Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. Like the hero of Dombey and Son, he remained haunted by "what might have been, and what was not." In his own lifetime, Dickens was without rivals. He styled himself simply "The Inimitable." But he was not always confident about his standing in the world. From his traumatized childhood to the suicide of his first collaborator and the sudden death of the woman who had a good claim to being the love of his life, Dickens faced powerful obstacles. Before settling on the profession of novelist, he tried his hand at the law and journalism, considered a career in acting, and even contemplated emigrating to the West Indies. Yet with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and a groundbreaking series of plays, sketches, and articles, he succeeded in turning every potential breakdown into a breakthrough. Douglas-Fairhurst's provocative new biography, focused on the 1830s, portrays a restless and uncertain Dickens who could not decide on the career path he should take and would never feel secure in his considerable achievements.
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"A quiet shrewd-looking little fellow who seems to guess pretty much what he is." So wrote Carlyle about the young Charles Dickens. Douglas-Fairhurst, however, understands as Carlyle did not what an immense challenge Dickens faced in determining just what kind of creature he was. In the tangled events of Dickens' formative years--refracted through his journalism, political polemics, correspondence, and early fiction--readers discern the emerging identity of Victorian England's greatest novelist. The Pickwick Papers looms especially large in this narrative of self-discovery, as Dickens decisively reveals himself in the amusing, verbally inventive, protean, and remarkably autobiographical character, Sam Weller. Though enthusiastic public response to Weller bolsters Dickens' confidence, the writer struggles with the perils of notoriety, finally finding his authorial poise through the unlikely task of editing the memoirs of the great clown Joseph Grimaldi. Manifest in Dickens' decision to use his own name, for the first time, on the title page of Oliver Twist, that poise profoundly reshapes British literature. A convincing portrait of budding genius.
--Bryce Christensen --Booklist, 1st October 2011
What is extraordinarily fresh in Becoming Dickens is Douglas-Fairhurst's ability to support such arguments by sensitive explication de texte...Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reads Dickens the author with brilliantly acuity.
- John Sutherland --Literary Review, October 2011
"Becoming Dickens" is an ingenious, playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative." --The Economist, 1 October 2011
Subtle and searching...Dickens made his early fiction, Douglas‐Fairhurst argues, out of lives he escaped from himself. During his ordeal at the blacking warehouse he might easily have become, as he later wrote, "a little robber or a little vagabond", and imagining that outcome generated Oliver Twist. During his painful climb to social respectability he worked as a lawyer's clerk, and hapless, hungry clerks crowd his stories, from Bob Cratchit to Nemo in Bleak House. Names in the petty-cash book he kept as a clerk -- Bardell, Corney, Rudge -- arise as people in his fiction. As a stagestruck clerk he went to the theatre, he recalled, every night for three years and longed to be an actor, and theatricality permeates his writing. His job as a reporter in the press gallery at the House of Commons gave him another fixation -- a lifelong contempt for "that great dustheap".
- John Carey
--The Sunday Times, 2 October 2011
"Becoming Dickens is the freshest and most insightful book I have read on this great theme since my first schoolboy reading of House. [...] It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens than Douglas-Fairhurst's appearing in the coming months. I shall treasure it." -A.N. Wilson --New Statesman, October 2011
"Harvard University Press has produced, for Douglas-Fairhurst, a fine volume in the best tradition of American bookmaking: nice paper, elegant dust wrapper and binding, a volume to keep on your shelf for ever". -A.N. Wilson
--New Statesman, October 2011
"In his original and elegant Becoming Dickens, Robert
Douglas-Fairhurst gives a twist to the [biography] genre by focusing on the 1830s, the decade that saw Dickens achieve international fame "before he needed to start shaving"...Douglas-Fairhurst asks who else [Dickens] might have been. What potential selves did the young man murder when he chose to be a novelist rather than an actor, a clerk, a stage-manager or a journalist?...Douglas-Fairhurst, who has every line ever written by Dickens at his fingertips, inhabits them; he shows us the internal process of the writing, revealing the hidden jokes, the coded messages, the ways in which "the most central and eccentric literary figure of the age" wove his other selves into his texts.
-Frances Wilson
--Daily Telegraph, 22 October 2011
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens is quite possibly the best piece of Dickens criticism since John Carey's The Violent Effigy - a series of minute investigations into the way Dickens projected elements of his early life into the fiction that followed it, full of arresting historical detail and sharp-eyed deductions".
