A Biography of Dickens by Fred Kaplan - Coursework Example

A Review of Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan Charles Dickens is widely recognized as England’s next best writer after Shakespeare. He not only wrote interesting and complex serial novels about life in Victorian England, capturing many elements of society, primarily the boundaries of then establishing middle class, but addressed many social issues he saw occurring in the world around him. These topics came to him as he either experienced them through his childhood and travels or as he encountered them in his work to try to reform some of the more blatant human concerns he saw occurring. More than simply writing fiction about these issues, which did provide a great service in giving these issues form and life within the minds of the populace reading them, fomenting thought and discussion, Dickens also worked within his community to try to bring about reform in numerous areas, such as educational institutions, factories, mines and in bringing services to the poor. He did this by writing articles, publishing journals, joining committees and writing letters to legislators and businesspeople in positions to help him with these causes. The complicated web of his life, his writing and his civic activities served to impact the development and understanding of Britain today, all of which is outlined in Fred Kaplan’s biography of Dickens based upon extensive research and analysis. Kaplan’s presentation is examined for style, sources and materials used as well as his credentials as a researcher and author to determine the probable accuracy of his interpretation of Dickens’ life and works. Dickens lived a very complex and active life, finding success in his field early on and blessed with a keen memory and showmanship ability to appeal to an audience. He is shown to have had a relatively happy childhood, particularly during his time in Kent. In the city and in the country, from serious drama and opera to comedy, spectacle and musical, in established theatres and in temporary outdoor sites frequented by traveling companies, the theatre was a magical presence, a precious alternate world. The excitement of the stage and of the histrionic, of an exaggerated bright spectacle that heightened life, caught his imagination from an early age.”1 Despite this carefree time, Dickens nevertheless seemed to have had uncertain feelings about his parents, developing an engaging stage presence as a means of winning their approval and affection and frequently being disappointed by them. This rift between Charles and his parents was widened when the family went into financial crisis and, although his older sister Fanny was provided education and boarding at the school, Charles was sent to work in Warren’s Blacking factory, gluing labels to pots of paste-blacking at the age of 12. This period in Dickens’ life was characterized by deep loneliness, significant loss of self-esteem and the oppression of dreams, hopes and ideals. Although he gained a great deal of information regarding the lower classes and their way of life and survival, including those within Marshalsea that he would use to great effect in his later works, his family’s treatment of him at this time finally cemented his understanding of himself as somehow less valuable to them than the other members of the group, particular upon his father’s release from prison. “Whereas everyone else had been liberated, he was still imprisoned”2 and Charles’ release from the blacking factory ‘prison’ was not occasioned by any concern for his welfare, but was instead occasioned by an external antagonism between his father and the factory owner. Finally, his mother insisted that Charles return to work at the blacking factory while his father insisted that he go back to school, thus making it certain that Charles “was both only a pawn and at the same time the cause of such a bitter quarrel.”3 These early experiences informed and shaped the author Dickens, instilling in him a deep-seated interest and fascination with the social circumstances that constrained lives regardless of hopes or promises in youth and would affect his activities throughout the remainder of his life. The psychological effect of these times is expressed throughout all of Dickens’ work. His continuing concern regarding the plight of the oppressed and the poor was coupled with an intense horror of extreme poverty, which he avoided writing about in any great degree until Hard Times (1854). His novels can be seen to increasingly address the social concerns of the day. For example, in Pickwick Papers (1836), he avoids much discussion into issues of poverty, class identification and industrialization that he addresses in future novels and instead creates a series that “at its core is a definition of human nature as essentially benevolent, as desirably Pickwickian. The scenery of Kent, the dignity of Rochester, the comedy of farce and remediation, the glow of Christmas, dominate the Pickwickian self-definition.”4 By Oliver Twist, he was more introspective, capturing many of his childhood feelings as a lonely and hard-working poor boy in the blacking factory. Here, too, he begins to address those social issues that had placed him in such a position regardless of his personal sensibilities, aspirations or talents. In Nicholas Nickleby (1838), he begins to address more intensely social issues such as regulating the educational system, making education available to more children and the effects of poverty on children. As a result of this shift from external satire to internal reflection to commingled interest, Nicholas Nickleby became the starting point of Dickens’s foray into an area of writing he had not previously considered with all seriousness. Combining his early experiences and psychological makeup with the stories of his youth, Dickens’ work also became a voice that decried all that was ill with Victorian education and the issues involving social mobility during his time. Again incorporating a good deal of biographical detail into the story, Dickens can be seen to work his way through his issues of parental disgrace on the part of his father and his mother’s frivolous unconcern while exploring the concepts and issues of gentile poverty. In The Old Curiosity Shop he again worked out his personal demons in the death of Little Nell, who echoed the death of Mary Hogarth even as he explores the effects of gentile poverty and lack of appropriate resources and community services. However, while