britain, but at the time there was a huge amount of anxiety that they would. Uh the Hungary 40s, particularly in Ireland, that led to the huge emigr waves of emigration, uh not least to America. Um, again, it it didn't affect the rest of uh Britain, but um the aftershocks of those years continued to be felt for decades to come. So, yes, that there is a sense um within the nation at large that this is a peculiarly vulnerable, but also a time that's full of potential that hasn't yet been realized. And I think the same is true of Dickens, that Dickens has uh arrived at some kind of minor peak in his career in which he is very well known, very successful, commercially successful, and yet he hasn't uh still written the great novel or the great series of novels. He's his own reputation is still a little kind of uncertain, not least because a number of readers who preferred the early funny books are not altogether convinced by the later more serious ones. And he's having to kind of win over the audience that he had earlier won over by showing that he could indeed still write the kinds of fiction they liked, but wrapped up within a much more kind of serious kind of social purpose.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

At the start of the book, you mentioned about the murmurs going around that, oh Dickens, he's past it now, you know, his best days are over. I mean, I'm sure he's very tuned to what his public are saying. Do you think that filtered into him and gave him that extra steel and determination and possibly insecurity in writing this one that he really, really wanted to prove himself?

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Oh, I'm I'm I'm I'm sure at some extent that's right. Um, and of course, his rivalries with other novelists like Thackeray would also have sharpened that because a number of those novelists, and indeed Bulwellytton, um these are people who are uh either entitled literally uh or behave as if they are entitled. And Dickens, of course, still sees himself as the jobbing journalist uh who is having to earn his crust by you know the sweat of his brow and the ink flowing out of his pen. And that's why I suppose this kind of novel is so important for him, because this is a novel which is about uh ordinary people making their way in the world and realizing that even ordinary people are extraordinary if looked at in the right light. And that's the light that Dickens lends them. That's the light he gives them in his in his story.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Yes, I and I love what you're saying about the rivalry with other novelists, in particular, the account of whenever at the Garrett Club, either Thackeray or Dickens would bump into each other, they'd come into the room and pretend that they were looking for somebody or something else and then leave.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

I just think that's and you can imagine you can that that world of club land, the horumphing and the the flicking of newspapers and the you know hunching of the shoulders and the turning towards the fire. You can absolutely imagine that.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Was there ever a chance that Thackeray could have taken Dickens' prize off him as the foremost novelist? Do you think it ever felt that it was going that way for him?

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Certainly not in terms of sales and popular appeal, no. Vanity Fair never sells more than 5,000 copies of any issue. Uh and and Dickens is outselling him comfortably, you know, seven or eight, nine, ten times. But that's not to say that Thackeray didn't have the social cachet or the critical kudos that Dickens, of course, also wanted. Dickens didn't only want to be the popular entertainer, he did want that, but he also wanted to be the um uh the novelist who has taken seriously his art, which is one of the reasons why he does launch this campaign to try and protect ordinary writers who have fallen on rough times. Because he realizes that if you are committed to a certain kind of writing, your position is incredibly vulnerable. If you don't have a private income, you know, if you're not aboard with it, and then you have to always be on it. Otherwise, you're just you know one or two novels away from you know the workhouse.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

And this is a key moment, isn't it, where Thackeray isn't on board with the scheme, the idea of the guild at all, is he? He sees it as demeaning to the practice. And it's very he comes across as very, very Aristo and Snooty, doesn't he, Thackeray, in the way that he looks down on you know, any any author that cannot sustain himself isn't worth the charity. And you know, basically, and this is this is a turning point for him and Dickens where they they diverge, don't they? They don't become closer in any respect, they they really drift further away, and it's kind of quite hostile.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

