Christmas and Charles Dickens have gone together at least since the wonderful Dingley Dell chapters of “The Pickwick Papers,” while a somewhat later book, the one with “Carol” in the title, is now as integral to the holiday as Handel’s “Messiah” and last-minute shopping. Biographers have recorded that in the Dickens household, the novelist — “the Inimitable,” as he was grandiosely called — regularly made a great production of the season between Christmas and Twelfth Night, packing the evenings with lavish dinners and private theatricals, the latter featuring the writer’s children.
The year now winding down marks the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, with new books aplenty, including a fine one by Robert Garnett called “Charles Dickens in Love” (Pegasus, $29.95), which explores the various women in the novelist’s life, most notably the first person named in his will: the actress Ellen Ternan. Like many of us, Dickens espoused conventional values and yet would readily flout them when it suited his desires. After the middle-age novelist met “Nelly” Ternan and fell passionately in love, he brutally separated from his wife of many years, claiming that Catherine Dickens was an unfit mother. Charles Dickens — in person as in his fiction a force of nature, relentless in getting his way — then persuaded her unmarried sister Georgina to stay on and manage his house, Gad’s Hill Place. The connection with Ternan was kept secret for many years, and the rumor that she bore a child, who died shortly after his birth, remains unverified, although probably true.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Landport, Hampshire, S. England, and died in 1870.
But what of Dickens’s legitimate children? What was it like to grow up bearing the name of the world’s most famous writer? How did his two daughters (a third died young) and seven sons turn out after their mother was suddenly, almost inexplicably torn away from them and they were discouraged from ever seeing her? This is the subject of Robert Gottlieb’s easygoing, elegant and surprisingly fascinating book, “Great Expectations.”
Gottlieb isn’t a Dickens scholar, except through avocation: He was for many years a distinguished book editor and is now the dance critic for the New York Observer. But he is, to use a fashionable term, an excellent aggregator, drawing on and graciously acknowledging the research of others. To read this book is to be reminded that families are seldom — pace Tolstoy — simply happy or unhappy. Every one of them is a messy, mixed-up business and, more often than not, utterly amazing to outsiders.
The common view, Gottlieb writes at the end of “Great Expectations,” is that Dickens’s children led “failed lives.” Certainly their father felt that his sons lacked fire, grit, a compulsive work ethic. “I never sing their praises because they have so often disappointed me,” he once said. They struck him as weak-willed, unambitious, sometimes sweet-natured but on the whole nothing like himself. You can almost hear Dickens grousing to them, Why, when I was your age, I was already putting in a full day at the blacking factory. He does write to one, “You know how hard I work for what I get, and I think you know that I never had money help from any human creature after I was a child. You know that you are one of the many heavy charges on me” etc., etc. Fathers never change.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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