Charles Dickens, arguably Britain's greatest novelist

7^th February is a special day for the worldwide community of people who are proud to call themselves “Dickensians” (myself included) because this was the day in 1812 when Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth.

His father, John Dickens, was a naval pay clerk whose duties included taking wages to the crews of ships moored in the harbour. The Dickens family moved with the job, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London. Charles Dickens is therefore regarded as a “London novelist” because that is where he spent most of his life and all but one of his novels is set wholly or in part in London (the exception is Hard Times which is set in an imaginary northern industrial town).

Charles Dickens had some hard times of his own as he was growing up, mainly due to his father’s inability to manage money and support his growing family, but he discovered an ability to write amusing and incisive stories that were soon to prove immensely popular. By the end of his life (he died in 1870 at the age of 58) he was a wealthy man who was able to buy a substantial property (Gad’s Hill House) that he had admired while talking walks as a boy when living in Chatham.

Dickens is renowned for bringing the public’s attention to many of the evils of his time, particularly those associated with poverty. Although he sometimes lapsed into sentimentality, his general tone is a hard-headed one that recognises that good and evil deeds can be committed by members of all classes of society. Although many of the social problems mentioned in his novels and stories are only of historical interest today, Charles Dickens was a master at creating colourful and complex characters (not just caricatures, which is an accusation often levelled at him) whose failings and foibles are still very much with us. That is why Charles Dickens was a writer for all times and not just his own.

There are many fascinating aspects to the life of Charles Dickens, which I came to appreciate a few years ago when I was asked by the Dickens Fellowship to compile an index to 31 annual volumes of their journal “The Dickensian”. This involved me in reading and analysing some 6,000 pages of text devoted to the life and works of Dickens, so I ended up acquiring quite an encyclopaedic knowledge!

© John Welford

Fanny Burney (1752-1840), English novelist

Frances (or Fanny) Burney was born on 13^th June 1752 at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, the third child of Charles Burney, a well-known musician who wrote a celebrated “History of Music”. Although she was a slow starter, she became a voracious reader and an early writer of stories, plays and much else. However, on her 15^th birthday she burnt everything she had written up to that date.

When Fanny was eight the family moved to London, where her father taught music to many distinguished pupils and became acquainted with a number of the celebrities of the day, to whom Fanny would have been introduced.

Her mother died when she was 12, in 1762, and her father re-married in 1767. Fanny’s relationship with her step-mother became increasingly strained, although she got on well with the children of her step-mother’s previous marriage. We know these facts from Fanny’s earliest diaries, which she started to keep from 1768.

Fanny helped her father with his literary work, which brought her into contact with London society, as did the fact that the Burneys lived in a house previously owned by Sir Isaac Newton, and many distinguished people came to visit. Acquaintances included Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson.

Fanny Burney is best known for “Evelina”, a novel which was probably begun around 1772, with most of the writing dating from 1776 after the first volume of her father’s “History of Music” had been published. The writing of “Evelina”, and its publication, were done under a cloak of secrecy, as writing was not regarded at the time as a suitable occupation for a woman. Only the closest members of her family, not including her father, were even aware that Fanny was writing anything other than her work on the “History of Music”. All sorts of subterfuges were used to preserve the secret, including writing in a disguised hand and night-time visits to publishers by Fanny’s brother.

“Evelina, or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World” was published on 29 January 1778 and was an almost immediate success. It was read with enthusiasm by such notables as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, who praised it highly. The secret of its authorship eventually leaked out, but this also brought Fanny to the notice of the writer and socialite Hester Thrale, who was a friend of both her father and Samuel Johnson. Fanny and Hester became firm friends and Fanny gained access to the most distinguished intellectual circles of the day. Her diaries record many incidents from the lives of these people, and have proved to be valuable source material for the social history of the time.