That's right. Um, and I say, yes, I mean, and then Thackeray thinks of uh fiction as an art, uh, and it's one that he's very, very good at. Dickens also thinks of it increasingly as an art, but for him it's also um it's commerce. Uh it's it's industry, it's um uh a serious way of making a living and dealing with a world in which other people are also seriously having to make a living. So you you you can't, if you're Dickens, you can't simply deal with um silver fork world. You you you have to deal with the the messy, nitty-grissy world as well.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Yeah, and as you point out, Dickens is admired by Queen Victoria and the Charwoman. You know, you get the full scope, the full range, don't you, of society, which I can't imagine Thackeray ever enjoyed. Um there's something interesting about you know 1851 and where the nation is heading. And of course, I think in our times we've had that little turning point in 2016, haven't we, where everything seemingly out of nowhere, things have been sort of shaken up. Um, but what I find extraordinary about the whole Crystal Palace episode with Prince Albert leading it is that sense of the interconnectedness of nations and a kind of yearning for harmony and a globalization, and uh an idea of globalization. Is this, do you think this is the first on this scale, the first sort of idea of that coming across?

SPEAKER_01 25:31

I think so. It's partly to do with um with uh politics, but it's also partly to do with um science and technology. So the fact that um across the uh developed world, the railways are really binding that world together uh with their tracks, but also telegraphs increasingly are binding the world uh together, allowing you to send a communication hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles in in a matter of minutes. Um, it creates an extraordinary new sense of the world not being a series of disparate and uh kind of displaced individuals, but being essentially one community which should start cooperating and thinking about itself, um, employing ties of sympathy, but also not only in a kind of loosened, kind of muzzy-headed emotional way, but also sort of purely practical, economic reasons. You can if you can expand your markets, if you can expand the interconnected web of potential consumers, it is therefore going to grow the economy, and therefore it's going to make the poorer less poor. It's potentially going to make the richer a lot richer, but it is going to help to keep, as it were, the the blood pumping through uh the civic body, not least economically, the money kind of pumping through the economy, which our metaphors Dickens himself loved and liked using.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

Yeah, something else that that picking up from the pages of your book is the fact that visitors from all over the world and all levels of society arrive at the Crystal Palace, and as well as looking at all the exhibits, they look at each other. And it's an extraordinary sort of gathering, isn't it? Unprecedented. Did it have a positive effect, do you think, in terms of healing the divisions that you mentioned, the hungry 40s and the angry 30s before it? Did it go any way to sort of heal that two nations divide of the rich and poor?

SPEAKER_01 27:32

It's a really interesting question. Um, I I think that you'd have to say no. Uh what it did was expose those divisions, and it did lead to an awful lot of well-intentioned guff um about Yeah, the the the the the the idea that sort of suddenly you know the worker who is paying a shilling to get in and you know the knob who was paying a pound to get in were kind of meeting on you know grounds of perfect equality. There's a a punch cartoon from 1851 where sort of yokel and a smock uh meet a kind of you know refined kind of nobleman, and the caption is whoever thought of meeting you here? And it's not quite clear which word we're supposed to stress. Is it whoever thought of meeting you here, or is it whoever thought of meeting you here? As opposed to in a dark alley where you might mug him for his money. Nor is it quite clear who is speaking. Is this the um the yokel who is daring to speak up for himself? Or is this the nobleman who is suddenly realized you can indeed talk to these people instead of just you know exploiting them economically?

SPEAKER_00 28:43

I think what's interesting, because you mentioned a lot of the punch cartoons at the time, is there one that includes John Bull in the middle of the exhibition shaking hands with people? That there's a sense that you overcome your kind of nationalism, your kind of xenophobia. I mean, there seem to be opposite forces happening all the way through, that there's some people are really worried about this influx of foreigners and what could it be? And they they camp in the park and it's like an invading army, as you say. Which side do you think won in the end, if it if it's as clear as that?

