SHOULD BIOGRAPHIES TELL THE TRUTH?

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 261, 4 August 1928, Page 24

SHOULD BIOGRAPHIES TELL THE TRUTH?

THE CASE OF CHARLES DICKENS

When James Anthony Froude published “Carlyle’s Reminiscences,” which had been entrusted to him by the Sage of Chelsea for posthumous publication, he was bitterly assailed by many of the friends and relatives of Carlyle, and accused of treachery to Carlyle’s memory. These reminiscences, in which Carlyle, with characteristic illhumour, criticised all and sundry, including his closest friends, shocked the reading world. “The untruths, the injustices, the gratuitious wounds througout these unhappy volumes are too numerous to be overlooked, too flagrant to be forgiven,” wrote one critic. And the inclusion in the "Reminiscences” of the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle, in which the domestic troubles of Carlyle and his wife were exposed to the public gaze, added to the fury of Carlyle’s relatives and worshippers against Fronde. Subsequently, when Froude published the first volume of his biography of Carlyle, he confounded his critics by reprinting in the preface a long extract from Carlyle’s essay on Sir Walter Scott, in which Carlyle held up to derision those critics- of Lock hart's biography who contended that Scott had been made to appear an unheroic figure, that Lockhart had been guilty of "indiscretion” in exposing “the sanctities of private life.” Carlyle contended that a biography to be worth anything must be true; that it must tell the facts, and not suppress them in order to make the subject of the biography “a white, stainless,. impersonal ghost-hero.” To the insinuation that Lockhart had tried in an underhand treacherous manner to belittle Scott, Carlyle said:—“lf Mr. Lockhart is fairly chargeable with any radical defect, if on any side his insight entirely fails him, it seems even to be in this, that Scott is altogether lovely to him; that Scott’s greatness spreads out for him on all hands beyond reach of eye; that his very faults become beautiful, his. vulgar worldliness are solid prudences, proprieties; and of his worth there is no measure.”

Ten years before th outcry against Froude began there had been a public outcry regarding John Forster’s “Biography of Charles Dickens,” but the charge against Forster was the antithesis of that directed against Froude. He was accused of suppressing im-

portant facts about the domestic .life of Dickens. To the well-known fact that Dickens and his wife had legally separated after twenty years of marriage, and after the birth of teu children, Forster devoted less than i page in a biography that filled two stout volumes. Forster knew all the facts comected with the separation, because he had been Dickens’s ‘ closest, friend for many years, and acted for,,him in arranging the terms of-the legal separation of husband .nd., wife Moreover, Forster, in his biography, made very few references to Dickens s domestic life, altho'ugh he was a constant visitor to Dickens's home for many years, and the novelist s confidant in all his domestic, business and literary worries. The reference to the separation of Dickens and bis wife is introduced in Forster’s biography in the most, abrupt manner, after mentioning that Dickens had given his first public reading from his own works. "Thenceforward he and his wife lived apart," wrote Forster. “The eldest son went with his mother. Dickens at once givitr effect to her expressed wish in this respect; and the other children rem 'ned with himself, their intercourse with Mrs. Dickens being left entirely to themselves. .It was thus fur an arrangement of a strictly private nature, and no decent person could have had excuse for regarding it in any otho light, if public attention had not been unexpectedly invited to it by a printed ' statement in 'Household Words.’ (This printed statement in "Household Words,” which Dickens was editing, was , written by Dickens himself.) Dickens was stung into this by some miserable gossip at which in ordinary circumstances no man would more determinedly have been silent : but he had now publicly to show himself at stated times as a public entertainer, and this with his name even so aspersed lie found to be impossible. Such illustrations of grave defects in Dickens’ character as the passage in his life tiffords I have not shrunk from placing side by side with such excuses in regard to it as lie had unquestionable right to claim should be put, forward also. How far what remained of his story took tone or colour from it, and especially from the altered career on which at the same time

he entered, will thus be sufficiently explained, and with anything else the public have nothing to do. The facts concerning Dickens’ domestic life have never been fully disclosed, but some details concerning his estrangement from his wife aie available in books that have been written about him since Forster’s biography appeared. Mr. G. K. Chesterton, an enthusiastic admirer of Dickens s literary genius, says in his book “Charles Dickens” concerning the novelist’s -marriage- “A very young man fighting his way, and excessively poor, with no memories for years past that were not monotonous and mean, and with Ins strongest and most personal memories quite ignominious and unendurable, was suddenly thrown into the society of a whole family of girls. I thrnk it does not overstate his weakness, and I think it partly constitutes his excuse, to say that he fell in love with all of them. As sometimes happens in undeveloped youth, an abstract femininity simply intoxicated him. And again, I think we shall not be mistakenly accused of harshness if we put the point in this wav—that by a kind of accident he got hold of the wrong sister. In what came afterwards he was enormously to blame.” V new and revised edition of Forster’s “Life of Charles Dickens,”, with extensive notes by Mr. J. W. T. Ley, the author of “The Dickens Circle. These notes contain much new material concerning Dickens's life and work, and add much to the value of the biography. In referring to Forster’s brief description of the, estrangement of Dickens and his wife, Mr. Ley writes: "From one point of view it has been asserted that no man’s domestic affairs are the concern of the public, but as an arbitrary proposition that is obviously untenable, because it would prohibit the writing of any biography worth while. On the other hand, a biographer’s first need is discretion as to what is and is not the concern of the public, and if he is writing very close to his subject’s lifetime he is bound to draw a narrower life than need be drawn 57 years later. When Forster wrote Mrs. Dickens was still living, so were practically all the children. He was properly conscious of a restraint that