Fanny was urged, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and others, to write a play, which she did. This was “The Witlings”, a satirical comedy that poked fun at some of the lesser literary lights of the day, much as Alexander Pope had done a generation earlier. However, although the play was completed, and would no doubt have been highly successful, her father took fright at the consequences of its being staged, and so this never happened.

Her second novel was “Cecilia, the Memoirs of an Heiress”, begun in 1780 and published in 1782. Like “Evelina”, this was very well received, with her readers accepting that a well-connected woman could also be a respected writer of fiction.

Even though her novels brought her wealth and success, Fanny Burney’s personal life then underwent a number of upheavals, including a break with her friend Hester Thrale and the death of Samuel Johnson, who had been one of her greatest supporters. Together with changes on the domestic front with a sister marrying and her father accepting a post at Chelsea Hospital, plus the fact that she was still unmarried in her mid-thirties, she felt obliged to accept an offer she had received of a post at court, as “second keeper of the robes” to Queen Charlotte.

She took up her responsibilities in July 1786 and stayed in royal service for five years. Despite moving in the highest circles, the work was nothing short of menial drudgery and extremely boring to a woman with such a lively mind and outgoing personality. She would much have preferred to mix in the literary and intellectual circles that she had known previously, but the royal family and court consisted of people with virtually no interest in that world, and she simply did not fit in.

To later generations, the main interest of Fanny’s Burney time at court comes from her journals, which covered the time of King George’s first period of madness, in 1788. Eventually, Fanny’s health began to suffer, and it was on health grounds that she was finally released from her duties, in July 1791.

With her health on the mend, Fanny rejoined the society she had missed so much and soon made the acquaintance of a group of French émigrés who had escaped from the Terror being perpetuated by the Jacobins. These were not reactionary aristocrats but constitutional reformers, whose efforts at moderation had been repulsed just as strongly as had the representatives of the “ancien regime”. Among this group was Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard d'Arblay, a soldier and former adjutant to the Marquis de Lafayette. Fanny became attracted to him and accepted his offer of marriage, much to her father’s dismay.

On 28^th July 1793, at the age of 41, Fanny Burney became Madame d’Arblay, the wife of a penniless Frenchman, a Catholic with, for the time, very liberal political views. None of these facts was likely to please her father.

However, the marriage turned out to be a very happy one, lasting until her husband’s death in 1818. A son, Alexander, was born in 1794.

Fanny began writing again, firstly working on a verse tragedy that she had virtually completed during her time at court as a way of staving off the boredom. This was “Edwy and Elgiva”, based on the life of a 10^th century Saxon king, and it was the only play by Fanny Burney to be staged in her lifetime. However, it was not well-received and was withdrawn after only one performance, despite its all-star cast.

Fanny’s third novel was “Camilla, a Picture of Youth” which was written in little more than a year and published in June 1796. As was common at the time, people were invited to subscribe in advance and would expect to receive their copy on publication. One notable name (among many such) on the list of subscribers was that of Jane Austen, aged 20 at the time. Although “Camilla” is not regarded today as the best of her work, being too moralistic for modern tastes, it was hugely successful at the time and the proceeds allowed the d’Arblays to build their own house, called “Camilla Cottage”.

Fanny soon became painfully embroiled in serious family problems affecting her sisters and brother. These included the death of her sister Susan in 1800, after she had suffered at the hands of her unworthy husband, and a family scandal, the details of which were kept entirely out of public knowledge, that involved her brother James living with his half-sister.

D’Arblay was anxious to recover his property in France, and the couple lived apart for a time until Fanny and Alex were able to join him there. However, when hostilities broke out the family became trapped in France and did not return to England for another ten years. While there, Fanny underwent a mastectomy, which was performed without anaesthetic.

In 1812 Fanny and Alex were able to return to England, and in 1814 she published her last novel, “The Wanderer”, which was based on her own experiences. However, this did not prove to be a success. Her father died during the same year and Fanny started work on compiling his memoirs.

