Peter Ackroyd: Dickens

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

A lot has been written about the life and works of Charles Dickens, most of it by Peter Ackroyd in his magisterial 1988 biography, which ran to nearly 1200 pages. Few people could benchpress let alone read it.

In 1990 an abridged version was produced which ran to just under 600 pages, a slimming performance to drive Jenny Craig to comfort food out of sheer envy. The effect was to bring the fruit of Ackroyd's scholarly feat within the scope of people who do not read for a living.

Here, Ackroyd employs the shrewd tactic which Dickens himself used to turn a pretty penny even when age and illness had slowed his prodigious output to a torrent, namely working the copyright of earlier books, re-issuing them in new editions. This is a reprint of that 1990 abridgment, designed to accompany a new BBC documentary series.

It is hard to think of a novelist in the history of the form to rival Dickens. His novels succeed on practically every level, whether as good yarns, as character-studies, as social commentary or as sketches of the human condition.

Many of the types he derived from his observations of his contemporaries - Scrooge, Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham - are instantly recognisable to modern readers. He was a great comic, but his billowing wit was sheeted back with a sense of social justice and ballasted with a sense of the melancholy of the human condition.

Not only has his work stood the test of time, but his popularity in his day was enormous. His novels appeared in serial form, commonly with the kind of cliff-hanger endings routinely employed in modern television soaps, and were bought frantically from booksellers.

Those who lacked the education to read them gathered and listened rapt as others read them aloud, and between numbers readers of all walks of life chewed over what had transpired and speculated in a mood of feverish anticipation about what might happen next. As Ackroyd tells us, crowds greeted transatlantic steamers in American ports and tried to pump disembarking passengers for details of the latest issues.

In the latter years of his life, when Dickens took to giving public readings, he was frequently obliged to stand, nodding and smiling, as his audiences cheered him for minutes on end. When he died, the crowd of Londoners who paid their respects took two days to file past his grave.

This biography is an old-fashioned project, insofar as it seeks to find explanations in Dickens' life for his genius. Certainly, there were cardinal episodes, such as when the 12-year-old Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory to pay his father's way out of debtors' prison, a worm's-eye view of laissez-faire economics which generated his undying empathy for the underdog, and a determination to make more of himself.

The principal sources are Dickens' vast correspondence and the reminiscences of contemporaries. It is a mighty feat of scholarship.

While Ackroyd needfully fills gaps with speculation, he does not indulge in the fashionable 21st-century practice of retrospectively psychoanalysing his subject; his surmises are respectfully tagged with such circumspections as "Is it too fanciful to suppose?"

It is elegantly written, with the cuts and welds of abridgment pretty hard to detect.

For those who are interested in the interaction of genius with its life and times, this book is full of insight, and will reward the considerable effort required to read it. But as an explanation for the genius of Dickens, it is inevitably a failure: there is simply no accounting for it.

Vintage

$27.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.