--New Statesman, 21 November 2011
"Brilliantly original, stylishly written, thoughtful, measured and altogether exhilarating...Becoming Dickens is itself a work of art. Incidents that have been written about hundreds of times before are made fresh: when Dickens's father was arrested for debt, `the family had to face up to the fact that the luxuries they could no longer afford included the young Charles's childhood'. Callow gives us several pages on Charles Mathews, and we're not quite sure why. Douglas-Fairhurst is far more succinct, yet throws new light on Dickens's fascination with Mathews's monologues, which showed `that personal identity was largely a matter of self-identity', a crucial lesson to this self-inventor. Throughout, we are given just the right amount of historical background, so that we understand the context Dickens was operating in without being overwhelmed by unnecessary detail...But, ultimately, it is the keen psychological insights that make Douglas-Fairhurst's book so rewarding. It was, he shows us, Dickens's identification with children who hunger not just for food, but for love, for acceptance, and for security, that make it not at all coincidental that his most famous line was, `Please, sir, I want some more.'
--Judith Flanders --Spectator, February 2012
About the Author
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English, Magdalen College, Oxford.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Because February 2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens I imagine we will see quite a few new books on Dickens in the coming months; if they are all as good as this one we are in for a treat. This new biography concentrates on Dickens's early life - and in particular what made him the novelist that he was. It goes through his early years, and his early journalism, and goes through Pickwick in particular at a slow pace. It is excellent in illustrating some of the influences which formed Dickens while looking ahead to the mature writer of the superb later novels.It illustrates that - looking back - we see his emergence as probably the greatest novelist in the language as a sort of inevitable progression. That is the result of hindsight and Douglas-Fairhurst shows some of the ways it could all have turned out very differently. It doesn't cover his entire life - the book basically ends in 1838, which means that you get a significant level of detail.
The book is well-written and a pleasure to read. I both enjoyed it and learned from it, and I would very warmly recommend it.
Other plus-factors are that the hardback is excellent quality, the notes are scholarly and detailed, and the book is reasonably well-illustrated.
The contents are -
Prologue - Somebody and Nobody..
Lost and Found.
The Clerk's Tale.
Up in the Gallery.
Mr Dickin.
"Here we are".
Becoming Boz.
The Moving Age.
Pickwick, triumphant.
Novelist, Writer
Dickens at Home.
Is she his wife?
Being Dickens.
Postscript - signing off.
The book is well-written and a pleasure to read. I both enjoyed it and learned from it, and I would very warmly recommend it.
Other plus-factors are that the hardback is excellent quality, the notes are scholarly and detailed, and the book is reasonably well-illustrated.
The contents are -
Prologue - Somebody and Nobody..
Lost and Found.
The Clerk's Tale.
Up in the Gallery.
Mr Dickin.
"Here we are".
Becoming Boz.
The Moving Age.
Pickwick, triumphant.
Novelist, Writer
Dickens at Home.
Is she his wife?
Being Dickens.
Postscript - signing off.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It's been a privilege to read this book: immensely subtle, sophisticated, elegant and witty. There's at least one sharp insight, resonant turn of phrase or amusing aside on every page. The book also has a range beyond Dickens's youth, suggesting ways in which early experiences influenced his later life and writings, so potential buyers should be mindful that this isn't 'just' a book about Dickens before the 1840s. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's book seems to me a model of good scholarly writing - carefully considered, deeply informed and, above all, hugely communicative. I can't recommend it highly enough.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
After reading some glowing reviews, I decided to give Mr Douglas-Fairhurst's book a go...and haven't been able to put it down. It is superbly written; confident, engaging, warm, friendly...like having a friend telling you the story of the early Dickens - the man he was, the one he could have been, and the man he ultimately became. I'm savouring every page, reading and re-reading each paragraph loaded with meaning and a richness of tone so lacking in other biographies of Dickens I've had the chance to read.
Chapters in his life that may have been skipped over in a few sentences, are finally given the chance to live and breathe in this book.
I can't recommend this book enough - and hope that Mr Douglas-Fairhust may be pursuaded to do a follow-up after Dickens became who he became. But he certainly has a new fan and I shall be waiting with baited breath to see what he'll come up with next.
Bravo.
Chapters in his life that may have been skipped over in a few sentences, are finally given the chance to live and breathe in this book.
I can't recommend this book enough - and hope that Mr Douglas-Fairhust may be pursuaded to do a follow-up after Dickens became who he became. But he certainly has a new fan and I shall be waiting with baited breath to see what he'll come up with next.
Bravo.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read for all Dickens lovers
I came late to Becoming Dickens, having first read the Tomalin. That was excellent, but this is better - more scholarly, yet with every page illumniated by the kind of insights... Read more
Published 12 months ago by A. Craig
4.0 out of 5 stars
narrates well the twists and turns of Dickens' earlier life
This book narrates the twists and turns of Dickens' earlier life - ie up to the time when he 'becomes Dickens', that is to say when he start signing all his work unequivocally... Read more
Published 16 months ago by William Jordan
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