SPEAKER_01 29:14

I'm not sure it is as clear as us. I I think it was a sort of double helix um of thinking where nationalism and internationalism were kind of wrapped around each other, um, and they carried on um fighting it out or trying to engage each other or all the way through to, I mean, now. You you look at other great national celebrations, even things like the most recent Euros, you know, the European football kind of tournament, in which it was both uh Britain seeing itself as a hub of international sport, but also Britain at the heart of international sport. Yes, and you you you have that sense in which we we we're both both seeing ourselves as um opening our doors up to the world, but at the same time firmly plonking ourselves at the heart of it and seeing ourselves as a spider in the middle of the web. And I think you see you see that kind of ambivalence stretching back to 1851.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Are there any parts in the book where you wish you'd said more about or you that you couldn't fit into this this book? Anything in your research that came up?

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Not really to do with the wider social context or historical context. Um I might have been a little more generous to, in terms of the time I gave her, uh, to Catherine Dickens. Um I I I I I give her a fair amount of space, but um I don't do what perhaps some others have done, which is to imagine the world through her eyes rather through Dickens' eyes. As this is clearly the time when their marriage is really starting to enter its rockiest phase. And the cookbook that, well, I say she publishes, I mean, she assembles and Dickens writes a preface for, and it's clearly a collaboration that he is steering uh all all the way along. That to me reads like a kind of last gasp attempt to involve her in his world of books and reading. And in some ways, it's a very sad publication, given that one of the reasons that he then finds her sort of so unappealing later on is he thinks that she's fat. Um and you know, she's becomes sort of less appealing to him. So the idea that it'll be a cookbook that involves lots of toasted cheese and other kind of calorific treats, it's a sort of horrible irony, I think.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Yes, Catherine, I have to say, having read it, Catherine does jump out, I think, at the reader in in your book. And because um is it the journalist Henry Morley says about her, Catherine has a warm heart for anybody who won't be satirical. And you think, oh God, who have you married? Who have you married? I mean, the best satirist of the of the age. Precisely.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

And and I think that was that was her great appeal to him when when they were younger, that he needed someone who was, you know, soothing and calming, and generous, and kind, and stable. And then as he got you know more and more famous, she carried on being generous and calm and stable and sweet natured. And I think he wanted more, he needed a whetstone, and she was never going to be a whetstone, she was more of a sponge.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Yes. And I suppose fame like Dickens had in that time was not commonplace, was it? We it wasn't a we didn't have a world of celebrity in the way that we we obviously do now. And so that must have been she must have been awestruck. Everyone around him must have been awestruck by that.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Yes, and one of the stories I do tell um uh near the start of the book is the fact that um even when her own portrait was put on display, some people thought that it was Dickens, it was himself, kind of in drag, sort of uh living out one of his characters, and that had been painted. So even poor Mrs. Dickens, Catherine Dickens, even then she couldn't be her own woman. Even then she was seen as a sort of strange um kind of adjunct to her husband.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Yes, is that is that an episode where the where it's the actual in the book or something in the catalogue, it's misnamed. The painting is misnamed.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

That's right, that that's right. This isn't mislaimed, it's Mrs. Charles Dickens, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Yeah. And obviously, but it's a very hard year for them both, isn't it? I mean, John Dickens, his father, dies, and then Dora at eight months old, their baby, also dies. And is Catherine already pregnant again at this point when Dora dies, or is that the I think that she gets pregnant very, very soon after.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Uh, or or it's it or it's it's almost simultaneous. But in some ways it doesn't matter because she was almost always either pregnant or um nursing. Um she the the the number of babies that poor woman had over a very small number of years, um, but again, it's it it suggests that Dickens didn't know when enough was enough, um, either in terms of his own appetites or in terms of um the family that he both you know adored and and loved babies, but kept forgetting that babies tend to grow up and become children, and those children become needy adults. So he loved the children when they were very, very young. And as soon as they started being, dare I say, independent beings that had you know needs and desires of their own, at that stage um they became a lot less appealing to him, it seems.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

I had a question I wrote down here, and I don't know if it's possible to answer at all, but is do you imagine Catherine ever thought that she would want to leave Dickens? I mean, we know that he's very cruel to her later on in the separation, but that aside, do you think she herself would have acknowledged that things weren't right or that?

