Claire Tomalin. Charles Dickens: A Life

Claire Tomalin. Charles Dickens: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2011. Pp. xlvii+ 527. $36.00. Charles wanted no memorial, avowing in his Will: rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their of me. Yet two decades earlier he had accepted his friend John Forster's 700-page Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) with the response: desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer--and such a Critic!--and, as Claire Tomalin says, In this way he appointed his own biographer, at the early age of thirty-six, and never afterwards wavered from his choice (211). Forster accepted the commission, and produced Life of Charles in three volumes (1872, 1873, 1874), based both on his own experience of his friend and extensively on Dickens's letters as well as the work. Letters from Dickens, that is, for in September 1860 had made a great bonfire of the correspondence he had received--such a blaze that his son Henry recalled roasting onions in the ashes (319). Forster's Life, together with the excellent 12 volumes of the Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles (1965-2002) serve as the foundation for recent studies by Peter Ackroyd (1990), Tomalin's own Invisible Woman (1990), Lucinda Hawksley (2006), Rosemarie Bodenheimer (2007), Michael Slater (2009) and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2011). This great assembly, rising to crest on the eve of the bicentenary, already challenging the author's own embargo on literary monument, inevitably poses the question, for? Why attempt the life again? Why now? What does this new volume have to offer either a casual reader or an eager scrutineer? New material? New understanding? New possibilities? Coming with these cautions in mind, I found Claire Tomalin's Life robustly confident, even reassuring, in tone, welcoming those (surely now predominant amongst young readers) for whom basic information about Dickens's life and times is helpful, but equally accommodating both knowledgeable Dickensians and experienced critics: those for whom the deep contradictions of the author, and his own attempts first to conceal his childhood shame and then to reconstruct his marital history remain defiantly challenging to grasp or to accept. This Life, like Dickens, is open, yet deep; explicit, yet able to hold secrets, mysteries, and lies as a necessary part of its truths. With over 500 pages, including some 50 pages of prefatory matter and Prologue, Tomalin's Charles resembles a Victorian novel in scope. From the warm personal dedication to a mother and grandmother who fostered by example Tomalin's fascination with Dickens, the tone is established through a page of quotations that may be summed up by Anne Thackeray, writing in 1913: My sister and I first realised Mr ... as a sort of brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless. I remember how everybody lighted up when he entered (vii). correlative aphorism, however, comes from in 1869: The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself And from John Forster, with a delicate ambivalence apt to this enterprise, It will not do to trace round any part of such a man too hard a line. Between the brilliance of the man and the sad book of his life Tomalin selects Walter Bagehot's 1858 tribute: He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity. This cue she follows to very good effect. Charles Dickens: A Life opens with lively hand-drawn maps (by Andrew Farmer) of Gad's Hill and Rochester, Dickens in central London, and Dickens in north London, the key presented in engaging narrative form: so avoiding for Tomalin's readers the predicament that elaborated with such glee for those invited (in Martin Chuzzlewit, [1844] ch. …