Dickens is effective in pointing out several social ills that had come about as a direct result of Industrialization, modernization, colonization and economic shifts, he does not begin to focus on these issues to any great detail until he is able to discover that the issues faced by Britain were not unique to this country’s particular political structure, but were being confronted by other nations as well. It was his trip to America in 1842 that opened his eyes to the idea that these social problems were not endemic to England alone. “America had brought him sharply to the conclusion that there were no easy solutions to long-standing social problems … Mankind needed a reformation of heart before it could substantially reform the political and economic structures it had created. Justice and charity in the public world could only come from such virtues in the private individual. Much depended on how powerful were the voices calling for reformation, how responsive the ears and hearts that heard.”5 Dickens realized, through his own popularity and profession, he was in a unique position to bring about this type of change by working upon the hearts and minds of his reading public. By bringing various issues to the attention of the public, exposing the fallacies of the situation, such as the generally held concept that poverty was brought about as the result of some divine judgment or poor character. “Soon after returning to England, he entered the public debate on … the working conditions for women and children in the coal-mining industry.”6 By 1843 he was touring the ‘ragged’ schools and arguing for educational reform as the most effective means of preventing criminality in adults and the development of slums. “Educated children were likely to become socially productive citizens … The best antidote to criminal irreversibility was to catch the criminal in formation, in childhood, before poverty, disease, and ignorance had transformed the malleable child into the hardened malefactor. Universal education was essential, for all classes, from an early age, and the ragged schools seemed to him a start.”7 From this point forward, Dickens continued to focus on reforming conditions for the poor, particularly for women and children who had few rights, opportunities or options in determining their own fate. Kaplan presents Dickens’ story as just that, a story of one man’s life. He doesn’t separate his book into segments that cover Dickens’ fictional writings, non-fiction writing and personal life, but instead presents them as they were lived. This allows personal life events to overlap with the authorship of a new novel as it is influenced by past life events and an increasing awareness of social issues and Dickens realization of his social responsibility. For example, in discussing Dickens’ childhood, Kaplan illustrates how and why the Kent of his childhood continued to appear in his later fiction works and what it served to represent for him. “That landscape was the primal home of Dickens’ imagination. All his ‘early readings’ dated from this place. In his memory, he bathed that vista in a glow of calm summers, of celebratory winters. That radiant landscape became forever associated with the time in which he felt young and loved. The garden of his creative fruitfulness, a place initially almost without dark shadows, it was the home to which he regularly returned, in his novels and in his life, his place of refreshment until refreshment was no longer possible.”8 This style of allowing the history of the man to intertwine with the history of his works and activities gives the impression that the reader is gaining a more intuitive sense of the living person and a deeper concept of his motivations and involvement in the works produced. The sense that the personal man is being presented is reinforced by the continual emphasis on the effect of Dickens’ early life on the direction of his works. The effect of the presentation is a Dickens incapable of escaping the psychological damage of the past despite inventing multiple means of working it out in the form of 15 autobiographical novels. “Kaplan’s Dickens was doomed to misery whatever he did. Feeling deprived of a dependable family, he created one inordinately dependent upon himself. Undervalued by a self-indulgent mother, he chained himself to an apathetic wife.”9 Despite this appeal to the emotional side of Dickens’ character, it is recognized by more than one critic that Kaplan’s sentimentality regarding the author is less sincere in its presentation than earlier, and wordier, biographers. Rather than being concerned with presenting the nature of Dickens, Kaplan is accused of advancing his own ego as a quality author at the expense of his subject. “Admirable in itself, Kaplan’s intellectualism is of small value, and is sometimes a hindrance, in providing the imagination with something resembling the real life Dickens.”10 In considering this criticism, it is important to keep in mind that one of Kaplan’s objectives in writing the book was to provide a more manageable biography of Charles Dickens than some of his predecessors had produced. Kaplan’s attempt to condense the details of a complicated man’s complicated and busy life into the small space of a single volume has to make allowances somewhere. Despite the attempts to capture the living, breathing man, Kaplan focuses on only one aspect of Dickens’ character, the traumas of his childhood as they manifested themselves within his work. This has the effect of reducing this exploration to an exercise in conciseness that detracts from the attempt to portray the man. “Kaplan’s new biography of Dickens is an achievement in conciseness, slighting no aspect of Dickens’s life or work.”11 Yet, in attempting to condense all this information into a manageable size, there is “a certain coolness or distancing effect; and this means that we experience mainly analysis rather than the spirit of generous sympathy naturally taking the form of spirited narration and depiction.”12 This coolness of spirit is continued into the presentation of photographs, drawings and other illustrations in the center of the book. While the individuals are identified in each image and are known to the reader of the book, reminders of who these people were and why they are important to an understanding of Dickens’ life and work is not readily available. The reader must undertake the scholarly search through indexes and contents to find the specific information they want. This difficulty of quickly and