Claire Tomalin: Charles Dickens: A Life (Audiobook Extract) read by Alex Jennings by Penguin Books UK

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.

At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children.

Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

This audiobook will soon be available to buy form iTunes UK and Audible.co.uk

‘Gripping, galloping... Tomalin has captured Dickens, in sun and shadow, with all the full-hearted exuberance, generosity and keen wit that he merits.’ Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

'She has the gift of being able to set a scene and a time with compelling vividness. This is a superb biography of a great writer' William Boyd, Observer

'Clear-eyed, sympathetic and scholarly, she spreads the whole canvas, alive with incident and detail, with places and people. It is wonderfully done' Economist

'With Claire Tomalin as our guide, the life of Charles Dickens, 200 years after his birth, reads as newly minted as one of his novels' Sunday Express

‘Tomalin is the nimblest of narrators... with a steady gaze, she does her utmost to single out the many Charles Dickenses that made up the man. Magnificent’ Chris Moss, Time Out

‘Hypnotically vivid...’ Jenny Uglow, The Guardian

‘A book that goes to the heart of the mystery of Dickens as a writer.’ A N Wilson, New Statesman

‘Flawless…superb.’ William Boyd, Observer

‘Vivid, illuminating…fascinating.’ John Carey, Sunday Times

‘Superb…meticulous…fine’ Miriam Margoyles, The Times

‘Deft, acute, magisterial.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The inimitable biographer.’ Independent

Amazon placed Charles Dickens at number 6 in their list of their favourite books this year! They said:

“Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature--his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being--while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great--his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination and showmanship-- finally destroyed him. The man who emerges is one of extraordinary contradictions, whose vices and virtues were intertwined as surely as his life and his art.”

Prologue: The Inimitable
1840

14 January 1840, London. An inquest is being held at Marylebone Workhouse, a muddled complex of buildings spread over a large area between the Marylebone Road and Paddington Street. The Beadle, a parish officer responsible for persuading householders to do their duty as jurors at such inquests, has assembled twelve men. Most of them are middle-aged local tradesmen, but one stands out among them as different. He is young and slight, smartly dressed and good-looking, neither tall nor short at five foot nine inches, with dark hair falling in curls over his forehead and collar. He is a new resident who has just moved into a fine airy house with a large garden, close to Regent’s Park at York Gate: it is No. 1 Devonshire Terrace, from which the Beadle has made haste to summon him to his duty.

It is only a short walk from Devonshire Terrace to the workhouse, but it is a different world he has entered through its gates. He is directed to a room in which the other jurors are talking among themselves as they wait for the inquest to begin. They have come to pronounce on a case of suspected infanticide, a servant girl accused of killing her newborn baby in the kitchen of her employers’ house. One of the jurors immediately declares himself in favour of the utmost rigour of the law being applied to the young woman. The new young juror recognizes him as a furniture-dealer he suspects of cheating him over the recent purchase of a pair of card tables. Another solid parishioner presses his card into his hand, murmuring that he hopes to be of service to him in the future: he is an undertaker.

Before they can settle down for the inquest the jurors must be taken downstairs to the workhouse mortuary in the basement to be shown the body of the baby. It is lying on a box set upon a clean white cloth, with a surgical instrument beside it that has been used to open it up for examination. The baby has been sewn up again. The new juror, who has a two- month-old baby daughter of his own at home – Katey – reflects that it looks as though the cloth were laid and the Giant coming to dinner, but he does not share this thought with his fellow jurors. They agree among themselves that the mortuary is clean and well whitewashed, the foreman says, ‘All right, gentlemen? Back again, Mr Beadle,’ and they troop upstairs. The coroner is Thomas Wakley, a surgeon and until recently a Member of Parliament. The new juror is Charles Dickens.

