A potted biography of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7^th February 1812, the eldest child of a naval pay clerk. The family soon moved away, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London, which was to be Charles’s home for most of the rest of his life.

The family went through some bad times during his childhood, and at one stage he had to work in a shoe-blacking warehouse to help support the rest of the family.

He started writing stories and sketches while working as a parliamentary reporter, and, once he got a story into print, he simply had to write more. At first he used the name “Boz” as a non de plume, and his “Sketches by Boz” proved to be highly popular.

His first novel was the somewhat rambling “Pickwick Papers” that was really a set of farcical stories within a loose framework. However, this was so popular with the public that Dickens was set on a full-time career as a writer. In all he wrote 15 novels, including the unfinished “Mystery of Edwin Drood”, as well as shorter stories that included “A Christmas Carol”.

Among his most popular novels were “Oliver Twist”, “Nicholas Nickleby”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations” and “Bleak House”.

Dickens wrote all his novels in serial form, producing weekly or monthly parts which were sometimes part of journals containing other material, both by himself and other writers.

Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth on 2^nd April 1836. They were to have ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. However, the marriage eventually broke down and the couple separated in 1858, although they were never divorced. Dickens had a secret affair with an actress, Ellen Ternan, which continued for the rest of his life.

Dickens’s popularity was so great that he was able to make a considerable income by giving readings of extracts from his books to audiences across the country. He visited the United States twice during his lifetime, the second trip, in 1867-8, being a reading tour that was highly profitable.

However the strain of constant travelling and performing began to tell on his health and he had to give up the reading tours in 1869.

He died from a stroke on 9^th June 1870, having written his last words the day before. He had asked to be buried in Rochester Cathedral but Queen Victoria insisted that only Westminster Abbey was a suitable resting place for him.

© John Welford

The two funerals of Thomas Hardy

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy died, aged 87, on 11^th January 1928 at Max Gate, his home on the edge of Dorchester, Dorset. His final full-length novel, “Jude the Obscure” had appeared as long ago as 1895, but he continued to write poetry almost to the day he died, clocking up around 1,000 poems during his lifetime.

At his death he was regarded as one of the foremost literary figures of his age. Although he was never knighted he did receive one of the highest honours that a writer could be awarded, namely membership of the Order of Merit in 1910. If anyone merited a place in Westminster Abbey’s Poets Corner it had to be Thomas Hardy.

A dilemma and a compromise

However, Hardy himself had other ideas and he had expressed a wish to be buried alongside his parents, grandparents and first wife in the churchyard at Stinsford, only a few miles from both his current home and the cottage in which he had been born and had spent his early years. This desire was echoed by the surviving members of his family.

The call for a more public funeral was led, oddly enough, by Hardy’s own literary executor, Sydney Cockerell, who chose to ignore Hardy’s wishes. The great and the good soon leapt on the bandwagon, with luminaries such as Sir James Barrie (author of “Peter Pan”) and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, being of their number. The Dean of Westminster was at first reluctant to agree, as he was aware of Hardy’s unconventional religious and moral views (as expressed in novels such as “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure”), although he really had little choice but to allow the request.

Back in Dorset, however, the response was far from enthusiastic. Thomas Hardy may have been a national figure but he was first and foremost a Dorset man, and that, according to the people of Dorset, was where he belonged. A compromise was needed, and this came from the Vicar of Stinsford, the Rev Cowley, who said that, because Hardy was at heart a local man, his heart should stay in the locality.

This solution was therefore adopted. A doctor opened Hardy’s body and removed his heart which was then placed in a small casket. The rest of his body was taken to London for the Westminster Abbey funeral.

So, at 2pm on 16^th January 1928 two very different ceremonies took place. This was only five days after Hardy had died, but it was still possible for hundreds of people to drop what they were doing and give Thomas Hardy a magnificent send-off.

At Westminster Abbey

Hardy’s remains were accompanied into the Abbey by both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition (Ramsay Macdonald), together with literary figures including Sir James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling and A E Housman. The body had already been cremated, so the casket that was buried in Poets Corner only contained Hardy’s ashes and a spadeful of Dorset soil.

In Dorset

At Stinsford, after a service in the church, Rev Cowley carried the casket containing Hardy’s heart along the short path from the church door to the grave in which Emma Hardy had been buried in 1912. He was accompanied by Thomas’s brother Henry (who would find his own place in the family plot later that year) and the path was lined by as many local people as could fit into the confined space. Hardy’s heart was placed alongside Emma’s coffin, where it still lies with the inscription on the grave recording that “Here lies the heart of Thomas Hardy OM”.

