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Of the making of books by, about, from, around, among, between — pick your preposition — Charles Dickens, there apparently is no end. He wrote constantly, published promiscuously, lived intensely, dreamed extravagantly.
And if that wasn’t enough, Dickens influenced, inspired and challenged others to produce amazing things too. The thriving field of what we might call Contingent Dickens — works based on Dickens’ works, or on his life or on the Victorian era that his vivid word portraits made famous — is a significant literary genre in its own right.
Consider “A Christmas Carol,” one of Dickens’ best-known tales, beginning its Yuletide run on stages across the country. Consider the new film version of the same tale, with Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, the mean old miser who gets his holiday comeuppance. Consider “Drood” (2009), the brooding, brilliant Dan Simmons novel that features a distastefully conniving Dickens. Consider “The Last Dickens” (2009), Matthew Pearl’s fictional picture of Dickens’ American lecture tour. Consider “Mr. Timothy” (2003), Louis Bayard’s strikingly atmospheric novel that imagines the adult Tiny Tim, the cheerful urchin in “Carol.”
Film, stage, television, comic book, Internet and drama-class adaptations of Dickens’ stories? Numberless as the stars.
Wrapping one’s arms around Dickens is no easy task. He was too big, too restless, too productive, too accomplished, too complicated, too mysterious. He was a journalist and a publisher and an actor and a social reformer. He wrote very long novels — “Bleak House,” “David Copperfield”— but he could also write pleasingly short ones such as “Great Expectations” and “Hard Times.” He had a sophisticated intellect, but he also loved a good belly laugh.
Thus no one gets Dickens whole and entire — you might as well try lassoing the ocean — but Michael Slater’s new biography, “Charles Dickens: A Life Defined By Writing” (Yale University Press), makes the kind of valiant attempt that Dickens himself would have admired. Slater’s book is downright Dickensian — that is, it’s a beautiful profusion of facts, insights and observations that, detail by detail, bring a recognizable world into crisp and scintillating focus.
It is also the definitive record of a solid professional life. Authors must be businessmen and businesswomen, not just dreamy-eyed creators. While some biographies focus on the mystical sources of a writer’s creativity, “Charles Dickens” is about Dickens the diligent professional, the man who made a living from literature —against rather substantial odds, given his scrappy childhood. In the end, Dickens’ greatest creation may have been not Martin Chuzzlewit or Ebenezer Scrooge, but himself as a successful author.
“All his life,” Slater writes of the author’s early years, “Dickens took pride (with good reason) in his efficient time management and ability to keep many balls in the air at once ... Despite his already crowded schedule, he is taking on more and more work with the object of getting himself into a position in which he would be able to turn full-time author.”
The means by which Dickens achieved this — a methodical climb up the social and professional ladder, a steady accumulation of business contacts and contracts and canny publishing ventures, the endless hustle — is the true drama of Slater’s book.
Where did Dickens get the energy?
That’s the question bound to haunt any reader of “Charles Dickens.” Unlike contemporary authors whose delicate sensibilities send them shrinking back from the bad old world — the Thomas Pynchons, the J.D. Salingers — Dickens was a vital, fully engaged presence in mid-19th century Britain, getting his hands dirty and heart broken in the great social issues of his day.
He raged against social injustice while maintaining a fantastically demanding writing schedule and a complicated family life.
This is still Dickens’ world, even in 2009.
It’s a world filled with his characters and his ideas about what motivates people, be it greed or love or fear or ambition. The fact that so many of his characters are still around us, in plays and in movies and in our vocabulary — “Scrooge” is firmly embedded in the lexicon — means that Dickens’ energy is still very present, a sort of cultural aurora borealis.
Check the horizon: There it is, a shimmering dance of light, eternally reflecting us back to ourselves.
