Literary Rivals by Richard Bradford

Author:Richard Bradford [Richard Bradford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548021
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2014-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Even when writing to Richard Watson, who was not a close friend, he confessed to being ‘the most restless of created Beings … I weary of rest, and have no satisfaction but in fatigue. Realities and idealities are always comparing themselves together before me, and I don’t like the Realities except when they are unattainable – then I like them of all things’ (7 December 1857). He did not give any substance to these tortured abstractions and Watson could have been forgiven for suspecting his acquaintance of losing his mind. With the benefit of hindsight, we might dare to infer that the ‘Realities’ he disliked included the status quo – specifically his marriage – while those matters ‘unattainable’ which he liked ‘of all things’ were embodied by Ellen Ternan. During the ten months after he first met her in Manchester, Dickens was in a state of limbo. It is certain that further meetings took place in this period but he knew that for them to conduct even a clandestine relationship it would be impossible for him to maintain the charade of his marriage at his Gad’s Hill home.

Yet, the thought of bringing their acquaintance to an end suddenly, with no stated cause, was unimaginable too. Dickens was not only the most popular writer in the English-speaking world, he was also treated by many of his readers as the guardian of public conscience, a man whose fiction gave life to and, more importantly, defined notions such as decency and kindness, cruelty and misbehaviour. His life and profile seemed to mirror that of his most creditable characters. Divorce in the mid-nineteenth century involved a grotesque exercise in well-publicised humiliation, and even separation would soon attract the attention of those newspapers that owed him no favours. He knew precisely what, or rather whom, he wanted, but he could see no practical means of making such ‘Realities’ attainable.

Then, in May 1858, a single act changed things forever. It was a sentence spoken without obvious malice, but when we consider the identity of the speaker and the consequences of his utterance we have cause to wonder about motive and premeditation. The speaker was William Makepeace Thackeray, novelist and journalist. He could not compete with Dickens in terms of popularity and acclaim, but, since the publication of Vanity Fair a decade earlier, he was being talked of among the intelligentsia as a man whose enduring reputation as a literary artist might equal, perhaps even eclipse, those of his peers. Some reviewers hated Vanity Fair, but their antagonism can be explained by their admissions of puzzlement and fascination. It was a novel that threw readers’ sympathies and judgements into a state of confusion. Its two principal characters, Becky and Amelia, were designed to frustrate any straightforward sense of empathy or antipathy, praise or condemnation. They blurred the boundaries that novels, in many people’s opinion, ought to respect and reinforce – an ideal exemplified in the fiction of Dickens.

If you have read my chapter on Fielding and Richardson, the parallels might seem striking, even ominous, but they go even deeper than that.

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