Two years after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870, his closest friend, John Forster, published the first volume of his Life of Charles Dickens. Based on letters Dickens had written to him and stories he had told him, it was, in effect, an authorised biography. For Dickens buffs, it has always been both a matchless source and an untrustworthy narrative. By Helena Kelly’s account, it is more misleading than the most sceptical biographer has supposed. Far from Forster being Dickens’s hagiographer, he was his dupe. We have always known that Dickens aimed to manage his reputation; as Kelly sees it, this led him to deeper deceit than anyone has previously imagined.
So, for instance, Forster was the first to make public what Dickens said was the most crushing experience of his life: being sent, aged 12, to work in a blacking warehouse. It was an experience that he handed on to the young protagonist of David Copperfield. “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” Dickens wrote, in the account Forster quoted. Yet Kelly picks at some inconsistencies about dates to suppose that it was all fiction. Dickens wanted us to believe he had been neglected and mistreated: it made for a great story of triumph over adversity.
At its heart, this book is an example of something familiar to 21st-century readers: a case history of celebrity. Those “Lies” are in its title because, for Dickens, the cost of fame was “the ability to be honest about himself”. Kelly is right that the great novelist was obsessed with “brand management”, as she calls it, that he “loved to control how others viewed him”. More questionable is her conviction that duplicity was essential to his character. She thinks his early life was “the perfect training for a liar”.
First, she latches on to the fact that his sister Harriet died not as a baby, as had been assumed, but aged nine, as researchers have only recently discovered. Silence about this truth is apparent evidence of Dickens’s deep trauma and his need to lie about it. Kelly also hypothesises that Dickens’s father John was involved in embezzlement. His boss in the Navy Pay Office, one John Slade, shot himself when auditors started investigating him. Surely Dickens Sr knew all about it? This becomes a hidden truth that haunts Dickens for the rest of his life, emerging indirectly in his novels every time the topic of dodgy dealings comes up.
The key words in Kelly’s narrative are “perhaps”, “maybe” and “possibly”, which, supported by her sense of Dickens’s deviousness, allow her to make all sorts of speculations. In middle age, Dickens met with Maria Beadnell, now a married mother of two, whom he had courted more than 20 years earlier. He wrote to her flirtatiously, but was then horrified to find her stout and matronly. Cruelly, he used her for the character of Flora Finching in Little Dorrit. But Kelly claims this was a smokescreen. “It seems perfectly possible that there was an affair.” The depiction of Flora Finching was just “a blind, a distraction”.
Her Dickens is so steeped in deceit that even the great blunders of his life can be reinterpreted as deep-laid schemes. After he publicly announced his estrangement from his wife, rumours began to swirl about his relationship with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, who had taken Dickens’s side and become, in effect, his housekeeper. It has always been thought that these rumours were mortifying to both of them, but Kelly believes Dickens allowed them to circulate because they distracted attention from his relationship with Ellen Ternan, the young actor with whom he was besotted and who became his mistress.
It has long been surmised that Ternan gave birth to their baby in France, where Dickens started making trips in the early 1860s. The story of Dickens’s biggest secret has often been told, so Kelly needs to add something new. Her theory is that one of the two sons of Ternan’s cousin, Frances Cleveland, was in fact Dickens and Ternan’s child. Born after the death of his sailor father, he might have been “a little cuckoo in the Cleveland nest”. Dickens’s trips to France were him “laying a false trail”.
Kelly finally infers that Dickens wanted rumours about his relationship with Ternan to circulate in order to hide a more shameful truth. In a final flurry of speculations (“Perhaps … could it be that … possibly …”) she explains various misfortunes in Dickens’s life (and the “decidedly retroussé noses” of his younger children) with the theory that he developed syphilis in his early 30s and infected his wife. Or maybe Catherine Dickens, blameless in all previous accounts of the writer’s life, was the source of the infection. “It’s not impossible that Catherine could have contracted syphilis during an affair of her own – it isn’t as if she didn’t have an excuse for being unfaithful.” Not impossible, no. But if that is the only standard that conjectures about Dickens’s life have to meet, where does that leave the truth?
• The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly is published by Icon (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