SPEAKER_01 34:42

It's impossible to say, but my my my sense from everything that we do know is that it would never have crossed her mind that such a thing could be possible, that you would leave your husband um and your children, which of course she also had to do when she left. She had to leave the children uh behind. And the fact that when she gave um some of her uh letters up many years later, so that she says the world may know that um he loved me once suggests that she was conscious when she left that she did still love him then.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

Yeah. And I suppose again, in the spirit of the biography, of things not naturally leading to the conclusion that we know they're going to, that actually for Catherine's point of view, maybe the separation was never in her mind going to be permanent. That it might have just been a phase or and then they'd be back.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Quite quite possible. I mean, and he he was he was a man of sudden enthusiasms. Um and yes, I mean she if she'd heard rumors about uh this kind of brewing affair with um Alan Ternan, she may well have thought, well, it's another one of his enthusiasms. Uh it'll come and go like the others did. Um and and and then he'll he'll come back or she'll come back.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Something that really jumps out also in the book is the appearance of the whale, otherwise known as Moby Dick. But that that obviously there's a challenge. I quite like that as a foil because obviously Dickens can put down just about every author he comes into contact with, but there suddenly, I mean that makes it a fascinating year, doesn't it? Well, how what is Moby Dick a an important book to you? Is that one that you jumped to as well?

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Well, it I think it's important to everyone, but it wasn't at the time. That's what's so interesting. That Bleak House was this extraordinary success uh for Dickens from the beginning. So whereas um Moby Dick from the beginning was uh was a dud. He was a huge kind of white elephant rather than a white whale. It just kind of collapsed and nobody was interested. It was only over many years it gradually built up a loyal following. People realise what an extraordinary uh work it was. And there's also, of course, the fact that it emerges as a whole rather than uh in instalments. So people are introduced to Bleak House little by little. They get to know the characters as you might get to know real people, um, they they they follow their adventures um as as you might kind of gossip about, you know, mutual friends. Whereas um Moby Dick is simply presented as a kind of huge three-volume kind of event, and nobody knows what to do with it. So therefore they tend to ignore it.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

And and you say that in the UK edition, whether it's called the whale, there are all kinds of things done to it. Um, Americanism's removed, blasphemy, vulgarities, anything that's not right for a British ear is taken from it. Yeah. I I just I ask about Moby Dick because I've heard it said by many people will swear that Moby Dick is the greatest novel in the English language. Do you think Dickens can match Moby Dick in his best work?

SPEAKER_01 38:02

I I I I do, but it but it's like um, I don't be like a giraffe arm wrestling a Puma. They're just such different attempts to capture the kind of fullness of life. And Moby Dick does it through overwhelming you with kind of alternative ways of looking at something which seems to be very, very small, but turns out to have much, much larger implications. Dickens tries to capture something which is very, very large, but when you look at it more closely, you realize it has tiny ramifications. So so i in some ways they're looking at the world through different ends of the telescope.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Yeah. Something else in 1851, the detective comes to the fore as uh, you know, in in a special police force that uh use a science of detection and discovery. And Dickens goes on these these trips with with um Field, is it?

SPEAKER_01 38:58

The Inspector Fields, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 39:01

So you see all of these things. I that's something else that I hadn't realized is that you he really is taking from his life.

SPEAKER_01 39:06

Oh absolutely. I mean I mean I I think every everything at Dickens writes is a kind of memoir in disguise. Uh and and sometimes it's really explicit, like David Copperfield, but sometimes it's implicit, like the fact that the initials of the two leading characters in A Tale of Two Cities were going to be C D and D C, you know, like someone looking in a mirror, so they're they're doubles of each other, but also, of course, then both of them are in some ways doubles of Dickens, who is looking in his own mirror and then going and writing down what they say to him. You know, these are all displacements of of Dickens himself.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Yes, yes. I think I read that in your other book, Becoming Dickens. You talk about how it's Charles Darnay, obviously, but Dick Carton.