need not hold us quite so firmly today.” Dickens was married at the age of 24 to Catherine Hogarth, the eldest of three daughter of George Hogarth, a journalist of some standing, employed in' London on the “Evening Chronicle.” on which Dickens himself bad been employed, but had resigned a few weeks beA‘»re his marriage on receiving a commission from Chapman and Hall to write the “Pickwick Papers.” The two other sisters were Georgina and Mary, but some confusion exists even to-day as to which was the younger of these two. Mary, it is known, was sixteen at the time of the marriage of her sister Catherine, who was 23, to Dickens. Mary is generally spoken of as the younger, but Dickens, writing of Georgina, said: —“from the age of fifteen she has devoted herself to our house and our children:” The age of Georgina when she died an old maid in 1917 was given as 92, which would make her eleven years of age when Dickens married her sister. In the circumstances it is absurd to suggest, as G. K. Chesterton and other writers have done, that Dickens ought to have married Georgina instead of Catherine. "No accusation has ever been brought against Mrs. Dickens, and there is none that can be brought,” writes Mr. Ley in one of his notes in the new edition of Forster's biography. “The worst that has been said of her or can be said is that she was uot fitted to be the wife and helpmate of a creative man of genius. He was as restless a man as evei lived, and with acute restlessness there always goes irritability. He was un-. doubtedly an exacting man, too. She had not the capacity to give him the stimulus he always needed. He could not discuss with her the creations of his mind. One who knew her in her early married years has described her as iather pretty, with a constant habit of making rather silly puns. Actually extraordinarily little is recorded of her any where, but that little all points to her having been lacking in personality and character, to her leaning upon her husband in all things, even in the commonest details of domestic management, which lie certain!v should have been able to leave to her . . . The whole truth is that in feinncramcnt, character and intellect

she w.as unequal to the demands which marriage made upon her. As this incompatibility more and more manifested itself it would appear that she became listless, slack, careless, untidy, both in regard to her household duties, in her own person, in the care of the children. In short, she felt that her marriage had failed, and she lost her grip upon things. This, of course, accentuated the trouble, for Dickens was intolerant all his life of listlessness, slackness, untidiness. And so they steadily drifted further and further apart, until it all culminated in frequent quarrels and bickerings, which were a menace to the husband’s work. This I believe to be the whole truth. There is no real blame to be attributed to either.” It is remarkable that although Forster declared in his biography that the estrangement of Dickens and his wife did not concern the public, Dickens during his lifetime took the public into his confidence by publishing in “Household Words” the statement already alluded to, protesting against some scandalous rumours that were circulated concerning the cause of his separation from his wife. In the course of his statement, which bore the heading, “An Address,” and his name at the foot, he said:—“Some domestic trouble of mine of long standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no anger or ill-will of any kind, and the whole origin, progress and surrounding circumstances of which have been throughout within the knowledge of my children. It is amicably composed, and its details have now but to be forgotten by those concerned in it. By some means, arising out of wickedness or out ot folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations most grossly false, most monstrous and most cruel —invoilving not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if, indeed, they have any existence—and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom one touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed like an unwholesome air.” Forster had vainly pleaded with Dickens not to publish this address, which Mr. Ley describes as being “as mad an act as ever was committed by a man of eminence.” But Dickens not only published it in “Household Words,” but sent it to other papers to publish. And when his friend Mark Lemon, the editor of “Punch,” refused to publish it he quarrelled with Lemon.

By a mischance a letter written by Dickens, in which he gave fuller details of the estrangement and its i causes, was published in the "New I York Tribune,” and subsequently reprinted in England. This letter was I written by Dickens to his friend Arthur Smith, with a covering note authorising him’ to show it “to anyone who wishes to do me right or to anyone who may have been misled into doing me wrong.” Smith thought he was doing Dickens a service by making it public in America, where Dickens's novels were extremely popu-l,-ii, so Ik gave a copy of it to the London correspondent of the "New York Tribune,” who sent the copy to his paper. Am’ this crisis in the domestic life of Dickens concerning which the public had been enlightened during his lifetime, was subsequently regarded b his biographer r.s-a matter with which the public had nothing to do. No wonder the public when it was admitted ten years later to a view of the domestic discord of the Carlyles at Cheyne Row. ’“hcl- -a. felt shocked I at Fronde for opening wide the door ami allowing the sounds 'f discord to ‘ travel round the world 1