Michael Slater’s excellent new study of Dickens is the first major biography to appear since the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens in 1990, and the contrast between the approaches taken by the authors could not be greater. While Ackroyd was sufficiently confident in his understanding of Dickens to incorporate a surreal dream sequence in which he and Dickens share a carriage on an underground train in Essex, Slater’s touch is lighter and much more modest. Slater is becomingly deferent to the biographers who have come before him, citing their work and engaging with their theories, noting with great honesty when he has nothing more to add to the debate. Importantly, unlike Ackroyd, he also acknowledges all of his sources in carefully prepared footnotes, which are much easier to follow than Ackroyd’s somewhat haphazard narrative summaries of texts and resources. Slater, forthright about the difficulties involved in writing about Dickens’s early years, points to the problems posed by Forster’s Life, its reliance on memory (both Forster’s and Dickens’s) and Forster’s tendency to play up his own role in the great novelist’s rise to fame.

Although he produced an autobiographical fragment in his own lifetime, dwelling in particular on his childhood sufferings, Dickens’s instructions about his posthumous representation were uncharacteristically unclear, and he seems to have done his best to muddy the trail. Slater notes that Dickens doubted that he could convey the horror of some of the most horrific events of his childhood: his father’s imprisonment for debt and his own abrupt removal from school to be sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, labelling jars of boot blacking in full view of the public. Although tormented by the ‘deep remembrance’, he left the decision to publish to Forster or unnamed ‘others’. Forster’s revelation of Dickens’s childhood privations caused a sensation among readers, who had not previously known of the connections between Dickens’s life and that of his ‘favourite child’, the character David Copperfield. The fragment is, alas, now lost, meaning that subsequent biographers experience an uncomfortable dependency on Forster, which, as Slater acknowledges, is highly problematic.

Aware of his own remarkable status as one of the first international literary celebrities, Dickens always seems to have had one eye on posterity. Uniquely, his appeal ranged from the upper echelons of society to illiterate workers, who would gather to hear the latest instalment of his work; and he sought to play up his distinction from peers such as Thackeray. Dickens was not averse to manipulating public perceptions of his life, even attempting to do so from beyond the grave. His will, in which he took the opportunity to correct the scandalmongering associated with his relationship with his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, offers one example of his many attempts to influence popular opinion, particularly regarding his separation from his wife, Catherine. Considering contemporary reactions to the will, Slater, in the closing pages, measures its impact upon Dickens’s reputation and analyses his efforts to distract attention away from his mistress and to divert sympathy from his abandoned wife. Slater’s reading here is subtle and, as it is throughout this exceptional account of Dickens’s life, thoroughly engaged with the author’s psychology, his need to be loved and his need to control.

Slater provides countless examples of Dickens’s efforts to hinder those seeking to piece together an account of his life. The most notorious example, though, has to be the burning of more than twenty years’ worth of letters and papers in September 1860. Reacting to what he regarded as the ‘misuse’ of writings never intended for publication, Dickens set fire to an enormous number of the letters he had received, many of which would have been written by some of the foremost figures of the nineteenth century. The next day, in a letter to W.H. Wills, the managing editor of his journal Household Words, he remarked: ‘They sent up a smoke like the Genie when he got out of the casket on the seashore; and as it was an exquisite day when I began, and rained very heavily when I finished, I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens.’ These comments should alert us to the sheer volume of correspondence destroyed that day (according to the Collins scholar Paul Lewis, it is likely to have been more than fourteen thousand letters) and in subsequent purges by Dickens. They are also, though, a poignant reminder of just how difficult a task Dickens biographers face, with a subject who seems to have desired to thwart them at every turn.

Slater handles the excisions from the Dickens archive with elegance, offering intelligent speculation when it is appropriate and showing genuine empathy towards the novelist. His compassionate attempts to understand Dickens’s often inscrutable psyche are most apparent when dealing with the novelist’s complicated relationships with women, particularly his mother. Dickens seems to have enjoyed a close relationship with both of his parents prior to his brief but damaging experiences at the blacking factory. While he seems to have been able to forgive his father, he blamed his mother for not removing him from Warren’s immediately when the family’s circumstances improved. His feelings of resentment and abandonment never diminished. Slater is both sensitive and analytical in considering Dickens’s ‘bitterness’ when responding to her slow decline with dementia, and his general coolness towards her.