There was actually a third service held that day, at St Peter’s Church in Dorchester, which gave the people of the town their chance to pay their respects.

There is a story that is resurrected from time to time to the effect that Hardy’s heart was not actually buried in Stinsford Churchyard at all. When the doctor extracted the heart, so the story runs, he left it on his kitchen table when he had to answer a knock at the door. When he returned, he saw to his horror that his cat had found the heart and was making short work of it. He therefore substituted a pig’s heart from the local butcher’s shop, and that is what ended up in the casket. It’s a good story, but one that has “urban myth” written all over it. One can believe it or not, as one wishes, but surely Thomas Hardy himself would have been highly amused by it had it been true. It is just the sort of story that he would have liked to tell.

© John Welford

Why Charles Dickens avoided Chicago

Charles Dickens made two visits to the United States, but they were very different in nature. He had been 30 years old in 1842 and was keen to discover as much as he could about the country and its people (he used this material most notably in his 1843 novel “Martin Chuzzlewit”). By the time of his return visit in 1867-8 he had written a large number of novels and stories, was hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and had discovered that he could make a good living by reading his works aloud to an adoring public.

His later visit was therefore a money-making trip, and he hoped to fit in as many readings as he could, in as many cities as he could reach. However, he was not in good health at this time in his life (he died in 1870), and one of the reasons for this was exhaustion brought on his many public performances in Britain. The original itinerary had to be cut back, and one of the cities to miss out was Chicago.

Why not Chicago?

The population of Chicago was not happy about being snubbed in this way, and they found his argument that “it was better that Chicago should go into fits than he should” to be a flimsy one. However, there was more to it than that.

Dickens had a younger brother, Augustus, who had settled in Chicago in 1858 but died there the year before Charles left London to start his tour. Augustus had caused Charles a considerable amount of trouble, and Charles had no wish, especially given his state of health, to have the past raked up again, which he thought was highly likely if he visited Chicago. He must therefore have been greatly relieved when told that he could leave that city off his itinerary.

Augustus Newnham Dickens

Augustus Dickens married Harriet Lovell, in London, in 1848. However, Harriet went blind two years later and Augustus refused to support her. When he left Britain for America he was accompanied by Bertha Phillips, the daughter of an Irish barrister. As far as the people of Chicago were concerned, there was a married couple in the city called Augustus and Bertha Dickens, they had three children, and Augustus was the brother of a famous British novelist.

The Chicago Dickenses were not well off, and Augustus had appealed to Charles for financial help, which Charles was not prepared to give, being highly critical of his brother’s conduct. When Augustus died from tuberculosis, aged 39, Bertha and the children were left in very poor circumstances.

Criticism of Charles Dickens

The Chicago Tribune got to hear about Charles Dickens’s refusal to help his relatives. They therefore ran a series of stories that accused Charles of gross hypocrisy in his “total want of consideration for the widow and children of his deceased brother”. Not only was Charles visiting America to make lots of money, but he would be doing so by reading from books that were full of instances of generosity being shown to the poor and needy by characters who were made aware of their social responsibilities. As far as they were concerned, Charles Dickens was the lowest of the low.

The Truth about Augustus and Bertha

However, what Charles Dickens knew, but the people of Chicago did not, was that Bertha was not the widow of Augustus at all. Indeed, Charles had been more than generous to Augustus’s real widow, Harriet, who was still living in England. Charles had no obligations to Bertha. He may have had a great deal of sympathy with her plight, but if he was seen to support her there was every chance that her status as an adulteress would be revealed. The kindest thing, therefore, was to stay well out of it.

As it happened, the truth did emerge, but not through any action by Charles Dickens. He had left America by the time that the Chicago Tribune ran its apology, and the consequence of that was exactly what Charles had feared, namely the exposure of Bertha.

The story had the worst possible ending because, with her past revealed for all to read, Bertha’s mental health collapsed. Her death in December 1868 appears to have been from a deliberate overdose of morphine.

So did Charles Dickens do the right thing?

At the root of the affair was a family in desperate need which could have been helped by a wealthy relative who chose not to, and he even took the opportunity to avoid seeing them when he could quite easily have done so. Charles could have insisted on not dropping Chicago from his list of venues, and he could even have used the income from his Chicago performance to help Bertha and her children. So was he being cowardly by staying away?

