In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.
In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. ‘It requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate,’ wrote Hayward. ‘He has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick.’
A bit mean, but very funny, of Michael Slater to quote this Victorian prognosticator — a literary ancestor of William Rees-Mogg or Anatole Kaletsky. So far from coming down like a stick has been Dickens’s reputation that one wonders at first what a new biographer has to bring.
Everything has been examined. A single lost pocket-book can give birth to an academic microclimate. Dickens left his diary on a table somewhere in America in 1867 and, as Slater writes, ‘it ended up in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library, where it was subjected to intensive scholarly investigation and interpretation’.
Naturally, then, this book contains a good few hat-tips in the form of ‘famously’ and ‘as has long been recognised’, but Michael Slater’s research has been compendious and his judgments are clear-eyed and his own.
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For Dickens himself, writes Slater,
the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith . . . but through the continued circulation and enjoyment of their work.
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