![]() ![]() Ackroyd, who is not an academic, thinks otherwise. For him and his university-based colleagues biographies, like legal cases, are built on the hard evidence of literary remains and interviewable eye-witnesses. Kaplan’s is an academic’s view of things. The biographer must remain for ever fenced-off. We may speculate, but we will never know the inner Dickens which those burned papers would have revealed. ![]() He largely succeeded thanks to his own vandalism and Forster’s loyal destructions and suppressions. ![]() Dickens laboured tirelessly to make himself publicly famous and at the same time to bury the private Dickens beyond all exhumation. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with the manuscript holocaust of 1860 was that there was a core of Dickens’s life which we would never know. Fred Kaplan’s 1988 life of Dickens began with the vivid scene of his incinerating ‘every letter he owned not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. ![]() It is a device that stakes out the territory while creating a sense of overall shape – something that even famous lives lack in the day-to-day business of living. In the manner of old Hollywood movies, biographies like to open at a terminal point and then flash back to the start of things. ![]()
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