There is no stopping ‘the Inimitable’ in his bi-centenary year. The Duff Cooper Prize was awarded last night, and the winner was Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. The prize is awarded to the best work of history, biography or political science published in French or English in any given year; it is held at the French ambassador’s residence in London.
Douglas-Fairhurst beat Susie Harries’ life of Pevsner, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, Anna Reid’s Leningrad and Jonathan Steinberg’s Bismarck. The Spectator has two contrasting reviews of Becoming Dickens. Judith Flanders said it was ‘a work of art’ that offered fresh psychological insights on very well worn facts; and Matthew Richardson remarked that there is now no better place to start on Dickens. They are just two voices in a cacophony of praise — the literati have gone wild for this book.
Becoming Dickens is certainly novel. Claire Tomalin’s more famous Dickens biography repeats the argument she made in The Invisible Woman (1991), that Nelly Ternan was the great unrequited love of his life. Douglas-Fairhurst thinks otherwise: Dickens had a secret yen for his sister-in-law.
There’s no reason why both surmises can’t be accurate. The evidence is limited and its interpretation is not settled. But Tomalin’s will probably carry more weight over time because her book is more accessible. Becoming Dickens is enthralling hard work. It’s not a book that one can dip into while watching the footy. Next to Steinberg’s life of Bismarck, though, it’s a breeze. A worthy winner of an esoteric prize.
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