A Tale of Two Dickenses

CHARLES DICKENS: HIS TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH (1,158 pp.)--Edgar Johnson--Simon & Schuster ($10).

For all its 1,158 pages, Edgar Johnson's critical biography of Charles Dickens is the definitive treatment of Dickens only in the sense that a vacuum cleaner is the definitive treatment for a rug. Seven years of earnest scholarship together with access to much fresh Dickens material have enabled Biographer Johnson to pick up every fact worth knowing about his hero. As biography, his book is complete, conscientious and fleetingly dramatic. As criticism, it is a hothanded fan letter posing as a balance sheet. Constant prose transfusions from Dickens keep the book alive, and for the rest, the author relies on a quality best characterized by Dickens himself as "enthoosemoosy."

Essentially, it is a tale of two Dickenses that Biographer Johnson has to tell. One is a 19th-century success story, the other a saga of personal disenchantment. Success came to him with a smash at 24 with The Pickwick Papers. It swelled with each succeeding novel and never deserted him as he launched into weekly newspaper editing, amateur theatricals and public readings. In the end, he became a kind of king-of-the-hill of Victorian letters. At his death in 1870, he left -L-93,000, in today's money something like a million dollars. But through the major theme of royalties and applause ran the compelling minor of his unhappiness.

Family Trouble. At the age of twelve, he saw his free-spending but improvident father clapped into debtors' prison. Young Charles did a five-month stretch of child labor in a shoe-polish factory in the Strand; years later, he could not walk past the site because it made him cry. In his early 20s, he was jilted by a flirt whom he had worshiped for four years. On the rebound, he married Catherine Hogarth,* a pouter pigeon of a woman who gave him ten children but small joy. This brood he later called "the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves."

"Why is it," he asked himself in the flush of his fame, that "a sense always comes crushing upon me now . . : as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" At 45, when he met Ellen Ternan, a blue-eyed actress of 18, he thought he knew the answer. When his wife objected to what was still, in Biographer Johnson's words, a "technically innocent" relationship, Dickens drove her to a separation while waging an acrimonious publicity duel with her family. But it took Dickens five years to coax Ellen to place "comfort before chastity." Their affair was blotted with self-reproach. Ellen did not really love him, and after Dickens' death she married a clergyman, and said to a friend that she "loathed the very thought of the intimacy" with Dickens.

Is He with Shakespeare? Biographer Johnson believes that Dickens was enormously self-willed but rarely self-centered. In his books and out of them, the great author fought the good fight against bad schools, bad prisons, bad laws and the bad byproducts of the Industrial Revolution. With Bernard Shaw, Johnson insists that this makes Dickens a social revolutionary. Lenin, for one, did not agree and once stomped out of a dramatization of The Cricket on the Hearth, because he could not stomach Dickens' "middleclass sentimentality." It is probably true to say, as other critics have, that Dickens had an alert social conscience; he knew what he was against, but he never knew quite what he was for--except the underdog.

It is in pushing his estimate of Dickens the novelist too boldly that Biographer Johnson finally falls through thin ice. Dickens was not overly sentimental, he insists; the modern age is simply too hardboiled. Echoing Matthew Arnold on Keats, Biographer Johnson says of Dickens: "He is with Shakespeare." But Shakespeare's is the company Dickens rarely keeps. Shakespeare's characters grow; Dickens' characters only have Scroogian turnabouts. Where a Hamlet, a Captain Ahab or an Ivan Karamazov helps the reader to know himself, most of Dickens' fabulous folk reveal only their inimitable selves. They teach little, but, with the help of Dickens' beguiling gusto, they still make good reading and pretty good movies.

* No kin to Painter William Hogarth.

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