Holy Terror

DICKENS: HIS CHARACTER, COMEDY & CAREER (361 pp.)--Hesketh Pearson--Harper ($4).

It was G.B.S.'s idea. "As you have done Shakespeare and Shaw," he told Biographer Hesketh Pearson, "are you not bound to do Dickens? Anybody but Dickens will be a comedown after Shakespeare and G.B.S." Pearson, who is Britain's most fecund literary biographer* and a Dickens fan to boot, heartily agreed; and although his Dickens reveals more about the man and his life than about the artist and his novels, it is nonetheless the best-balanced, most complete biography to date.

What makes Charles Dickens such a tough cadaver for the dissector is the fact that he embodied (in the words of his friend Leigh Hunt) "the life and soul ... of 50 human beings." Some of these 50 beings were pretty sleazy characters, and they have been sternly ignored by those whom Pearson calls "Dickolators." Most biographers have refused to admit that their idol often fell short of the ideal Dickens expressed: a "glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming [attitude] to Home and Fireside."

Life with Father. No one, least of all Dickens himself, could guess what the mood of his next moment would be. No contemporary (and the competition was pretty stiff in those days) was capable of ejecting so huge or so sudden a flood of tears, and of drying it up a second later in such gales of laughter. Once, at the funeral of a beloved friend on a rainy day, Dickens found himself close to Cartoonist George Cruikshank (who illustrated Oliver Twist) and became fascinated by the artist's "enormous whiskers, which straggle all down his throat in such weather [looking] like a partially unravelled bird's-nest." As Dickens explained himself later, he was "penetrated with sorrow" for the family of the dead but, at the same time, threatened with "convulsions" at the sight of the living. He nearly blew himself apart with simultaneous spasms of misery and hilarity.

Dickens' first love, hardhearted Maria Beadnell, trampled all over him before she brusquely showed him the door. Three years later, Dickens married Kate Hogarth, whom he completely dominated. Kate bore him ten children and he adored them all, but he gave her small thanks. "My wife," he wrote resentfully to a friend, "is quite well again, after favoring me (I think I could have dispensed with the compliment) with No. 10 . . . I have some idea ... of interceding with the Bishop of London to have a little service in St. Paul's beseeching that I may be considered to have done enough towards my country's population."

Life with Father Dickens was a succession of unpredictable tempests. He supported not only his own family but also his father & mother, his dead brother's widow and five children, and in later years his mistress, Actress Ellen Ternan, and their child. To keep all in room & board, Dickens lived in a frenzy of ceaseless labor, which was intensified by his sharing in the multifarious experiences and sensations of all the characters in all his novels. Extracts from letters, written while he was busy with The Old Curiosity Shop, illustrate what he meant when he said, "Men have been chained to hideous walls . . . but few have known such suffering and bitterness ... as those who have been bound to Pens."

November. "You can't imagine how exhausted I am ... All night I have been pursued by [Little Nell] . . . The anguish is unspeakable . . ."

December 22. "I am breaking my heart over this story, and cannot bear to finish it."

January 7. "I am the wretchedest of the wretched . . . Nobody will miss [Little Nell] like I shall ... Old wounds bleed afresh when I only think of the way of [killing her]; what the actual doing it will be, God knows."

January 14. "I am ... nearly dead with work and grief for the loss of my child."

Dickens' friends always shared his grief at such moments, adding their salt pints to his sea of tears. Crusty Thomas Carlyle and Irish Rebel Daniel O'Connell both tottered about, racked with sobs, when Little Nell's knell tolled. Humorless old

Poet Walter Savage Landor (who strove with none, for none was worth his strife) was shocked almost to speechlessness.

Dickens had other ways of shocking friends such as Landor. He once sent the poet a deadpan note confiding 1) that he had fallen in love with Queen Victoria ("Don't mention this unhappy attachment," Dickens warned another friend gravely) and 2) that, in order to recover from this sad affair, he intended "to kidnap a [royal] maid of honor and take her to an uninhabited island." It was no wonder that London buzzed with fantastic rumors and no wonder that Dickens found himself furiously denying that he had suddenly "become a Roman Catholic and was raving mad in an asylum."

Boston Saw Red. When all the 50 human cylinders in him were popping in rapid succession, Dickens was a holy terror. He went into a rage if a single piece of furniture in his house was moved or left untidied; he pinned angry notes to his quaking daughters' pincushions, urging them to better habits. On the other hand, he thought nothing of suddenly taking off and striding madly 15 or 20 miles through the night streets of London, or of popping through the window into a friend's drawing room, dressed as a sailor and dancing a hornpipe.

On his first visit to the United States, he disgusted Washington Irving with his coarse "tavern manners." He shocked Boston with his foppish "velvet waistcoats of vivid green or brilliant crimson" and his lowbred way of breezily combing his long tresses during a dinner given in his honor. At one such function he was asked which of two countrywomen of his was the more beautiful, the Duchess of Sutherland or Mrs. Caroline Norton, and put the whole Eastern seaboard into deep freeze by replying airily: "Well, I don't know. Mrs. Norton is perhaps the more beautiful, but the Duchess to my mind is the more kissable . . ."

When, at the age of 45, he fell in love with 18-year-old Ellen Ternan (who didn't love him, says Author Pearson, but "placed comfort before chastity"), he had little compunction about booting his wife out of the house, retaining custody of most of the children and giving a thoroughly dishonest version of his behavior to the newspapers. He aroused millions to compassion for "fallen women," but once, hearing a young girl swear obscenely on the street, he had her marched straight off to jail. It was this inability to see life (or himself) in consistent proportions that was his strength and weakness; it made the Dickens novels, says Author Pearson, seem like "a blazing volcano of genius almost entirely surrounded by a morass of imbecility."

So many parts, ranging from sheer farce to stark tragedy, drained Dickens' abounding vitality even more than his dependents drained his well-filled purse (he left nearly half a million dollars when he died). When he deliberately added to the strain by touring England and the U.S., reading and miming famous chapters of his novels, he knew that he was shortening his life. For a few years he enjoyed the actor's supreme privilege of seeing men & women rolling in the aisles or being carried out in terrified swoons. Meanwhile, at the reading desk, the man who had as many voices as he had characters, could feel his pulse rise from 80 to 120 beats a minute as, in the person of Bill Sikes, he advanced on himself in the person of Nancy, and her dying "shrieks rang through the hall." Once offstage, Dickens would collapse.

On June 8, 1870, he cried out: "On the ground!" and sank to the floor for the last time. The next day he was dead.

* Among his subjects: Oscar Wilde, Sydney Smith, Gilbert & Sullivan, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Paine, William Hazlitt, Arthur Conan Doyle.

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