The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens review – the man behind the novels

Charles Dickens, who burned thousands of his letters. Photograph: AP

On 19 April 1842, while in Cincinnati, Charles Dickens wrote a brief note to Rebecca Nichols, thanking her for her letter about The Old Curiosity Shop. It goes, in full:

    My Dear Madam,
    I am very much obliged to you for your beautiful lines on the death of Nell, which I have read with great interest and pleasure.
    Believe me
    Faithfully Yours
    CHARLES DICKENS.

The footnote gives us the context:

    Rebecca Nichols (1819-1903), poet and newspaper editor, then living in Cincinnati. Her poem, commemorating Nell in spring, summer and autumn, began: “Spring, with breezes cool and airy, / Opened on a little fairy.”

In those few lines we can see what a good editor Professor Jenny Hartley is. First, she has included Dickens’s letter, which does not, on the face of it, look interesting at all, except perhaps as an indication of his politeness to his public. Second, she has looked up the poem that occasioned the reply. This isn’t hard to do, thanks to the digitising efforts of the Library of Congress, but she could still have thought her time better spent elsewhere. And third: she quotes all she has to of the poem, without comment. (It goes on in the same vein, but those opening lines are, you will agree, special; the guffaw that exploded from me as I read them made me think of Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) Then you imagine Dickens himself reading this rubbish and realising he was going to have to say something nice about it; and then, perhaps, rolling his eyes before putting pen to paper. While we’re at it, we can pause to reflect on Nichols’s world, and her delight in receiving a note from the great man, unless a corner of her mind registered the faint possibility of sarcasm (“believe me”).

Extracting this much from six lines isn’t bad going, and when you think that Hartley had to plough through the 12 huge volumes of Dickens’s surviving letters to make her selection (he burned thousands more, but in an age when Londoners could expect a reply from a letter within two hours, inevitably many escaped the bonfire), your admiration for her grows deeper and deeper.

The letter I quoted is not, of course, representative. There are others that are less ambiguous or formal. It’s hard to say which are my favourites: they are all, in their way, good. Dickens was not known for his restraint in his exploration of the rhetorical potential of the English language, and reading this book is like listening to the work of an already uninhibited court maestro who has been let further off the leash.

The reason Dickens tended to burn his letters was, he said, because they captured him at unguarded moments – and they are all the better for it. We get an anonymously written letter about the exploitation of women and children by mine-owners prior to the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, for publication in the Morning Chronicle, which has lines you could quote today that would shame our government with their articulate fury. There’s a letter in which he describes being visited in a dream by the “Spirit” of his dead daughter, Mary, and asking her which is the true religion, or whether they are all true (the right religion for Dickens, he is told, is Catholicism, which made me raise an eyebrow). Another describes him taking round water in his hat and brandy from his flask to the injured and dying victims of the 1865 Staplehurst train crash, which he was in with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. There are musings about works that have been sidelined (such as Master Humphrey’s Clock, a weekly periodical written entirely by Dickens for a year and a half), and also about whether to murder Chapman and Hall, his publishers. In short, the whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters. If you don’t buy it now, or put it on your Christmas list, it can only be because you already have a copy.

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Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea review – a symphony out of historical silence

A few families possess paper records stretching back through the centuries, but for most of us, family history is handed down from mouth to ear. These stories illuminate the past with a particular, fitful brilliance, but much is left in the dark. This darkness is both a gift to a novelist and a daunting responsibility. When a writer claims to speak for an illiterate woman who lived in the mid-19th century, to what extent will he overlay her story with his own preconceptions?

Although Gavin McCrea’s first novel is set in the circles of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this is not their story, and it does not flatter them. Engels and Marx left copious records behind them, but were unable to describe how they themselves might appear to a member of the working class, still less to a woman of that class. Nor did they tell the history of two sisters born in Manchester of Irish descent, Mary and Lizzie (Lydia) Burns, although both women were closely connected with Engels and Marx for many years. Neither sister left any account of their lives, but in Mrs Engels they step forward to dominate the narrative.

