The Spirit of Christmas Present

By Paul Gray

CHARLES DICKENS: HIS TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH by Edgar Johnson; Viking; 601 pages; $15

Near the end of A Handful of Dust ( 1934), Evelyn Waugh sentenced one of his characters to a bizarre fate. Tony Last was trapped forever in the backwaters of the Amazon, held prisoner by an illiterate half-breed who demanded, at gunpoint, that Tony read aloud to him the collected works of Charles Dickens. Waugh's barbed tribute to Dickens' universal popularity hilariously summed up an attitude then prevalent among the literati: Dickens was fine for soothing savage breasts, but he was not a writer with whom educated gents would care to spend much time.

Edgar Johnson's two-volume biography, published in 1952, was the first long, authoritative look at Dickens' life in 80 years; it revived scholarly interest in the once derided Victorian novelist and helped spur what has now become an avalanche of academic criticism. Through it all, common readers have simply remained enchanted by Dickens' indestructible magic. Johnson's new abridgment of his biography, judiciously cut in half and stripped of footnotes and other such paraphernalia, is intended especially for them.

It comes at just the right season. Except for the principal actors and St. Luke, no one has done more to create the modern Christmas than Charles Dickens. Scrooge and Tiny Tim are almost as ubiquitous as Santa Claus. Small matter that the Times of London came to blame Dickens and his imitators for "the deluge of trash" that descended on booksellers each Christmas. Dickens' yuletide tales were hungrily awaited by hundreds of thousands; even when pressed by the demands of his novels, the author did not want to omit his annual story and thus "leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I ought to fill." Dickens patented the plum-pudding vision of Christmas that reality so often mocks, sending millions into holiday funks. "It is good to be children sometimes," he wrote in A Christmas Carol "and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself."

Dickens meant every word of this and desperately wanted it to be true. Part of him knew better. Johnson's biography resurrects the sad child that Charles became, forced at age twelve to work in a grimy London warehouse while his father languished in prison for debt. Although his servitude lasted only about four months, Dickens never forgot his feelings of abandonment and humiliation; he never confided the experience to his wife. Equally painful was his adolescent--and unrequited--love for a young girl teasingly above him in station.

These two traumas may seem commonplace enough; few reach adulthood without brushing against embarrassment and rejection. But the extraordinarily sensitive Dickens gnawed long and hard at them. Such disappointments give Dickens' biographers something their story otherwise might have lacked: dramatic tension. For Dickens succeeded early and never failed thereafter. The roaring public response to The Pickwick Papers in 1836 transformed him overnight from an unknown newspaper reporter into "Boz," the soon discarded pseudonym for England's most popular and acclaimed writer. His audience swelled with each of his 14 following novels. Dickens worked furiously to support his wife, nine surviving children and a throng of dependent or sponging relatives, in-laws and friends; the money always came, in greater and greater amounts. Toward the end of his life, Dickens discovered that public readings of his works would yield up still more gold. He ultimately made -L-45,000 on the hustings, roughly half the value of his estate when he died in 1870.

Johnson describes the novelist as "one of the heroes of art." He undoubtedly was that, a prodigious force of invention. But Johnson's reverence for his subject keeps him from answering questions that the facts seem to raise. Refusing to play armchair analyst, Johnson nonetheless portrays Dickens as a manifest manic: hurling himself into amateur theatricals and taking on six roles in a single farce, playing the accordion to entertain and calm female passengers during a stormy Atlantic crossing, getting up at 2 a.m. and walking 30 miles from one of his homes to another.

Similarly, Johnson presents without comment evidence of Dickens' strange preoccupation with adolescent girl-women. The death of his young sister-in-law Mary Hogarth shattered Dickens. He cherished a hope to be buried beside her but had to give it up when other Hogarths died and preceded him into the cemetery. "It is a great trial to me to give up Mary's grave," he wrote a friend, "greater than I can possibly express." When his marriage fell apart after 22 years, Dickens became involved with an actress younger than two of his own daughters. Except for a polite reference to "nocturnal adventures," Johnson keeps silent on Dickens' extramarital activity.

Perhaps it is impossible to fit all of the man into a single book. Johnson lists but does not explain his subject's many contradictions. The dedicated and pugnacious social reformer coexisted with the sentimentalist who blubbered over his own words at public readings. The generous benefactor to down-and-out friends wore the same loud waistcoats as the pinchpenny negotiator who scalped outmatched publishers. The public artist who knew that his every utterance would be heeded by Queen and charwoman alike was the same private man who agonized over his impotence in affecting the state of the world. The stern but loving father was the cynic who wondered why kings in fairy tales always wanted to have children: "If they had but known when they were well off, having none!"

In setting all this forth, Biographer Johnson, does enough. Next to Shakespeare, Dickens created the largest cast of memorable characters in the English language. It is appropriate that he was a large cast himself. However many men Charles Dickens happened to be, God bless them, every one. -- Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Before the last number of Pickwick had appeared in its green paper covers, its plump and amiable little hero with his gaiters and benevolently glittering spectacles, together with Sam Weller and his other friends, had become more than national figures--they had become a mania. Nothing like it had ever happened before. There were Pickwick chintzes, Pickwick cigars, Pickwick hats, Pickwick canes with tassels, Pickwick coats; and there were Weller corduroys and Boz cabs. There were innumerable plagiarisms, parodies, and sequels--a Pickwick Abroad, by G.W.M. Reynolds; a Posthumous Papers of the Cadger Club; a Posthumous Notes of the Pickwickian Club, by a hack who impudently called himself Bos; and a Penny Pickwick, not to mention all the stage piracies and adaptations. People named their cats and dogs "Sam," "Jingle," "Mrs. Bardell," and "Job Trotter." It is doubtful if any other single work of letters before or since has ever aroused such wild and widespread enthusiasm. Barely past the age of twenty-five, Charles Dickens had become world-famous, beaten upon by a fierce limelight which never left him for the remainder of his life."

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