1 00:00:00,630 --> 00:00:07,050 So my name is Robert Douglas Fairhurst and I teach English at Magdalen College here in Oxford, 2 00:00:07,050 --> 00:00:13,500 and what I'm doing at the moment, I suppose, goes back to what I was working on a few years ago. 3 00:00:13,500 --> 00:00:20,310 I wrote a critical biography of Dickens in 2011, which came out of a very simple idea, 4 00:00:20,310 --> 00:00:28,240 which is that the way that people experience their lives full of clutter and confusion 5 00:00:28,240 --> 00:00:33,960 and and loose ends is very different to the way that they write about life, 6 00:00:33,960 --> 00:00:41,250 especially in biography, where everything is tied it up into a neat story with a beginning and a middle and an end. 7 00:00:41,250 --> 00:00:46,200 And I suppose if you want a popular example, then think about the radio for game show. 8 00:00:46,200 --> 00:00:54,000 Just a minute where the panellists have to tell a story without any repetition or hesitation or deviation. 9 00:00:54,000 --> 00:01:01,860 Of course, that's what biographers do as well. The biographies to try and tell the story without repetition, hesitation or deviation. 10 00:01:01,860 --> 00:01:09,840 The only problem with that, of course, is that most life is nothing but repetition and hesitation and deviation. 11 00:01:09,840 --> 00:01:13,500 So when I started to plan becoming Dickens, 12 00:01:13,500 --> 00:01:23,910 what I asked myself was whether it's possible to describe someone's life in a way that's true to how they experienced it at the time. 13 00:01:23,910 --> 00:01:30,930 In other words, life that is full of detours and dead ends and choices which aren't made without 14 00:01:30,930 --> 00:01:35,850 all the pieces just falling neatly into place like a big jigsaw puzzle. 15 00:01:35,850 --> 00:01:43,350 And what I discovered was that it wasn't just me who puzzled over this Dickens to worries about this, 16 00:01:43,350 --> 00:01:48,360 and it stimulated a lot of these most interesting writing Dickens was obsessed with, 17 00:01:48,360 --> 00:01:53,730 with the many different paths that his life could have taken and how easily. 18 00:01:53,730 --> 00:02:01,530 What now looks like a steady ascent to fame and fortune could easily have turned into something much grimmer. 19 00:02:01,530 --> 00:02:07,770 His life could easily have become a story, a fable of disappointment and failure. 20 00:02:07,770 --> 00:02:16,530 And obviously the 19th century is full of people whose lives weren't recorded beyond maybe a register of births or deaths. 21 00:02:16,530 --> 00:02:25,740 They've been lost between the cracks of the historical record, and Dickens knew how easily the same could have happened to him. 22 00:02:25,740 --> 00:02:34,170 And I suppose that's why so many of his characters in his fiction act out the fate that he feared could have happened to him. 23 00:02:34,170 --> 00:02:39,030 So you might think about characters like Nemo in Bleak House. 24 00:02:39,030 --> 00:02:48,900 Nemo is just a clerk, a lowly clerk, just as Dickens himself had been, and he spends his time scratching out copies of legal documents. 25 00:02:48,900 --> 00:02:55,950 But of course, his name means nobody and he means nothing to anybody. 26 00:02:55,950 --> 00:03:05,310 Dickens, to who started life as a clerk, seemed to have worried that he too could have become simply a nobody, just an anonymous member of the crowd. 27 00:03:05,310 --> 00:03:10,440 Or I suppose you might think about other minor characters like little Charlie in Oliver Twist. 28 00:03:10,440 --> 00:03:16,980 Charlie is all of his only friends in the workhouse, and Oliver has to leave him behind when he goes to London. 29 00:03:16,980 --> 00:03:22,740 By the time he gets back to the workhouse to try and save his friend's little Charlie is dead again. 