The Shakespeare Code

Blazing Dickens

 by

Stewart Trotter

Simon Callow’s tornado of a book……

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World…..

…..blasts for ever the heresy once taught at our Universities…..

…. that a writer’s life has nothing to do with his work.

For Dickens, his life had everything to do with his work….

His life WAS his work…

As Simon guides us expertly through Dickens’s childhood, youth and maturity…..

…..he’s played the man and knows the man….

…..the themes of the novels form before our very eyes…..

We see….

……the young Charles visiting his father in Debtors’ Prison……

……falling in love with a heartless young vixen…..

……mourning the death of an angelic young girl……

…….fighting to get a foothold on the world…..

……. and making glorious, eccentric friends…

But Simon shows it was BLIND CHANCE that Dickens transmuted these experiences into novels….

He originally wanted to be an actor….

His sympathetic observation of people – his ability to feel what they feel – could best be used, he thought, on the stage.

He even fixed an audition with the Manager of Covent Garden Theatre – only to fall ill on the day….

……an early indication of the massive power his emotions were to have over his entire being…

Dickens hated the solitary life of a writer: he wanted to be surrounded by friends.

That’s why he set up journals and newspapers and amateur theatrical companies…..

….he even knocked down the walls of his home to create his own theatre…..

…. where he staged shows of unrivalled beauty and excitement…..

…. in which, of course, he himself starred……

….. to dazzling and  sometimes chilling, effect.

Dickens expended this energy in the belief that life would give him energy in return….

Like William Wordsworth……

…….he walked for inspiration; but unlike the Lakeland poet, he sought dangerous terrains……

He even walked to the top of Vesuvius when it was erupting, delighting in the fact that his shoes and clothes were burnt…

He wanted to grasp life with both hands….

He exorcised demons with ‘mesmerism’….

He visited morgues, insane asylums, brothels and jails….

He lurked in the stinking slums of London at the dead of night….

He was a ‘doer’, not just an observer…

He despised politicians…..

…..and believed he could achieve more by working outside the system. 

With the great millionaire philanthropist, Angela Bourdett-Coutts……

……he formed a rehabilitation ‘home’ (he was the first to use the word in this context) for prostitutes.

He loathed the English class system and spent as much energy trying to stay out of the company of the great and the good as others did trying to get into it.

He longed for the democracy of America….

….that is, till he visited it….

He found there was NO freedom of speech in ‘the land of the free’…..

…..that black people were whipped…

…..that convicts were kept in solitary confinement with bags over their heads….

…..that even the President spat and……

……most unforgivable of all…..

……the people were boring.

He was to revise his opinion of America twenty-five years later……

…..but for now returned home  with the realisation that he was…..

 ….an Englishman after all….

….and  completely in favour of a….

 …..liberal monarchy.

As a father, he was a brilliant entertainer. He would dress up (and black up) as…..

.….the Unparalleled Necromancer, Rhia Rama Roos…..

 ….when….

cards burst into flames, watches found themselves in the middle of loaves of bread, dolls appeared, disapperaed and re-appeared all over the room [and] blazing plum-puddings emerged from perfectly ordinary hats…

 

Dickens celebrated Christmas and Twelfth Night (when his first son was born) with all the exuberant joy of Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol……

……laying on dancing, games, charades, punch and long country walks.

It was as  a husband he was deficient….

Simon quotes G.K. Chesterton……

….who believed that Charles had married the…..  

…..wrong [Hogarth] sister….

Catherine…

The ‘right’ sister, Mary, suffered an early, Nell-like death…..

Charles was left with a wife he called…..

 …..the donkey…

This was unkind. ….

But she did have an inordinate number of accidents……

…..(743 falls, Dickens counted, on the American tour)….

…..and even contrived to fall down the trapdoor of their home theatre.

Everything came to a head when Dickens fell in love with a seventeen year old ‘wannabe’ actress, Ellen Ternan…

Catherine was pensioned off with the not inconsiderable sum of £600 a year.

But Dickens had to keep his ‘affair’ – if it ever got to that stage – a secret from his rapturous, adoring but predominantly middle class public.

(Intellectuals despised Dickens’s work.)

Dickens’s liaison was nearly exposed when a train he was travelling in with Ellen and her mother crashed….

…..with their carriage dangling over a river….

Dickens, typically, took charge of the whole rescue operation, serving people with water from his top hat…..

…. and the bottle and a half of brandy he just happened to have with him…

But the break with his wife brought with it guilt…..

……an emotion he’d felt as a boy when he was forced to work at a blacking factory….

…..a time he never once referred to in public….

He was also beginning to suffer from ill-health: his left leg had started to swell when he walked any distance….

Life had finally let him down….

His response was to venture on a series of wildly popular, but exhausting, Reading tours….

He would bring the whole theatre of his imagination to life before an audience……

……which howled with tears and laughter….

However, Dickens made the fatal decision of including the brutal killing of Nancy in Oliver Twist….

…..which so excited him that his pulse rate rose from 72 to 174…

Soon afterwards Dickens was dead….

Simon argues that ……

Dickens was pushing himself towards extinction….

There was a massive darkness within his soul that he wrestled to control….

Spirits of the dead would come to him, as they came to Scrooge….

 

….and, like Scrooge, he battled to live a Christian life.

But his nature was to dominate others…

And not always the strong…

But, as Simon shows in this brilliant book , Dickens was acutely aware of his failings.

His character was flawed, but he knew it was flawed…..

And it could well have been this very flaw that brought him close to the public….

They embraced him as their friend and their brother.

Simon writes:

Playing Dickens, and performing his work has been like standing in front of a blazing fire. If I can convey any sense of that, I will have succeeded in my aim….

Simon, you ARE that fire…

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THIS GREAT BOOK BY CLICKING BELOW:

www.harpercollins.co.uk

To read Simon Callow’s own endorsement of Shakespeare: The Movie please click: HERE.