Now the young woman accused of murder is brought in by one of the workhouse nurses. She looks weak, ill and frightened. She is allowed to sit in one of the horsehair chairs and tries to hide her face on the shoulder of the unsympathetic nurse. Eliza Burgess is twenty-four or five years old, a maid of all work and an orphan, which may be why there is uncertainty about her age. It is likely that she grew up in a workhouse, quite possibly this one. Her story is that on Sunday, 5 January, she went into labour in the kitchen of her employers’ house, No. 65 Edgware Road, where she was the only servant. When the front doorbell rang, she hurried upstairs to let in two lady visitors, and by the time she got back to the kitchen the baby – a boy – had been born under her skirts and appeared to be dead. It is not clear whether the birth took place on the stairs, but she delivered him herself, and must have cut the umbilical cord and cleaned up as best she could. Then she found a box, or a pot, in which she placed the dead newborn child and hid him under the dresser. Her mistress, Mrs Mary Symmons, sent her up to scrub the front-door steps in the cold after her guests left, and then, seeing how ill and thin she looked, taxed her with having given birth. At first she denied it, but then, being threatened with a medical examination, confessed and showed Mrs Symmons where she had put the baby. Mrs Symmons sent for a hackney coach to remove Eliza and her dead child from her house to the Marylebone Workhouse infirmary.

Mrs Symmons appears as an unsympathetic witness and resists questions from Dickens, who hopes to give a favourable turn to the case. The coroner gives a look of encouragement to the juror and the accused girl wails. The next witness is the house surgeon, Mr Boyd, who reports that the accused told him she was seized with labour in the kitchen when the bell was rung by two ladies. She hurried to let them in, and ‘in the act of doing so the child was born, and on her return it was dead’. He is not able to say positively whether it was born alive or dead. Afterwards, in private conversation, Mr Wakley tells Dickens that it is very unlikely that the child could have drawn more than a few breaths, if indeed any, since there was foreign matter in his windpipe.

Miss Burgess is led away while the jurors discuss the case. Dickens resolves to take on those who are ready to find her guilty of killing her child, and, with some encouragement from Mr Wakley, he argues against them, so firmly and forcefully that he wins the argument. When Miss Burgess is brought back the verdict is given: ‘Found Dead’. She falls on her knees to thank the jurors, ‘with protestations that we were right – protestations among the most affecting that I have ever heard in my life’. Then she faints, and is carried away. She will still have to be held in prison and appear at the Old Bailey in due course, but the threat of the death penalty has now been taken from her. Dickens, who is without doubt the busiest man of the twelve, goes home and makes arrangements for her to be sent food and other comforts in prison. He also finds an excellent barrister – Richard Doane of the Inner Temple, a friend and amanuensis of the late Jeremy Bentham – to defend her at the Old Bailey trial.

That night he cannot sleep. He is overcome with sickness and indigestion, does not want to be alone and asks his wife, Catherine, to sit up with him. The dead baby in the workhouse, the thought of prison and the terrified, ignorant, unhappy young woman prisoner have upset him. In the morning he writes to his closest friend, John Forster, ‘Whether it was the poor baby, or its poor mother, or the coffin, or my fellow-jurymen, or what not, I can’t say . . .’ He already knows a good deal about prisons, since he has seen his father held in one for debt. Also about babies dying, since two of his younger siblings perished early – happily his own three little ones are stout and healthy. And he knows about maids of all work, or ‘slaveys’, well remembering the one who served his family when he was a boy, straight out of the workhouse where she grew up. He recovers from his sickness, and in the evening he and Forster meet at the Adelphi Theatre to see Jack Sheppard – the highwayman – played en travesti by Mary Anne Keeley, an actress well known to Dickens, since he had taken lessons in acting from her husband eight years earlier.

Charles Dickens had been observing the world about him since he was a child, and reporting on what he saw for the past six years, as a journalist and then as a novelist. Much of it amused him, but more of it upset him: the poverty, the hunger, the ignorance and squalor he saw in London, and the indifference of the rich and powerful to the condition of the poor and ignorant. Through his own energy and exceptional gifts he had raised himself out of poverty. But he neither forgot it, nor turned aside from the poverty about him. He drew attention to it in his books, and he was personally generous with his time and his money, and not only in the case of Eliza Burgess.