30 00:03:22,740 --> 00:03:27,840 Charlie Charles. It's one of the number of characters who seem to act as strange, 31 00:03:27,840 --> 00:03:34,890 distorted reflections or echoes of the fate that Dickens worried could have been waiting for him. 32 00:03:34,890 --> 00:03:44,190 So these are Dickens's fictional double's is his shadowy twins, these are the characters who he allowed to act out in his stories, 33 00:03:44,190 --> 00:03:50,040 the kind of fate that he never stopped worrying could easily have swallowed up his own life. 34 00:03:50,040 --> 00:03:54,030 But of course, it's not just writers lives that can go in different directions. 35 00:03:54,030 --> 00:04:05,070 Anyone's life is a series of forking paths where you choose to do this rather than that you choose to go here rather than go there. 36 00:04:05,070 --> 00:04:09,480 And that's the kind of idea that's influenced lots of other kinds of writing. 37 00:04:09,480 --> 00:04:13,560 You might remember Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken, 38 00:04:13,560 --> 00:04:22,020 which begins two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveller long. 39 00:04:22,020 --> 00:04:31,860 I stood and looked down as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took the other and it ends. 40 00:04:31,860 --> 00:04:40,970 I shall be telling this with a sigh. Somewhere ages and ages hence two roads diverged in a wood and I. 41 00:04:40,970 --> 00:04:46,860 I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. 42 00:04:46,860 --> 00:04:52,560 But of course it's not just highfalutin literature with these kinds of ideas played out or teased out. 43 00:04:52,560 --> 00:04:56,280 That idea of the road less travelled, of course, 44 00:04:56,280 --> 00:05:03,900 is the title of one of the most popular self-help books and the same idea you can find even in very, very popular kinds of literature. 45 00:05:03,900 --> 00:05:12,840 Shakespeare, for instance, Shakespeare's tragedies often show the worst possible outcome of a dramatic situation. 46 00:05:12,840 --> 00:05:19,830 But those same stories also contain a few tantalising clues that things could have ended happily. 47 00:05:19,830 --> 00:05:24,810 But then those doors are slammed shut, scene by scene, one by one, 48 00:05:24,810 --> 00:05:30,870 until the outcome we have seems to be the only one that was inevitable right from the beginning. 49 00:05:30,870 --> 00:05:35,670 Well, that's how I came to the story of Dickens, and that's why I wrote the book that I wrote. 50 00:05:35,670 --> 00:05:44,490 How does it affect what I'm doing at the moment? Well, I'm still interested in how these ideas affect Dickens and also in talking to groups of 51 00:05:44,490 --> 00:05:49,770 readers in book groups and literary festivals in Britain and in America and other places. 52 00:05:49,770 --> 00:05:56,730 It's been really good to see how many people want to come back to Dickens and want to look at him with fresh eyes. 53 00:05:56,730 --> 00:06:02,640 I suppose that's one of the main aims of criticism. It's one of the reasons that people like me do what we do. 54 00:06:02,640 --> 00:06:08,760 The critics shouldn't be someone who stands on a pedestal and tells you what to think. 55 00:06:08,760 --> 00:06:17,860 The critic is someone who tries to persuade you, the reader, to think again about writers or writing that you thought you knew. 56 00:06:17,860 --> 00:06:25,650 Dickens is an especially good test case for that kind of project because Dickens himself didn't take anything for granted, 57 00:06:25,650 --> 00:06:32,970 not just his own life, anything at all. Whatever he describes, Dickens sees through fresh eyes. 58 00:06:32,970 --> 00:06:39,210 And the result of that is that Dickens does for the world what Shelley said was the job of the poet. 59 00:06:39,210 --> 00:06:42,810 He strips the veil of familiarity from it. 60 00:06:42,810 --> 00:06:48,570 Dickens is the kind of writer who appeals the world until it looks fresh and new. 61 00:06:48,570 --> 00:06:56,580 So I'm still interested in Dickens. And I suppose that interest is also filtered out into some other projects, 62 00:06:56,580 --> 00:07:02,220 like a new edition of the Water Babies, which I've just completed for Oxford University Press. 63 00:07:02,220 --> 00:07:05,610 And the reason I was interested in that project is that there, too, 64 00:07:05,610 --> 00:07:14,340 we have a story about what happens to a boy who falls into a river and the changes that he undergoes. 