Charles Dickens

eddie wrote:Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens.

200 years old today.

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World by Simon Callow - review

An insider's view of the writer as actor

David Edgar

guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 February 2012 22.55 GMT


Roger Rees and David Threlfall in David Edgar's stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Rex Features

It's both the best and worst of times to produce a Dickens biography. Best because (for anyone just returned from the further reaches of the galaxy) 2012 is the bicentenary of the great man's birth. Worst, because there's competition. In fact, Simon Callow's Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World is intriguingly complementary to Claire Tomalin's deservedly feted Charles Dickens: A Life. Callow has form as a biographer (Charles Laughton, Orson Welles), and as a memorialist and essayist. But he is a writer best known as an actor, and it's as such that he has taken on someone best known the other way round.


Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World
by Simon Callow

The front and back cover present Callow's thesis with a certain amount of chutzpah. Both consist of a cut-out of a Victorian gentleman standing on a toy theatre stage. On the front, the cut-out is topped by the book's subject's head, on the back, by its author's. On the second page of the book, Callow justifies his presumption. He has performed several Dickens stories on stage (most recently, A Christmas Carol), and played Dickens in a one-man play by Peter Ackroyd, and on Doctor Who. Quoting actor Warren Mitchell's response to the accusation that he'd changed a playwright's line, Callow hasn't just written Charles Dickens: "I've been 'im".

Being him, Callow describes the psychodrama of the great man's life persuasively: the ghastly year in the shoe-polish factory that gave Dickens his social anger, but also his iron will; the premature death of his adored sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, which led him to idolise women in his fiction and mistreat his wife in real life. Noting Dickens's "orotundities", Callow comes up with a few of his own: "noctambulistic researches into the condition of the people" are undertaken; Dickens's sartorial theatricality is "unfavourably animadverted on in some quarters". But the unique insights of Callow's book are not so much about Callow the actor's perceptions of Dickens but about Dickens the actor himself.

Conventional wisdom has it that Dickens was lucky to have been born into a showy but shoddy period for the British theatre (the playwriterly glories of the Sheridan and Goldsmith era were long gone). Had theatre been in the "high and balmy days" wistfully evoked by Mr Curdle in Nicholas Nickleby, then the passionate young theatre-goer might well have become a playwright, a calling for which he was clearly unsuited (the great William Macready – friend and dedicatee of Nicholas Nickleby – assured Dickens that his farce The Lamplighter was not worth putting on). Dickens clearly learned important lessons from the theatre: as Callow points out, he picked up his "streaky bacon" technique of alternating comic and tragic scenes from the dramaturgy of his day. He was a prodigious stage manager and producer of highly successful and sometimes commercially successful amateur dramatics. As Callow puts it, "literature was his wife, the theatre his mistress". But although Dickens wondered in later life whether "nature intended me for the lessee of a national theatre", posterity is generally agreed that he picked the right girl.

For Tomalin, theatre had a baleful influence on the novels: Dickens's plots "tend to the theatrical and the melodramatic", as if theatre and melodrama were self-evidently bad and the same. But for Callow, Dickens's experience as a highly praised but always amateur actor was not the flaw but the making of his writing. It formed his desired, face-to-face relationship with his public (the relationship he was to achieve literally with his readings), in which he and his audience were present in the same room. But it also formed his characters. Callow acknowledges that the highly gestural form of acting favoured in the theatre of Dickens's day is no longer fashionable; but he argues that Dickens's natural power of "reproducing in my own person what I observed in others" is an actorly skill, which – in Dickens's case – involves an immersion of the actor into the character (so, while writing a character's speech, Dickens would frequently leap up to check his own expression in the mirror). Far from pleasurably losing himself inside another personality, as Tomalin describes Dickens the actor, Dickens himself becomes his characters.

For that, Dickens drew on a personality and a biography that was not entirely admirable. He was not a good husband or ex-husband (he issued public statements berating his former wife as a failed spouse, mother and woman). As with many people, his virtues (energy, drive, single-mindedness) implied his faults. But although you could take the book's subtitle ("the great theatre of the world") to imply that Dickens's view of the world was as theatrical as his writing, Callow does not suggest that Dickens's political radicalism – and the considerable charitable efforts that flowed from it – were any kind of affectation. The extent of his polemical and practical efforts on behalf of what the Victorians called "the remnant" and we call the underclass were as considerable as they were commendable. It is one of the many virtues of this book that Callow not only admires his subject, but has got inside him.

Dickens was also – of course – immensely popular, as he still is, though now through dramatisation as much as publication. Callow agrees with Tomalin that Dickens's appeal crossed all classes, but he notes one exception: a literary intelligentsia which then and now mostly regards him with suspicion and condescension. Perhaps that, too, is a legacy of Dickens's love of the theatre.

Ed, I just did a library search for Simon Callow's bio of Dickens, but the system doesn't have it (yet). The list included a bio by Peter Ackroyd. Have you read that? I wonder if it's worth looking at. I read Ackroyd's bio of Blake last year.

Constance wrote:a bio by Peter Ackroyd. Have you read that? I wonder if it's worth looking at. I read Ackroyd's bio of Blake last year.

There are two versions of Ackroyd's Dickens biography, Constance. I've read the abridged version, which I can recommend for all the usual Ackroyd merits of well-assimilated research and lucid prose.

The unabridged version I haven't read, but I understand that it's a positively enormous tome containing strange hallucinatory sections in which PA encounters Dickens (or his ghost?) in the streets of London and converses with him. I suppose this device makes a kind of sense since they're both prolific writers in whose work London features prominently- almost as a character in itself.

Much enjoyed the Callow book, by the way. It's hot off the press, so that's probably why it hasn't yet appeared on your library system.

Glad you liked the Callow book. I still have two small memoires to read--books I picked up just browsing the shelves. And two mindless novels from the "chick-lit" genre, both by Sophie Kinsella. But first I have to finish the Austen bio. I'll order the Ackroyd Dickens from the library; glad to hear you liked it.

Constance wrote:Glad you liked the Callow book.

The overwhelming impression is one of Dickens' sheer energy. In another age, he'd have been diagnosed as manic.

It was the best of tomes … the quintessential Charles Dickens novel

Charles Dickens's novels are all about the characters. From Stage villain to Beatific virgin, from Devious lawyer to Ludicrous spinster, they are powered by archetypes that have seeped off the page and into our collective consciousness. But where to begin if you haven't yet encountered them between soft covers? Our fans' guide shows which of his novels assemble the strongest casts – the perfect start for a Dickensian voyage of discovery
Which novel is the most Dickensian? (PDF)

Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin and Jamie Lenman

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012 15.07 BST



If anyone deserves a birthday party lasting all year, it's Dickens – a name that conjures images of red faces, blazing fires, bowls of punch and people partying like it's 1849. But as Claire Armitstead argues, it's hard to keep the celebrations going when your birthday is in February. That's why a group of us at the Guardian's digital agency came up with our very own tribute to the great man. What makes a novel Dickensian? And which of his works gives you the most Dickens for your dollar?
Adam Frost

Photographer: guardian.co.uk