BY CHARLES DICKENS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22326, 28 July 1934, Page 4

BY CHARLES DICKENS

THE LAST PUBLISHED WORK “The Life of Our Lord: Written Expressly for His Children.” By Charles Dickens. Loudon: Associated Newspapers, Ltd. ((is net.) The publication, 64 years after his death, of Charles Dickens’s “ The Life of Our Lord ” (from Whitcombc and Tombs) raises several interesting considerations. Dickens, as Lady Dickens, his daughter-in-law, states in a foreword, wrote this ] story from the New Testament “without thought of publication, in order that his family might have a permanent record of their father’s thoughts.” The assumption is that he did not desire that it should be published, since it was in manuscript in his hands, or those of his family, for 21 years before lie died, and remained thus until after the death of his last surviving child, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens. Sir Henry, we are told, was averse from its publication in his lifetimp, but saw no reason why it should be withheld after his death. In his will he allowed that publication should be undertaken if a majority of his family was in favour. Their approval was forthcoming, and the rights to the 14,000-word story were secured by an English publishing firm for a sum which is said to represent, cash per word, a record. The purchasers of the copyright proceeded to publicise their quite unique possession to the best of their by no means circumscribed capacity. Rights to serial publication were sold in various countries. It proved a successful syndicated feature, the manager of the United Feature organisation, which handled it in the United States, describing it ag “the greatest circulation builder of all time,” better even than a series of war horror pictures recently featured in the American press. The circulation-building value of this pious labour having now, apparently, been exhausted, “ The Life of Our Lord ” has been sped on . its way in book form, blessed, no' doubt, with the wish that it may prove a best-seller. Should the hypersensitive hav« any doubt concerning the ethical nature of the commercialisation in blatant manner of the great novelist’s intimate writings, they may be reassured by the reflection that publication of so potentially valuable an, ,MS. was inevitable soon or late; that the wishes of dead men are rarely consulted in such circumstances (Thackeray charged his daughter that no biography of him should appear); that the great interest iir “The Life of Our Lord on the part of the public is a healthyspiritual sign; and thht a revival of interest in Dickens’s other works is promised.

The story itself is no literary sensation. It is a faithful transcription made with deep .piety in typically Victorian prose, from the New Testament. There ,is one interesting departure from the severely orthodox in the author’s statement, radical in his day, that Jesus Christ was the son of Joseph, but otherwise the story follows simply the lines' of its great original, and concludes with the moral■ injunction: Remember! —It is Christianity 10 DO GOOD always—even to those who dp evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbour as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them Do to us. - . ” The internal evidence in such vagaries in the use of capital letters as are evident in the paragraph above, and inconsistencies in punctuation which appear elsewhere, support the view that Dickens gave no thought to the late celebrity which was to attend what must be regarded, from the literary viewpoint, as the least considerable of Ins works. . , „ , “The Life of Our Lord is quite handsomely produced, with a facsimile reproduction of the MS. and seveial reproductions of more or less meritorious works of art illustrating the Gospel '“ rl - J. 51.