Dickensblog

British author A.N. Wilson has just released a new biography, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, in the U.K. You can find reviews of his book here, here, and here.

I don't know whether I'll read Wilson's book or not when it gets published over here, but I can say this much: If I do, I'll take it with a large grain of salt. Here's why:

• George Sayer on Wilson's biography of C.S. Lewis: "To support his theory of Lewis's adultery, Wilson tells us that Douglas Gresham, in an oral interview taped at the Wade Center, states that in 1955, when he was only eight, he surprised his mother and Lewis in a compromising position in her bedroom. But Gresham has stated in writing that he never made this statement, and I have it on the authority of the former curator of the Wade Center, Lyle Dorsett, that Douglas's statement is not on the tape or in the typewritten transcript that was made from it."
• Michael Flannery on Wilson's biography of Charles Darwin: "But my uneasy sense of déjà vu turned to dismay when I read Wilson’s claim that Darwin did more than merely suppress his predecessors, he actually stole ideas from Edward Byth’s proto-theory of natural selection, published in two essays appearing in the Magazine of Nature History in 1835 and 1837. Wilson claims some mysteriously missing pages in Darwin’s notebooks prove it. The problem is, these have long been recovered and are readily available in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844 (1987). Historians have since examined these discovered pages and have concluded that there is no substantiation to the charge of intellectual thievery on the part of Darwin, an accusation first issued by Loren Eiseley in 1959 before the lost pages were found. It is puzzling that Wilson resurrected such a baseless charge, especially when the countervailing evidence sat right under his nose with the published Notebooks he cites in his biography.

  "As if this weren’t enough, there are a multitude of simple factual errors in the book. For example, Darwin’s first grandchild did not die in childbirth. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) did not 'scoop' Darwin. Herbert Spencer did not suggest Darwin adopt the phrase 'survival of the fittest.' The alleged 'July 1' meeting of the Linnean Society was not cancelled because of Society President Robert Brown’s death ten days later! Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of natural selection was not 'all but identical' to Darwin’s. The list could go on."

• Richard J. Evans on Wilson's biography of Adolf Hitler: "It would take more space than is available here to list all the mistakes in the book. Most obvious are the simple factual errors. The 'Aryan race' in Nazi ideology was not 'the Eurasian race'; it did not include 'Slavs', 'Latins' or 'Celts'. Hitler’s ideas did not include a 'quasi-religious cult of violence based on a return to the mythologies of the pagan north' — pagan cults and mythologies were publicly condemned by Hitler in 1938. General elections were not 'held on an almost monthly basis' in 1932; there were only two, in July and November. General Erich Ludendorff’s 'proph­ecy' of the damage Hitler would cause once in power was invented later by the Nazi Hans Frank and has no basis in fact. Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, author of the compelling Diary of a Man in Despair, was not 'aristocratic' but the son of an innkeeper. Heinrich Brüning was not 'leader' of the Catholic Centre Party but its parliamentary floor leader.

  "In the beer hall putsch of 1923, Hitler was not met by a hail of police bullets at the Bürgerbräukeller, where he launched the putsch, but at the Feldherrnhalle in the centre of town. Bavaria was not 'separate from the rest of Germany until 1918'; it was a federated state, like Prussia or Baden.

  "There were not 750,000 'mixed-race' Jews in Germany in 1933; Wilson’s source for this grotesquely inflated number is a document quoted in Robert Gellately’s Backing Hitler but so hastily has he read Gellately that he hasn’t even bothered to note the sentence immediately following, which states that the document exaggerated the number and the real figure was about 85,000.

  "The number of Catholic priests imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp was not 20,000 (this would have enormously exceeded the camp’s capacity) but, as noted in Stanislav Zamecnik’s standard work, 1,007 to the end of 1940 and another 2,720 to the end of the war. Thomas Mann’s novels were not publicly burned by the Nazis. The Hitler-Stalin pact did not allocate just German-speaking areas of Poland to German control — the vast majority of those who came under German occupation as a result of the pact were Polish or Yiddish speakers. Erwin Rommel was not a 'man of the people' — his father was a headmaster and his mother an aristocrat. And so on, and so forth."

And then there was this infamous incident, when Wilson included in his biography of John Betjeman a fake love letter, supposedly written by Betjeman to Honor Tracy, that was given to him by a prankster. Wilson later argued that he couldn't be expected to check the first letter of every sentence and realize that the letter was in fact an acrostic poking fun at him, which is a fair point. However, he failed to do his due diligence before including the letter in his book, remarking later that he merely found it strange when he tried to return the letter to its sender but got it sent back with "addressee and address not known," instead of suspecting that he'd been had.

In summary, I don't find Wilson a trustworthy biographer. This is not me being catty because he wrote that Dickens did some bad things. As we all know, Dickens did do some bad things, and that's on him; it's not the fault of any of his biographers. One can't hold it against a biographer that he reports what happened. But one can and should be leery of a biographer who's careless at best, and who just plain makes things up at worst.

I'm not advising anyone to read the book or not to read the book. That's up to each reader to decide. I just think that anyone who does read it should be aware of the author's track record, and proceed with caution.