Dickens’s response to his time at Warren’s is ambivalent and complicated. On the one hand, he represents it as one of the most devastating events of his life, but on the other, he regards his experiences as formative, remarking of that time in his autobiographical writing, ‘I know all these things have worked together to make me what I am’. While not downplaying the impact of these events, Slater broadens his approach to pay attention to the cultural factors that aided Dickens’s success. Recounting warnings by those who believed the writing of serials to be a ‘low, cheap form of publication by which [Dickens would] ruin all his rising hopes’, Slater skilfully demonstrates Dickens’s astute understanding of his own broad appeal and its relationship to the Victorian literary marketplace.

Michael Slater is well known within Dickens circles for the work he has undertaken in recent years to make Dickens’s journalism (over one hundred and fifty articles written between 1850 and 1859 alone) widely available; Slater collected the numerous essays into the authoritative four-volume Dent Uniform edition. Here, Slater emphasises the diversity of Dickens’s writings. He offers detailed discussions of the novels, their context and influences, but also takes pains to bring Dickens’s journalism to the fore. Slater reminds his readers of the dialogue between the fiction and the more topical journalistic pieces that often framed the novels when they appeared in serial form. He also points to the political activism that motivated so much of Dickens’s writing. At the same time, Slater documents Dickens’s movement from being a serial writer to becoming a serious novelist, charting his efforts to transcend charges of ‘hack’ writing and demonstrating how he revolutionised the realist novel.

Having achieved great success with the publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Dickens, according to Slater, began to consider himself a ‘social problem’ novelist, rather than simply a comic writer. The key to his success, notes Slater, was a ‘well-developed instinct for just how much squalor and misery his readers could bear’. Dickens, who wandered the streets of London as a boy, had a deep understanding of the vulnerability of children. Slater draws attention to the many social reform tracts that Dickens produced (sometimes pseudonymously) to demonstrate a career-long engagement with improving conditions for the underclass. Having himself been in danger of being pulled into the abyss, Dickens was perhaps more motivated than were most of his contemporaries when it came to alleviating some of the worst symptoms of urban poverty. Slater highlights Dickens’s many charitable endeavours and points to his efforts as a fundraiser, proponent of administrative reform, advocate for international copyright law and champion of authors’ rights. He captures Dickens’s astonishing tenacity, along with an engaging wholeheartedness that is distinctly Victorian.

While Dickens is often presented as one of those eminent Victorians, able – as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen might put it – to achieve ‘six impossible things before breakfast’, Slater’s Dickens is a reassuringly human figure. Dazzlingly brilliant and prodigiously energetic, not to mention successful by the age of twenty-four, Slater shows Dickens’s early career to have been an almost incessant and desperate juggling act. The young Dickens struggled to manage his writing commitments and added stress to his endeavours by constantly stretching his finances. Spectacularly flamboyant, Dickens often seems to have lived beyond his means. As Slater reveals, he would often spend large sums entertaining guests to create a show of prosperity befitting an up-and-coming writer of enormous ambition. All of this meant that he had to work ridiculously hard, often taking on more projects than he could handle comfortably.

Among the pressures that continued to drive Dickens were undoubtedly the many needs of his large family. The father of ten children (his daughter Dora died in infancy), he complained regularly of the financial strains associated with his brood. Poverty was a constant spectre on his horizon, and even when he was secure in his fame and while his novels constantly celebrated family life, Dickens’s sense of his fiscal responsibilities towards his children seems to have weighed him down, while stimulating him to write more and more. Dickens’s activities and immense productivity were, on occasion, the source of great anxiety. In the late 1830s he attempted to insure his life with the Sun Insurance Office, only to be declined by the Board who, as Dickens put it, ‘seem disposed to think I work too much’. Slater handles this type of anecdote wonderfully, suspending judgement, resisting the urge to regard the incident as somehow anticipating Dickens’s premature death, and leaving the comedy and pathos of the account to speak for themselves.

