This Side Idolatry”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 548, 28 December 1928, Page 12

This Side Idolatry”

Mr C. E. Bechhofer Roberts has rewritten the following letter to the [New York *Herald Tribune " Books Supplement, defending his biographical novel about Charles Dickens. t'Thi* Side idolatry”, against its t numerous critics.

JN BOTH ENGLAND and America, criticism of my novel, “This Side idolatry,” dealing with the life of Sickens, has raised the following jjpoint; if a writer offers a different (picture of Charles Dickens from that which has hitherto been accepted, pught he to present documentary proofs for his views? Also, since it ijs clearly impossible to insert such proofs in a novel, can a novel be accepted as an authentic portrait of ihe man described? I can answer this criticism very pasily. I set out, four years ago, to write a fully documented biography of Charles Dickens. As you know, no such book Is in existence. Forster’s 7'Lifer” and all its successors ara notoriously partial and Incomplete. They have been written in the spirit of fulsome adulation of one whom they present as an incomparable genius and. In private life, a plaster saint. So astonishingly has this policy been pursued that there is even a society, the Dickens Fellowship, whose main purpose appears to be to spread the gospel of Dickens’s personal perfection. As I began my researches I soon grew aware that the conventional picture of Diokens was untenable. For example, and this is only one of many such cases, I came upon a series of letters published privately by the Bibliophile Society of Boston In 1906 nnderr the title of “Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell.” It was obvious to me, as it must be to every unbiased reader of those letters, that the construction usually placed upon Charles Dickens’s encounter with ■Maria in 1555 was false. His idolaitors have always pretended (when *hey dared to mention the incident ■at all) that Marla was the pursuer. the pursued. They have maintained that his later caricature pf her as Flora Finching in “Little Dorrit”—with himself as Arthur Clennam—was, in John Forster’s words, “a piece of kindly and tender humour.” The text of the letters, however, shows that Dickens sought a clandestine Interview with Maria, Inviting her to call at his house one afternoon, when there was almost certain to be no one else there; characteristically, he tells her to ask the servants first for Mrs Dickens and only then for himself. So far as this incident would have had a place in my biography—and, while of no great Importance In itself, it nevertheless displays the hypocritical strain in Dickens's character —I should, of course, have quoted the whole letter. It was at this point that a remarkable document came into my hands —nothing else than the refusal by Georgina Hogarth, Dickens's sister-in-law and executor, to permit the Beadnell correspondence to be published. Writing to a prominent and devout Dickensian on September 17,1908, from her address. 31 Egerton Terrace, London, this lady said; “Of course, the book cannot circulate in this country. If I should hear of any such idea I should request Messrs Chapman. and Hall to communicate at once with intending publishers to say that I forbid the publication of these letters in England—where they cannot be published without my permission, which I will not give. "It you wish to say anything la •The Dickensian.’ please say as little as possible. All that was necessary tfrom our point of view) was said by Mr Forster in his ’Life’.” This was revealing. I soon discovered that the Beadnell correspondence was not the only material evidence about Dickens which his family was suppressing. There was also the wicked letter which he wrote after the separation from his wife, in which he pretended that she had always neglected her children (she bore him 10), that she suffered from mental disorder and that she had for years wished to leave him. The family, claiming the copyright In all these documents, refused to allow their publication. No wonder, I thought, that all the biographers of him hitherto have been perforce so adulatory! Since then a biography was made impossible by the family’s action—for a biography without documents is like a sandwich without meat —I pondered how to use the enormous mass of material, new and old, published and unpublished, which 1 was amassing during my four years of research in England, America, Germany and Italy i taw no other wav than that of the hiatorical novel. I knew I apottld be for mv evidence.

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