That could be argued, but, then again, the argument for not exposing Bertha was a strong one, as later events made tragically clear.

There was another reason for Charles’s decision, which was that it would have been an insult to Harriet, Augustus’s true widow, for Charles to support the woman who had been the cause of her distress in the first place by robbing her of her husband at a time when she had been in great need by virtue of going blind.

One can also sympathise with Charles who was just about the only member of his family who ever made any money. Charles was constantly being badgered by his siblings and his children for support, just as he had been in earlier life by his father. It is understandable that he had little desire to add another name to the list of people who were content to rely on him for hand-outs.

That said, there is evidence that Charles Dickens did actually do something to help Bertha, in the form of a secret annuity, but by the time this came into operation she was in such a poor state of health that it made little difference.

All in all, this was a difficulty that Charles Dickens could well have done without. The mess had been caused entirely by his feckless brother Augustus, who had abandoned his blind wife and fled to America. In the same circumstances, there can surely be few people who would not have followed the same line that Charles did, and been similarly reluctant to visit Chicago.

© John Welford

Honoré de Balzac: an influential 19th century French novelist

The French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) made an important contribution to the development of the modern novel. He is also an important illustration of the principle that failure can be followed by great success if one refuses to give up.

He was born in Tours, a city on the River Loire about 130 miles southwest of Paris. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer, but this idea did not excite Honoré who, from the age of about 19, made up his mind that he was going to be a great writer. To this end he left Tours and headed for Paris.

He would spend the next decade enduring a series of disappointments and considerable poverty. As well as writing he tried his hand at printing and publishing, plus some even less likely ventures such as growing pineapples, but the only result was a steady accumulation of debt.

His attempts at writing got him absolutely nowhere. He started with a verse tragedy entitled “Cromwell”, which was a failure, as was a string of potboilers that were either slushy, sensationalist, or both. He had the notion that because writers such as Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper had enjoyed huge success from their historical fiction in English, he could do the same in French. He was wrong – mainly because his efforts lacked originality.

But when he was about 30 Balzac got an idea that was not only original but revolutionary. This was to create a body of work that was based on a central theme and in which characters made appearances in more than one book. The theme was life in Paris and the surrounding region, as lived by the huge variety of people to be found there. He discovered a gift for description of people and places that had not been appropriate to his earlier derivative work, and once he had started on creating his self-contained world he did not stop until he died from exhaustion 20 years later.

He gave his new venture an overall title, “La Comédie Humaine” – The Human Comedy – which he hoped would be every bit as significant to literature as “The Divine Comedy” of Dante Alighieri. His ambition was not misplaced.

The project ran to nearly 100 works, some being novels and others stories of varying lengths. They introduced more than 2000 characters, many of whom made re-appearances in later works and helped to bind them together. Titles included “Le Père Goriot”, “Eugénie Grandet” and “La Cousine Bette”.

Once started, there was no stopping Honoré de Balzac. He would routinely work for 18 hours at a stretch, drinking as many as 50 cups a coffee a day. His story “The Illustrious Gaudissart”, which is 14,000 words long, was written in a single overnight sitting. He was no slapdash writer, in that he would survey publishers’ proofs with keen attention and revise his work six or seven times before allowing it to be printed.

Despite his dedication to work Balzac was constantly searching for the perfect woman to make his life complete. This turned out to be a Polish countess, whom he eventually married after corresponding with her for 15 years. However, married bliss turned out to be short-lived, because he died only five months after the wedding.

Balzac’s work showed that the novel could be an art form capable of representing life in considerable detail, warts and all, but with sympathy and humour thrown in. This was a gift that he shared with his near contemporary across the English Channel, Charles Dickens. Between them they set the tone for the 19^th century realist novel.

© John Welford

William McGonagall: the greatest bad poet of all time

The world is full of very bad poets, so the crown of the “best” (or should that be the “worst”?) has to be bestowed with care. However, there must be few people who, having been introduced to his poetry, would deny that honour to William McGonagall.

William Topaz McGonagall

To be truly bad as a poet, the candidate has to have an abundance of bad poetry to their name, to have their own style of awfulness, and to have always deceived themselves into believing that they were gifted as a great poet when they were in fact precisely the opposite. McGonagall ticks all those boxes, many times over.

