Book review: The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

Dickens’s letters are a startling window into an exceptional life, from his early prentice days to his last years as a national figure. The extent of his acquaintances, his life experience, his travels and his involvement with the literary and public figures of his time gives them an extraordinary range and immediacy. Fourteen thousand survive to form the Pilgrim, and Jenny Hartley notes there must have been many more, lost in fires, in the Blitz, possibly at Dickens’s own hands – though 20 or so new ones surface each year to augment this astonishing survival. And, writes the editor, “each one of Dickens’s letters is a performance, finely calibrated to the nature of its recipient, as if he were talking to him or her”.

Dickens’s prodigious energies are everywhere visible, in his circle of friends and relatives, his plans, his management of periodicals as well as of his own fluent pen, his handling of a huge incoming correspondence, and through it all there shows evidence of someone who could not stay still, nor could sit back after finishing some project, but who was already moving on to the next.

And what a circle of correspondents. Here is Thackeray being invited to an 1848 dinner to celebrate the ending of Dombey and Son. “I purpose holding a solemn dinner here, on Tuesday the 11th of April, to celebrate . . . Hour, half past six. It couldn’t be done without you. Therefore, book it cher citoyen!”. And round the table Macready, Forster, Jerdan, Browne, D’Orsay, Hogarth, Evens, Stone – and the irrepressible Dickens.

And here is the other end of the process, in Lausanne on 28 June 1846: “BEGAN DOMBEY! I performed this feat yesterday – only wrote the first slip – but there it is, and it is a plunge straight over head and ears into the story. . .”

This most convivial of men seemed able to write wherever he was, in London, on the move, in a train – in Lausanne, where he had a productive winter with Dombey, though he confided that “Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I seem to have a preposterous sense of the ridiculous”. Though he likes Lausanne very much he misses the stimulus of London, “the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern is IMMENSE!”. The labour, and the personal involvement in writing, are themes again and again in the letters, above all in his confidential letters to John Forster: in December 1850, nearing the end of David Copperfield: “I am within three pages of the shore; and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside-out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.”

There is a hint, very occasionally, of the shadowy world pressing in on him: from Parma, 8 November 1844: “It is dull work, this travelling alone. My only comfort is, in Motion. I look forward with a sort of shudder to Sunday, when I shall have a day to myself in Bologna… Never did anyone want a companion after dinner (to say nothing of supper) so much as I do.”

The letters cover a very wide range of recipients, as well as of moods from the man who wrote them. As performer and businessman, he is endlessly particular and practical: his recollection of Edinburgh, the attendance and the profit from his readings (“The house was more than twice better than any first night here previously. There was £90 in it. They were, as usual here, remarkably intelligent, and the Reading went brilliantly.”) As an editor, he is thoroughly practical, and tactfully helpful. His letters to Elizabeth Gaskell on her to-be-serialised North and South are encouraging without gush. “I have read the MS you have had the kindness to send me, with all possible attention and care. I have shut myself up for the purpose, and allowed nothing to divine my thoughts. It opens an admirable story, is full of character and power, has a strong suspended interest in it (the end of which, I don’t in the least foresee), and has the very best marks of your hand upon it.”

Occasionally some strong personal feeling comes through. To a clergyman proposing a ragged school, a plea that the children be spared too early an exposure to religious controversy: “I heard a lady visitor, the night I was among you, propounding questions in reference to ‘The Lamb of God’ which I most unquestionably would not suffer any one to put to my children: recollecting the immense absurdities that were suggested to my own childhood by the like injudicious catechizing”.

To a clergyman who asked why his caricatures and exaggerations did not make way for more conventionally “good” characters: “I have so strong an objection to mere professions of religion, and to the audacious interposition of vain and ignorant men between the sublime simplicity of the New Testament and the general human mind to which our Saviour addressed it, that I urge that object as strongly and as positively as I can”. To Macready, a mild protest after seeing and admiring the improvements in art and instruction for the poor in Manchester in 1857: “They want more amusement, and (as it strikes me) something in motion, though it were only a twisting fountain. The thing is too still, after their lives of machinery, and Art fires over their heads in consequence”. His own “melancholy mad elephants”, the remorseless nodding-beam steam engines in the mills of Hard Times, show his genius for the vivid and the unforgettable.

To have so many letters is a miracle – perhaps the miracle, like the Carlyle letters, is that they were too good to destroy, and so many kept them. The Pilgrim edition is an achievement that will not be repeated, but here is a very strong and very various selection.

His energy drives through them all: his strong sense of family (though his extra-family affairs do not show much here); his strong sense of money (the readings, though immensely popular, took their toll on his health); his ability to divide his attention between many subjects; his tact in framing replies to the less friendly as well as the friendly communication; his affection for family and friends; the occasional glimpse (above all to Forster) of the turmoil that lay behind the finished writing of the sparkling Dickens world.

Jenny Hartley acutely surmises that writing letters “could also sop up the surplus of writerly force which Dickens seems to have had”. That force never slackens to the end of this marvellous volume.

• The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens

edited by Jenny Hartley

Oxford University Press, 496pp, £20