Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué like his own father, and this of course happened. Charles Dickens had fantasised in David Copperfield that the jokey version of his own father — Mr Micawber — would become a success in life by going to Australia. In real life, Dickens’s parents had been ‘hopeless’, and as he watched his own family growing up, he had a heartless fear that his dud children would be versions of parents who were sent to the Marshalsea.
Sure enough, Dickens sent two of his least promising sons to Australia, hoping something would turn up. Alfred (named after his godfather Tennyson) was packed off in 1865, and Plorn – Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens — a few years later. Plorn had been a dull little boy, and he grew up to be a dull little man, never making a success in Australia. He opened a stock and station agency in New South Wales, lost what little money he had been able to make, married a dull Australian girl, and, in so far as history knows much about him, was an unpromising subject for a book.
You could, however, have made a novel about him: the dull failure, carrying within his breast resentment or envy or some such emotion directed towards the famous parent. The novel would have been about Plorn’s failure, and his death aged 49, never living up to the burden of having a famous father. Instead, Thomas Keneally takes us on a rather plodding journey through Plorn’s early life in various sheep stations in New South Wales, with flashbacks to the better known gruesome domestic tyranny of the great novelist — his abuse of his wife (Plorn’s mother), his arranging for a screen to be built between his dressing room and his wife’s bed, his adultery with the much younger actress Nelly Ternan.
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