Born to parents in service but always sure that he could do better, his early life and aspirations were made complicated by the possibility that he might have been the illegitimate son of his parents’ master. He was as genteelly incapable of living within his means as was Micawber, and the famous maxim, ‘Annual income twenty pounds…’ is one of John Dickens’ own. Chapter 1 is ‘The Sins of the Fathers’, and those pre-echoes start early: his father, John Dickens, is the model for Mr Micawber.
The man’s a dynamo, and Tomalin ends the Prologue with the words of someone who met him: ‘I remember how everyone lighted up when he entered.’Ĭhapters 1 and 2 cover Dickens’ life up to the age of 15, and they begin – unlike Dickens in David Copperfield – long before he was born. Dickens is already successful, already well-known for his humour and compassion both in his writing and his life… and he has so much energy that when he refers to himself, perhaps only half-jokingly, as ‘the Inimitable’ we can see what he means. She widens the scope, and soon she has mentioned characters from his first three novels: Pickwick, Oliver and one we have to place for ourselves, Squeers. He successfully argues for her, and later helps her to find a new job – at a time, Tomalin tells us, when he must have been ‘the busiest’ of all the jurors. To begin with he is an unnamed juror at an inquest in which a sad little maid is questioned about the death of her newborn child. The Prologue is a clever move: eight pages subtitled ‘The Inimitable, 1840’, describing an episode when Dickens was 28. But Tomalin chooses to begin somewhere else entirely. I was aware of the recent publication of Tomalin’s book as I was reading both of them, and I always intended to read it to find out more about how Dickens made use of incidents and experiences from his own life.Īs expected, Chapters 1 and 2 are full of ghostly echoes, or pre-echoes, of the novels. And I only finished re-reading Great Expectations last month, a novel in which Dickens develops a more reflective approach to the subject of growing from childhood to mature adulthood. I’ve re-read David Copperfield recently, the one Dickens called his ‘favourite child’ – it isn’t my favourite at all – and everybody knows it’s full of autobiographical elements. I don’t usually read literary biographies, but I must be in the perfect target group for this one.
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