My Life in Pieces (56 page)

His contemporaries were fascinated and sometimes appalled by him and many of them wrote of him with detailed discernment. In the matter of the readings – a key and central element in his output – there were no fewer than three books published while he was still alive describing what he did, how he did it, and why he did it. It remains an area of deep interest, not least because it underlines how perfectly unique he was in the annals of literature. There have been plenty of authors eager to read from their works – even in Dickens's own time Thackeray and others had had a go – but most of them were content, as Dickens wickedly put it, to ‘drone away like a mild bagpipe'. What Dickens offered was a major histrionic event, brilliantly stage-managed, in which he electrified huge numbers of people in vast auditoria, creating stampedes for tickets, rousing his hearers to almost uncontrollable laughter or tears.

He had always had a taste for acting and the theatre, even contemplating a career on the boards. Famously, he cancelled an audition at Drury Lane because he had a cold, and before he could arrange another, his journalistic activities suddenly took off and he was lost to the stage. Instead, he indulged his passion for theatre in amateur dramatics, although there was nothing amateur about the all-consuming seriousness with which he took every aspect of the productions. At a charity benefit in which he participated, a stagehand told him, ‘What an actor you would have been, Mr Dickens, if it hadn't been for them
books
.' The idea of reading from his novels came to him relatively late: his debut was in Birmingham in 1853, reading from
A Christmas Carol
for a benefit, and the success of that and subsequent readings led him to embark, five years later, on the arduous and very well-paid professional tours which continued until a few months before his death, to which they may well have contributed a great deal, at the age of fifty-eight.

In his subtle and probing study, Malcolm Andrews, acknowledging the great pioneering work of Philip Collins, examines every aspect of this phenomenon, and in doing so comes very close the heart of the mystery of Charles Dickens, at the same time offering some strikingly original insights into the nature of acting and performance. At the core of his analysis is his understanding of the nature of what might be called the Dickens enterprise. What was he up to? What sort of relationship did he seek to establish with his readers (and eventually his audiences)? Andrews acutely notes that Dickens was the most successful – indeed the only really successful – writer of novels in serial form: the directness of the rapport with his readers, the sense that he was coming into their houses on a regular basis, that every fresh instalment was, as the
Illust
rated London News
observed, ‘as if we'd received a letter or a visit at regular intervals from a kindly observant gossip', appealed to him greatly. In 1841, after
Barnaby Rudge
, he determined to write a novel without serialising it as he wrote, but when it came to it, he missed the regular rapport with his readers too much. He regarded the relationship between reader and writer as one of ‘travelling companionship'. Andrews notes the sense of intimacy with his readers that approached collaboration: he was inundated by suggestions from the readers of
Pickwick
as to what should happen next. ‘To commune with the public in any form is a labour of love.' He aspired to ‘live in the household affections' and hoped that his characters would take their place ‘among the household gods' – as they assuredly did.

It was a logical step from this to public performance. Logical to us, that is, but for a Victorian, there was the terrible stigma of the theatre to overcome. Dickens agonised over the propriety of appearing not only in public, but for money; his best friend John Forster argued strongly against it, but Dickens's compulsive need for direct communication with his readers overcame all objections. At first, the readings were relatively low-key: the characters lightly sketched in and a conversational narratorial tone maintained. Increasingly, however, his desire to escape into character prevailed. He learned the texts by heart and rehearsed them intensively. As a young man and aspiring actor he had been deeply influenced by the actor-writer Charles Mathews, whose wittily designated monopolylogues had the performer playing several different people, as well as the narrator. Like Mathews, Dickens came increasingly to delight in abandoning himself to the characters, and this aspect of his performances drew the astonished admiration of his audiences (many of whom were professional actors themselves). ‘Assumption,' he said, ‘has charms for me… being someone in voice &c. not at all like myself.'

Before the audience's very eyes, and without the aid of props or costume, he would become David Copperfield, Mrs Gamp, Fagin. ‘The impersonator's very stature,' reported Charles Kent, ‘each time Fagin opened his lips, seemed to be changed instantaneously. Whenever he spoke there started before us – high-shouldered with contracted chest, with birdlike claws, eagerly anticipating by their every movement the passionate words… his whole aspect, half vulpine, half vulture-like, in its hungry wickedness.' This description underlines the fact that acting is above all an act of imagination rather than of external representation: it is an overpowering mental connection which produces a physical result. Malcolm Andrews finely says: ‘In order to get the right voice, in a concentrated way, Dickens had to move his full being into that of the character.' I can think of no better description of the art of acting, and Dickens's readings, bereft of any external aids, show this in particularly pure form. He explored in the flesh, as he had done in his novels, ‘the fissility of self', the multiphrenia latent in us all.

It cost him dear. He spoke of tearing himself to pieces, seeing himself as some sort of Orphic figure: ‘the modern embodiment of the old enchanters whose familiars tore them to pieces'. But his submission to this self-morcellation, as Andrews calls it, was in paradoxical service to the primary drive of his writing: reconstituting the sundered body of
society. Every one of his readings was in that sense a paradigm of the great effort of his work: healing society, restoring it to oneness. There is something medieval in his sense of the interconnectedness of everything. The contemporary
Times
reviewer who described these performances as a ‘return to the practice of Bardic times' correctly catches the oddly atavistic quality of Dickens. He was the enemy of Progress, in the Victorian sense, as much as he was of Poverty: alienation was what he set out to abolish, in himself as much as in society. When he read, the surge of affection from the public moved him to tears and helped, however, temporarily, to heal his own sense of internal estrangement; even I, a hundred and fifty years later, acting as a mere conduit for his work and personality, felt this massive affection for him rising up from the audience, the deep-rooted sense that he speaks to us and for us.

