now) how remarkably many small
rooms there are to be found in Great
Expectations, and it is good to be told on
p. 900 that that great novel is "a much
more frankly auto-biographical work
than David Copperfield".
Ackroyd has an excellent sense of the
period and manages to convey it well:
the smells and sounds of London's
unpicturesque squalor, the drain and
excitement of Victorian travel, the
Victorian fascination with infant
sexuality and fallen women, all this is
very vividly done, as is the picture of
Dickens himself, his mannerisms,
quirks, restlessness, inexhaustible
energy, fastidious tidiness, his working
habits and irritabilities. All the details
are there, including his using Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy as a kind of
"Sortes Vergilianae", his bookshelves
filled with dummies, and his turning
every bed he slept in or was offered in
a north-south direction.
Like previous biographers, Peter
Ackroyd argues that much of what
strikes one as odd or eventful in
Dickens's life goes back to his traumatic
childhood. In this he, too, follows the
"autobiographical memorandum" first
disclosed by John Forster. Much space
is given to Dickens's wife, the long-
suffering Catherine Hogarth, and her
husband's hurtful over-reaction to the
death of her younger sister Mary.
Curiously, Ackroyd rejects the by now
generally accepted idea that the actress
Ellen Ternan was for some time
Dickens's mistress and perhaps bore
him a child. Rather, he explains
Dickens' long and close relationship
with her which included between
1862 and 1865 regular cross-Channel
visits to Condette in France where Ellen
was staying in the chalet of the
Beaucourt-Mutuels by suggesting that
Dickens saw in Ellen Ternan a second
Mary Hogarth; thus he considers it
significant that she was eighteen
(Mary's age when she died) when they
first met. It was no affair in the
"ordinary" sense of that word: he was
no ordinary man (indeed, as this
biography makes perfectly clear,
Dickens was "decidedly odd", as
Ackroyd puts it on p. 914) his
relationship to Ellen Ternan was rather
like Arthur Clennam's love for Little
Dorrit (whose tender words regarding
"ties of innocent reliance and
affectionate protection" are cited: "ties
of compassion, respect, unselfish
interest, gratitude, and pity"). One may
well wonder.
In fact, when all is said and done Peter
Ackroyd's Dickens does complement, but
does not replace what must still be
considered the standard biography,
Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His
Tragedy and Triumph of 1978 - and I
don't think Ackroyd would mind. As he
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Peter Ackroyd
