literary lives eighteen-year-old actress and cast off the mother of his ten children. Why does The Turning Point not linger on the possible part played by Dickens in Hogarth’s rejection of Egg? Perhaps because Douglas-Fairhurst’s earlier book covered Dickens’s love for the first of Catherine’s younger sisters to live in the household, Mary Hogarth, and her early death. If you lower a net into any period of Dickens’s adult life, common themes will emerge. There are always campaigns and charities and journals and theatrical projects demanding his attention, a Hogarth sister in the wings, a baby on the go and a novel on the cook. But Douglas-Fairhurst is looking to catch his elusive quarry on the turn. The closer you look, his argument runs, the more unfamiliar appear the ingredients that went into Bleak House.
Within two months of Dora’s death, Catherine Dickens was pregnant with her tenth child. Douglas-Fairhurst detects a note of jokey despair in Dickens’s claim after the birth the following year that ‘divine intervention alone could prevent his wife from becoming pregnant’. But he dismissed the various forms of contraception available as ‘unreliable as well as unpleasant, and highly unlikely to be used by a respectable married couple’.
Highly unlikely? What about withdrawal? Time was when Peter Ackroyd and other acclaimed biographers dismissed as unthinkable the idea that Nelly Ternan was the novelist’s mistress. I am not suggesting here that Dickens did use contraception. My argument is with the failure of Dickens’s biographers to ask why not. He always said he didn’t want a large family and he was a rotten father to his seven sons, whom he treated as failures before they had a chance to prove otherwise, with the unsurprising result that most of them did indeed grow into pale shadows who tried and failed to make sense of their famous father. His two surviving daughters fared better and saw straighter: ‘My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man,’ wrote one. ‘He did not care a damn what happened to any of us.’ And yet The Turning Point, like all biographical studies of Dickens, contains numerous instances of the trouble he took to improve the lives of relative strangers. I am reminded of that minor character in Bleak House who has become a byword for charity not beginning at home: Mrs Jellyby, c’est lui.
allan massie
A Convivial Chap Led Easily Astray
The Sins of G K Chesterton
By Richard Ingrams (Harbour Books 292pp £20)
The title of this book is a surprise. Chesterton’s admirers have regarded him as a saintly figure; indeed he has been proposed for canonisation. Even those, like Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, who engaged in fierce argument with him regarded him with affection. He was a master of paradox whose sincerity was nevertheless rarely questioned. Orwell’s complaint that everything Chesterton wrote was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Catholic Church was nonsense, and not only because he didn’t convert until 1922, when he was fortyeight, by which time he had, as Richard Ingrams observes, written his best books. It would be truer, though still an exaggeration, to say that everything he wrote was intended to demonstrate the good sense of the ordinary man. He might well, like a certain Tory politician today, have said we have had enough of experts.
Gilbert Chesterton, a middle-class Londoner who was educated at St Paul’s and the Slade School of Fine Art, was essentially a journalist of a type rare today. He wrote intellectually challenging essays for newspapers that occupied the now deserted middle ground between the qualities and the tabloids. In his best years, between 1900 and 1912, his main outlet was the Daily News, a Liberal newspaper owned by the teetotal Quaker Cadbury family. Chesterton himself, a lover of beer and wine and the Fleet Street pubs, probably shocked some of the paper’s Nonconformist readers while delighting others. The paper’s outstanding editor, A G Gardiner, adored him.
14–30 August Live, Online + On-demand edbookfest.co.uk september 2021 | Literary Review 7
