Fictionalisation in Biography: Creating the Dickens Myth

ABSTRACT

‘Dickens’ is a universal, global commodity. Our contemporary cultural memorialisation of the celebrity-author relies less on historical facts and more on the overlay of reductive and selective renditions created in texts such as biographies or biofictions. Harnessing both creative and academic directives of research, and drawing on my insights from my praxis of writing a neo-Victorian biographical novel, this article interrogates three representations of Dickens, placing my own rendition within the field of biographical/biofictional conceptualisations of the Victorian author.

The article examines three contributions to the cultural memorialisation of Dickens. John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74) exposes the biographer’s personal investment in his subject and the self-mythologising of both subject and biographer; Richard Flanagan’s twenty-first-century biofiction Wanting (2008) unravels authorial identity, revealing Flanagan’s perception of writerly self-fictionalisation through a fictional version of Dickens; and my forthcoming novel Anchorage draws on the ‘Dickens Myth’, responding to authorial anxieties about the ethics of fictionalising historically documented lives. These three versions engaging with the Dickens celebrity myth provide alternative perspectives of their subject by which to examine the ramifications of fictionalising historical figures; comparing them sheds light on the implications and repercussions both for writers and their subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Biofiction
• celebrity
• cultural memorialisation
• biographical novel
• Charles Dickens

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rosemary Kay is an internationally award-winning screenwriter and writer of biofiction, who has worked with leading TV and film companies, including Colombia, Sony, ITV, Granada, and BBC Film. Rosemary’s hybrid fiction/non-fiction book, Between Two Eternities, was published by Headline in 2000. Saul, the American version, published by Random House in Canada and St Martin’s Press in America in 2000, has been translated into several languages. She is currently writing her second novel about the real woman who inspired Dickens to create his iconic fictional character Miss Havisham. Having received the President’s Doctoral Scholarship and AHRC funding, she is a research scholar at Manchester University studying the spaces between fiction and non-fiction, the ways real people and historical events are fictionalised to explore contemporary issues and preoccupations, and the role of innovative storytelling in hybridised narratives.

Notes

1 I use the term ‘real’ here in a biographical context, to denote lives or events which are historically documented to have taken place.

2 ‘Of the two kinds of education which Gibbon says that all men who rise above the common level receive; the first, that of his teacher, and the second, more personal and more important his own; he [Dickens] had the advantage only of the last. It nevertheless sufficed for him’ (Forster 1927, 47).

3 See Foucault 1980; Denzin 1989; Hutcheon 2002; Mitchell 2010; Derrida and Butler 2016.

4 After Dickens’s death in 1870, there was an immediate race to get biographical material to the public. George Augustus Sala, who worked with Dickens at Household Words, produced Charles Dickens, and Robert Sheldon Mackensie wrote Life of Charles Dickens, both before the year was out. Although there were some critical notes in this material, recalling previous negative comments about Dickens’s flaws as a literary figure, most were adulatory, following the ‘model citizen’ ideal. However, it is Forster’s work, Life of Dickens, which ‘instantly became not only the standard for evaluating the novelist’s work, but also for judging his character’ (Mazzeno 2008, 34).

5 ‘No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men’ (Carlyle 1927, 39).

6 Ley remarked in the introduction to Forster’s biography that the intimacy between Dickens and Forster ‘which may have seemed [Forster’s] greatest asset was in this regard his handicap’ (Forster 1927, xv).

7 Ley writes that ‘[George Henry] Lewes was certainly offended at Forster’s determination to rely wholly upon his own knowledge of Dickens. Wilkie Collins was offended, too, and there were others who … resented the way in which Forster was apt to arrogate the novelist all to himself’ (Forster 1927, 55).

8 In a note to Harry Wills, his assistant and confidante, Dickens writes that Forster ‘knows Nelly as you do, and will do anything for her if you want anything done’ (qtd in Tomalin 2012b, 180).

9 The notes in Chapter 8 of the 1965 Penguin edition of Great Expectations claim that another novelist, James Payn, introduced Dickens to a woman who inspired the creation of Miss Havisham. Payn said that Dickens’s portrayal was ‘not one whit exaggerated’ (Dickens 1965, 76).

10 Biographers and critics have provided much evidence of the way Dickens exploited his friends and acquaintances for inspiration. But the finest evidence comes from his own pen, when he asks a friend for help. ‘In my next number of Oliver Twist I must have a magistrate; and casting about for a magistrate whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be shown up I have as a necessary consequence stumbled across Mr Laing of Hatton-Garden celebrity … In this dilemma it occurred to me that perhaps I might under your auspices be smuggled into the Hatton-Garden’ (Forster 1927, 549).