The readings gave him a spurious lease of life. His transformation from prematurely old, lame, frail man into energetic, vital, compelling storyteller was widely noted. It is something with which many of us in the theatre are familiar – Dr Theatre, we call it. But in this case, the treatment didn't cure him: it killed him. Andrews's last pages, describing the final reading – of
A Christmas Carol
, ending as he had begun – are inexpressibly moving. ‘From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful and affectionate farewell.' Andrews writes with deep imaginative sympathy of the phenomenon that was Dickens. ‘In mid-Victorian towns and cities he arrived in person to conduct people nightly into a world where the great blaze of Christmas celebrations issuing from the red hearth of the reading platform threw giant shadows around the hall of listeners, and where, for Scrooge, Past and Present, reality and illusion became therapeutically confused.'

The more I read about Dickens, the more I sensed that he represented,
both in his social attitudes and in his literary vision, a tradition which was
almost pre-Shakespearean; Chaucerian, perhaps; carnivalesque, like
Falstaff. (He had had rather a success as Falstaff, as it happens, in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, in his own fanatically well-rehearsed
production.) This piece was written for the
Chicago Examiner
in 2003
.

When he was already well-established as the most prosperous and famous novelist of his day – not just in England – Charles Dickens was to be found stalking the streets of London at dead of night, witnessing for himself the atrocious conditions under which laboured the wretched of the earth. ‘There lay, in an old egg box, which the mother had begged from a shop, a feeble, wasted, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in his little frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the little body from which he was slowly parting – there he lay quite quiet, quite patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said, he seldom complained. He lay there, seeming to wonder what it was all about. God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering – and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be.'

His anger thus fuelled, Dickens turned it into incandescent words – hundreds and hundreds of pages of journalism, speeches up and down the country, and of course the great novels of his maturity,
Bleak House
,
Hard Times
,
Little Dorrit
– in which he puts Britain at its industrial zenith in the dock, prosecuting with savage ferocity those whom he held responsible for the iniquities he had witnessed. His compassion had never been in doubt from the very first – from the early sketches he wrote under the name of Boz, from
The Pickwick Papers
and
Oliver Twist
– but to this was added a kind of volcanic rage which made him more than ever publicly identified with the disadvantaged. With
A Christmas Carol
and its explicit attacks on the disparity between those who have and those who do not, he had given the conscience of the age a powerful jolt, but that was just a beginning. From his early forties until his death some fifteen years later, he never ceased to engage with the howling injustice he saw all around him. This is not in itself, of course, enough to make a great novelist. But when this sort of active, practical, radical determination to reform the system under which he lived is allied to a genius for storytelling and an incomparable imagination in the creation of character, you have a pretty potent combination.

There is nothing distant or cool about Dickens, nothing formal or academic. His structures are big and unwieldy; he seems to be making it up as he goes along, which of course is exactly what he did, writing in episodes, sometimes knocking off three or four at a time for weekly or
monthly publication, as he pursued his active, not to say frantic, other life – corresponding, speechifying, editing (weekly journals and even, for a time, a crusading daily newspaper), partying, breeding (ten children by the time he was forty), performing conjuring tricks with nonchalant ease – the fruit of much serious rehearsal.

The thing that pulses through his work like an electric current is his almost carnal need to communicate with his readers. His relationship with them far exceeds in intensity any other relationship in his life: those with his children (devoted but formal), his wife (initially affectionate, ultimately disgusted), his friends (passionate but erratic), or even his hidden mistress Ellen Ternan, thirty years his junior; we can only conjecture at the nature of his feelings for her, though it is safe to say that an element of play-acting – he adopted the persona of ‘Mr Tringham' to throw the curious off the trail – must have formed a large part of them.

His relationship with his public was something quite different, altogether more real. Simply put, he needed their love in order to exist. Like a lover, he responded instantly to their moods and to their wants; they for their part expected him to speak for them, to express their joys and their miseries, to create for them their monsters and their comic heroes. Almost shamanically, he was possessed by their spirit, the great popular carnival spirit. His playful, metamorphosing language – distorting, personifying, now engorging, now withering, transforming a city into a single breathing organism or an individual into a swarming mass of grotesque features – is the vernacular mode at its most extended and its most exuberant. He embodies appetite, glories in extremes. This is where he can most be compared to Shakespeare, his immediate superior in the pantheon of English literature – in this, and in his matchless creation of character. Only in the matter of sex is he oddly reticent, almost blank. In every other area, his inventiveness is almost surreal, which is why adaptations of his books, attempting to treat him as a social realist, or a psychological realist, are so rarely successful. The screen and even the stage have a confining effect on the psychedelic fantasias of Dickens's pen.

In true carnival spirit, Dickens's work is a performance, generous and unstinting, for his audience of readers. We never forget that it is him that is doing it, nor that he is doing it for us. And, on cue, we laugh, we cry, we moan, we applaud. Dickens is the writer as actor. In life, of course, he acted whenever he had the opportunity, finally, triumphantly, taking to the boards with great tours of England and America in which he ‘read'
his own work. His audiences (who also knew his books by heart and who were more or less chanting the words in unison with him) were in ecstasy: they thronged to him in their thousands and the performances became cathartic experiences, both comic and tragic, on a grand scale. They were unprecedented events, only to be compared today in their emotional fervour to rock concerts; but they were implicit in the novels themselves: the literal performance was the logical extension of the literary one.