The many rival identities of Charles Dickens

Until the age of ten I lived in a street of mock-Georgian houses called Dickens Drive. Copperfield Way and Pickwick Close were just around the corner. Even now I regularly pass the Pickwick Guest House on the main road out of Oxford. None of this is especially surprising. Go online and you can buy a ribbed tank top for your dog emblazoned ‘I love Charles Dickens’ or a flexible Dickens action figure ‘with quill pen and detachable hat’. Visit Rochester or Chatham, the Kent towns where he spent the happiest years of his childhood, and it’s hard to turn a corner without bumping into a Dickensian ghost — Little Dorrit body piercing, or A Taste of Two Cities Indian restaurant.

Whenever new souvenirs come to light they’re treated with all the veneration of a saint’s relics: at a New York auction in 2009 his ivory and gold toothpick fetched more than $9,000. Then there are the costume dramas, the catchphrases (‘Bah! Humbug!’) and the fact that a whiskery drawing of him used to appear on the back of the £10 note, alongside a scene depicting the cricket match in The Pickwick Papers. Dickens is everywhere.

In many ways this busy cultural afterlife is an accurate extension of Dickens’s own life. Novelist, playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist, amateur conjurer, hypnotist: he was like a bundle of different people who happened to share a single skin. On one occasion an elderly charwoman was told that the man who had been spotted visiting some London lodgings she cleaned was the famous writer Charles Dickens. Although she could not read, every month she attended a snuff shop where she listened to the latest instalment of Dombey and Son being read aloud, and as far as she was concerned the real ‘mystery’ of this novel was how it had been written by just one man.