Charles Dickens: A tale of

two centuries
Susun Elkln selects the best of the new books
belng publlshed to celebrute Dlckens's
blcentennlul yeur
SUSAN ELKIN


SUNDAY 22 JANUARY 2012






Suggested Topics
y Mumbai
y Simon Callow
y Charles Dickens
If Charles Dickens were as immortal as his writing, he would
be celebrating his 200th birthday on 7 February. He may be
like Jacob Marley as dead as a doornail, but culturally he's
never been more alive, thanks to all of those timeless themes
in his work. We are still wrestling with Orlick-style crime;
punishment for men such as Sykes; daunting lawyers such as
Jaggers; greedy industrialists such as Merdle and terrible
poverty for Oliver Twist-like children. And family anxieties,
tensions, miseries and joys think Micawber, Pocket,
Cratchit, Wemmick and Gradgrind have changed
remarkably little.
It is no wonder that, in addition to its recent adaptations of
Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the
BBC very successfully moved an entire novel to modern India
in its recent The Mumbai Chuzzlewits, adapted for Radio 4 by
Ayeesha Menon. The material, which poured out of the kind,
ruthless, workaholic, radical, campaigning Dickens, is ageless.
It is also why, in acknowledgement of his bicentenary, the
Dickens commentators, critics, editors and creative
responders have been busy producing new books. Hard on the
heels of Claire Tomalin's excellent Charles Dickens: A Life
(Viking, 30), published in October last year, comes Charles
Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World by Simon Callow
(HarperPress, 16.99).
As the 21st-century actor most closely associated with
Dickens, Callow brings out Dickens's passion for theatre. He
takes us from living-room theatricals in Dickens's Portsmouth
childhood to those gruelling, ultimately fatal dramatised
readings which Dickens undertook with rock star charisma
and extraordinary energy in Britain and in America. (He
disliked the latter far less on his second visit in 1867-68.)
Callow, who has a number of books and a lot of journalism to
his name, writes with great authority and elegant insouciance,
which makes this "biography with a twist" very entertaining.
"At his writing desk, he felt like an emperor; in the theatre he
felt like a god," Callow tells us. And he gives us a neat
summary of Dickens's relationship with his exasperating
father, who was the model for Mr Micawber. "Dickens was not
unaware what a boon it had been for him as a writer to be
brought up by a father given to such utterances, to say
nothing of his industriousness and sunny temperament."
Don't be put off by the rather dull title of John Sutherland's
The Dickens Dictionary (Icon Books, 9.99). Sutherland, as
always, wears his erudition lightly, and his love of the quirky
and off-beat shines warmly through this enjoyable book,
which often made me laugh aloud. It isn't even really a
dictionary. Rather, Sutherland takes 100 themes, ideas,
Dickensian bits and pieces and biographical fragments
arranged alphabetically from Mr Sleary's "Amuthement" to
"Zoo Horrors" via serendipitous headings such as "Cauls",
"Gruel", "Nomenclature" and "Onions".
Each section comprises a short, upbeat essay written in
concise, witty, Hemingway-esque prose. Sutherland tells us
under "Blue Plaques", for example, that "Dickens has left
more blue china in his wake than most notables", or, under
"Children", that, from his marriage in 1836: "Thereafter
children came thick and fast in his homes and into his
narratives."
In a different mood, Dickens and the Workhouse (Oxford,
16.99) is Ruth Richardson's engaging account of her recent
discovery that, the young Dickens lived only a few doors from
the Cleveland Street Workhouse, which still stands in central
London, and which presumably inspired Oliver Twist. She
paints a colourful picture of the rich and the poor, the
landlords and lodgers, the clerks, shopkeepers and outcasts of
the area. And she's strong on the changing times, the politics,
and social conditions through which she traces Dickens's
interests and his emerging career as a writer.
Although Dickens burned almost all the letters he received in
an angry fit of privacy defence in 1860, he wrote an enormous
number and it would seem that, as Sutherland remarks, just
about anyone who ever received a letter from Dickens kept it.
These letters are an important source for all the books so far
mentioned. So it's good to have editor Jenny Hartley's new
selection of 450 of them. The Selected Letters of Charles
Dickens (Oxford, 20) gives us missives ranging from the
very formal and transactional to the reflective, excited, angry
and personal many to his friend and posthumous
biographer John Foster and some exquisitely graphic ones
from America.
If you want more information about those letters, the plots of
the novels, their publishing history or Victorian context, the
people in Dickens's life and far more, try the new bicentenary
edition of Paul Schicke's very full and useful 1999 "dipping"
book, The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens (Oxford,
25) which now has an engaging foreword by Simon Callow.
And finally, here's an imaginative spin-off. Tom-All-Alones by
Lynn Shepherd (Corsair, 12.99) is a novel rooted in Bleak
House, although you don't need to have read Bleak House to
enjoy it. It's a highly compelling, immaculately written 19th-
century murder mystery with a lot of Dickensian references in
the language, featuring young detective Charles Maddox and
the sinister secrets which Edward Tulkinghorn is determined
to conceal at any cost. There's a slightly post-modern sense of
looking back at a less enlightened age from a 20th-century
perspective, and Shepherd can be franker about the evils of
prostitution and the disposal of unwanted babies than
Dickens could. It's an engaging read.
The Dickens Dictionary: An A-Z of England's Greatest
Novelist, By John Sutherland, Icon 9.99
"Bastards: Children born out of wedlock are as common as
fleas in Dickens's dramatis personae (16,000 characters
make up the population of the Dickens world, it's reckoned).
Fagin's little pickers and stealers are almost certainly
illegitimate. At least half the sad enrolment of Dotheboys
Hall in 'Nicholas Nickleby', one can plausibly assume, are
legally unowned by any parent"