The year of his birth is uncertain, as it could have been anything from 1825 to 1830. McGonagall wrote a prose autobiography but neglected to give his date of birth (we know that he died in 1902). He was a handloom weaver in Dundee (on the east coast of Scotland) who fell on hard times when machine weaving became established in the city. He then suddenly became a poet at the age of around 50, having had what he describes as a sort of “Road to Damascus” experience. Hearing voices telling him to write, he thought he might write a poem in praise of a local preacher, the Rev. George Gilfillan, which he did. He also sent it anonymously to the local newspaper. It must have been a slack week for news because they printed it, including the final lines:

“My blessing on his noble form and on his lofty head

May all good angels guard him while living and hereafter when dead.”

George must have been delighted with that!

McGonagall’s love affair with the Tay Bridge

Success now went to William’s head, as he convinced himself, in his own words, that “Dame Fortune has endowed me with the genius of poetry”. His next effort was therefore a paean of praise for the railway bridge that crossed the estuary of the River Tay into Dundee. The poem was written before the bridge was opened (on 31^st May 1878) and it contains elements of the McGonagall style that were to feature in virtually all his subsequent work:
 

“Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!
With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array
And your central girders, which seem to the eye
To be almost towering to the sky.
The greatest wonder of the day,
And a great beautification to the River Tay … ”

There is the delight in precise detail, the appalling scansion, the forced rhymes and the general sense that the words are simply there to make up the numbers. However, worse was to come.

McGonagall’s capacity for deluding himself was apparent from the account in his autobiography that it was the reading of his poetry in Brazil that persuaded the Emperor to visit Dundee in disguise to see the bridge. However, the poem relates that it was the bridge itself:

“That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave
His home far away, incognito in his dress,
And view thee ere he passed along en route to Inverness.”

However, what most people know about the Tay Bridge is that it collapsed in a gale as a train was crossing in December 1879, with the loss of 75 lives. Strangely enough, McGonagall had foreseen this possibility:

“I hope that God will protect all passengers
By night and by day,
And that no accident will befall them while crossing
The Bridge of the Silvery Tay,
For that would be most awful to be seen …”

Needless to say, McGonagall was equal to the task of meeting the occasion with a poem, entitled “The Tay Bridge Disaster”. This poem has several interesting features, such as the line which occurs here several times, as well as in many other McGonagall poems:

“Which will be remembered for a very long time”

When William Topaz was stuck for a line, this was one that came in very handy.

We also get some details that stretch the concept of poetry to breaking point:

“I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses.”

And the concluding couplet is one of McGonagall’s most memorable:

“For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.”

The bridge was rebuilt, and our friend was on hand with “An Address to the New Tay Bridge”:

“Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery Tay,
With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array,
And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye
Strong enough all windy storms to defy.”

Having enjoyed such a triumph with his original version, William Topaz saw little point in changing a winning formula. However, he possibly went a bit over the top with:

“The New Yorkers boast about their Brooklyn Bridge,
But in comparison to thee it seems like a midge …”

There are many other examples that could be cited to show McGonagall’s genius as a terrible poet, but the point to be made is that his poems are not merely inept as poems but characteristically original in their style. There have been many bad poets and innumerable bad poems (some of them by otherwise good poets), but a McGonagall poem is recognizable at thirty paces. No-one else, before or since, has written in quite the same style, which is why the accolade of the best bad poet must surely go to William Topaz McGonagall.

© John Welford

Peter Ustinov: a much-missed entertainer

Peter Ustinov was a writer, actor, director, raconteur and more, who delighted audiences on stage, television and film screen with his ready wit and larger-than-life character.

He was born on 16^th April 1921 in London, the only child of Jona von Ustinow and his wife Nadezhda. His ancestry was extremely mixed, including Russian, German and French, and his parents had arrived in England from Russia not long before he was born. His father had been a journalist, but later worked as an intelligence officer for the British government.

Peter was educated at Westminster School but did not do well, and his mother enrolled him at a drama school at the age of 16, having been impressed by his early talent as a mimic. He obtained several minor parts in repertory theatre.

He was married in 1940 to Isolde Denham, the daughter of an actor, when both bride and groom were 19. World War II had broken out, and many such marriages took place when the man was on the verge of going away to fight and might never return. 

In Ustinov’s case, the war presented an opportunity to develop his career as a playwright, his first full-length play being written while he was an infantry private. He spent much of the war producing films for propaganda and recruitment purposes, the most substantial being “The Way Ahead” in 1944.

