Inscribing friendship: John Forster’s Life of Dickens and the writing of male intimacy in the Victorian period

Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4) was described in contemporary reviews as ‘The Autobiography of John Forster with Recollections of Charles Dickens’, and continues to be charged with making Forster a disproportionately large character in Dickens's life story. This article takes a different approach to The Life, viewing Forster's biography of his friend and literary advisee as a significant document for the exploration of personal and professional intimacy between men in the period; a document that reveals a plenitude of available languages for the expression of a rich emotional experience of male friendship, encompassing amity, tenderness, loss and mourning. In exploring the Life of Dickens as a narrative of the life in relation, this article endeavours to expand upon often rather fleeting critical references to the significance of a personal relationship between biographer and subject. I close-read Forster's biography alongside Dickens's own discussions of male friendship in his fiction, journalism and letters, using approaches from queer theory and a historical approach to friendship between men to offer a new framework for understanding the narrative and emotional effects of biographical intimacy