Charles Dickens: Old
curiosities with a new twist
%roudstulrs ln Kent wus once Dlckens's hollduy
retreut. As the blcentenury of hls blrth urrlves,
Hllury Mucusklll puys u vlslt

In 1842, Charles Dickens spent six months in exotic America
a trip that took him and his intrepid wife, Catherine, from a
log house in Pennsylvania to a steamboat along the
Mississippi. The next year, however, he took his family away
for the summer from his London home opposite Regent's
Park to ... Finchley, north London.
Nowadays, on the site of that holiday home stands a street of
Edwardian villas, a plaque on 70 Queen's Avenue marks the
spot. Then, it was the "sequestered farmhouse" of Cobley's
Farm, his "Arcadian retreat" of "green lanes" where on long
walks Dickens devised Mrs Gamp while writing Martin
Chuzzlewit.
The 200th anniversary of the birth of this most prolific of
Victorian novelists will be marked on Tuesday with a wreath-
laying at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey and this
bicentennial year offers a frantic itinerary of ways to honour
the great man (see dickens2012.org).
Dickens himself was very good at taking a holiday (even
though he never entirely switched off). A summer home was
always important to him, though he usually went further than
Finchley. Broadstairs, for example, a favourite for many years,
was his "home from home".
Back then, travel to Broadstairs was generally by river and sea
from the wharf at London Bridge. Once established, he sent
invitations to friends with instructions about boarding the
Ramsgate steamer.
I took the train instead, trundling along the North Kent coast.
On arrival, there was time for lunch in the stripped-back
stylishness of The Royal Albion, now somewhat removed from
the jolly "Albion Hotel" where Dickens spent "merry nights".
It still offers the same wide views of the sea that so enticed
him: for three years his summer home was next door, a house
later absorbed into the hotel. From the terrace, I had a perfect
outlook on to the bay, the smooth sands, and the sailing club.
Later, I joined the Saturday walking tour which starts on the
seafront at 2pm. It's led by Peter Shaw, who besides being a
guide is also chairman of the Cramptown Tower Museum
(engineer Thomas Crampton was responsible for laying the
first telegraph cable under the Channel). As we took shelter by
the Pavilion, Peter pointed out the sights: Eagle House,
named after the captured French imperial standard brought
ashore here after victory at Waterloo in 1815; the clock tower
erected for Queen Victoria's Jubilee; and Bleak House,
formerly Fort House the holiday home Dickens aspired to
during his years here.
His first stay, in 1837, was in lodgings overlooking High
Street. It was here that he finished The Pickwick Papers.
There's a plaque: one of many Dickens plaques here. (There's
one in York Street that reads: "Charles Dickens did not live
here.") Oliver Postgate, creator of Bagpuss and The Clangers,
has a plaque too, in Chandos Square, together with a mosaic
depicting two Clangers.
It was always important to Dickens to be close to the sea. The
town has lovely beaches and he spent much time on them,
with his children, with his friends, and swimming. Of course,
being Dickens, he was also writing all the time. He started
books here and finished books here. One reason for being
fond of the Albion Street house was that he"started the old
man and the child on their Curiosity-Shop wanderings from
