Herfst 2007 no. 61
Dickens, who suffered from profound personal
pain and social despair derived from his child
hood experiences in the Blacking Factory, and
thereafter identified himself with the criminal
and the rebel in all his works. Wilson was the
first to do justice to the dark novels and one of
the first to focus on Dickens's use of symbol
ism, for example the prison symbol in Little
Dorrlt, but while confirming that Wilson's
essay was a landmark in establishing modern
critical approaches to Dickens, Professor
Sasaki argued that it relied on discredited
sources, deduced too much about the influ
ence of Ellen Ternan on the later heroines,
was muddled in its conclusion and dubious in
some of its contentions. He provided an
invaluable hand-out including quotations not
only from "The Two Scrooges" itself, but also
from Philip Collins and George Orwell as evi
dence in the development of his persuasive
argument that, contrary to Wilson's thesis,
Dickens was neither consistently a rebel com
pletely antagonistic to his age, nor indis
putably morally confused near the end of his
life. Tbis was a thoroughly thought-provoking
and lucid paper, and a sound start to the aca
demic side of the Conference.
Professor Michael Slater outlined the develop
ment of biographies of Dickens, focussing on
the changing ways in which the novelist had
been viewed. There was inevitably some over
lap with last year's lecture on Dickens's image
in The Dickensian, but also plenty of different
material and a fascinating series of slides. In
the last few years of Dickens's life and the
immediate aftermath of his death the empha
sis was very much on "the great popular idol,
the world class celebrity", but relatively little
was actually known about him. He was
inevitably much respected by his contempo
raries for being a selfmade man, and was the
subject of much idolisation, so the publication
of Forster's Life, which included the autobio
graphical fragment, came as an immense
shock. However, the revelations about
Dickens's childhood enhanced his reputation
by making him more heroic, an epic hero. (It
is interesting to note that Forster divides his
biography into twelve books like a classical
epic with a tragic but ultimately triumphant
hero). Despite some dissenting voices this
remained the standard view until the late
twenties and thirties, which saw the
publication of Thomas Wright's biography,
"with new and highly interesting particulars",
and there were to be further revelations con
cerning Ellen Ternan in Gladys Storey's
Dickens and Daughter in 1939. Edgar
Johnson's 1952 biography, presenting the
tragic side of Dickens's life, was for a long
time considered definitive, and still has not
been superseded. Professor Slater ended by
discussing Peter Ackroyd's Dickens (1990) and
his own forthcoming A Writer's Life, in which
he is writing about the sequence of all
Dickens's writings, speeches etc, investigating
how in the early part of his career he was
improvisatory.
On Friday afternoon delegates were offered
the opportunity to visit sites, museums and
other places of interest in Amsterdam, and at
8pm a most enjoyable excursion by boat on
the canals had been organised, complete with
generous supplies of wine and cheese! The
weather having been extremely warm and
humid during the day, this evening tour by
canal of some of the most picturesque parts of
Amsterdam was especially welcome.
As usual the Dickens Fellowship Business
Meeting (now referred to as the Annual
General Meeting) took place on the Saturday
morning, 29 July. There was a minute's
silence in memory of members of the
Fellowship who had died during the previous
year, including three members of the Dickens
family. Mrs Thelma Grove and Dr Tony
Williams gave their final reports as Honorary
Secretaries, summarising the various develop
ments during their period of office, and
Professor Michael Slater gave a generous and
well-deserved vote of thanks, paying tribute to
both of them for having carried out a very
strenuous workload.
The major excursion of the conference was to
Enkhuizen to visit the famous open-air
Zuiderzee museum, with its 130 houses along
streets, canals and alleys, providing a fascinat-
21 The Dutch Dickensian Volume XXVII
