DM. You
focus a lot on Dickens’ family and relationships in your book. How did they
influence his writing?
Fred K. The
family Dickens was born into was a fertile source for many of his fictional
characters. Like many writers, Dickens transformed some of the characteristics
of both his parents & some of his siblings into memorable fictional
representations. That's hardly surprising. After all, most of us are formed
irreversibly from the start by the people who bring us into the world &
raise us. Most Dickens biographers have highlighted the resemblances between
Dickens father & various father figures in the novels, including Micawber
in David Copperfield, & Dickens' mother makes many partial appearances.
There's a consensus among biographers, starting with Forster & the blacking
factory incident, that John Dickens' imprisonment for debt & Elizabeth
Dickens' desire that young Charles continue at menial labor had an immense
long-term influence on Dickens' life & novels.
DM. Dickens edited a few
different publications. Was this significant to his writing or overall career
and, in what way?
Fred K. Dickens had a career as a journalist & editor
simultaneous with his career as a novelist. In the case of the two weekly
magazines he edited, Household Words & All the Year Round, he solicited
contributions, made the editorial decisions, & had a financial interest in
their success. The success of the magazines & the money he earned was
important to him. Numbers of his novels were published in weekly installments
in these magazines, including Great Expectations & A Tale of Two Cities. The demands &
the structure of weekly magazine publication were considerably different from
those of monthly serial publication. Consequently, Great Expectations & A
Tale of Two Cities are much shorter than novels like Pickwick Papers & Our
Mutual Friend & they have different ways of organizing narrative energy.
DM. Dickens as an actor continued
to perform even with his success as a writer. Do you think his understanding
about acting affected his writing and how?
Fred K. Dickens had a fatal attraction to performance from any
early age. Well, not "fatal" in the negative but in the determinative
sense. As he wrote, he performed his characters, as if he were simultaneously the writer, the
director, & the actor. He was not shy about public performance, from
childhood on, in every aspect of his life. No wonder, then, that this
performance personality found the actual stage attractive. His writing &
his acting were facets of a single personality. His public stage performances,
all for charity, & his public readings, mostly for private profit, were the
overflow of his life as a writer & inseparably connected to it.
DM. What influence did the visits
Dickens made to morgues, public social institutions: hospitals, prisons, etc.,
even a hanging have on his writing, the characters and settings?
Fred K. It's difficult & unrealistic to separate Dickens'
social consciousness & fascination with such institutions from his life as
a writer. Prisons, morgues, schools, etc. appear over & over again in his
novels. Part of his interest was in improvement & reform; much of it was
psychological & thematic; some of it had its roots in his own experience,
such as his father's imprisonment in the Marshalsea. And Dickens, like all of
us, could not but sometimes be obsessive about the power of the many forms of
dying & the mystery of death.
DM. Did his fascination with the
ills and underbelly of society play a part in the success of his novels or
cause controversy?
Fred K. Yes, to some minor extent. But such matters were not
central to the success of his novels at the time of initial publication. And
they took on greater importance to later generations than to their initial
readers.
DM. Many of Dickens’ protagonists are children at a time when
children were not viewed the same way as they are today. How did his writing help
to change society’s attitude toward children?
Fred K. Hardly at all, except to the extent that they were another
of many fictional, poetic, philosophical, & intellectual depictions &
discussions of childhood on the Continent, in Great Britain, & in America
from Rousseau & the Romantics through the 19th-century. Over time the
culture changed the way in which childhood & children were defined. This
was a long term transformation & had many sources. It would have occurred
if Dickens had never existed.
DM. How did he contribute to social welfare?
Fred K. Not in any meaningful or sustained way. Novelists rarely
do. It's accurate to say, I think, that none of the social reforms in
19th-century Great Britain were influenced significantly by Dickens' novels.
The social & institutional ills that Dickens highlighted in his novels were
widely discussed in the society as a whole. Dickens is one small current in the
social zeitgeist, part of an ongoing larger stream which would have flowed as
fully as it did if he had never published a novel. And Dickens' novels often
highlight social & institutional miseries that were at their height in his
childhood. For example, the poor laws that Oliver Twist highlights had been substantially
reformed by the time Dickens wrote the novel.