Back in France, Fanny witnessed the events leading up to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, after which the d’Arblays returned to England for good, settling in Bath where her husband died in May 1818.

Fanny Burney devoted much of the rest of her life to assembling her father’s “Memoirs”, which were published in 1832. Her final years were marked by a series of family deaths, including that of her son Alex in 1837. By the time of her own death in 1840, at the age of 87, only one family member of her generation, a half-sister, was left to survive her.

Fanny Burney has been hailed as the first woman writer of note in English literature (not counting the far less talented Aphra Behn). Her early reputation depended a lot on her journals, some of which were published from 1842 and were soon recognised as valuable insights into late Georgian England. As a novelist, her influence on later writers such as Jane Austen cannot be doubted, particularly her ability to place female characters in realistic social settings. In more recent years, Fanny Burney has been re-assessed as a feminist icon, with her troubled life-history being analysed alongside her literary works.

© John Welford

A conversation with Philip Pullman

In 2008 the well-known writer Philip Pullman was given an honorary Professorship in the Department of English at Bangor University, North Wales. As a graduate of that department (in 1974) I was invited to attend a reunion at which Philip Pullman gave an inaugural talk.

The event was highly enjoyable, not least because of the chance to meet again some people I had not seen for more than 30 years. I discovered, for example, that my first tutor in English, who had started in his job on the same day that I started as a student, was now the Head of Department!

In his address on Saturday 9th February, Philip Pullman gave some insights to the world of fantasy fiction and his reasons for writing. I was also able to have a short private conversation with him later in the day (when I took the accompanying photo), and found him to be a fascinating person to talk to. He is a very level-headed man who can take criticism in his stride, but he is also convinced of the need to speak out when freedom of thought and speech are under attack.

His Dark Materials

The work for which he is best known is "His Dark Materials", a trilogy of novels about the growing-up of two children from parallel worlds who are able to meet and work together to fight the forces of darkness.

He sees the trilogy as a version of the Blakean theme of innocence and experience, but experience is, for Pullman, something to be welcomed and the loss of innocence is not a matter for regret. "Children", he said, "do not play at being children. They play at being grown-ups".

The first of the three novels is known as "Northern Lights" in the UK and several other countries where it has been published in translation, but as "The Golden Compass" in the United States and elsewhere. He said that the reason for the American change of title was too boring to mention, so he didn't mention it! However, he did say that in France the title is (in French) "The Kingdom of the North" - "but that's the French for you!"

The Golden Compass had recently been issued as a film, to great acclaim. Pullman was clearly not displeased with the film, although he said that it "bears a strange resemblance to a book I once wrote". The ending of the book and the film are not the same, although the filming did originally include the final chapter, which takes the reader forward to anticipate the second volume, "The Subtle Knife". This was because of a doubt on the studio's part as to whether films would follow that covered the rest of the trilogy. There would be little point in ending with a cliff-hanger if it was never resolved.

The film has attracted criticism, especially in the United States, for its anti-Christian stance, which is apparent from the activities of "The Magisterium", a thinly-veiled version of the Roman Catholic Church. This is not a problem for Pullman, who is only the latest in a long line of British authors, from Charles Dickens to J. K. Rowling, to have faced American wrath.

When I asked Pullman about my own idea for writing a novel on a highly controversial subject, he was all for it. Books don't worry people any more, he told me, it's only when the mass media produce versions of them that the self-appointed guardians of religion and morality feel the need to tell the rest of us what influences we are allowed to absorb.

Other work

Philip Pullman is not a one-book writer. He had been writing long before he began the seven-year process of producing his most famous work.

He was a teacher who clearly enjoyed the business of opening young minds, but, "I stopped being a teacher when I got worse at it". He has written a number of "fairy stories" and looks forward to writing more of them, a genre that clearly gives him great satisfaction.