Her case came up at the Old Bailey on 9 March and was reported in The Times the next day. She was indicted for unlawfully concealing the birth of a male child delivered on the 5th of January. Her barrister, Mr Doane, pleaded that she was of weak intellect. He was also able to produce a crucial witness to her character, Mr Clarkson, a tradesman in Great Russell Street; she had previously worked for his family, and he was willing to do his best for her. Mr Clarkson said his wife was greatly interested in Eliza and had got her a promise of a place in the Magdalen Asylum, an institution that looked after young women who strayed from the path of virtue, and did its best to restore them to it. The Clarksons were willing to take her back into their service until she could be admitted there. The willingness of these respectable people to help Eliza was good for her case. The jury found her guilty of concealment but strongly recommended her to mercy. The judge, Mr Serjeant Arabin, said that under the circumstances he would respite judgment till next session, and that meanwhile she was free. Nothing more is heard of her except a brief word by Dickens that her sentence had been lenient, and that ‘her history and conduct proved it right.’ This was written twenty-three years later, in 1863: Dickens had stored up the memory of the sad young woman.

This is a very small episode in the life of Dickens, but it allows us to see him in action, going to the workhouse just along the road from his own home, and deciding to help a young woman whose character and history are quite without interest or colour, and who comes from the very bottom of the social heap, a workhouse child, a servant and a victim – a victim of ignorance, of gullibility, of an unknown seducer and a harsh employer, and of the assumptions made by respectable jurors. He is at his best as a man, determined in argument, generous in giving help, following through the case, motivated purely by his profound sense that it was wrong that she should be victimized further.

What makes his behaviour the more remarkable is that he was himself living under intense pressure at this time in 1840. He was very successful, and also exhausted. He had spent the past four years in the hard labour of writing three long novels in monthly instalments, huge efforts of imagination and penmanship that had lifted him from obscurity to fame and comfort. Their publication as serials established a new style in publishing and reached a new public, because the paper numbers were cheap to buy and could be passed round, collected and preserved; and they found readers who were for the first time buying fiction to keep on a shelf at home. The names of his characters passed into the language: Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Oliver, Squeers, Smike. The voice of Dickens, offering fun and jokes, then switching to pathos, with a good peppering of indignation, seemed like the voice of a friend. His stories were dramatized and played in theatres all over the country – Mary Anne Keeley took the part of Smike at the Adelphi. His success was unprecedented and thrilling, but he felt the strain, because his income and standard of living depended on keeping up the pace. He had no savings, lived from month to month, and worried about money; yet he had just vowed not to commit himself to another serial novel, having convinced himself that he could earn as much for less work by becoming editor of a new weekly journal. In January 1840, in the very month of the inquest, he was starting work on the first numbers.

He was able to keep many servants, a horse for himself, and a coach, with a fourteen- year-old lad to drive it, John Thompson, who would remain in his service in different capacities for the next twenty-six years. He took his family out of town for a month in June and again in September, and also made short pleasure trips with his wife – ‘my missis’ or ‘my better half’. At the same time he was being lionized, invited by the ultra- respectable and rich Miss Coutts (court dress required when royalty present), by the less respectable but very clever Lady Holland, and by the wholly unrespectable, brilliant and charming Lady Blessington and her companion Count D’Orsay. His missis did not go with him to these ladies’ houses, or to the breakfast given by Richard Monckton Milnes, man of letters and Tory Member of Parliament. Lord Northampton, President of the Royal Society, invited him to a reception at his house in Piccadilly. Thomas Carlyle got him to attend an early meeting about the establishment of the London Library, and Dickens became a supporter and subscriber. There was a great demand for engravings of his portrait, and his head was being modelled by an admiring sculptor.

This was Dickens nearly halfway through his life: he was twenty-eight in February 1840, and had another thirty years ahead of him. He was living in a country that had been at peace for a quarter of a century. There had been no foreign wars, and no revolution at home, partly thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832, passed under the old King, William IV, in which parliamentary constituencies were redrawn and the electorate widened, cautiously. But the courts and alleys of London remained squalid with poverty, overcrowding and disease, and the rich in their great houses were unshaken. Railways were changing the habits of the nation more than votes, and railway stations at Euston and Paddington already connected London to the north and the West Country. New Oxford Street had just been cut, and the Finchley Road, the Caledonian and Camden Road, and Charles Barry was designing Trafalgar Square. In January the penny post was established, covering the whole country: in its first year it would double the volume of letters written. London was preparing for a royal wedding on 10 February, when the young Queen Victoria was to be married to a German prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In parliament there was a debate over what allowance should be paid to the foreign Prince. It was settled at £30,000, and in the streets people sang, ‘Prince Hallbert he vill alvays be/My own dear Fancy Man’ – at any rate according to Dickens. The novelist pretended to fall in love with the Queen, went to Windsor and lay down on the ground outside the castle to show his passion, to the considerable surprise of passers-by.

