Before Dickens was a Victorian

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were.
 
With a father constantly dodging the debt-collectors, Dickens’s childhood was the very definition of unstable. The book makes much of the trauma of John Dickens being jailed in Marshalsea for debt with the young Charles forced to earn his keep by working at Warren’s blacking factory. The experience might have been brief, but the impact on Dickens’ imagination was huge. Not only did it absorb details — Bob Fagin was the name of a co-worker — but the experience haunts subsequent work, whether in telling references to ‘Warren’s blackin’ in The Pickwick Papers and ‘old blacking bottles’ in Nicolas Nickleby or filtered into bloodstream of characters like Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield or Jo in Bleak House.
 
Throughout, the book is alive to these ways in which Dickens recycled his own experience and obsessions. At school he was noted by friends for being ‘particular with his clothes’, a trait continued when he went to work among fashion-conscious clerks at Ellis & Blackmore. Douglas-Fairhurst uses this episode to guide us through the recurrent attention to surfaces in the fiction (a flower in David Copperfield’s buttonhole is forensically described as ‘pink camellia japonica, price half-a-crown’) and the way clothes share character traits with their owners (Mr Vholes, in Bleak House, removes gloves ‘as if he were skinning his hands’).
 
In very Dickensian fashion, the book continually shimmies between subjects like this. From clerks and clothes we move to the idea of costume and performance, seamlessly conjuring up Dickens’s passion for amateur theatricals and his early experiments with farce. And no sidestep is misplaced. The influence of the theatre proves essential for understanding the young writer, with the book charting the death of Dickens the playwright as much as the birth of Dickens the novelist. With numerous one-act dramas filling his back catalogue, it is only once his farce The Lamplighter is rejected that Dickens bids a reluctant farewell to the stage, channelling all such dramatic energy into the fiction.
 
The most intriguing chapter of the book revolves around Oliver Twist. Douglas-Fairhurst traces the way in which Dickens transformed family tragedy — the death of his sister-in-law, Mary — into fictional resurrection through the saintly character of Rose Maylie. But Oliver Twist also represents a larger idea for Dickens. It is, as the book explains, ‘his most sophisticated piece of counterfactual storytelling’. The idea of the counterfactual runs throughout the study, born from Dickens’s early fall from grace and a consequent alertness to the various flipsides of fate. What if he had never left the blacking factory? What if the Monthly Magazine had rejected his first story? What if he had followed up on ambitions to be a barrister? What if Sam Weller hadn’t been introduced into the fourth number of The Pickwick Papers and almost single-handedly boosted flagging sales?
 
The book begins and ends with such questions, imagining by turns the various ways the Victorian age could have turned out and concluding with thoughts about what would have happened if Dickens had never made it further than 1838, just as he was creating a name as a novelist. The fact that he did is no matter. Such a quirky approach brings colour to scenes that too often exist only in black-and-white. For a vivid introduction to a writer and an age, I can think of few better places to begin.