My life with Charles Dickens
TV this weekend. They’ve got to put something up against the Strictly final on Saturday night - and I’m delighted to say that on Channel 5 they have chosen the documentary I have made with Graham Cooper and Viacom about Charles Dickens and some of the places that were special to him. If you’re intrigued by Dickens but miss the programme on Saturday night (7.35 pm on C5), no worries: you can find it on Catch-up (or whatever it’s called) and on 5Select you’ll find some of the other films I’ve done in the same series: on Thomas Hardy, on Jane Austen, and on the Bronte sisters.
What follows here is a piece that I wrote for the Telegraph about my own and my family’s lifelong interest in Dickens. He had ten children and consequently masses of descendants - several of whom I’m lucky enough to know. A couple appear in the film. Another, Marion Dickens, published many of my children’s books when I was writing them in the 1970s and 1980s. I saw her again the other day (at Jeffrey Archer’s delayed 80th birthday bash) and she hadn’t changed at all. But enough wittering. Back to Charles Dickens …
Charles Dickens shaped my life. That sounds like hyperbole. It isn’t. The spirit of Dickens informed my childhood (and not just at Christmas) and his career as Britain’s first super-star novelist has influenced my life as a jobbing author - as well as the lives of most working authors around the world, whether they realise it or not.
When I was a little boy in the 1950s, we took our family seaside holidays in Broadstairs in Kent, where, between 1837 and 1859, Dickens took his. My father (born in 1910 to Victorian parents) was a Dickens obsessive and when I was small I was taken to every part of Broadstairs with a Dickens association. (There are so many of them there is even a building in the town that features a plaque saying, ‘Charles Dickens did not stay here.’). Dickens wrote David Copperfield while living at Bleak House in Broadstairs. That book, my father explained to me, was Dickens’s own story. My father had lifelong money worries, each year spending a little more than he earned. Like ever-hopeful Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, he was always waiting for ‘something to turn up’.
Every summer in Broadstairs we visited the house said to be the home of Betsey Trotwood, David Copperfield’s great-aunt, a character notorious for her aversion to both boys and donkeys. (In real-life it had been the home of an old lady whom Dickens had known: Miss Mary Pearson Strong.) And when we got there, my father would immediately call out, ‘Donkeys! Get those donkeys off my green!’, echoing the character in the novel. My father had assorted quotations from David Copperfield in his repertoire and would adapt them to suit the moment. After I had run around the green chasing away the imaginary donkeys, he would paraphrase Miss Trotwood: ‘Never be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices, Gyles, and I can always be hopeful of you.’
I was brought up on the precepts of Dickens (‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies’; ‘A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self’) and in London, where my father worked as a solicitor, spent many childhood hours walking the streets of Dickens’s London, being reminded by my father that Dickens routinely walked twenty miles a day. Dickens claimed he needed those walks for his mental wellbeing: ‘If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.’
Dickens at fifteen found employment as a solicitors’ clerk, working at No. 1 South Square in Gray’s Inn, where my son, a barrister, now has his chambers. It’s around the corner from 48 Doughty Street, which today houses the Dickens Museum and was Dickens’s London home from 1837 to 1839. It’s where he lived with his wife Catherine (when he still loved her) and the first three of their ten children, and where he completed The Pickwick Papers and wrote Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist.
Making the documentary about the places that meant most to Dickens (Channel 5, Saturday at 7.35 pm), I spent a day in Doughty Street with the great man’s great-great-grandson, Gerald Charles Dickens, an actor who gives readings from his forebear’s novels standing at one of the reading desks Dickens himself used.
I learnt from my father how Dickens (born in 1812) was perhaps the most famous man in the land in his heyday - certainly the most famous author. Dickens made himself more famous as a writer than any of his great contemporaries when he began to make public appearances giving readings from his books. With his first major tour in 1858 (129 appearances in 49 towns across the British Isles) he started something that hadn’t been done before, but now has to be done by every author who wants to sell their books. Oscar Wilde followed Dickens’s example with his celebrated lecture tours in America in the 1880s. Now we’re all at it, making personal appearances, strutting our stuff. Fane Productions, specialists in the field with more than a hundred writers on their book, have sold 160,000 tickets to theatre events featuring authors this autumn – Annie Liebovitz, Marian Keyes, Jojo Moyes, Miriam Margolyes and yours truly among them.
Dickens killed himself with these live appearances. In his farewell tour in the winter of 1868, he managed eighty-seven out of a hundred contracted readings, pressing on despite giddiness and fits of paralysis. Following a stroke, he gave his last reading in London on 15 March 1870 and died a few weeks later, exhausted and only 58. And when he wasn’t around anymore, so popular had he been that actors began playing him and recreating his shows - from Bransby Williams in the 1890s to Emlyn Williams in the 1950s to Simon Callow in our time. I remember as a child seeing Sir Donald Wolfit re-enact the death of Bill Sikes on stage. It was before the era of trigger warnings. I had never seen anything so terrifying - or exciting.
This Sunday (19 December), with lexicographer and fellow author, Susie Dent, I will be on stage at Birmingham Town Hall, presenting our Something Rhymes With Purple word-lovers’ podcast and celebrating Dickens’s contribution to the English language. Dickens coined several hundred words and phrases that are now in the dictionary. ‘Butterfingers’ from Pickwick Papers, ‘the creeps’ from David Copperfield, and ‘on the rampage’ from Great Expectations are three of my favourites. We chose to go to Birmingham Town Hall this Christmas because we will be on the very stage where Dickens had one of his last great successes reading from A Christmas Carol. We will be walking in his footsteps.
In a sense, because of the pressure to promote our books by appearing in theatres, at literary festivals, on radio, podcast and TV, all modern authors are walking in Dickens’s footsteps. Of course, we are pale imitations of the great original. Yes, we now know he was cruel to his wife: he wasn’t flawless. But he created some of the greatest characters in all fiction, he wrote some of the most gripping and humorous and touching stories in all literature, he helped invent Christmas as we still celebrate it, and he set the benchmark for aspiring authors: if you’ve got a story to tell, get out there and sell it.
Charles Dickens with Gyles Brandreth is on C5 this Saturday at 7.35 pm; Something Rhymes With Purple is at Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday at 5.00 pm.
Odd Boy Out, Gyles Brandreth’s childhood memoir, is published by Penguin Michael Joseph at £ 20.