Michael SlaterNew York: Oxford UP, 2007
$9.99/Small Trade Paper
The “Very Interesting People” series provides a creative way of outsourcing information from the epic Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), a massive store-house of sound writing on the lives of famous Brits. The series was first under the general editorship of Sir Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s pop) and has spiraled into a body of over 55,000 entries. Taken on the whole, the DNB is not amenable to casual reading. It has too many lives and could wholly consume rather than casually enlighten. The “Very Interesting People” series intervenes by taking one such entry, which can be packaged as across a small 100 page book, and selling it on its own. The genius behind the series is that it is an attractive re-packaging of material that is available elsewhere, but the immediate downside is that one is almost automatically over-paying based on the total amount of information available in the set.
But, for those of us who do not relish the idea of owning sixty (!) print volumes of DNB, or shelling out a hefty sum for unrestricted online access, the VIP series saves the day. Michael Slater (Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at Birbeck College, University of London) is an agreeable distiller of Dickens. Armed with the academic chops and blessed with the merciful gift of talking about the most long-winded literateur in English-language history with few, precise words, Slater narrates the life, works, and legacy of Charles Dickens without noticeably retrofitting the writer into pre-ordained sainthood.
Slater postures his book as something predominately interested in chronicling “Dickens’s career as a phenomenally productive and phenomenally popular writer, both of fiction and non-fiction,” with “as much attention as possible…paid to the main events of his personal life” (viii). The approach is somewhat traditional in that the major events of the writer’s life are often thrown into contrast with the subjects of the literature, but never to unruly ends. The life and times of Charles Dickens are broken into periods based on the writers successes, his occupations (some would say preoccupations, as Dickens is demonstrated to have been somewhat obsessive in a few areas), and his family life. His ideology, personal views, and prejudices are thrown into fascinating contrast upon his initial visit to America (see especially 32-39). For Dickens, Britain still represented a bastion of civility, while the United States wore him down through rabid fan assaults, money disputes, and shear distance traveled.
Slater subtextually shows that Dickens was infatuated with the idea of profitability. This text is peppered with figures: accounts, earnings reports, expenditures, copies sold, and on. Taken in total, they allow the reader to approach Dickens less as an author in the popular imagination so much as his own business plan, a multi-lateral writing machine who continually invested in himself (through frequent travels and a consistently luxurious lifestyle) and who diversified himself to the point of totally assured success. Slater does well to show that Dickens did not just write, but also edited his own journal, staged theatrical productions, did dramatic readings from his works, and championed social causes. It is well knownIn this way, Dickens exponentially assured his renown, in his own lifetime (the relative rarity of a genius recognized as such while still alive is beyond debate).
The blessing/curse drawback of the VIP series is their length. While Slater gets ample mileage out of the format, his book manages to lightly skim the surface. One of the most compelling aspects of this biography is the “Reputation and Legacy” chapter (91-104), which reads as woefully inadequate and should have been expanded were it not for the format of the series. In the final analysis, Slater has written a nearly perfect 100 page introduction to Charles Dickens, but one is left with the feeling that there is much, much more to learn. Since the interested reader will want to consult other biographies, works of critical scholarship, and the complete writings of Dickens, think of it as an initiation into the “Dickens Industry.”