Stepping out of the shadows of time … Lizzie Burns c1865 

McCrea’s narrator is the younger, Lizzie (pictured), who was born in 1827. According to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, Lizzie “was illiterate and could not read or write but she was true, honest and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you could meet”. Like her elder sister Mary, Lizzie worked in a cotton mill. Mary met Engels when he was sent to work at the family firm of Engels & Ermen in Manchester, and she entered into a relationship with him which lasted until her death at the age of 40. Some historians detect her influence on Engels’ The Condition of the English Working Class, which deals with the industrial working class of Manchester and Liverpool and describes in some detail the district of Manchester known as Little Ireland. The Burns sisters knew about poverty, child labour and slum housing from the inside, and would have made valuable guides for a middle-class son of a factory owner. “Some 4,000 people, mostly Irish, inhabit this slum ... Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. The atmosphere is polluted by the stench and is darkened by the thick smoke of a dozen factory chimneys.”

Mrs Engels moves back and forwards in time, between the earlier days in Manchester and the later years after Mary’s death, when Lizzie becomes Engels’s partner in her sister’s stead and moves with him to Primrose Hill. From the outside, she appears secure, but inside she is torn, even tormented by the contradictions of her life. The Engels and Marx menages are funded by reserves of family money. Refugees from the French Commune pack the drawing room, swallowing fine wines faster than they can be brought up from the cellar. The Marxes’ servant, Nim, is the single mother of a child whose father Lizzie believes to be Engels. Jenny Marx, with three surviving children out of seven born, is obsessed with the future marriages of her girls. Meanwhile, Lizzie is in contact with the Fenian movement through a former lover. This whirlwind of politics and personalities might become dizzying were it not stabilised by Lizzie’s unmistakable voice. She begins life by grabbing what she needs in order to survive; she ends it having achieved deep self-knowledge. She tells her own story with a fierce wit and trenchancy, shot through with poetry.

The historical Lizzie tells us nothing. Was she, as McCrea suggests, made infertile after infection with syphilis, or did she make sure, in one way or another, that no children were born to her? Did she hold on to enough of her faith to see, at the closing of the coffin that held her sister’s body, “how her hollowness and ash turned to a radiance that the oils and the candles couldn’t fully explain”? No one will ever know, but McCrea’s fictional speculation makes a fine symphony out of the silence that surrounds Lizzie Burns.

The Not-Dead and the Saved review – Kate Clanchy’s wide-ranging short stories

Family ties, especially motherhood, take centre stage in many of the 16 stories in Kate Clanchy’s first collection. Irene is something of a prose companion to Newborn (Clanchy’s poetry collection about parenthood), skilfully juxtaposing the disorientation – “Post-partum, that’s what they call it. In parts. Parted from yourself” – with the protagonist’s flourishing sense of maternal solidarity with other women. There are also some curveballs thrown in for good measure, like the clever Brunty Country, which imagines the Brontës as a contemporary slush-pile discovery of a literary agent: “Maybe, just maybe, WH isn’t really the eternal masterpiece we’re all making out? Maybe it’s just a small press novel that got really, really, lucky? You know, warm wind from Twilight, warmer one from Charlotte, the public in a hot mood for incest and cheap ebooks.” Moving swiftly between the comic and the tragic, Clanchy has an eager eye for each and every detail in between.