Away from the writing (longhand in biro, apparently), he is currently passionate about saving the Oxford boatyard in the Jericho district of the city where the Oxford Canal joins the Thames. The Oxford bargees feature as important characters in "His Dark Materials", but Pullman admitted to me that he has yet to take to the waterways himself.

In conversation

He warns against stretching fantasy further than can be justified by the needs of the story to hand. I had a question of this type, wondering how the concept of daemons ("souls" in animal forms that always accompany humans) could work in the context of a drama production. He had also been asked in the past how characters in Lyra's world could play sports - thirty daemons charging around a rugby field would cause problems surely - and there was the question of how daemons are born.

However, should the need ever arise to explain any of this, he was sure that explanations would be found! In answer to another question from me, he also pointed out that a storyteller is not required to fill in all the gaps of a character's existence. Characters in fiction must have enormous bladders, I said, as they never seem to need to urinate. That was true, he replied, but suppose somebody found a toilet bowl full of blood - that would be a good reason for making a character want to have a pee!

Philip Pullman is a writer who knows how to tell a good story and make important statements about the human condition at the same time. To those people with fixed opinions about what the rest of us should believe, he is something of a bugbear, but as an apostle of the open mind he has few to match him.

©John Welford

George Eliot, 19th century novelist

George Eliot was one of the foremost novelists of the 19^th century, ranking alongside the Brontës and Dickens in her skill at characterisation and plot-making, but bringing to the novel something new, namely a moral purpose that went beyond the prime motive of most of her predecessors, which was to entertain.

She is almost universally referred to by her pen name, adopted more as a device to achieve anonymity than a pretence to masculinity.  She was born as Mary Anne Evans, although she used several variants on her given names (such as Marian) and took the surnames of her two husbands.

She was born on 22 November 1819 near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, the third child of an estate manager.  Her mother was the daughter of a local farmer.  She grew up in a semi-rural environment, aware both of the life of the agricultural community and the developing industry of nearby cities such as Coventry, as well as the busyness of the local coalmines and the canals and railways that criss-crossed this area in the heart of England.

She was educated locally, and soon developed a strong sense of religion, with a definite evangelical bias.

Her mother died when she was only sixteen, after which she stayed at home to help her elder sister keep house, becoming a full-time housekeeper when her sister left home to get married.  Her education now had to come from her own reading, and the occasional services of visiting tutors.

When her father retired, leaving the estate management business to his son, he and his daughter moved to a village near Coventry. She soon came under the influence of Charles and Cara Bray and their circle, renowned for their religious free-thinking, and her religious views changed markedly, from piety to agnosticism.  Her father nearly turned her out of the house when she refused to attend church, but relented.  Mary Ann (she had by now dropped the “e”) continued to keep house for her father until his death in 1849, with her unconventional opinions and less than beautiful appearance making it unlikely that she would find a husband very quickly.

Her contacts with many free-thinkers and liberals led to her first literary work, a translation from German of a critical examination of the life of Christ, and this led to a second commission of a similar kind.

Her father proved to be a demanding invalid during the long illness that ended with his death in 1849.  She was left with just enough money to live on, but only just, and the problem of what to do next. The Brays took her with them on a tour of Europe, but when they reached Geneva she decided to stay put, and spent the winter on her own, mostly devoted to reading and walking.

On returning to England she decided to try her hand at journalism, under the name Marian Evans, and moved to London, where she lodged with the publisher John Chapman.  This was a huge boost to her prospects, and she impressed her landlord so much that he asked her to edit his journal, the Westminster Review. 

However, Chapman, who had a wife and a mistress living under the same roof, paid more attention to Marian than could be tolerated by either woman, and she found herself back in Coventry for a time, although the rift was soon healed and she was allowed to return to London, where she continued to work on the Westminster Review, as both editor and frequent contributor. She became introduced to many of the leading lights of London’s literary, social and political scene, including Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes.

