Englishman in Adversity

CHARLES DICKENS (488 pp.)--Dame Una Pope-Hennessy--Howell, Soskin ($4).

Someone once compared Critic John Forster to a pencil stub--"short, thick, and full of lead." In writing his classic Life of Charles Dickens, Forster presented the public with only the best of the man who was his best friend. Not until 1938, when the Nonesuch Press published over 8,000 intimate items of Dickens' correspondence, did the public learn what it had already guessed--that David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers had been written by a very human being, not by a bearded Apollo in a frockcoat.

The author of the latest and most comprehensive--but by no means the best written or most imaginative--Dickens biography, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, is the first biographer to make use of the mass of Nonesuch and other new material. Readers will find no trace of literary judgment, but they will find every last detail of Dickens' stormy life, from crib to coffin.

Copperfield at 40. "Success," observed Nathaniel Hawthorne, from his vantage point as American consul in Liverpool, "makes an Englishman intolerable, [but] an Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character." When successful Charles Dickens looked back on the adversities of his childhood, he found them too painful to disclose even to his wife: not until he was almost 40 could he bear to relive them, and to cast them from him into David Copperfield. Father John Dickens, the original of Micawber--"a jovial opportunist . . . who borrowed from anyone foolish enough to make him cash advances"--took twelve-year-old Charles away from school, put him to work at a shilling a day in a blacking factory. Father and mother Dickens spent this period in a debtors' prison, where they were relatively comfortable, and safe from creditors. When they were released, Mrs. Dickens tried to persuade Charles to go on working in the factory. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget," said Dickens, "that my mother was warm for my being sent back."

As office boy, clerk, and, at 20, shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates, Dickens struggled frenziedly to climb out of poverty. His inspiration was his love for Maria Beadnell, a City bank manager's cold, flirtatious daughter, who aroused "whatever of fancy, romance, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me." When, after some two years' courtship, he realized that Maria was making a fool of him, Dickens buried her away as deeply as his childhood miseries.

Ten Children & No Eden. What Dickens called his "celestial or diabolical energy" emerged reinforced from his struggle with Maria. As reporter for the Morning Chronicle he stood, note-taking, in Parliament, until his feet swelled, raced over England in post chaises, sometimes wrote all night--and managed at the same time to pen his first, instantly successful literary works: Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers. He gave up journalism after he married Catherine Hogarth, an unambitious, lethargic Scot, who once remarked of the Garden of Eden: "Eh, mon, it would be nae temptation to me to gae rinning about a gairden stark naked ating green apples."

In the next 15 years, placid Kate Dickens bore her husband ten children, suffered four miscarriages. But Dickens' attitude toward pregnancy and childbirth was "outwardly unsympathetic and often that of a low comedian." "My wife," Dickens informed a friend, "has presented me with No. 10. I think I could have dispensed with the compliment." "He seemed to think," Dame Una explains, "that she alone was responsible. . . ."

Conceived in Tears. "I am certain," said Charles Dickens Jr., "that the children of my father's brain were much more real to him at times than we were." Over his mental offspring, Dickens suffered all the joys and torments of family life. He wrote daily, rigorously, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. No Victorian reader of Dickens' works ever wept so copiously over them as Dickens himself. "I have had a good cry," he once wrote to Forster. "I am worn to death. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished yesterday, for my face was swollen to twice its proper size. . . ." "Between ourselves," he gravely informed another friend, "Paul [Dombey] is dead. He died on Friday night about ten o'clock. . . ."

"You know my life and character," Dickens wrote to a friend, "and . . . you may understand that the intense pursuit of any idea that takes possession of me is one of the qualities that makes me different, sometimes for good, sometimes, I dare say, for evil, from other men." But Mrs. Dickens was bewildered by her passionate husband's avid pursuit of the moment. She found it hard to understand how he could give away to uncontrollable grief on hearing that a friend had died, and a few hours later enter into amateur theatricals with uncontrollable guffaws.

The best story in Dame Una's book is about Dickens' temporary obsession with hypnotism. After successfully putting his own not-very-wide-awake wife to sleep, Dickens felt the need to try his hypnotic power on the spry wife of a Swiss banker. When in bed, this attractive, possibly neurotic lady was in the habit of rolling up into a tight ball between one and two a.m. Mrs. Dickens resented the fact that only the "strokings and passes" of Hypnotist Dickens could induce her to unwind.

Byron at 45. Thirteen years before Dickens' death he became obsessed by the belief that at 45 he was "capable of loving a young girl in the same idealistic whole-souled way that he had once adored Maria Beadnell." The object of his passion was fair-haired Actress Ellen Ternan, whom Dickens discovered backstage modestly weeping because her role obliged her "to show so much leg." Dickens established Ellen in a house near London. His daughter Katey wrote: "More tragic and far-reaching in its effect was the association of Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan and their resultant son than that of Nelson and Lady Hamilton and their daughter. My father was like a madman. He did not seem to care a damn what happened to any of us." Mrs. Dickens was expelled (with a pension) from her husband's home at Gad's Hill, and her sister, Georgina, who was friendly to Ellen Ternan, was made mistress of the house.

Dickens set out to prove that he had "renewed his youth." He claimed that he was not his children's father but their "elder brother." He dyed his hair and beard. He replaced his aging friends with younger men. He made a bonfire of all the letters he had kept, exclaiming as they blazed: "Would to God every letter I had ever written was on that pile!"

But Dickens could not shake off the specter of death, though he fought it to the very brink of the grave. He insisted on a secret burial without mourning clothes--"No scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband or any other revolting absurdity." But he was powerless to stem the flood of mourners who thronged Westminster Abbey to view his open grave.

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