Although emphasising Dickens’s amazing self-discipline, Slater does not shy away from the novelist’s tendency to overcommit himself or from his struggles with deadlines. Nor does he attempt to excuse Dickens’s often unscrupulous behaviour towards his publishers. He quotes the son of one of them: ‘Dickens was a very clever man, but he was not an honest man.’ Intriguingly, Slater argues that Dickens may have come to identify the controversial character Fagin in Oliver Twist (1837–38) with his publisher in the late 1830s, Richard Bentley, whom he described in a letter to John Forster as an ‘infernal, rich, plundering, thundering old Jew’ – a direct quote from the novel. At the time of writing, Bentley was attempting to hold Dickens to an agreement to write two novels, while Dickens increasingly (and it seems, unjustly) regarded himself as the victim of Bentley’s exploitation. Although the matter was eventually resolved in Dickens’s favour (largely because he threatened to stop writing Oliver Twist), he continued to think himself greatly beleaguered. Slater suggests that, so great was his fury, he seems to have slid jokes at Bentley’s expense into the narrative, most notably when the young Oliver tells his new friend, Mr Brownlow, that it is better to be a bookseller than a writer. This type of conflict punctuated Dickens’s career. He routinely fell out with publishers, and he alienated friends and even members of his own family.

In spite of his obvious affection for Dickens as a writer and as a man, Slater is also notably sympathetic towards Catherine Dickens. Although previous biographers, including Edgar Johnson, have tended to downplay the ‘shadowy’ Catherine’s role, work by the likes of Lillian Nayder and Slater himself (see Dickens and Women, 1983) has, in recent years, enabled scholars to re-evaluate her contribution to her husband’s success. In a bid to understand Dickens’s conduct in the late 1850s – which eventually led to a separation in 1858 – Slater dwells upon brief, but telling, accounts of her behaviour. Commenting on her great popularity during Dickens’s often-difficult American tour of 1842, Slater notes ‘Catherine was Dickens’s “perfectly game” faithful fellow-sufferer, invariably impressing the Americans with her good humour and truly ladylike demeanour’. He also recounts, at times with some bewilderment in the light of subsequent events, countless examples of Dickens’s pride in, or affection for, his wife. Slater refuses to accept the revisionist account of their marriage that Dickens attempted to circulate in the wake of its breakdown, and presents a Catherine who is energetic, supportive, entertaining, maternal and often quite absurdly busy.

Dickens’s relationship with Catherine was not the only aspect of his life that he sought to revise and re-imagine after the fact. The greatest strength of Slater’s biography is its emphasis on memory and its centrality to understanding Dickens’s work. Slater incisively identifies an inclination on Dickens’s part to ‘re-visit and reimagine painful passages in his early life’, arguing that during times of crisis he constantly raked over the past. He demonstrates that this process of remembering shapes every depiction of abandoned or endangered children in Dickens’s writing, arguing brilliantly for a parallel between the ignorant crossing sweeper Jo, of Bleak House (1853), and his creator. Drawing together Dickens’s lifelong fascination with the metropolis with his compulsive return to his childhood trauma, Slater regards Jo as a less fortunate version of Dickens. Jo is killed by the city because he is ignorant and ‘don’t know nothink’, while Dickens survives his time wandering the streets because he is sustained by fairy tales and romances.

Capturing the dangers and attractions of nineteenth-century London, Slater complicates our understanding of Dickens as an essentially metropolitan writer, suggesting that he found the city as repellent as it was alluring. Slater’s Dickens is a man of contradictions, paradoxically trapped and motivated by his past, and haunted yet driven by his memories. One comes away from Slater’s study feeling a curious combination of awe and sympathy. This biography is a compelling read: beautifully written, meticulously researched and a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and troubled writers of the nineteenth century.