SPEAKER_01 39:49

That's right, originally, originally Dick Carton, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

So Dickens is both those people. He's seeing different distorted mirrors of himself, then with these jewels.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

Yeah, and for the same reason, uh, in all the novels, you find the things that he takes very, very seriously are also the things that he he loves poking fun at. So you have some characters who are the holy than thou kind of heroic, utterly you know, dependable uh kind of figures, and then you have others who are, you know, the villains or the kind of smirking comedians or uh the people we're not supposed to take seriously. And often they kind of play off against each other because they are two sides of the same coin. And both of them are Dickens. That's the thing. That both of them that there is his both his desire to project himself as uh the melodramatic hero, and there's his kind of satirical uh or um sort of parodic desire to kind of poke fun at all the things he also takes most seriously. Uh, and that's why he needs to perhaps divide himself up in those ways.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

A character that I think from Bleak House slightly reminds me of Dickens is Rick, actually, that when he describes him about having the energy of fits and starts. Absolutely. And that to me seems that's almost like Dickens a warning to himself, which he doesn't heed, obviously, because he ages so prematurely, doesn't he? And it sort of starts around this period of the 1850s, I think.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

Yeah, absolutely. And and and and similarly, Richard in the novel, um, who is clearly one of his sons, uh, or what he what he he's worried about his son's becoming. But also, you know, Amy, uh I suppose what all the female characters in some sense are uh versions uh of himself, what he sees as um his kind of pure, high-minded, uh idealistic, kind of hard-working uh kind of tendencies.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

I was interested also that Charlotte Bronte wasn't impressed with Esther. I find that I find that so because I love Charlotte Bronte. I'm always wanting all these authors over time to get on. It's like Tolstoy not liking Shakespeare because he believed that Shakespeare couldn't write a common man because he thinks, well, uh, you know, a shoemaker wouldn't be that eloquent ever.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

I know, I know. It's and it's interesting that often it is some female authors in the period who are most suspicious uh of of Dickens' women.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Is it, I mean, is it is it kind of also perhaps she doesn't want men to write as women? That she is a woman and she's it's damned hard enough to be a female writer at this time, and you don't need a man to put words in the mouth of a of a heroine.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

I'm sure that's right. And the fact that Dickens does tend to idealize uh his women or um the opposite might not go down terribly well if you are trying to produce more kind of nuanced and realistic versions of of women's voices.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

I mean she describes describes Esther as speaking twaddle, I think. Is that right? I mean that's sort of I mean it's so damning, isn't it? Literally nothing Esther says it means anything. But as you point out, that actually it's what Esther doesn't say that is as important as as what she what she does.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Yeah, because uh Esther is, I mean, we would now call her an abused child. Um, and that manifests itself um in a kind of trauma, and that trauma manifests itself in uh the kind of the bright but brittle uh attempt to be cheerful and uh engaged and uh you know useful, which we might find a kind of sick making, but is also perhaps the demeanour of someone who needs to keep busy in order not to sit and brood, not to think about what what else has happened.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

Something that jumps out right near the end of the book for me is is the meeting, is that scientific meeting, I think, um where they talk about the uh the ramifications in 1851 they talk about the ramifications of deforestation, of shipping down the Amazon. Uh how did how did you come across that source and and did you where did you find it and what what did it say about?

