Flaws in our national treasure

Charles Dickens remains in his bicentennial year as much a national treasure as Shakespeare, and just as deeply embedded in the English psyche as the Bard, declares Michael Slater, an Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of London. Among the innumerable Victorians who sanctified domesticity, sentimentalised hearth and home and idealised family love, Dickens is especially conspicuous.

Few people nowadays know Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, but many have seen depictions of Bob Cratchit’s humble Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s weekly magazine for the lower middle classes, Household Words, entrenched his reputation as the favourite storyteller of the 19th-century English-speaking world, and as an idealist serving humanity and battling social evils.

Yet the English like to stand on tiptoes, peer into secret compartments and catch their betters philandering. And so, beginning in his lifetime, and mounting to a fervent pitch in the last 80 years, there has been scrutiny of his relations, during the last 12 years of his life, with an intelligent, cultivated and pretty young actress called Ellen (‘Nelly’) Ternan.