John Sutherland
No Smoke without Fire?
The Great Charles Dickens Scandal
By Michael Slater
Yale University Press 215pp £20 order from our bookshop
Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor
By Ruth Richardson
Oxford University Press 370pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Michael Slater’s book has an epilogue entitled ‘Will We Ever Know?’ No need, in this year of Dickens, to ask what the question is. Nelly, of course. His mistress? Mother of his deceased or living offspring? A young actress whom he helped through some difficult years from purely avuncular motives?
Slater has spent fifty years with Dickens at a supreme scholarly level. He has edited volumes of the letters, conducted The Dickensian journal, gathered the authoritative multi-volume collection of Dickens’s journalism and produced a monumental biography. He is, in short, a critic you can trust with the Dickens legacy. If there is one person you wouldn’t trust it’s a journalist. Slater’s book opens with a quote from Victoria Coren in The Observer from 2005:
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