Robert Gottlieb. Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens

Robert Gottlieb. Great Expectations: the Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Pp. 256. $25.00. The idea of a book devoted to an examination of the lives of the children of Charles Dickens is a good one. After all, there were a lot of them, and they had a great influence on their father. Not quite so much influence, though, as he was determined to have, or felt it was his duty to have, on them. It is perhaps inevitable that the lives of Dickens's children can be seen only through the prism of his own life, personality, and achievements. In his book Great Expectations: the Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb demonstrates that wherever in the world his children went the long shadow of their father followed, as soldiers in India, as sheep-farmers in Australia and as a Mountie in Canada. While their father was living, their lives were directed and succoured by his overwhelming personality; then, after his death, they wrote about him, gave readings of his works, edited his letters, painted scenes from his books and were forever known as the children of Charles Dickens. Henry, the most successful of them, achieving a knighthood and rising in the legal profession to the high level of judge at the Old Bailey, was summed up by one of the old lags he was sentencing: You ain't a patch on your he said. Henry, telling the story against himself, quite agreed with the criminal, and promptly sent him to prison for eighteen months. Gottlieb is good at picking out pithy anecdotes like this, giving color to the character of each of them, whilst never forgetting the shadow that followed them. The book is sensibly arranged in two halves, the first dealing with each child during their father's lifetime and the second covering the years following his death. Gottlieb captures the delight Dickens took in his offspring's younger years, and the occasional gripe as his family grew in size. Through Dickens's voluminous correspondence Gottlieb shows that, as they developed into adolescence, Dickens swung from disarming honesty about their shortcomings to excessive praise of their abilities and character. He was very much a hands-on father, choosing and switching the schools they attended, arranging with the schools which subjects they could pursue or drop, always with an eye on the career they might follow. Gottlieb repeats from one of Dickens's letters a wonderful description of an outing on the River Thames, on which he entertained 14-year old Charley and three of his Eton school friends: This was the boyhood Dickens himself had never enjoyed, and he reveled in it. (Years later, a participant in another such picnic would write, What a day that was! The great man was full of life, bubbling over with fun, the youngest boy of the party ... the spirit of joy incarnate.) We can't help noticing how he immediately turns it all into a comic sketch, as if it's Boz who's observing, not a father who's participating. (35) All the children submitted to the organization of their lives, as did their mother. Dickens met resistance from only one, Kate, who sought escape in marriage. Despite the control Dickens exercised, his children who lived to later look back on, and write about, their childhood described the great joy of growing up with such a famous, wonderful, and loving father. The chapters describing the years after Dickens's death carefully narrate the tragedies and triumphs of a dispersed family: Charley's relative success with his father's magazine All the Year Round, financial difficulties and death at the age of 58; Mamie's lack of purpose after the death of her father; Kate's loss of her first husband, her happy second marriage, the sadness of the death of her only child and her achievements as a minor artist; Frank's adventurous life in India and Canada and his early death at the age of 42 in Illinois; Alfred's difficult life in Australia and later death in New York while on a reading tour; little Sydney's death and burial at sea at the age of 25, on his way home to England from India; Henry's successful career, happy marriage with seven children, and long life, the last surviving child of Dickens, living to 1933; and lastly Edward, known as Plorn, who was sent to Australia at the age of 16 and never returned home. …

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