Dickens was still a young man. His grammar could be shaky, his clothes too flamboyant – ‘geraniums and ringlets’ mocked Thackeray – his hospitality too splendid, his temper fierce, but his friends – mostly artists, writers and actors – loved him, and their love was reciprocated. When he went out of London in order to have peace to write, he would within days summon troops of friends to join him. He was a giver of celebratory parties, a player of charades, a dancer of quadrilles and Sir Roger de Coverleys. He suffered from terrible colds and made them into jokes: ‘Bisery, bisery,’ he complained, or ‘I have been crying all day . . . my nose is an inch shorter than it was last Tuesday, from constant friction.’ He worked furiously fast to give himself free time. He lived hard and took hard exercise. His day began with a cold shower, and he walked or rode every day if he could, arduous expeditions of twelve, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, often summoning a friend to go with him. He might be in his study from ten at night until one in the morning, or up early to be at his desk by 8.30, writing with a quill pen he sharpened himself and favouring dark blue ink. He was taking French lessons from a serious teacher. He was also doing his best to help a poor carpenter with literary ambitions, reading what he had written and finding him work.

He was an obsessive organizer of his surroundings, even rearranging the furniture in hotel rooms: he wrote to Catherine from a hotel in Bath, ‘of course I arranged both the room and my luggage before going to bed’; and, from lodgings in Broadstairs, to an old friend, ‘the furniture in all the rooms has been entirely re-arranged by the same extraordinary character’ – he meant himself. He smoked cigars, and often mentions his wine-dealers in letters, and the brandy, gin, port, sherry, champagne, claret and Sauternes delivered and enjoyed; and although he was very rarely the worse for drink, he sometimes confessed to feeling bad in the mornings after overindulging the night before. Raspberries were his favourite fruit, served without cream, and he was very fond of dates in boxes. He belonged to the Garrick Club and the Athenaeum, and he knew and frequented all the theatres in London and could ask any of their managers for a box when he wanted one. Eating out, going to the theatre, adventuring through the rough areas of London with a friend or two were habitual ways of spending his evening. He also walked the streets by himself, observing and thinking. He was passionately interested in prisons and in asylums, the places where society’s rejects are kept.

He revisited the Marylebone Workhouse ten years later, in May 1850, when it held 2,000 inmates of all ages from newborn to dying, and wrote a painfully vivid account of the place: the smell of so many people kept in wards together, the listlessness, the dreary diet, the sullen lethargy of the old who had nothing to look forward to except death. He found then that it was redeemed by one thing – the good care given to the pauper children, who were kept in large, light, airy rooms at the top of one of the buildings, and who impressed him as lively and cheerful as they ate their potatoes, with ‘two mangy pauper rocking-horses rampant in the corner’. But what struck him most was the grief of one of the pauper nurses, a ‘flabby, raw-boned, untidy’ woman of coarse aspect, who had been tending a ‘dropped child’ – one found in the street – and was now sobbing bitterly because the child had died. Once again he did his best to help: ‘If anything useful can be done for her, I should like to do it,’ he wrote, ‘if you can put me in the way of helping her, do me the kindness of telling me how it can be best done?’ he wrote to Jacob Bell, the philanthropist and MP. Once again, it was a poor woman and a dead child who spoke to him.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation – and sometimes sobs. He stored up his experiences and reactions as raw material to transform and use in his novels, and was so charged with imaginative energy that he rendered nineteenth-century England crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation – and sentimentality. Even one of his most hostile critics acknowledged that he described London ‘like a special correspondent for posterity’. Early in his writing career he started to call himself ‘the inimitable’: it was partly a joke with him, but not entirely, because he could see that there was no other writer at work who could surpass him, and that no one among his friends or family could even begin to match his energy and ambition. He could make people laugh and cry, and arouse anger, and he meant to amuse and to make the world a better place. And wherever he went he produced what, much later, an observant girl described as ‘a sort of brilliance in the room, mysteriously dominant and formless. I remember how everyone lighted up when he entered.’