I’ve been spending all my reading time with Charles Dickens this week, not reading one of his novels, but rather a biography in the series Penguin Lives by novelist Jane Smiley.

I was struck by several facts and observations. I had a vague memory that Dickens had a troubled marriage and that he had some kind of “relationship” with an actress named Ellen Ternan. “Some sort” is about right. According to Ms. Smiley, none of the Dickens’s biographers or critics can decide whether Ellen Ternan was Dickens’ mistress or whether he acted toward her with exteme propriety in an avuncular manner. He did divorce his wife not too long after he met the eighteen year old Ms. Ternan; Dickens was forty-five years old when he met his erstwhile “niece.” Shades of Arthur Gride, the old man in Nicholas Nickleby; however, Dickens wasn’t after Ms. Ternan’s money. She hadn’t any, and she and her mother and sisters lived off of Dickens for the rest of his life.

I thought the order of Dickens’ novels was interesting, too. I knew Pickwick Papers was Dickens’ first book. After Pickwick was such a success, he wrote the following major works in order:

2. Oliver Twist, one of my favorite Dickens’ novels. However, it was rather grisly to read that Dickens, toward the end of his life, made a mint doing dramatic readings of the murder of Nancy Sikes to much popular acclaim.

3. Nicholas Nickleby Two of my girls were in a play this spring based on this novel. That’s why I remember Arthur Gride.

4. Barnaby Rudge. I’ve not read this one.

5. The Old Curiosity Shop. I’ve not read this one either, but I’ve always heard the stories of how everyone on both sides of the Atlantic was anxiously dreading the possible death of Little Nell as the book was published in installments. Ms. Smiley quotes Oscar Wilde: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Cynical old Oscar.

6. American Notes for General Circulation. In this travelogue, Dickens wrote about his tour of America in which he offended his hosts and he was, in turn, “eager to get home.”

7. Martin Chuzzlewit is another Dickensensian novel that I haven’t read. I fact, I suppose, Dickens fan notwithstanding, I’ve read fewer than half of the novels Dickens wrote.

8. A Christmas Carol. Dickens created Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts during October and November of 1843 while he was finishing Martin Chuzzlewit. “With power must come an inner sense of connection to others that, in Dickens’s life and work, comes from the model of Jesus Christ as benevolent Saviour.”

9.Dombey and Son. Another Dickens novel I have to anticipate. Ms. Smiley compares it to Vanity Fair. I thought it was funny that, according to Ms. Smiley, Thackeray expressed a definite sense of rivalry with Dickens that Dickens never seemed to notice or reciprocate. Dickens called himself “the Inimitable” and gave out indiscriminate, benevolent encouragement to other lesser beings.

10.David Copperfield. As Dickens himself did, I absolutely love David Copperfield. I like all the characters, Miss Betsy Trotwqood, Mr. Dick, Mr. Micawber and all the little Micawbers, Dora and Agnes, Peggotty and Little Em’ly, even Steerforth and Uriah Heep. David Copperfield is just so much fun, and it doesn’t really get melodramatic as A Tale of Two Cities and other Dickensian novels sometimes do.

11. Bleak House. I wouldn’t know except from what I deduce from the title, but Ms. Smiley says that Bleak House is “the most unhopeful of Dickens’s novels.” It sold well, though. Maybe bleak and unhopeful sells.

12. Hard Times sounds as if it would be another bleak novel. Dancer Daughter read this one last year for a class and hated it. She’s not alone. Charlotte Bronte complained that she disliked Dickens’s “extravagance.” Trollope called Dickens “Mr. Popular Sentiment.” George Eliot, in spite of Dickens’s praise for her work, thought Dickens’s novels were shallow and melodramatic. (This criticism comes from the author of Mill on the Floss, which may not be shallow but definitely leans toward the melodramatic.)

13. Little Dorrit. After Dickens finished writing Little Dorrit in June 1857, Hans Christian Andersen came to visit and overstayed his welcome. This summer was also the summer of his meeting with and falling in love with Ellen Ternan, and by the next summer he was formally separated from his wife, Catherine, and seeking a divorce. It was messy, public divorce attended by all sorts of nasty rumors, even though Catherine “maintained her loyalty to her husband for the rest of her life” and biographers “record no instances of anger or recrimination, either in public or in writing, on her part.” Dickens, unfortunately, was not so circumspect. His own daughters characterized his behaviour during the divorce proceedings as “wicked and “mad.”

14. A Tale of Two Cities. Another favorite of mine. I probably don’t know too much more about the French Revolution than what I learned from A Tale of Two Cities. I just re-read thi novel for my British Literature class last year, and I found it just as good as the first time I read it in ninth grade.

15. Great Expectations. I have fond memories of this novel because we read it aloud as a family when the first four urchins were only elementary school age. Yes, there were some things they found difficult to understand, but everybody got the basic plotline. And we all grew quite fond of young Pip.

16. Our Mutual Friend was Dickens’s last completed novel. I’m quite interested in reading this one because Ms. Smiley says it’s “Dickens’s perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line.” Also, I want to know why Desmond (LOST) was carrying Our Mutual Friend around with him, unread. He said he was saving it to be the last novel he read before he died. I’m not sure how one would pull that trick off, but I’m intrigued enough to want to read the novel to see what it’s about and why the writers of LOST would use it as a prop.

17. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last novel, was never finished.

Sorry, this post has become unmanagably long. Especially if you’re not a Dickens fan. Chalk it up to the influence of the The Inimitable.

Maybe I’ll finish up tomorrow with a couple of more quotations Jane Smiley’s biography.