Claire Tomalin

Somehow, Claire Tomalin packed the entire life of a busy man like Charles Dickens into just 400 pages and still managed to make it feel like she did him justice. I knew the broad strokes in advance: that Dickens was troubled at a young age by poverty, that he grew to be a court reporter, workaholic, a lover of theatre. That he believed he had married the wrong woman but proceeded to have an enormous number of children with her; and here lies his greatest failing. His wife Catherine was perpetually pregnant, the births were often hard, and Dickens was an indifferent father. Reading between the lines brings bitterly home what he valued Catherine for, and all that he valued her for. His strongest affections were saved for his male friends, whom he was more ready to regard as his equals, and for attractive young women who were not his wife, including his wife's sisters. If you come away despising Dickens the man, it will probably be for his treatment of his wife and children. If you can forgive him, it will probably be for his considerable acts of charity. A number of other well-known figures move through his life story. I expected and met Bulwer, Gaskell, Wilkins and Nelly Ternan, but John Forster was a surprise as Dickens' closest friend and confidant.

The degree of detail provided about the various parts and moments of Dickens' life is extremely uneven. This is hardly Tomalin's fault; where there are records that describe events in detail, she uses them, and where there are not she can only skim over those days, months or years. I regret that we don't know more about what drove Dickens to write each of his early novels. There is only the timeline of when he began and ended the work, and no way to explain the 'how' of what Dickens did. We can see when he disagreed with publishers, or when he pushed himself too far or, almost miraculously, pushed through. The central fact we do know is that he was a wonderful observer, and especially so of the city of London, its environs and its people.

I'm glad I read all of Dickens' completed novels first. Tomalin is unreserved in her judgements of each, not shy about spilling their details, and turns partial book reviewer while quoting from reviews by Dickens' contemporaries. She doesn't care much for any of his early novels and I disagree with her on the majority of those. There's little she can find about the story behind them, it isn't until Copperfield that she begins turning up his specific inspiration for each that follows. Coincidentally, from there to the end she is mostly praising.

I'm troubled by the relationship with Nelly Ternan. It isn't clear how much she resisted Dickens' advances (she was nineteen and he was around fifty when they met) but Tomalin suggests she at least demurred a little, even as Dickens was quick to place himself in a position of power over her family as their benefactor. Without having the details it looks like possible harassment, though she must have found it flattering and it seems she found real and lasting feelings for him. Tomalin explores their relationship with greater detail in another of her books, which I may pursue.… (more)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-life-of-my-own-by-claire-tomalin/

I have previously hugely enjoyed Tomalin’s biographies of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and the young H.G. Wells, so I had pretty high hopes for this autobiography, published in 2017 when she was already 84 (she turned 90 in June). And it pretty much fulfilled them.

Tomalin is the daughter of an English musician and a French writer, who married too young and were already on the verge of separation when she was conceived. She too married young, finding a journalist chap while a student at Cambridge, and the relationship deteriorated into on-again-off-again until he was killed covering the Yom Kippur war, exactly fifty years ago last month. But they had five children, two of who died, one as a baby, the other in her early 20s; and their surviving son has a serious disability. She tells us much less about her second husband, Michael Frayn, which is a little disappointing. But there is still plenty of personal material to draw on, with her literary endeavours a secondary theme. The hilarious contact lens scene from Noises Off was inspired by something that actually happened to Tomalin while on holiday with Frayn.

Writing of her time at Cambridge, she says that she gave up writing poetry because she felt she was not good enough at it; but this “left an emptiness in my life which has never quite been filled.” I find that rather sad. Her biographies are superlative, but I guess she feels that there was something more creative that was possible and that she missed out on. There is still time.… (more)

This one took a while to get through. It’s very thorough, and the author spent several chapters with in-depth descriptions of Austen’s immediate family, extended family, and neighbors. It made sense to give as clear a picture as possible of the people who meant the most to Jane Austen, and of the place where she was raised. These chapters weren’t, however, the most compelling reading, and even with my chapter-a-day style of reading nonfiction, I didn’t always accomplish that some days.

As Tomalin progressed through Austen’s life into her adulthood and writing, the book grabbed my attention more, and I especially enjoyed the chapters about her different books being published and their reception. I wasn’t sure what to think of the commentary on Mansfield Park, and I was surprised to hear how many people preferred Mary Crawford to Fanny Price. It’s been many years since I read that one, and I’m sure it wasn’t a particularly deep reading, so maybe I’ll have to take another look. I’ve always disliked Mary Crawford, in the book and in movie adaptations. It’s funny, as Jane Austen’s cousin Eliza was described, she reminded me of Mary Crawford. And Tomalin described Eliza as someone Austen admired.

As I got near the end of this biography, I kept wishing for a different ending to Austen‘s life than what she got, death at 41. It’s incredibly sad to think about how she died so young and must have had so many more stories to tell. And it just killed me to read about all the letters of hers that were destroyed by her sister Cassandra and her niece.

I’m glad I read it. It was very well-researched, and it certainly inspired me to reread the novels I haven’t revisited yet.… (more)