Claire Tomalin on Dickens

Embarrassingly, I haven't read Claire Tomalin's widely credited Charles Dickens: A Life. However, you needn't have to read the book to get a wonderful feel for the author whose name has been for centuries a house-hold name, just hear Tomalin talk. To be honest, Claire Tomalin has done so many talks on Dickens this year in celebration of his bicentenary that I'm surprised she still has a voice...

Think Dickens, think the Victorian working classes, novels, debtor's prisons, ridiculous hair, obsessions etc but Tomalin brought colour and life last night to a man we thought we knew so much about already. When asked by a member of the audience why she decided to take on a person of whom there are already so many biographies, Tomalin eloquently said that biographies are like portraits - there are never too many as each author, each angle, each style is different even if the subject is, essentially, the same.

In this case, Tomalin decided to dedicate many pages to Dickens best friend, John Forster. If you think about how much of your life is taken up with and informed by your friends, it seems staggering that there is not more information about Dickens' friendship with Forster when so much of his material was inevitably influenced in some way, however small, by the people around him. According to Tomalin, for instance, it was Forster who insisted that David Copperfield were written in the first person - a device rarely used at the time, except Jane Eyre, which Dickens did not read but Forster almost certainly did. Forster was a critic and biographer and would have read an awful lot - in fact he wrote a biography of Dickens himself.

Dickens was completely convinced that 'the little people' in life should be explored, written about and given a voice and his books certainly do that. Outside his writing, however, he did a hell of a lot. He regularly visited the inmates at prisons all over the country, he wrote to friends in high places to donate money to London's ragged schools for the poor, he published his novels in cheap, serialised form so that everyone could afford them and he travelled endlessly to perform to people all over the world until his death.

Not to say he wasn't flawed... but a really interesting guy. I'm gonna go buy the book now. Don't you just hate it when you become aware of how easily sold to you are? *sighs*