It was the literary equivalent of Gordon Brown’s Arctic Monkeys moment. Disgraced American politician Michael Steele was asked to name his favourite book. ‘War and Peace,’ he said, aghast that anyone could have imagined anything else. He then illustrated his mastery of Tolstoy with the following quotation: ‘It was the best of times and the worst of times.’
This must be the age of foolishness rather than wisdom. To have misattributed a famous quotation is one thing, to have bastardised it another. Anyway, this slip reminded me of Robert Gottlieb’s wonderful and extensive examination of Dickens, published by the New York Review of Books last July.
Drawing on recent biographies and a love for Dickens that was kindled by his ‘exposure’ to a Tale of Two Cities in the fourth grade, Gottlieb dispels the enigma that has collected around that most famous of Victorians. Trollope may have earned a very pretty packet from his pot-boilers and Thackeray may have been loved for his wit; but Dickens was a national celebrity, and one who died young. I urge you to read the whole piece, but here is how Gottlieb gets under way:
‘He was almost certainly the best-known man in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and certainly the most loved: his very personal hold on his readers extended from the most distinguished—Queen Victoria, say—to illiterate workers who clubbed together to buy the weekly or monthly parts in which his novels first appeared so that one marginally literate man could read them aloud to his fellows. And this popularity and influence carried to America, Germany, France, and Russia as well. There was universal sorrow when he died. “I never knew an author’s death to cause such general mourning,” wrote Longfellow. “It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief.”
The New York Review also has a podcast of Gottlieb musing about his hero.
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