Baddies in books: Captain Blicero in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon’s Captain Blicero appears to be an archetypal baddie: a sadomasochistic, sexually indiscriminate pederast Nazi and the source of the mysterious 00000 V-2 rocket that is the white whale of Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.
Blicero made his first appearance in Pynchon’s 1963 debut, V, as Lieutenant Weissman, a decadent German army officer stranded in the former South-West Africa seven years after it ceased to be a German colony. In this earlier novel, he is a mysterious, occasionally transvestite figure who appears to be engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with the German agent Vera Merovering. He is sneaky too, potentially drugging and then stealing from another character, Kurt Mondaugen. More droll than disquieting, he is not yet a fully-fledged bad guy.
By the time he crops up again in Gravity’s Rainbow, 20 years later, he has metamorphosed into something quite different. Now an SS major, he is the commander of a V-2 rocket battery in the Netherlands, where he has imprisoned a young Dutch woman and a German boy. Blicero is a shocking figure; the prisoners are his sex slaves and when he first appears in the action he is “in high drag” and in the act of having sex with the young German, Gottfried. When it is revealed that his hostages are playing roles in a skewed Hansel and Gretel fantasy, in which he is the witch trying to lure the children into his Kinderofen, things do not get any less bizarre.
Over the course of the novel’s dense and plentiful pages, Blicero/Weissman is revealed to have first been the lover of a young Herero male in colonised South-West Africa, and later to have been a key figure in the Nazi rocket-building programme, during which he tortured a technician into designing a customised V-2 rocket for his own ends. With his penchant for quoting his favourite poet, Rilke, Weissman cuts a singular figure. He is described as both “balding, scholarly, peering up … through eyeglass lenses thick as bottles” and as “a brand new military type, part salesman, part scientist”. He is brutal: “the sadist [with the] responsibility for coming up with new game variations building towards a maximum cruelty.”
There is little doubt that Weissman is death-obsessed. He even takes the name Dominus Blicero as his SS codename because it was a Teutonic nickname for death himself. In the novel’s penultimate section, we see him “in his final madness” as he abandons humanity altogether and embraces the ultimate destructiveness of the rocket. He has mutated into “another animal … a werewolf … but with no humanity left in its eyes”.
As long-time readers and viewers of the recent Inherent Vice adaptation can attest, Pynchon can never be accused of stinting on his creations. He is often criticised for creating cartoonish characters, and Weissman at first seems to fit this mould. But his African partner’s description of the early Weissman casts him in a more wistful light. He was, Enzian says, “a young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance”, but at the same time his “thirst for guilt was as insatiable as the desert’s for water”. He is human after all: another son of empire who is ultimately corrupted by its “mission to propagate death”.
Despite the satirical and ridiculous nature of Blicero, he embodies an important real-world point. He is a composite of the fears and prejudices of the post-Cuban missile crisis era in which this 1973 novel was composed. Perverse and unsettling, he represents the unabashed wickedness that lies at the heart of man’s romance with deadly technologies. His corrupted idealism is meant to bring to mind the Nazi rocket scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who were transplanted from Germany to Texas immediately after the war to work on the American space programme.
Many of those scientists were exonerated of crimes they committed or were privy to, and became fixtures of American public life. Thus the anger in the line: “If you’re wondering where he has gone, look among the successful academics, the presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” For all his preposterousness, an uncanny undercurrent of history underpins this baddie. Pynchon characterises evil in such a way as to confront us with history’s complacent attitude to the baddies of the real world.

Shami Chakrabarti reveals Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist

The women’s prize for fiction, established to redress the tendency by literary awards to overlook writing by women, is now in its 20th year, but chair of this year’s judges Shami Chakrabarti believes we are “still nowhere near where we should be” when it comes to literary recognition for women.
Announcing a longlist of 20 titles for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which runs the gamut from literary works by the likes of Ali Smith, Anne Tyler, Kamila Shamsie, Sarah Waters and Rachel Cusk to dystopian science fiction and thrillers, the Liberty director was adamant that there is still a place for a literary award focusing on women’s fiction.

