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What the Dickens?

According to some, possessions maketh the man. But verily, some men maketh their possessions. Take the walnut chair and the mahogany desk that will go up for auction in London in June. True, the mid-19th century furniture artefacts are venerable and well preserved. But what lies behind the confidence that they will go under the hammer for at least £80,000? The reason lies in man’s abiding fascination with antiques that have historical significance, in this case acquired due to the bottom the chair supported and the elbows that rested on the desk. It is entirely appropriate that there are such great expectations about how much the artefacts will fetch. After all, this is where the foremost novelist of the Victorian era, and one of history’s greatest, wrote the eponymously named book and his other later works. This is a good time to remember Charles Dickens, whose finely honed social sensibility led him to write incisively — during the pomp and splendour of the British Empire — about the country’s soft and deprived underbelly. Recently in New York one of the biggest auctions of his works reportedly fetched a cool $2 million+. As collectors and fans gathered together to witness 208 lots fall under the hammer, an anonymous American picked up a first edition of Oliver Twist for $229,000, a record for a Dickens book.

The writer, who died in 1870, has influenced the preceding week in another way. Novelist Lloyd Jones’ celebrated best-seller Mister Pip, a novel about a young girl’s great fascination for the orphan in Great Expectations, was awarded the Kiriyama Prize for literature. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, the coming-of-age narrative is a tribute to Dickens and a reminder of the power of his imagination and sustained literary influence. While he did experiment with the genres of romance, farce, and melodrama, he saw the novel as a form of social commentary. His fiction was underwritten with a moral purpose, a desire to enlighten rather than entertain. Success came early to Dickens — with the Pickwick Papers, his very first novel — but his childhood was a difficult one. Poverty forced the 12-year-old to work in a boot polish factory. The unforgettable images of deprivation, brutality, and urban squalor in novels such as Oliver Twist were a result of lived experience as much as imagination. Very few of Dickens’s personal effects have survived, which partly explains the enormous interest in his desk and chair. But that is not surprising given that a lock of his hair was sold in London three years ago for over £3000 — easily exceeding, one might add, the auction house’s greatest expectations.

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