Helena Kelly

Disclaimer: I love Dickens’s novels. I reread several of them every year. I have several thick biographies of him on my shelves, and am quite sure that he is NOT someone I’d want to have dinner with, and his egotism, faithlessness, and treatment of his wife and children were atrocious. And I STILL adore his novels. I finally checked this new bio out after long hesitation. A Dickens scholar I admire and have had some brief and friendly email correspondence with published a critical review. But if I want to consider myself a fairly knowledgeable fan, I felt I was obliged to at least have a look.

The title and cover of the book flag its apparent intent: “Life and Lies,” with LIES highlighted. Helena Kelly seems to come at this with an agenda to ferret out every inconsistency, contradiction, or lacuna in the evidence surrounding CD’s life, and then posit her own possible explanations for them. And almost always to CD’s detriment. She has delved into archival files, memoirs, and other documentation to try to assemble a factually supported chronology of his life: exactly where he lived during what dates, the composition of family and connections’ relationships, backing up the details of what he told his first biographer and faithful friend Forster decades later, matching others’ recollections, etc. All of which is a very useful endeavor. The bits and pieces and scraps are jiggered and lined up, and yes, indeed, there are gaps and mismatches. The trouble is what she makes of them.

It feels like Kelly is setting out to come up with possibilities chosen to stand out as iconoclastic and different from conventional wisdom whenever possible. If a point can be stretched, she will stretch it. The text is riddled with “might have,” “could have,” “possibly,” “can be imagined,” and “what if.” Whatever facts are available to her are plot points for her to string into stories of her own making. The childhood death of CD’s little sister Harriet is spun into a scenario of a disabled child that no one would talk about, in an era when as many as 30% of children in London died before they were five, and about whom CD’s daughter Katie said she had died of smallpox. What is the point of that? Kelly sets out to suggest that CD either actually never worked in the blacking warehouse at all, that a family connection who helped arrange it didn’t exist, or that if he did, he was hired as a teenage ad writer. And her use of CD’s fiction is cherry-picked: examples are selected to support or deny her theories depending on whether they make CD look bad. At one point, she uses the fact that CD named a character convicted of embezzling “John” to support her proposition that CD’s father John may have been involved in an embezzlement scheme himself… as though “John” wasn’t the second-most common men’s name in the UK in 1850.

I was done. If the first two sections were so rife with speculation, far-fetched theories, and suppositions (“we may be intended to read…Miss Pross as Jewish…” because she has red hair? Is Uriah Heep Jewish too then?), I’d had enough. Kelly may have provided fodder for a lot of alternative history, and marshaled some useful data and documentation, but the use she makes of them smacks of ego and a foregone agenda. Even as CD has provided me with countless hours of joy, admiration, and contentment, I am very aware of many of his failings. But this book started to feel like an exercise in an imaginative hatchet job based on too little.



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This was very interesting. The author does a wonderful job of explaining the forgotten circumstances at the time of Austen's writing and then placing her words into that context. Learning of that additional context completely changes the themes of her stories for me. Altering them from 'well-written love stories' into 'very thoughtful examinations of politics, religion, tradition, the vulnerable of society, etc. (with well-written love stories as the vehicles to present them)'. Knowing the second, unspoken half of a quote Jane included, that all her readers at the time would have known (and couldn't have helped to think of when referenced) makes a big difference in the true message she was communicating (without risking her life challenging the authorities straight out). Similarly, naming fictional characters after actual prominent figures of her day couldn't have helped but bring their associations along with them. Or knowing the plots of popular (for that time) books that characters reference, bring with them additional considerations. Seemingly small details like the names of books/places/people/laws/etc. weren't at all randomly dropped in to add a little color, they were very carefully chosen to further the points she was crafting. Over and over the context in which she was writing makes an incredible difference in the message she was actually communicating. It makes it all the more extraordinary that her stories, even without all that contextual knowledge her early readers would have come in with, have remained so beloved! I think she was even more clever and brave and talented than I had been giving her credit for. Excellent.… (más)