“I think we do need to keep celebrating women’s fiction. We need to celebrate women generally and there’s nothing more powerful than stories,” said Chakrabarti. “We need to celebrate stories by women, for women, as just one more way to redress gender injustice.”
Gender injustice, said the campaigner, is “the greatest human rights violation in the world ... like an apartheid. It’s global in reach and millennial in duration. It’s certainly not a time to be doing anything less.”
The women’s prize for fiction was launched in the wake of the judges’ failure to shortlist a single female author for the Booker prize of 1991. Literary figures led by the author Kate Mosse discovered that “by 1992, only 10% of novelists shortlisted for the Booker prize had been women”; by 1996, their plan to launch an award solely for women had come to fruition. After years of sponsorship by Orange, the 2013 award was privately funded by sponsors including Cherie Blair and Joanna Trollope. The prize is now sponsored by Baileys.
“We are still nowhere near where we should be,” said Chakrabarti. “I also don’t think women are getting their due in other literary prizes. I am still surprised at some of the lists and comments made by judges and chairs of judges elsewhere, so I don’t think it’s time to end a women’s prize.”
According to Guardian analysis, since 1996 there have been 12 male winners of the Man Booker prize and seven female winners, which is just over 35%, but when you look at the shortlists the ratio drops to 25%, with 23 women, as against 70 men.
“Literature ought to be further on than it is, given how long women have been writing brilliant stuff,” said Chakrabarti. “It’s just hilarious to me that we should target a women’s book prize ... at a time when women are so much further back then they should be, not just in publishing but in politics, economics, health care ... I think there is still work to do and there’s an ocean of talent to be discussed and shared and celebrated, and this is one way of doing it.”
Chakrabarti was joined on the judging panel for this year’s award by Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, columnist Grace Dent, novelist Helen Dunmore and presenter Cathy Newman. They read a total of 165 books to come up with their longlist of 20 novels for the £30,000 award, a lineup which the Liberty director called a list “to be proud of – with its mix of genres and styles, first-timers and well-known names from around the world”.
American veteran Tyler is longlisted for her 20th novel, the story of three generations of a family A Spool of Blue Thread, alongside Smith’s dual narrative How to Be Both, which twines together the stories of a renaissance artist of the 1460s and a modern teenager, and which has already won the Goldsmiths prize and the Costa novel award. Waters, chosen this time for her historical novel The Paying Guests, has been shortlisted twice before for the award, as has Tyler.
Five debut writers also made the cut, from Emma Healey’s bestselling and Costa-winning first novel Elizabeth Is Missing, narrated by an elderly woman with dementia, to Laline Paull, whose The Bees is a dystopia set in a beehive.
Tiny UK publisher Legend Press has two first novelists on the longlist, Jemma Wayne for After Before, in which three women reach crisis point during a cold British winter, and PP Wong for The Life of a Banana, narrated by Xing Li, “what some Chinese people call a banana – yellow on the outside and white on the inside”.
Emily St John Mandel’s tale of a world wiped out by the flu, Station Eleven, and Sandra Newman’s dystopian The Country of Ice Cream Star, were also chosen by judges.
The award is open to novels written in English by women from anywhere in the world, provided they are published in the UK, and is intended to reward “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing”. Chakrabarti said there had been a “very strong showing of UK writers”, on this year’s longlist.
The winner will be announced on 3 June, following the unveiling of the shortlist on 13 April. The award has previously honoured writers including Eimear McBride, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy. Dunmore, on the judging panel this year, took the inaugural prize for her novel A Spell of Winter, in 1996.

Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist 2015

Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber and Faber) – British – 8th novel
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans (Doubleday) – British – 4th novel
Aren’t We Sisters? by Patricia Ferguson (Penguin) – British – 8th novel
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus) – Chinese/ British – 6th novel
Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape) – British - 3rd novel
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking) – British – 1st novel
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Picado) – Canadian – 4th novel
The Offering by Grace McCleen (Sceptre) – British – 3rd novel
The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman (Chatto & Windus) – British/American – 3rd novel
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill (Quercus) – Canadian – 2nd novel
The Bees by Laline Paull (Fourth Estate) – British - 1st novel
The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips (Jonathan Cape) – British – 2nd Novel
The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert (Virago) – British – 3rd novel
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) – Pakistani/British – 6th novel
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) - British – 6th novel
The Shore by Sara Taylor (William Heinemann) – American – 1st novel
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus) – American – 20th novel
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago) – British – 6th novel
After Before by Jemma Wayne (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel
The Life of a Banana by PP Wong (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel