Probably the latter, since he had already responded all too warmly to a letter from his first love, Maria Beadnell — the Victorian equivalent of the social networking website Friends Reunited. The physical meeting was a terrible disappointment. Maria had warned him that she was "fat and toothless". Alas, this turned out to be true. The reunion did produce the most cruelly funny scene in all of Dickens — when Arthur Clenham (in Little Dorrit) meets his old sweetheart, silly, simpering, middle-aged Flora Finching. But this attempt to revisit the past suggests Dickens was feeling something lacking from his marriage. Slater presents the break-up of the marriage without over-interpreting it. He does not explain away the raw pain of divorce and states clearly what we do not know about the motives and emotions of the participants. This actually makes it more involving. It becomes all too like every divorce one has ever known, in which even best friends are left guessing, through all the bitterness and bias, as to the true state of affairs.
Naturally, as in every divorce, one nevertheless takes sides. Dickens, whatever the deep-rooted excuses for his behaviour (including his manic-depressive restlessness, in which unhappiness was displaced into frenzied activity of all kinds), behaved inexcusably. Poor Catherine discovered only from her maid that he had moved his bed into a dressing room and walled off the communicating door to their shared room with bookshelves. All of Dickens's statements about Catherine make painful reading for readers who admire him, fraught as they are with obscure accusations, bitterness and repellent self-pity. He even begins publicly to claim that Catherine was a cold and neglectful mother, for which there is no evidence at all — beyond the record of her distress when she was unable to breast-feed her first-born and felt she was failing her baby.
As always in a divorce, the one who says most comes out worst. Dickens, working up a terrific, almost insanely self-obsessed "sense of wrong", turned, like a modern-day celebrity, to the press. He was furious when Punch refused to publish his "personal" self-vindication — though it is unclear why he thought a humorous magazine would provide a suitable platform.
But Dickens lived his life through publication and public readings. This is the point of Slater's book, in which the writing and the public performances take centre stage. Slater ranges with magnificent scope through everything that Dickens wrote — from his first schoolboy letter (already showing a facetious fixation on wooden legs) to the last words he penned, which were "...and then falls to with an appetite". Slater's own appetite is never sated. One of the great pleasures of this book is to be reminded of minor characters — such as the voluble Mrs Lirriper. I suspect, though, that if you are not already a Dickens fan, the effect might be rather of standing on the edge of one of those conversations where everyone else is warmly but allusively discussing a group of mutual friends. That, however, was Dickens's forte — establishing an "unprecedented and warmly intimate" sense of friendship with his readers. The great love affair in this book is not between Dickens and Maria or Dickens and Ellen, but Dickens and his public. He worked phenomenally hard to woo his readers. In 1840 he tried to cut back, but found himself delivering between 26,800 and 33,376 words a month. His other activities would have filled the lives of many ordinary men many times over — torrents of journalism and speeches, energetic editorship of excellent magazines, which he micro-managed to the extent of rewriting many of the contributions of others, charity work, ebullient theatrical shows, cricket, voluminous letter-writing, long and strenuous walks. He revelled in his own "inimitable" energies, exulting when sales of The Old Curiosity Shop reached an extraordinary 70,000 copies a week.
It is usual to end an account of Dickens's life by saying that his addiction to public acclaim killed him. Public readings of his own works became essential to him, psychologically as well as financially: he never lived life so intensely as when exulting in his power to sway the emotions of the crowds that thronged to hear him. ("...a dozen to twenty ladies borne out, stiff and rigid, at various times", he boasted after one reading.) But, reading Slater's book, one begins to suspect that without this outlet the pathologically "restless" heart of this extraordinary genius would have knocked itself to pieces even earlier. Dickens died, worn out, at 58.
