So my name is Robert Douglas Fairhurst and I teach English at Magdalen College here in Oxford,
and what I'm doing at the moment, I suppose, goes back to what I was working on a few years ago.
I wrote a critical biography of Dickens in 2011, which came out of a very simple idea,
which is that the way that people experience their lives full of clutter and confusion
and and loose ends is very different to the way that they write about life,
especially in biography, where everything is tied it up into a neat story with a beginning and a middle and an end.
And I suppose if you want a popular example, then think about the radio for game show.
Just a minute where the panellists have to tell a story without any repetition or hesitation or deviation.
Of course, that's what biographers do as well. The biographies to try and tell the story without repetition, hesitation or deviation.
The only problem with that, of course, is that most life is nothing but repetition and hesitation and deviation.
So when I started to plan becoming Dickens,
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.
In other words, life that is full of detours and dead ends and choices which aren't made without
all the pieces just falling neatly into place like a big jigsaw puzzle.
And what I discovered was that it wasn't just me who puzzled over this Dickens to worries about this,
and it stimulated a lot of these most interesting writing Dickens was obsessed with,
with the many different paths that his life could have taken and how easily.
What now looks like a steady ascent to fame and fortune could easily have turned into something much grimmer.
His life could easily have become a story, a fable of disappointment and failure.
And obviously the 19th century is full of people whose lives weren't recorded beyond maybe a register of births or deaths.
They've been lost between the cracks of the historical record, and Dickens knew how easily the same could have happened to him.
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.
So you might think about characters like Nemo in Bleak House.
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.
But of course, his name means nobody and he means nothing to anybody.
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.
Or I suppose you might think about other minor characters like little Charlie in Oliver Twist.
Charlie is all of his only friends in the workhouse, and Oliver has to leave him behind when he goes to London.
By the time he gets back to the workhouse to try and save his friend's little Charlie is dead again.
Charlie Charles. It's one of the number of characters who seem to act as strange,
distorted reflections or echoes of the fate that Dickens worried could have been waiting for him.
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,
the kind of fate that he never stopped worrying could easily have swallowed up his own life.
But of course, it's not just writers lives that can go in different directions.
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.
And that's the kind of idea that's influenced lots of other kinds of writing.
You might remember Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken,
which begins two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveller long.
I stood and looked down as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took the other and it ends.
I shall be telling this with a sigh. Somewhere ages and ages hence two roads diverged in a wood and I.
I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.
But of course it's not just highfalutin literature with these kinds of ideas played out or teased out.
That idea of the road less travelled, of course,
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.
Shakespeare, for instance, Shakespeare's tragedies often show the worst possible outcome of a dramatic situation.
But those same stories also contain a few tantalising clues that things could have ended happily.
But then those doors are slammed shut, scene by scene, one by one,
until the outcome we have seems to be the only one that was inevitable right from the beginning.
Well, that's how I came to the story of Dickens, and that's why I wrote the book that I wrote.
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
readers in book groups and literary festivals in Britain and in America and other places.
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.
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.
The critics shouldn't be someone who stands on a pedestal and tells you what to think.
The critic is someone who tries to persuade you, the reader, to think again about writers or writing that you thought you knew.
Dickens is an especially good test case for that kind of project because Dickens himself didn't take anything for granted,
not just his own life, anything at all. Whatever he describes, Dickens sees through fresh eyes.
And the result of that is that Dickens does for the world what Shelley said was the job of the poet.
He strips the veil of familiarity from it.
Dickens is the kind of writer who appeals the world until it looks fresh and new.
So I'm still interested in Dickens. And I suppose that interest is also filtered out into some other projects,
like a new edition of the Water Babies, which I've just completed for Oxford University Press.
And the reason I was interested in that project is that there, too,
we have a story about what happens to a boy who falls into a river and the changes that he undergoes.
But also the second chance, which little Tom, the chimney sweep falls into the river,
the second chance that he is given to affect the outcome of his story,
to give it a happy ending rather than the tragic ending that seems to be his inevitable fate.
So I'm interested in individual Victorians, but and also more generally interested in seeing how biography itself might be made new.
And what I mean by that is how we might want to think again about the kinds of
lives that we write and the kinds of lives that we read about to try and get
away from the celebrity memoir or to try and get away from the kinds of neat
Hallowes style exposes in which everything seems to fit so tightly together.
And the reality of life, which, as I said at the start of this talk,
is so you say messy is so confusing that all seems to disappear from the way that most people write about it.
So at the moment, for instance, I'm I'm at the early stages of a book on Lewis Carroll.
And Lewis Carroll is another Victorian writer who, like Dickens, was fascinated by how we grow up,
but also in what we might lose when we become grown ups and how writing.
Writing might help us to recapture that sense of wonder in the every day that we we normally
put to one side when we have to deal with with mortgage payments or going to the supermarket.
So I'm interested in writers like Carol and also at the moment planning a new book about 19th century life writing in general.