that mansion". One year Dickens, unusually for him, kept a
diary of sorts.
Entries for 15 days had one word: "Work" (he was writing
Nicholas Nickleby); the next five days involve, simply, "Sea
Bathing". Dickens finally got his wish to stay in Fort House,
which "stood prominently at the top of a breezy hill". He
finished David Copperfield here. Later, Fort House was
extended in the crenellated style of the original and renamed
Bleak House. This causes confusion: he neither wrote Bleak
House here, nor used it as a location: that novel was set near
St Albans. When it changed hands, the small museum here
was discarded in favour of an upmarket B&B.
The Dickens House Museum, despite the name, is one house
he did not stay in. It was the home of Mary Pearson Strong,
the inspiration for Betsey Trotwood, the magnificent aunt of
David Copperfield. Today, it is an interesting little museum
where Betsey's parlour has been recreated as described in the
book and there's Dickens memorabilia including letters.
In Our English Watering Place, Dickens enthuses about the
sparkling sea and the boats "dancing on the bubbling water".
He was less fond of St Peter's Church, a "hideous temple of
flint, like a giant petrified haystack".
Many of the landmarks he describes are recognisable today:
the "queer old wooden pier, fortunately without the slightest
pretensions to architecture, and very picturesque in
consequence"; the lighthouse; and the "fancy shops", stocking
"objects made of shells that pretend not to be shells".
Broadstairs has repaid this devotion. The library and
assembly rooms have now been replaced by The Charles
Dickens Inn. Close by are: Barnaby Rudge restaurant,
Nickleby's Takeaway, Marley's caf, and Dickens's Thai Diner.
And, each June at the Dickens Festival, locals dress in
Victorian costume and enact scenes from his books.
By 1851, he had become disenchanted with Broadstairs,
complaining of "vagrant music", including a "violin of the
most torturing kind" under his window. "I fear Broadstairs
and I must part company," he wrote. The following year he
switched his allegiance to Boulogne, but just two years earlier,
he had written boisterously to a friend "Veeve la Broadstairs!"
Charles Dickens at Home by Hilary Macaskill is published by
Frances Lincoln
Let Dickens be your guide to ...
... Brighton (148 King's Road)."I couldn't pass an autumn
here: but it is a gay place for a week or two."
... Dover (10 Camden Crescent). "The sea is very fine and the
walks are quite remarkable."
... Folkestone (3 Albion Villas). "The Down-lands in this
neighbourhood principally consisting of a chain of grass-
covered hills of considerable elevation are enchantingly
fresh and free."
... The Isle of Wight (Winterbourne Country House,
Bonchurch). "Cool, airy, private bathing, everything
delicious."
Travel essentials
Getting there
Fast trains from London St Pancras to Broadstaires take 82
minutes. Slower trains run from Victoria (0845 000 2222;
southeasternrailways.co.uk).
Staying there
Bleak House, Broadstairs (01843 865338;
bleakhouseholidays.co.uk); Dickens House Museum (01843
863453; dickensfellowship.org/ branches/broadstairs) where,
from Easter, the museum will open 2-5pm daily and 10am-
5pm from June.
More information
Broadstairs Dickens Festival runs from 16 to 22 June
(broadstairsdickensfestival.co.uk). Broadstairs tourist
information: 01843 862242; visitbroadstairs.co.uk. Visit
Thanet: visitthanet.co.uk