65 00:07:14,340 --> 00:07:20,340 But also the second chance, which little Tom, the chimney sweep falls into the river, 66 00:07:20,340 --> 00:07:25,170 the second chance that he is given to affect the outcome of his story, 67 00:07:25,170 --> 00:07:30,990 to give it a happy ending rather than the tragic ending that seems to be his inevitable fate. 68 00:07:30,990 --> 00:07:41,520 So I'm interested in individual Victorians, but and also more generally interested in seeing how biography itself might be made new. 69 00:07:41,520 --> 00:07:46,950 And what I mean by that is how we might want to think again about the kinds of 70 00:07:46,950 --> 00:07:52,230 lives that we write and the kinds of lives that we read about to try and get 71 00:07:52,230 --> 00:07:58,140 away from the celebrity memoir or to try and get away from the kinds of neat 72 00:07:58,140 --> 00:08:04,500 Hallowes style exposes in which everything seems to fit so tightly together. 73 00:08:04,500 --> 00:08:08,610 And the reality of life, which, as I said at the start of this talk, 74 00:08:08,610 --> 00:08:16,650 is so you say messy is so confusing that all seems to disappear from the way that most people write about it. 75 00:08:16,650 --> 00:08:21,900 So at the moment, for instance, I'm I'm at the early stages of a book on Lewis Carroll. 76 00:08:21,900 --> 00:08:28,530 And Lewis Carroll is another Victorian writer who, like Dickens, was fascinated by how we grow up, 77 00:08:28,530 --> 00:08:34,280 but also in what we might lose when we become grown ups and how writing. 78 00:08:34,280 --> 00:08:40,970 Writing might help us to recapture that sense of wonder in the every day that we we normally 79 00:08:40,970 --> 00:08:46,400 put to one side when we have to deal with with mortgage payments or going to the supermarket. 80 00:08:46,400 --> 00:08:56,090 So I'm interested in writers like Carol and also at the moment planning a new book about 19th century life writing in general. 81 00:08:56,090 --> 00:08:57,500 So not just biography, 82 00:08:57,500 --> 00:09:06,890 but also autobiography and memoirs and all the other ways in which the Victorians wrote about themselves and wrote about each other. 83 00:09:06,890 --> 00:09:15,080 So why am I interested in doing that? Well, I suppose it's because individual Victorians might be models, they might be templates, 84 00:09:15,080 --> 00:09:20,840 they might be individuals that we would want to model ourselves on, but not necessarily. 85 00:09:20,840 --> 00:09:30,410 It's also more generally because it's when you look at other people's lives, you start to think more carefully about your own life. 86 00:09:30,410 --> 00:09:36,020 So a good biography then can work a bit like one of those old fashioned fun, fair mirrors. 87 00:09:36,020 --> 00:09:40,730 You look at it and the page becomes like a distorting mirror. 88 00:09:40,730 --> 00:09:49,280 It casts reflections of yourself. That's why writing about the Victorians is a form of history. 89 00:09:49,280 --> 00:09:57,560 Certainly it's a way of trying to recapture the past, but it's also a way not just of looking at other people. 90 00:09:57,560 --> 00:10:02,580 It's also a way of looking at ourselves in terms of trying to recapture the past. 91 00:10:02,580 --> 00:10:07,610 A lot of modern authors are quite preoccupied with giving voice to the voiceless. 92 00:10:07,610 --> 00:10:11,060 So Tony Harrison does this with the miners young children. 93 00:10:11,060 --> 00:10:18,770 You went down down the pits. Do you think that Dickens had a similar agenda or was that was he trying to do something quite different? 94 00:10:18,770 --> 00:10:23,300 It's a very interesting idea. He does give voice to the voiceless. 95 00:10:23,300 --> 00:10:32,540 And but some of those characters like, say, Joe the Crossing sweeper in Bleak House becomes a major character, 96 00:10:32,540 --> 00:10:40,520 but is then killed off as if the voiceless can't be allowed to become the dominating force in a novel. 