So not just biography,
but also autobiography and memoirs and all the other ways in which the Victorians wrote about themselves and wrote about each other.
So why am I interested in doing that? Well, I suppose it's because individual Victorians might be models, they might be templates,
they might be individuals that we would want to model ourselves on, but not necessarily.
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.
So a good biography then can work a bit like one of those old fashioned fun, fair mirrors.
You look at it and the page becomes like a distorting mirror.
It casts reflections of yourself. That's why writing about the Victorians is a form of history.
Certainly it's a way of trying to recapture the past, but it's also a way not just of looking at other people.
It's also a way of looking at ourselves in terms of trying to recapture the past.
A lot of modern authors are quite preoccupied with giving voice to the voiceless.
So Tony Harrison does this with the miners young children.
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?
It's a very interesting idea. He does give voice to the voiceless.
And but some of those characters like, say, Joe the Crossing sweeper in Bleak House becomes a major character,
but is then killed off as if the voiceless can't be allowed to become the dominating force in a novel.
It has to be someone who is more recognisably like the readers themselves so
that they can see someone who is more like then becoming the hero of the story.
But what he does and in fact, a novel like Bleak House or I suppose a Little Dorrit is a good example of this.
Where he does very interestingly is he starts off at the the beginnings of
his novels tend to start off with a kind of panoramic view of of the crowds,
the anonymous throng often in the city. So we don't know who anyone is.
And then a bit like a movie director, he zooms in on individuals or he zooms in on families or on social groups,
and then he zooms not just onto that individual, but into them.
We go inside their heads, we see how they understand the world. We look through their eyes.
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,
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.
But also, in the last few sentences, Dickens zooms out and we realised we're leaving them back in the crowd,
that they came from the start of the story.
And what that does is, I suppose it reminds us that Dickens could have chosen anyone else in that crowd to write about.
It happens. We were looking at the world from the perspective of those two characters,
but it could have been that other person or that other person or those other people.
So it's not just the faceless poor that he's interested in, although he is interested in them.
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.
You're judging the Man Booker prise at the moment, you're involved in that.
Can you measure the influence, the way that a prise you're asked to assess the influence of a book?
It's a it's a very interesting question, because one's instinctive response is to say no.
The world of the complex multi plots serially published novel has gone.
But that's not strictly true.
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.
It's over a thousand pages long. It's called The Kills. The Kills is really four novels in one.
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.
One thing leads to another,
which given that the novel is about conspiracy theories and the idea of everything being interconnected across the world is a very Dickensian idea.
And it's not just that. It's also that the writer is also a filmmaker.
And the electronic version of the text has embedded inside its film clips and images and interviews and other kind of digital content,
which act like a series of, I suppose, marginal commentaries or kind of glorified footnotes.
You don't need them to make sense of the novel, but they help to make, I suppose, an extra sense of it.
And you might trace that all the way back to Dickens's illustrations, because for Dickens,
an illustration is not just supplementary and it's certainly not superfluous.
It's it's a crucial interpretive critical tool which helps us to understand what the novel is about.
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.
So that's just one example of how you can still see Dickens's influence,
even in what seems to be the most cutting edge ways, forward thinking, kind of writing.
Why should we still study him? Why should we still study Dickens?
Well, I said a bit earlier that he helps us to think about bits of the world that we would normally take for granted.
And I think that's true.
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,
like politicians or bankers or health professionals or other people who who invest our trust in.
Dickens's a deeply suspicious, sceptical writer when it comes to bankers, for instance,
there's one sketch you write in which he talks about and there's apoplectic snorting cattle.
And, you know, we might not agree with that assessment. One might, but but either way,
it suggests that he doesn't simply want to allow those who have positions of power and privilege to take them for granted.
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.
He makes it look unexpected and strange. Similarly,
he asks us to think about how the world is put together and the way that society understands itself and
structures itself and asks us to to think about whether that is the best way that society can be put together,
whether, in fact, we might want to reorganise it in certain ways.
So not just aesthetically, but also socially and politically. He's a radical thinker.
So again, for that reason to go back to Dickens is to find a way of thinking forward to perhaps a slightly better future.
So Dickens is a social critic, he's worth reading for that reason.
Yes, but not just as a critic of Victorian society. This is perhaps where people sometimes get him wrong.
They assume that because he was a Victorian and was writing about the Victorian world,
therefore his social and his political concerns were exhausted when the 19th century came to an end.
And that's not true because a good writer doesn't simply tell you what to think about a particular idea.
They show you how to think about all kinds of ideas.
And a writer like Dickens, even if the political and the social problems that he's writing about disappeared.
And at the moment, one might argue they have not.
Child poverty, for instance, and might well argue is on the rise in this country as around the world.
But that that's one side and that however one thinks about the world.
Dickens is the kind of writer who helps want to think about it with more nuance and subtlety and complexity.
Thank you very much.