l i t e r a r y l i v e s a crowd was gathering in defiance of his orders, he returned with his riflemen and ordered them to disperse it. He later said that between the two visits he had had ‘ample time to consider the nature of the painful duty [he] might be faced with’. Later he declared that he had wanted to create a ‘widespread effect’; he was not ‘merely dispersing the crowd’ but ‘producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but more specially throughout the Punjab’. No wonder Churchill found this ‘frightful’.

Dyer’s earliest explanation of his action was very different. He had opened fire, he said, because his ‘force was small and to hesitate might induce attack’. According to Lloyd, he was frightened but could not admit it later; hailed as the ‘saviour of the Raj’, he subsequently assumed the role and pretended that the massacre had been premeditated. The author may or may not be right to argue that Dyer’s first claim was the correct one and that his protagonist was guilty of an error of judgement rather than an intention to murder. But he tests our credulity as well as our goodwill by defending Dyer on the two points on which he was censured by the official inquiry: that he had not warned the crowd before firing; and that he had gone on shooting for too long – between ten and fifteen minutes. Lloyd excuses the pitiless continuation by arguing that, because the Bagh had only a small number of exits, it took a long time for the crowd to disperse. The length of the massacre was therefore not Dyer’s fault, since he was unacquainted with the geography of the place and could not know about this detail; so he went on firing, killing hundreds of fleeing people who at no stage had presented any threat to his soldiers.

Lloyd extends his defence of Dyer to other incidents and attempts to mitigate the brigadier’s notorious ‘crawling order’ (forcing Indians to crawl on their bellies along a street where a British missionary had been beaten up and left for dead) by stressing its ‘insignificance’: it was ‘only in force along one lane for five days’. It is advocacy of this kind, which permeates the text, that ultimately undermines the credibility of the book. To order this book for £15.99, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 29

j ohn s u t h e r l a n d

A Tale of Two Dickens

Charles Dickens: A Life

By Claire Tomalin

(Viking 527pp £30)

Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist

By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press 389pp £20)

There have been around ninety fulllength lives of Dickens. As the 2012 bicentennial approaches the discriminating purchaser will be able to choose between three current frontrunners. Michael Slater’s 2009 biography, still going strong in paperback, is one. A ‘radically revised’ reissue of Peter Ackroyd’s 1990 biography is another. And, coming up fast on the outside track, we have Claire Tomalin.

Each brings something distinctive to the task. Slater’s book is the distillation of fifty years’ rigorous scholarship. Ackroyd brings a novelist’s privileged insight to his subject. And Tomalin? She is a biographical big-game hunter, having already bagged Austen, Hardy, Pepys, Wollstonecraft and Mansfield. The shelf of prizes she has won testifies to her ability not just to write ‘lives’ but to bring the authors she writes about to life.

Most nineteenth-century novelists hated the idea of too much being known about them. As Henry James put it: ‘My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter’ – a species of literary vermin anatomised in The Aspern Papers. James frustrated the publishing rascals with that handiest of weapons, the safety match. In the conflagration he started in his garden many things which prurient posterity yearns to know (what was that ‘obscure hurt’ in the groin area?) went up in smoke. Dickens, as his personal life went haywire at the end of the 1850s, lit a similar bonfire. It was so massive that his children roasted chestnuts in the embers. All that was left for the biographers was cold ashes. No chestnuts for them. Dickens went a step further in his campaign against the postmortem exploiter. At the astonishingly premature age of thirty-seven he appointed his bosom friend, John Forster,

as his biographer. It was to Forster that he entrusted the unpublished ‘autobiographical fragment’ – that short sketch of his childhood which, like a plutonium pellet, has shaped every biography since.

The fragment relates two traumatic events: his father’s incarceration in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison; and his own ‘agony of soul’ at being sent for a few months to work in a boot-blacking factory by the Thames to help out with the family finances.

Why did Dickens confide these lifechangingly shameful events to Forster alone? The motive was not, one may hazard, confession but control. Both Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst draw attention to a jubilant remark he made to his wife after reading one of his Christmas stories to a group of friends: ‘If you had seen [William] Macready last night undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa as I read – you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power.’ As editor of the tuppenny newspapers Household Words and All the Year Round, Dickens customarily referred to himself as ‘the conductor’. Every biographer he’s ever had, however ingenious, has been subject to that posthumous Dickensian baton.

Why, then, should one buy Tomalin’s book rather than (or in addition to) Slater’s or Ackroyd’s? A good reason is her shrewdness. Tomalin, for example, is surely right in claiming that ‘Nelly’ Ternan, the young woman for whom Dickens left the wife who had borne him ten children, was his mistress, in the full sense of the word. Ackroyd, by contrast, finds consummated sex between them ‘almost inconceivable’. Slater – in the absence of clinching evidence – will not speculate. Tomalin’s speculations, as she weighs them up, have the force of o c t o b e r 2 0 1 1 |

13