97 00:10:40,520 --> 00:10:45,710 It has to be someone who is more recognisably like the readers themselves so 98 00:10:45,710 --> 00:10:51,090 that they can see someone who is more like then becoming the hero of the story. 99 00:10:51,090 --> 00:10:56,540 But what he does and in fact, a novel like Bleak House or I suppose a Little Dorrit is a good example of this. 100 00:10:56,540 --> 00:11:00,800 Where he does very interestingly is he starts off at the the beginnings of 101 00:11:00,800 --> 00:11:07,700 his novels tend to start off with a kind of panoramic view of of the crowds, 102 00:11:07,700 --> 00:11:12,770 the anonymous throng often in the city. So we don't know who anyone is. 103 00:11:12,770 --> 00:11:22,700 And then a bit like a movie director, he zooms in on individuals or he zooms in on families or on social groups, 104 00:11:22,700 --> 00:11:26,840 and then he zooms not just onto that individual, but into them. 105 00:11:26,840 --> 00:11:31,850 We go inside their heads, we see how they understand the world. We look through their eyes. 106 00:11:31,850 --> 00:11:38,990 We listen to the world through their ears. And then at the end of the novel, we zoom out again, like at the end of Little Dorrit, 107 00:11:38,990 --> 00:11:48,380 where we've got to know Amy Dorret and Arthur Clennon so well that when they finally get married, it seems like a natural conclusion to the story. 108 00:11:48,380 --> 00:11:54,800 But also, in the last few sentences, Dickens zooms out and we realised we're leaving them back in the crowd, 109 00:11:54,800 --> 00:11:57,560 that they came from the start of the story. 110 00:11:57,560 --> 00:12:05,450 And what that does is, I suppose it reminds us that Dickens could have chosen anyone else in that crowd to write about. 111 00:12:05,450 --> 00:12:10,250 It happens. We were looking at the world from the perspective of those two characters, 112 00:12:10,250 --> 00:12:14,720 but it could have been that other person or that other person or those other people. 113 00:12:14,720 --> 00:12:20,570 So it's not just the faceless poor that he's interested in, although he is interested in them. 114 00:12:20,570 --> 00:12:31,480 It's also the idea that lots of people are faceless to us unless we invest them with a sense of personality and dignity and trust. 115 00:12:31,480 --> 00:12:36,760 You're judging the Man Booker prise at the moment, you're involved in that. 116 00:12:36,760 --> 00:12:43,720 Can you measure the influence, the way that a prise you're asked to assess the influence of a book? 117 00:12:43,720 --> 00:12:49,030 It's a it's a very interesting question, because one's instinctive response is to say no. 118 00:12:49,030 --> 00:12:54,010 The world of the complex multi plots serially published novel has gone. 119 00:12:54,010 --> 00:12:55,220 But that's not strictly true. 120 00:12:55,220 --> 00:13:03,970 One of the novels that we were discussing at the meeting very recently, which led to the long list and it's now on the long list, is a huge novel. 121 00:13:03,970 --> 00:13:10,240 It's over a thousand pages long. It's called The Kills. The Kills is really four novels in one. 122 00:13:10,240 --> 00:13:21,010 And not only then is it a way of recapturing that sense of kind of incremental tension and pleasure that a writer like Dickens popularised. 123 00:13:21,010 --> 00:13:22,450 One thing leads to another, 124 00:13:22,450 --> 00:13:32,440 which given that the novel is about conspiracy theories and the idea of everything being interconnected across the world is a very Dickensian idea. 125 00:13:32,440 --> 00:13:37,600 And it's not just that. It's also that the writer is also a filmmaker. 126 00:13:37,600 --> 00:13:48,190 And the electronic version of the text has embedded inside its film clips and images and interviews and other kind of digital content, 127 00:13:48,190 --> 00:13:55,330 which act like a series of, I suppose, marginal commentaries or kind of glorified footnotes. 128 00:13:55,330 --> 00:14:01,420 You don't need them to make sense of the novel, but they help to make, I suppose, an extra sense of it. 129 00:14:01,420 --> 00:14:05,500 And you might trace that all the way back to Dickens's illustrations, because for Dickens, 130 00:14:05,500 --> 00:14:11,380 an illustration is not just supplementary and it's certainly not superfluous. 