What the Dickens!

The small but delightful and rather quirky Devizes Arts Festival is in full swing and I took myself along to have "Tea with the Dickens" in the beautiful Georgian Town Hall.

Lucinda Dickens Hawksley is the great-great-great granddaughter of the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and an author, art historian, public speaker and broadcaster as well as an award-winning travel writer. Lucinda's talk was not of Charles Dickens himself, as she says, most of us know a great deal about him and his books, but of the family, friends and contemporaries he knew, many of whom he generously supported financially. Her talk was fascinating, amusing and wide-ranging and it was quite delightful to find out about some of the real people on whom he based many of the characters in his books!

As Lucinda says in the introduction to her book 'Charles Dickens and his Circle',

"..his extraordinary, charismatic personality sparkles across the decades and the five generations that separate him from me." In 1849, the OED defined 'celebrity' in a new way, as meaning 'a celebrated person, a public character', the word first began to be used when describing Charles Dickens. "He is often described as the first 'modern' author. Through sheer force of will he propelled himself out of a rather depressing existence into a sphere of glittering parties and a circle of intelligent, radical, questioning friends who were determined, as was he, to leave the world a better place than when they had come into it". He began his writing career as a radical journalist and never lost his basic beliefs. Along with J.M. Barrie, he was one of the first fundraisers for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital.

Having grown up with a father constantly in debt, Charles Dickens knew what it was like to be poor. Mr. Micawber was based on his father and provides one of Dickens' most famous quotes: 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery'. For those too young to remember the old currency think £19.95 or £20.05 - no credit cards in those days! You could be thrown into prison and lose all your possessions for the want of a few pence. It is commonly accepted that Great Expectations and David Copperfield are semi-autobiographical. Charles Dickens had dreamed as a boy of the kind of gentlemanly future which Pip dreams of in Great Expectations.

Dickens' beloved sister Fanny had a disabled child on whom Dickens based Tiny Tim and Paul Dombey. His mother, whom he resented for taking him out of school to earn a living while his father was in prison, became Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens tried very hard to keep all his siblings on the straight and narrow but was sadly not always successful. His baby brother 'Boz' left his wife and absconded to the USA. Many of Dickens relatives and descendants were to live in America.

Dickens' circle included the Pre-Raphaelite artists and his daughter Katey

modelled for Millais and married two painters, first Charles Alston Collins (younger brother of Wilkie Collins) and secondly Charles Edward Perugini. She was also a successful painter herself and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1877. (Image shows Katey as a model for Millais' The Black Brunswicker, courtesy of http://flyhigh-by-learnonline.blogspot.com)

One of Lucinda's quirky stories concerned Grip, the Raven. Dickens was very fond of his pet raven, Grip and used him as a character in Barnaby Rudge. When Dickens visited America in the 1840s he met Edgar Allan Poe in Philadelphia. Poe was inspired by Dickens and excited to discover that the raven really existed. This prompted one of Poe's most famous works 'The Raven'. In 2012, the Tower of London welcomed two new ravens, Jubilee and Grip, Grip to celebrate the bicentary of Dickens' birth. This Grip was the third Tower raven to be named after the novelist's pet bird (BBC Culture, August 2015).

This is just a taster of a fascinating afternoon which was deliciously completed by afternoon tea and Victorian cakes courtesy of the local cookery school, Vaughan's Kitchen.

I'm not a great Dickens reader but if asked to recommend I would say read The Pickwick Papers for laugh out loud humour and A Tale of Two Cities for romance, old fashioned adventure and history.