On being demobilised in 1946, Ustinov continued to write and direct for the cinema, and made a good impression on stage in Anthony Quayle’s production of “Crime and Punishment” in which he upstaged John Gielgud. His 1951 film performance as Nero in “Quo Vadis” earned him an Oscar nomination and the attention of a much wider audience.

However, his personal life was not so successful, as he and his wife divorced in 1950, although Peter was awarded custody of their five-year-old daughter.

1951 also saw the production of two of Ustinov’s best plays, “The Love of Four Colonels” and “The Moment of Truth”. The former had a two-year run of more than 800 performances, and was also highly successful in Paris and New York.

Between 1952 and 1955 Peter Ustinov teamed up with Peter Jones in a radio comedy series, “In All Directions”, which was largely improvised. Ustinov and Jones played two East End spivs who constantly got into trouble, and Ustinov also played the parts of many of the characters they encountered.

Ustinov’s second marriage took place in 1954, his new wife being Suzanne Cloutier, a French-Canadian actress. They had a son and two daughters, but the marriage was not a happy one and they eventually divorced in 1971.

During the 1950s and 1960s Ustinov continued to write plays and appear on stage and screen. Among his successes as a playwright was “Romanoff and Juliet” (1956), and he won best supporting actor Oscars for “Spartacus” in 1960 and “Topkapi” in 1964. He combined his talents as producer, director, actor and writer in “Billy Budd” (1962, based on the novel by Herman Melville) which is widely regarded as one of Ustinov’s finest contributions to cinema.

However, Ustinov found it difficult to compete with the rising generation of “angry young men” such as John Osborne, and he also wasted his acting talents on a number of low quality pot-boilers in the 1970s in order to recoup his losses after his second divorce.

He found a new direction in 1968 when he agreed to become a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, a position that he took very seriously and to which he gave much of his attention during his later life.

His third marriage took place in June 1972, his new wife being Hélène du Lau d'Allemans, who was a journalist. Although childless, this was the happiest of his three marriages and lasted until his death in 2004.

Ustinov reappeared to the wider public eye in 1978 when he played Hercule Poirot in “Death on the Nile”, this being the first of six appearances as Agatha Christie’s famous detective (the last being “Appointment with Death” in 1988). Ustinov was perhaps an unlikely Poirot, being a much larger man than Christie had envisaged, but he was nonetheless very convincing in the role.

Other roles included a performance as King Lear in Stratford, Ontario, in 1979, which was the first time in 30 years that he had appeared on stage in a play that he had not written himself. He had long said that the only Shakespeare role that interested him was Lear, and it is to be regretted that he was unable to reprise the role in London.

Ustinov was often seen on television and heard on radio in the role of interviewee, as he had a wealth of stories and reminiscences that made him a popular choice. His old art of mimicry never left him and he could produce just about any national accent at a moment’s notice (he was in any case fluent in five languages besides English). 

However, it was as an interviewer, in 1984, that he had the most shocking experience of his life. He was set to interview the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, for an Irish television series on 31^st October when she was assassinated by her bodyguards as she walked across her garden in New Delhi to meet him.

In his later years, although he continued to write and to act and direct, he spread his net much wider, not only with UNICEF but by becoming President of the World Federalist Movement (an organisation devoted to breaking down barriers between the peoples of nations across the world) and Chancellor of the University of Durham. In 1998 he helped to establish the “Peter Ustinov Foundation” that aims to provide schools and medical care for children in developing countries. There are also six “Peter Ustinov Schools” in Germany devoted to furthering his philosophy of mutual respect, a positive attitude, and dedication to helping those in need.

He received many honours, both for his work in entertainment and his humanitarian efforts. These included a knighthood in 1990, a number of honorary degrees, and many international awards.

Although he travelled widely, he was based for much of his later life in Switzerland, for tax purposes, and took Swiss citizenship. He died at a clinic near his home on Lake Geneva on 28^th March 2004, at the age of 82, from heart failure brought on by chronic diabetes. 

Since his death, Sir Peter Ustinov’s influence continues to be felt in the humanitarian institutions he left behind him. For people who remember his performances he will always be unforgettable, whether in serious roles or comedy. It has been said that he spread his many talents too thinly, and that he should have concentrated on only a few of his many skills. However, one feels that doing so would have bored him rigid, because he always wanted to be doing something different, as that was what excited him. He was certainly a “Jack of all trades”, and master of many.

© John Welford