131 00:14:11,380 --> 00:14:20,080 It's it's a crucial interpretive critical tool which helps us to understand what the novel is about. 132 00:14:20,080 --> 00:14:29,560 But within the novel is if Dickens has taken a set of kind of snapshots of what the novel is about and is incorporate them into the novel itself. 133 00:14:29,560 --> 00:14:33,370 So that's just one example of how you can still see Dickens's influence, 134 00:14:33,370 --> 00:14:39,490 even in what seems to be the most cutting edge ways, forward thinking, kind of writing. 135 00:14:39,490 --> 00:14:43,270 Why should we still study him? Why should we still study Dickens? 136 00:14:43,270 --> 00:14:50,770 Well, I said a bit earlier that he helps us to think about bits of the world that we would normally take for granted. 137 00:14:50,770 --> 00:14:52,570 And I think that's true. 138 00:14:52,570 --> 00:15:03,610 But he also might help us to to think not just about the way that writers reimagine the world, but also people more obviously involved in changing it, 139 00:15:03,610 --> 00:15:13,270 like politicians or bankers or health professionals or other people who who invest our trust in. 140 00:15:13,270 --> 00:15:20,290 Dickens's a deeply suspicious, sceptical writer when it comes to bankers, for instance, 141 00:15:20,290 --> 00:15:26,080 there's one sketch you write in which he talks about and there's apoplectic snorting cattle. 142 00:15:26,080 --> 00:15:31,390 And, you know, we might not agree with that assessment. One might, but but either way, 143 00:15:31,390 --> 00:15:39,940 it suggests that he doesn't simply want to allow those who have positions of power and privilege to take them for granted. 144 00:15:39,940 --> 00:15:49,040 That just as when he describes something as simple as what people are eating or what clothes they're wearing, he gives it a kind of gloss of novelty. 145 00:15:49,040 --> 00:15:52,080 He makes it look unexpected and strange. Similarly, 146 00:15:52,080 --> 00:15:57,430 he asks us to think about how the world is put together and the way that society understands itself and 147 00:15:57,430 --> 00:16:03,370 structures itself and asks us to to think about whether that is the best way that society can be put together, 148 00:16:03,370 --> 00:16:07,510 whether, in fact, we might want to reorganise it in certain ways. 149 00:16:07,510 --> 00:16:12,520 So not just aesthetically, but also socially and politically. He's a radical thinker. 150 00:16:12,520 --> 00:16:23,280 So again, for that reason to go back to Dickens is to find a way of thinking forward to perhaps a slightly better future. 151 00:16:23,280 --> 00:16:27,600 So Dickens is a social critic, he's worth reading for that reason. 152 00:16:27,600 --> 00:16:33,300 Yes, but not just as a critic of Victorian society. This is perhaps where people sometimes get him wrong. 153 00:16:33,300 --> 00:16:38,130 They assume that because he was a Victorian and was writing about the Victorian world, 154 00:16:38,130 --> 00:16:44,820 therefore his social and his political concerns were exhausted when the 19th century came to an end. 155 00:16:44,820 --> 00:16:51,540 And that's not true because a good writer doesn't simply tell you what to think about a particular idea. 156 00:16:51,540 --> 00:16:55,740 They show you how to think about all kinds of ideas. 157 00:16:55,740 --> 00:17:02,160 And a writer like Dickens, even if the political and the social problems that he's writing about disappeared. 158 00:17:02,160 --> 00:17:04,920 And at the moment, one might argue they have not. 159 00:17:04,920 --> 00:17:10,410 Child poverty, for instance, and might well argue is on the rise in this country as around the world. 160 00:17:10,410 --> 00:17:15,660 But that that's one side and that however one thinks about the world. 161 00:17:15,660 --> 00:17:25,920 Dickens is the kind of writer who helps want to think about it with more nuance and subtlety and complexity. 162 00:17:25,920 --> 00:17:27,072 Thank you very much.