DM. How was Dickens influential in his own time?
Fred K. Influence is a variable & complicated process. In his
own time, Dickens was most influential as an entertainer & as a cultural
icon. He was immensely influential in creating respect for & popularizing
the novel as a literary form & giving heft to literature as a profession.
He had eminent predecessors, like Scott. But he gave the novel a great lift
into respectability & contributed to the emphasis on literacy & reading
that grew during the Victorian period. But what readers went to Dickens' novels
for was entertainment: emotion, suspense, drama, fascinating characters, &
themes that resonated in their own lives.
DM. Were his trips to America important to his career, and what was
the Boz Ball in 1842?
Fred K. Yes, they were important, but not in overwhelming ways. He
first visited America in 1842 out of curiosity & in a search for subjects.
He was disappointed in America, politically & socially. In practice it was
not the republic that he had imagined & had come to believe it was. And it
was crass & materialistic. Hence the criticism in Notes from America &
the satire in Martin Chuzzlewit, both products of this first visit. He also abhorred slavery. He did,
though, enjoy the adulation, including the Boz Ball, a grand dinner in New York
in his honor. His second visit to the United States was undertaken for profit,
a series of public readings.
DM. Why do you think his work has endured and is relevant after more
than 100 years?
Fred K. Because he had a genius for language, for description, for
character portrayal; because his words are alive with an electric vitality;
because he loved & was fascinated by the concreteness of this world, its
people & things; because he has a distinctive style & personality;
because he deals with universal themes that still interest us: human nature
& society in all its peculiar manifestations -- money, greed, love,
benevolence, ambition, hate, power, justice, family, death.
DM. Dickens wrote several Christmas novels. Why did he return to
this theme in particular?
Fred K. Christmas sold well. But also, like his fellow Victorians,
he contributed to the invention of Christmas as a major holiday, a semi-sacred
but mostly secular celebration of human fellowship.
DM. A Christmas Carol is the most familiar from this group.
Were the other Christmas stories as successful in his day and what was it about
this one work that appears to have become the public favorite?
Fred K. Almost all his Christmas tales & stories were
successful, published either as separate small volumes, like A Christmas Carol,
or as short stories in Household Words & All the Year Round. The long-term
greater success of A Christmas Carol results, I think, from its combination of
a more memorable cast of characters, like Scrooge & Tiny Tim, with a more
powerful plot than the other tales & stories.
DM. As an author, why do you focus on biographies?
Fred K. I've discovered that it's what I do best, in the sense
that the genre draws the best out of me as a writer & scholar, & that
of all the possibilities for me it provides the largest potential audience. It
gives me the chance to have readers & to contribute to the on-going
cultural dialogue about who we
are.
DM. You open your book with an anecdote of Dickens burning his
letters so he would be known by his work rather than his personal history. How
did you approach writing his biography, i.e. sources, research, angle or theme?
Fred K. This is a huge question. The short answer is that I
immerse myself in everything written by & about my subject. I look for
patterns & themes in the writings & the life. And I emphasize those
that seem to me most significant & that most interest me. I try to write a
biography (do I have an alternative?) that embodies the interaction between who
I am & who my subject is & the interaction between the culture that
produced my subject & our culture now.
DM. What did you enjoy most writing about Dickens?
Fred K. I enjoyed living along with him. I enjoy writing &
enjoyed making a book. And this process & his life contributed to my life,
gave it life & meaning.
DM. Tell me something you discovered about Dickens that
surprised you.
Fred K. Nothing comes to mind as a surprise. I was not even surprised
when my eyes swelled with tears & my throat with sobs when I wrote his
death.
DM. Who is your favorite Dickens character or book?
Fred K. Probably Our Mutual Friend, though at another moment I might
claim another one is my favorite. I suppose I really don't have a favorite.
DM. What would you like people to take away from reading your
biography of Dickens?
Fred K. A desire to read Dickens; a heightened sense of our common
humanity; a restrained hope that we & our society can do better; an
appreciation for how inseparable are the comic & the tragic, happiness
& unhappiness; & a better understanding of the relationship between
literature & life.