Her relationship with Spencer was more ardent on her behalf than his, and by 1853 her interest had turned towards Lewes, who was far more accepting of her attentions.  However, Lewes was a married man who was not able to divorce his wife, and the liaison with Marian led to a considerable scandal. 

This came about mainly because Marian and Lewes decided to live openly as husband and wife, with Marian even taking the surname of Lewes, which was not the way these things were done in Victorian England. This experience of flouting the accepted social norms was later to prove valuable in literary terms, with George Eliot’s portrayals of characters such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. The couple left England for a time, spending about nine months in Germany. Returning to England in July 1855, they found life to be much more difficult in social terms, with invitations being offered to one or the other, but rarely both together. 

Up to this point, Marian had written a huge amount of anonymous journalism, in the form of essays, articles and reviews, although it was widely known that she was the author.  She was now encouraged by Lewes to have a go at writing fiction, the result being three stories under the title Scenes of Clerical Life. The stories were published by Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857, with the name George Eliot being used for the first time.

The stories were well received, and she embarked on her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, which was published in 1859.  This was also a success, resulting in instant fame for the new author.

Marian’s authorship was guessed by some readers, but by no means all.  There was considerable speculation, with claims and counter-claims, but it was not long before Marian felt constrained to admit openly that she was George Eliot. This caused problems for some readers who knew about the scandalous Marian Evans/Lewes, and found it difficult to accept that such a person could be taken seriously when making moral judgments about fictional characters.  This in turn caused problems for Marian, who seriously considered giving up writing altogether and leaving the country.

It is just as well that she persevered, for her next novel was one of her greatest, namely The Mill on the Floss (1860), with its wonderful combination of humour and tragedy.  Personal tragedy interfered in Marian’s life whilst George was writing the novel, because her sister Chrissy, to whom Marian had been close at periods in their lives, died of TB.

The Mill on the Floss was another huge success in terms of sales, making Marian a rich woman.  She found that she was becoming more socially acceptable as her fame increased.

The next novel was Silas Marner (1861), another critical and financial success, but after that came Romola (1862-3), based on the story of the Italian monk Savonarola, and this proved to be difficult to write, as well as having a much less happy result in terms of literary merit and critical acclaim.

Felix Holt, The Radical (1866) marked a return to English rural life for her inspiration, and this was a more successful book, although not as well received as her first two novels.

A visit to Spain led to The Spanish Gypsy (1868), which, for some reason, she chose to write as a dramatic poem, a strange and unwise decision. 

With her career in apparent decline, it was as well for her lasting reputation that her next novel, Middlemarch (1871-2), would prove to be her abiding masterpiece.  This was in part due to a return to her safest ground, as far as novel-writing was concerned, namely life in a midland community, the repressed emotions of lower-middle-class women, and the clergy as targets of criticism.

Her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) showed her courage in tackling difficult material, in that she had become interested in the ‘Jewish question’, namely the aspirations of the growing Zionist movement in England.  Her sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters in the novel was unlikely to win her many friends in Victorian England, but the book was still a commercial success.

Marian, now aged 57, wealthy, and exhausted, was happy to enter a semi-retirement with Lewes in the Surrey countryside. This lasted for only two years before Lewes died and Marian became lonely and depressed. Indeed, she was now almost a recluse, allowing only a tiny number of people to visit her, one of them being the banker John Walter Cross, who was nearly twenty years younger than herself.

She married Cross in 1880, and made another change to her name, reverting to Mary Ann and taking Cross’s surname.  On honeymoon in Venice, Cross apparently attempted suicide, not a good sign for a forthcoming long and happy marriage.  This proved to be the case, for Cross’s depression was coupled with Mary Ann’s increasingly bad kidney disease.  Only three weeks after they moved into a new house in London she died on 22 December 1880.

Her religious views and her unconventional private life made it impossible for her to be buried in Westminster Abbey, and it was only 100 years later, in 1980, that a memorial to her was eventually placed in Poets’ Corner.

