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Dickens for Our Time
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18530 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
2,122 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
DICKENS
Peter Ackroyd
Harper Collins, 1991
1195 pp. $35.00
Much of what we know about nineteenth-century England comes to us from the richly detailed novels of Charles Dickens. His worlds, populated by a memorable, if sometimes bizarre, cast of characters, have been translated into films, plays, and television productions just as easily as if Dickens had written them for performance. Today, we can not only read Oliver Twist but also sing the score from the Broadway musical; we can rent Great Expectations on videocassette; and, at Christmas, we can see scores of amateur and professional renditions of A Christmas Carol. Even those who have not read Dickens's novels recognize at once such enduring characters as Scrooge, Tiny Tim, or the irascible Miss Havisham.
Dickens himself has endured as a biographical subject as well. Poet, novelist, and biographer Peter Ackroyd is not the first, and surely not the last, to set out to apprehend Dicken's life. Dozens of writers and scholars from John Forster (1874) to Fred Kaplan (1988) have endeavored to capture the elusive Charles Dickens. With so much already written about Dickens, Ackroyd took on this project, he said, as a "challenge ... to make something that is original and inventive."
This biography is closer in style and texture to Ackroyd's novels than to his previous biography of T.S. Eliot or his brief study of Ezra Pound. As one critic noted, Ackroyd's novels often are pastiches, blending "historical and invented material, parody, multiple narratives, and self-reflexive techniques" into an unexpected narrative. Ackroyd's first novel, The Great Fire of London, published here in 1982, conjures up a story about a strange assortment of characters involved in a project of filming Dicken's Little Dorrit. The idea for that novel, Ackroyd admitted, came long before he had any interest in writing this biography.
Ackroyd's subsequent fiction also focused on historical figures: He wrote a fictional autobiography of Oscar Wilde's final months in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, created a detective/horror story set in eighteenth-century London in Hawksmoor, and drew upon the life of seventeenth-century poet Thomas Chatterton in Chatterton. Although the plots of these books are set in the past, it would be difficult to fit Ackroyd's freewheeling novels into the genre of historical fiction. "I'm much more interested in playing around with the idea of time," he
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