David Gervais

The Critic as Aphorist

level of the sentence. Dickens liked to move inexorably forward in time, says Douglas-Fairhurst, ‘Each sentence unspooling across the page was a little model of how civilization could build on its past and reach confidently into the future. Even novels that dealt with the bloodiest excesses of the previous century, such as the French Revolution (A Tale of Two Cities) or the Gordon riots (Barnaby Rudge), show him to be recoiling from their horrors in narratives that are designed to outrun the brutal events of the past’ (p. 171). If the first sentence perhaps overdoes it, the second is sharp and true. Only sometimes does the cheerful style of Becoming Dickens sound as if it is trying too hard: we do not necessarily need the repeated insistence that ‘Dickens’s London was a city on the move’ (p. 165) for example, but on the whole the tone keeps us on the move too – this is a book to read fast in pleasurable admiration of its own swiftness of intelligence. At the beginning of 1838 Dickens was busy setting one of his many hares running. He was making tentative plans to collaborate with Harrison Ainsworth on the Lions of London, which was to be a one-shilling monthly periodical to feature old and new stories of city life. It never happened, but it could have done. In the same year Dickens made a failed attempt to buy life insurance, ‘The “Board” seem disposed to think I work too much’, he grumbled (p. 298). And Douglas-Fairhurst has shown us just how very hard he did work at becoming himself.