© John Welford

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With The Wind

Margaret Mitchell only wrote one novel that anyone has ever heard about, but that one (“Gone With The Wind”) was enough to make her name universally known, not least because of the blockbuster motion picture that was made from the story.

She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1900. Her father was an attorney and her mother, named Maybelle, was a woman of Irish ancestry who apparently had flame-red hair and a temperament to match. It would appear that much of the character of Scarlett O’Hara derived from Margaret’s mother.

Margret Mitchell grew up in a town that contained many people who remembered the events of the American Civil War, during which Atlanta (in 1864) had been evacuated and most of the buildings destroyed by fire. The people had had to start all over again after the War was over.

Margaret experienced tragedies of own during her young adulthood. Her fiancé was killed during the First World War in 1918, her mother died in 1919 and her father suffered severe health problems soon afterwards. Margaret was therefore unable to complete her studies at Smith College.

She married in 1920, but her husband treated her with cruelty and they divorced in 1924. The character of Rhett K Butler is probably a close parallel of her first husband, who was known as Red K Upshaw.

Margaret’s second marriage, which began in 1925, was much happier. Husband number two was John Marsh, a journalist.

Margaret kept her birth name (abbreviated to Peggy Mitchell) for her work as a writer on local newspapers, for which she contributed columns and interviews.

It was while she was laid up with a broken ankle in 1929 that she started work on her novel, which was based on the events of the Civil War. She worked quickly and completed the first draft in only a few months. However, she then did nothing with it and left the manuscript in a cupboard.

Six years later, in 1935, Margaret was asked to show an executive from the publishing firm Macmillan around the town. This was Harold Latham, who said that he was on the lookout for possible new material. She mentioned her stored-away novel and he asked to see it.

Latham was so impressed by what he saw that he had it rushed into print. Gone With The Wind was an instant success and became a runaway hit, heading the bestseller list for two years after its initial publication in June 1936. It led to a Pulitzer Prize for Margaret Mitchell and an 18% bonus for all of Macmillan’s employees!

Hollywood soon expressed an interest and Margaret was able to sell the film rights to MGM for $50,000. The film, directed by David O Selznick, came out in 1939. It is reckoned to have been, in financial terms, the most successful film of all time.

Much of the film’s success, apart from the poignancy of the story and the brilliant writing, was down to the inspired casting of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. Gable was already an established star but Leigh, a young British actress with no Hollywood credits to her name, was unknown to American audiences, and had actually suggested herself for the part.

The film version of Gone With The Wind followed the book reasonably closely, but toned down some of Margaret Mitchell’s pro-Southern prejudices. She had, for example had Rhett Butler riding proudly with members of the Klu Klux Klan. The book’s reputation has suffered in more recent years from accusations of racism, and Margaret Mitchell’s former home in Atlanta has been targeted by would-be arsonists.

Margaret Mitchell was feted as a literary genius and did not feel prompted to write anything else after Gone With The Wind. Indeed, the only other manuscript known to bear her name was a considerably inferior novel that she wrote when aged only 16; “Lost Laysen” was eventually published in 1996.

Margaret Mitchell died in 1949 as a result of being knocked down by a car while crossing the street near her home. She was known to have been somewhat absent-minded while out walking, and the accident was almost certainly her fault. However, this did not stop the car driver from being imprisoned for manslaughter – his misfortune was to collide with a careless pedestrian who just happened to be internationally famous.

Margaret Mitchell certainly counts as one of literature’s “one-hit wonders”. If she had not broken her ankle in 1929 it is quite possible that she would not even have been that.

© John Welford

Monica Dickens: a 20th-century writer with a famous ancestor

Monica (Enid) Dickens was a notable 20^th century writer of both fiction and non-fiction, whose success may or may not have had something to do with her surname. It cannot be said that any favours came her way because she was a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, but the name may have prompted many a book buyer to pick her titles off the shelf out of curiosity if nothing else.