SPEAKER_01 43:52

So I was I was just browsing um through scientific papers because I was curious to know what the British Association Advancement of science might be thinking about when it came to other kinds of advances, other kinds of futures they're imagining. And yeah, that just jumped out at me. And it would be untrue to say that they are imagining cataclysmic climate change, but they are thinking about the differences that it will make to the microclimate and potentially the larger kind of economy of the country concerned. But also I think it does show that this is a world that we tend to think of as separate from ours, uh, almost as if we look at it like a kind of giant snow globe. Um, and we enjoy kind of picking it up and shaking it and watching the you know the snowflakes move. But actually, the aftershocks of that world include us. You know, we are the aftermath of these things that Dickens is describing.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Yes, it's quite a chilling moment because you you, as you say, the clock was ticking even then, that even then there was a small voice out there saying that perhaps it's not such a good idea to destroy the Amazon. Um you you reference a lot of household words articles. What what did that do to what you were writing? What did that what did you see from looking at household words?

SPEAKER_01 45:23

So I saw all sorts of things. One is um it was a really interesting parallel to Dickens' life as a actor, manager, producer of theatricals, because it shows his love of being part of a company, but in charge of that company and marshalling different voices to a kind of common goal, uh, a common end. Both of those activities are also clearly related to his um life as a fiction writer, where again you create or you marshal different voices uh to a common end. Um and Household Words in particular showed his double love of both variety but also a kind of unity of purpose. And by that I mean that he loved having lots of different kinds of articles, but he also loved all of them to be glossed with his own particular kind of style, uh, which was you know optimistic and cheerful and um making everything Dickensian. So so that that sense in which he he loves things to be both diverse but also kind of singularly Dekensian, is I suppose what I got out of it.

SPEAKER_00 46:39

Yes, so reading this, I I sort of got the feeling that if you were commissioned to write an article for household words, you were sort of damned if you did and damned if you didn't make it a bit Dekensian, you know, because if you did and he detected it, he'd say, no, no, no, no, no, no. But if you hadn't got the right spirit or energy that he wanted, then he'd force it on you. Except that Elizabeth Gaskell apparently um rejected that from him. Can you tell us any more about that?

SPEAKER_01 47:05

Yeah, and I I think that um like a lot of people, I mean, is bully too too strong a word? Um maybe it's not in some ways. Uh I think like a lot of bullies, he liked people standing up to him. Uh, he liked it when people refused to kind of bow down before the great Tacensian genius. And she was one who said, absolutely not, this is my writing, this is what I want to keep. Uh and so he thought, yep, okay, fair enough. And he allowed her to keep her own voice unaltered, which was not what other writers perhaps felt they could do when if they were less famous or they were up and coming, or they were desperate for the kind of connections that he could bring them. So yeah, they they they might well have felt that to be to be Dickensian was better to be than themselves.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

Yes. And then there's another point further on that you you mentioned that did Dickens have to apologize to Elizabeth Gaskell for ripping off one of her plots for his story to be read at dusk? Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 48:03

That that's absolutely right. And and and what's interesting is he seems not to have even realized, uh, because one of the things that Dickens often did, um, as we all know, is that he he saw the world as a kind of series of stories or opportunities for stories. And even other stories were opportunities for stories. So um the world for him was always, as it were, a kind of latent um kind of Dickensian kind of world. He just needed him, he thought, to kind of twitch it here and sort of massage it there and bring it to life in his own writing. Uh, and that included other writers as much as as much as you know the world outside his window.

SPEAKER_00 48:45

In some ways, him as an individual, does he represent perhaps the the mission of the nation in that in the Crystal Palace uh sense that you're you're wanting to invite the world and be open your arms to the world and be benevolent and generous and that and admired? But at the same time, the world needs to kind of dance to your tune. You conduct the world, basically.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Yeah, and I sort of wish I'd put that in the book, actually, because it's very it's a very it's a very good analogy.

SPEAKER_00 49:11

Do you feel it seems an odd thing to say, really? Do you feel proud of him? Do you feel as a Brit, do you feel proud of him as an author? Do you think he represents something that we can be proud of? I mean, I'm clinging for things to be proud of at the moment myself.

