Guest Blog: Gail Jones on L038 Charles Dickens

Gail Jones, Festival Writer-in-Residence reviews Claire Tomalin and John Carey's session on Tomalin's new biography of Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens: A Life, from this past Saturday.

A couple of months ago, at an event at Dickens’ House in Doughty Street, I met the head of a Chinese delegation of twenty five translators, all engaged in producing new translations of Dickens’ work for the bicentenary of his birth. The first Chinese translations, he told me, were by a man who knew no English. He consulted with someone who did, who then “told him the stories”, which he then wrote down. Not translation as one would normally understand it, this sounds appallingly reductive, impoverished and even fraudulent, consisting chiefly of some vague, transliterated version of the plot.

At Claire Tomalin and John Carey’s session on Tomalin’s new biography of Dickens, what was most delightful – apart from the genial solidarity of the speakers and their impressive erudition – was the wonderful tribute to detail that each duly engaged and honoured. Typical of Tomalin’s biographies, Carey claimed, was her attention to ‘bit-players’, to minor characters, to wayward small details and the very texture of relationships that might altogether constitute the life and work of a writer. In a fabulously fluent session they then discussed the family and friendships of Dickens – the peculiarity of his father’s sense of class and entitlement, the inability of Dickens to ‘handle’ women, his prodigious energy and enterprise, comically driven, apparently, by pints of champagne and claret. Each gave special tribute to Dickens’ friendship with John Forster, his exceptional first biographer, whom Tomalin cited both as an inspiration to her own work and as a kind of model of loyalty and love.

Tomalin was beautifully modest in her magnificent achievement, and also acknowledged Carey’s contribution to the world of Dickens’ scholarship: together they demonstrated the friendship – and radical human specificity - that invisibly underpins all genuine art.

Gail Jones
Writer-in-Residence