She was born on 10^th May 1915 in Bayswater, London, the youngest of five children born to Henry Charles Dickens and his wife Fanny. Henry Charles was himself the eldest son of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, who, as a prominent barrister and judge in the late Victorian and early 20^th century period, was the most successful of the novelist’s ten children. Monica’s father also became a barrister.

A list of failures

Monica was educated at St Paul’s Girls School, from which she was expelled for bad conduct, and the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, from which she was told to leave for incompetence as an actress. Despite being a “debutante” (a member of the social elite who is presented at Court and thus made available on the upper class marriage market) she failed to attract a husband and ended up working “below stairs” as a cook in various London households.

Finding her role in life

It was a chance encounter with a publisher that started her off as a writer, because he encouraged her to describe her experiences as a cook. This became “One Pair of Hands”, which was published in 1937 and was immediately successful. She had discovered her skill, which was to write in a humorous and perceptive style. Perhaps there was something in the genes after all.

Her first novel, published in 1940, was “Mariana”, and others followed soon afterwards. Her war work consisted firstly of nursing and then in a factory helping to build Spitfires. All her experiences provided material for her writing, which continued to attract praise from a growing set of influential admirers.

As well as her novels, which appeared at regular intervals, she wrote a weekly column in “Woman’s Own” magazine for 20 years.

She was married, in December 1951, to an American naval commander, Roy Stratton, and the couple moved to a large house on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They adopted two daughters. Notable among her novels during this period were “Cobbler’s Dream” in 1963, which led to a televised version entitled “Follyfoot”, and “Kate and Emma” (1964).

In 1965 she stumbled upon “Strine”, or Australian English, when she found herself inscribing “To Emma Chisit, with best wishes” during a book signing in Sydney, when the lady buyer had only been enquiring about the price!

Later life

In the late 1960s she became aware of the Samaritans movement and its founder, Chad Varah. She found that her ability to listen to people in distress could be of real value, inspiring her to open a Samaritans branch in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1974. This was to lead to the spread of the movement throughout the United States. It was also the inspiration behind her novel “The Listeners”, published in 1970.

The 1970s also saw the publication of several books for children, and her autobiography, “An Open Book”, in 1978.

In 1985 her husband died and Monica Dickens moved back to England, where she bought a thatched cottage in Berkshire and continued to write. Her final novel, “One of the Family”, was published posthumously in 1993. She died of cancer on Christmas Day 1992, at the age of 77.

Monica Dickens not only inherited a writing gene and a sense of humour from her great-grandfather but also a social conscience that she developed to a considerable degree. As well as her work for the Samaritans, mentioned above, she was also very active in championing the work of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). Had these organisations existed in Charles Dickens’s day, doubtless they would have received his support as well.

© John Welford

Henry Fielding: novelist and magistrate

Henry Fielding (1707-54) is renowned as a pioneer of the English novel, particularly due to his best-known work “Tom Jones”. He was also a reforming London magistrate.

Henry Fielding was born on 22^nd April 1707 at Sharpham Park in Somerset, this being the estate of his maternal grandfather. His father was an army general. His mother died when he was aged only 11.

He was educated at Eton, where he was not particularly well-behaved but came away with an excellent knowledge of Latin and Greek. 

When aged 19 he attempted to run away with an heiress, and during the years before he eventually married (when aged 27) his life could be described as “rakish”, mixing with various dubious characters and thoroughly enjoying himself. His fortunes varied between poverty and good living, the latter funded by the writing of popular plays of a generally satirical nature – around 20 in total - and the patronage of a wealthy distant cousin.

His marriage was a happy one, spent mainly on a small country estate in north Dorset, although the Licensing Act of 1737, which introduced much stricter censorship of what could be performed in theatres, led to Fielding having to seek a new way of maintaining his lifestyle. He therefore sold his estate and began to study for a career in the law. He accomplished this aim in three years whereas it normally took twice that long.