accurately finding specific information within the book despite the availability of a lengthy index serves as an unfriendly blockade to the reader who perhaps does not wish to spend hours trying to discover one piece of evidence regarding Dickens’ relationship with Collins, for example. Kaplan does have numerous credentials and ample experience undertaking projects of this type and scope. According to the Biography Resource Center,13 specific Dickens credentials held by Kaplan include his serving as the Dickens Society president in 1990-1991, the publication of his book Dickens and Mesmerism and the editing of several books including Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist: Authoritative Text; Charles Dickens, Hard Times; and Dickens Studies Annual 1980 -. He edited, transcribed and annotated Charles Dickens’ Book of Memoranda and has published numerous articles focused on a study of Charles Dickens. In terms of less specific authorial credits, Kaplan has an impressive record here as well. Awards he has received include a Guggenheim Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist (1984). None of these credentials, however, offer him any expertise in the area of psychoanalysis, of which he seems to pull from strongly in his assessment of Dickens’ character. This is noted by Monod who says, “Another potential drawback of the book is the constant, conscientious and at times tiresomely systematic use of psychoanalysis. Kaplan may seem to overwork the bad-mother theme.”14 Since this psychological analysis provides a great deal of the foundational understanding in the book, it is important to recognize that Kaplan holds no specific qualifications in this area. While there is no new information to be had regarding Dickens and his life, making it inevitable that new biographies would have little to add to the existing canon, critics have provided some clues as to how Kaplan’s volume differs from other available biographies. “For example he usually offers more on the correspondences between Dickens’s female characters and their historical counterparts, and Kaplan is slightly more searching and more candid on Dickens’s marital life and on his relationships with his mistress, Ellen Ternan.”15 It can be assumed that a great deal of Kaplan’s confidence in this area is due to his conviction that he has accurately and completely psychoanalyzed Dickens’ personality in its complete context of childhood issues, family positions and other personal events in his adulthood. Whether correct or not, this is information that is not typically available in other volumes and thus provides some new light on the man as he lived and related to others. “Occasionally Kaplan is too sure that he knows Dickens’s experience better than Dickens himself knew it. In 1858 Dickens told Angela Coutts that in the first months of his marriage Mary Hogarth understood that the marriage was ‘as miserable a one as ever was.’ Kaplan claims that Dickens exaggerates: there could not have been so much trouble so soon.”16 This seems a tremendously bold thing to say, considering one cannot even say they know their own living family member close enough to be able to refute this sort of knowledge. It would seem if anyone would be in a position of sufficient authority to determine whether the marriage was already suffering signs of failure at such an early date, Dickens himself and his observant and intelligent sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, who lived with the couple at the time, would be those individuals. Through an analysis of the life and times of Charles Dickens as they are presented by the author of this biography as well as the credentials and experience of the biographer himself, it is possible to begin making conditional inferences regarding the information learned. For example, while the biography paints a portrait of a man constantly tormented by the embarrassment and humiliation of his youth despite his many attempts to write them out in his novels, an examination of the biographer and his approach reveals this may be largely the result of the biographer’s particular approach to his subject. Kaplan has been shown to dwell perhaps too much on the psychoanalytic conclusions he has drawn regarding Dickens to the extent that he ignores any other motivations and drives the man might have had, including natural and common human desires existing independently of his issues with his mother and his childhood. Understanding that Kaplan does not have credentials in this arena, although he holds several in English and literature studies particularly as they apply to Dickens, further reduces his credibility in basing so much of his understanding on this analysis. At the same time, Kaplan’s extensive research and approach to the topic serves to reinforce the concept that a man does not work in a bubble, independent of the world around him, the pressures of his present or the ghosts of his past. His more extensive look at the relationships between the women in Dickens’ life and the women in his novels provides some useful insights into his character, his messages and his conceptions regarding the social issues he addressed and why they were so important to him. It is seen in the book as well that as Dickens developed as a writer and became more involved in addressing the social issues of the day, he did end up having some effect on the life and history of Britain. By bringing attention to the hearts and minds of Victorian people regarding the impossible living conditions of the poor, the hopelessness of a future for an uneducated youth and the unavoidable destitution and usually prostitution of women incapable of finding gainful employment due to both lack of education and lack of opportunity, Dickens spurred many people to act to begin addressing these issues, introducing the arguments into the general discourse and allowing the people to carry the action with constant reminders from subsequent novels dealing with the same issues. References Beum, Robert. (1990). “Dickens Once More.” Sewanee Review. Vol. 98, N. 1, Winter 1990. Biography Resource Center. (2007). “Fred Kaplan.” Contemporary Authors Online. New York: Thomson Gale. Kaplan, Fred. (1988). Dickens: A Biography. New York: William, Morrow and Company. Meckier, Jerome. (Autumn 1989). “Review: Dickens: A Biography.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies. Vol. 21, N. 3. Monod, Sylvere. (Spring 1990). “Review: Dickens: A Biography.” Victorian Studies. Vol. 33, N. 3: 513-515. Read More