SPEAKER_01 49:26

Oh, well, well, same here. I mean, I I do, but, but interestingly, although I'm proud of him as a very international writer, both at the time in his interests, and since, in terms of the kind of influence and impact he's had on the world outside Britain. But I imagine that a Brexit-supporting reader could equally find um things to be proud of in him as a little Englander who was suspicious of the French and skeptical of the Italians, uh, and deeply suspicious of Americans. So he's one of those writers who can be a bit of an inkblot himself, that he he allows you to find versions of yourself because not at least there is so much that he wrote or edited or had a hand in in other ways, that you'll always be able to find bits of yourself kind of refracted or displaced or disorientated somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00 50:21

And it comes back to that mirroring again, doesn't it? There's the opposite side of him, which is, you know, rubbishes the French and is suspicious of America and all of that, alongside as the other one that wants to be enlightened and generous. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

Absolutely. It's and again, I I talk about this in some ways in the book, but it's the fact that Dickens sounds like a plural noun, and that is really what he was. He he was the human equivalent of a plural noun. There were many, many, many rival versions of Dickens all kind of squabbling for space inside the same skin. And everyone was welcome.

SPEAKER_00 50:59

Yeah, and and well, wherever you sit as a person, you can take your pick, which one you want. And it makes me think of Chekhov, actually, is also as well. You know, he survives the Tsarist regime, he survives the Soviet era, he survives contemporary Russia as well, because he can be everything. But it is interesting, it is at the same time though, that the championing side of Dickens, that the idea that, you know, he has more in common with socialism, doesn't he, when he's on the campaigning side for for the poor and and fallen women, for example. Um, so it is it is interesting. I find it strange that a little Englander, let's say, might read Nicholas Nickleby or something and not not feel that somehow it might apply to them, that they might want to change the way they think about the people below them.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

No, and similarly, someone who might read Hard Times and not realize that Greg Rind is not a model, Bounderby is not a model. But but on the other hand, because Dickens is sympathetic even to the villains, or at least he understands how they work and he he reads them from the inside out and not just from the outside in, there is that sense in which he is asking you to put yourself in their position and imagine what it would be like to be them. And it's very difficult, or rather, it's very easy to move from that to a sort of sympathy with their position once you realize what it's like to be them.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

I've been meaning to ask this for ages, and I think you're the person best qualified to answer this, I've decided. Um is it is it Boz or Bose? And if it isn't Bose, why is it Boz?

SPEAKER_01 52:29

Right. That's a really good question. Um, so it's his brother, isn't it, who says that um he mispronounced um is it um nose?

SPEAKER_00 52:39

Is it just noses? And yeah, Moses is in there as well, I think, somehow.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Moses and uh became sort of Bose's, which became uh Bose. Um I I've always said Boz, because most three-letter English words with an O in them, you have a sort of short, hard O, rather than a long one. But that's that's just kind of convention. I mean, I I I I could be entirely wrong.

SPEAKER_00 53:04

I don't know. Yeah, good. We're happy to keep that mystery unfolding. Um the last thing to say is do you have any other projects coming up, Dickens-related projects that you're you're looking towards now?

SPEAKER_01 53:13

No, not Dickens. No, no, I have I have a new book coming out next year, which is a sort of memoir with a twist. Um the twist being it's also a biography of a uh a naturalist uh called Bruce Cummings, who died of MS in the 1920s and wrote the most extraordinary diary of his uh his life um up to within a few weeks um of his death. So I'm sort of piecing together his life um and also uh my own life and what it's like to have MS, um, and uh also a kind of history of um MS and how it's been refracted through kind of literature and through film uh and so on. Um and yeah, that's that'll be coming out uh at the start of next year.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

That sounds incredible. That sounds amazing. Well, I wish you all the very best with that. Thank you. Well, there we go. Thank you so much, Robert.

SPEAKER_01 54:09

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 54:12

Thank you for listening to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire. I want to keep adverts off this podcast. So if you're enjoying these episodes and would like to make a small donation, please follow the link in the description wherever you're listening to this, and you can buy us a coffee. All contributions make a huge difference. See you next time.