He became a barrister in 1740 and began to practice the law, although his health started to give him problems and his career did not last long.

He therefore turned to writing prose fiction, the result of which was “The Adventures of Joseph Andrews”, published in 1742. Fielding had been annoyed by “Pamela” a prose work published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson that had proved to be highly popular but which Fielding considered to be pretentious and over-sentimental. He first wrote an anonymous satire entitled “Shamela”, but followed this with the more extensive “Joseph Andrews”, which purported to be the adventures of Pamela’s brother.

“Joseph Andrews” can be regarded as the first comic novel in English. The author acknowledged on the title page his debt to Cervantes and “Don Quixote” for the loose plot structure, but his use of comic situations and presentation of well-rounded characters such as Parson Adams was entirely original to him. It is easy to see how Charles Dickens in turn made use of Fielding’s example when writing his “Pickwick Papers”.

Tragedy struck in 1743 when Henry Fielding’s wife Charlotte died and he became seriously depressed. He was helped through this time by Mary Daniel who had been the family’s maid but became a firm friend. They were married in 1747. 

In 1748 Henry Fielding was appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster, which served to broaden his already extensive knowledge of the London underworld of criminals and ne’er-do-wells. This experience provided much material for his greatest prose work, “The History of Tom Jones”, published in 1749.

At the heart of the story is the interplay of the three main characters – exuberant and sensuous Tom, cold and heartless Blifil, and the object of desire for both of them, Sophia. There are several other memorable characters including Squire Western, Mr Allworthy and Harriet Fitzpatrick.

Fielding’s gift was to base his characters on aspects of real people that he had come across in his travels and work as a magistrate, and also to create situations that interest the reader and make him/her want to continue turning the pages. There is a certain amount of coarseness in the book, and plain descriptions of sexual encounters, but none of this was at all false to contemporary society in Fielding’s time. 

Dr Samuel Johnson was highly critical of “Tom Jones”, much preferring Henry Fielding’s third and final novel, “Amelia” (1751), although this is rarely read today. This is a domestic novel, set around the marriage of Amelia and Captain Booth, which is generally regarded as a pen-portrait of Fielding’s own blissful love affairs. 

Most people today would regard the depictions of squalor in Newgate Jail, a pawnshop in Monmouth Street and a bailiff’s lock-up in Gray’s Inn Road as being of much greater interest.

The book was a huge success, with Fielding being paid a thousand guineas for the copyright and a second edition being called for on the first day of publication. 

Fielding was a magistrate for only five years, but he made a considerable contribution during that time to improving the lot of his fellow Londoners. For one thing, he set an example in his own court by refusing to take the customary cut from fines imposed on people found guilty of minor offences, which tended to lead to innocent people being convicted in error. 

He wrote a pamphlet that pointed to connections between crime, poverty and the consumption of cheap gin. This inspired his friend William Hogarth to produce his series of prints on “Gin Lane and Beer Alley”, with the net result being an Act of Parliament that restricted the sale of spirits.

Another pamphlet by Henry Fielding sought to tackle the causes of crime by proposing that hostels, workshops and infirmaries should be established to help alleviate overcrowding and unemployment. However, these suggestions were never acted upon.

In 1753 the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, asked Henry Fielding to suggest a plan for breaking up robber gangs that were then terrorizing London. Fielding was not at well at the time, but he delayed a visit to Bath, designed as a health cure, to undertake the work, which had an entirely successful outcome. With winter approaching he decided to go to Portugal instead of Bath, but did not live long enough to return.

However, his final piece of literary work was his “Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon” that he wrote when on board ship. This piece is notable for its humour and freshness as he notes the idiosyncrasies of the ship’s crew and fellow passengers and bemoans the incompetence of bureaucrats and the insolence of Customs officers.

Henry Fielding died in Lisbon on 8^th October 1754, at the age of 47.

© John Welford