Prodigal Titan

...The impatience with theory, the scorn of abstract principles, the failure of contemplation—this inner want undoubtedly vitiates much of Dickens' social criticism, confuses and weakens his solutions to the problems posed by his subject matter...

...Dickens far more than Pater," we are told, "vibrated with the very pulsations 'of a variegated dramatic life.' " Yet the dramatic life, as Pater conceived it, involved an intensity of reflection from which Dickens constitutionally shrank...

...He recounts the scarifying boyhood experience ef the blacking warehouse and the debtor's prison, the domestic problems that afflicted the mature Dickens, and—faithfully yet unsensationally—the liaison with Ellen Ternan, who hardly proved "the one happiness I have missed in life...

...He remarks approvingly that Dickens "had no patience . . . with metaphysical systems remote from the hopes and fears of the human heart...

...It was likewise his tragedy that his restless genius allowed him no repose in life, no real serenity of outlook, "no satisfaction but in fatigue...

...Reviewed by Jerome H. Buckley IAM," said Dickens, accurately if a bit melodramatically, "the modern embodiment of the old Enchanters whose Familiars tore them to pieces...

...I am incapable of rest...

...He applauds Dickens' interest in modern science and his refusal to share Ruskin's fear of the "dreadful hammers" of geology...

...And Johnson, who believes "a critical analysis of modern society" the central impulse of Dickens' entire career, properly reminds us of the strength of the novelist's insight—especially in the later, greater books which have been too frequently ignored" by the most dedicated Dickensians...

...And it would be unjust to complain unduly of a partisanship by which his apologist communicates much of his own enthusiasm to the reader...

...for Dickens, who feared pity as much as he craved affection, hid his darkest secrets even from himself...

...It is, of course, idle, in the presence of such abundant creativity, to lament a lack which caused Dickens himself a nameless anguish...

...Edgar Johnson, whose work now strikingly supersedes all others in completeness, range of scholarship, and sustained gusto, succeeds most conspicuously in chronicling the triumph...

...Yet he clearly recognizes behind the "mask of exuberance" a deep concealment...

...But so great is Johnson's sympathy with his subject that he tends to rationalize this determined activism and to underestimate accordingly a major limitation in Dickens the man and the artist...

...What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas, confirmed...

...I am quite confident that I should rust, break and die, if I spared myself...

...Drawing largely on Dickens' letters and private papers, he gives us a full and rather terrifying impression of an almost demonic energy, a lust for power, an imperious yet self-immolating ambition, and an overwhelming humanitarian-ism...

...It was indeed, as this excellent new biography shows us, Dickens' triumph that he held a vast audience entranced by exploiting to the full his inventive sorcery, his capacity to call whole worlds into being...

...And he supplies ample objective evidence of the malaise, sufficient records of the recurrent mood in which Dickens could say, "I have now no relief but in action...

...For, all in all, despite its occasional bias, perhaps even because of it, Johnson's book assuredly belongs among the most animated and rewarding literary biographies of recent years...

...He relives with intense sympathy Dickens' hard-headed dealings with his publishers (conjoined with his contempt for business ethics), his exhausting career as editor, his endless practical jokes, his passionate social crusades, his self-abandonment as actor and producer of amateur theatricals, his virtual martyrdom as the public reader destroyed by his will to command absolutely the devotion of his admirers...

...In seeking to interpret the tragedy, Johnson is of necessity somewhat less successful...

...Much better to die, doing...

...But to the contemplative man such systems may be of abiding immediacy...

...Johnson quite rightly eschews unsupported conjecture...

...Johnson gives us a vivid record of Dickens' ramblings in London, his restless vacations by the sea, his travels in Italy and Switzerland, his tumultuous tours of an America which both fascinated and repelled him...

...Yet I suspect that the concern was with popular mechanics rather than with scientific ideas and their crucial impact, which Ruskin so keenly felt, on the values of civilization...

...Nevertheless, we cannot question Dickens' intuitive awareness of the problems themselves or his ability to dramatize them in terms of powerful symbol...