Word: life
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hesketh Pearson, "are you not bound to do Dickens? Anybody but Dickens will be a comedown after Shakespeare and G.B.S." Pearson, who is Britain's most fecund literary biographer* and a Dickens fan to boot, heartily agreed; and although his Dickens reveals more about the man and his life than about the artist and his novels, it is nonetheless the best-balanced, most complete biography to date...
What makes Charles Dickens such a tough cadaver for the dissector is the fact that he embodied (in the words of his friend Leigh Hunt) "the life and soul ... of 50 human beings." Some of these 50 beings were pretty sleazy characters, and they have been sternly ignored by those whom Pearson calls "Dickolators." Most biographers have refused to admit that their idol often fell short of the ideal Dickens expressed: a "glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming [attitude] to Home and Fireside...
...Life with Father. No one, least of all Dickens himself, could guess what the mood of his next moment would be. No contemporary (and the competition was pretty stiff in those days) was capable of ejecting so huge or so sudden a flood of tears, and of drying it up a second later in such gales of laughter. Once, at the funeral of a beloved friend on a rainy day, Dickens found himself close to Cartoonist George Cruikshank (who illustrated Oliver Twist) and became fascinated by the artist's "enormous whiskers, which straggle all down his throat in such...
...Life with Father Dickens was a succession of unpredictable tempests. He supported not only his own family but also his father & mother, his dead brother's widow and five children, and in later years his mistress, Actress Ellen Ternan, and their child. To keep all in room & board, Dickens lived in a frenzy of ceaseless labor, which was intensified by his sharing in the multifarious experiences and sensations of all the characters in all his novels. Extracts from letters, written while he was busy with The Old Curiosity Shop, illustrate what he meant when he said, "Men have been...
...most of the children and giving a thoroughly dishonest version of his behavior to the newspapers. He aroused millions to compassion for "fallen women," but once, hearing a young girl swear obscenely on the street, he had her marched straight off to jail. It was this inability to see life (or himself) in consistent proportions that was his strength and weakness; it made the Dickens novels, says Author Pearson, seem like "a blazing volcano of genius almost entirely surrounded by a morass of imbecility...