Restless Dickens: A Victorian Life in motion, 1872-1927

By comparing John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–1874) with subsequent amateur forms of biographical activity in the period 1872–1927, this essay aims to challenge lingering conceptualizations of the material properties of Victorian biography as smooth and standardized. I argue that the parity of practice revealed between Forster’s biography and the various composite forms of biographical narrative that came in its wake, such as Grangerizations and photography collections, throws into question the supposed unity of Forster’s original text. It shows the ways in which his Dickens was always an unstable and metamorphosing figure, tracing an alternative genealogy for the subsequent forms of memorialization that push these biographical qualities further. It demonstrates continuities of preoccupation and practice in biographical activity 1872–1927, producing a narrative of Victorian and Modernist biography that emphasizes connection rather than rupture. Examining these composite forms of biographical narrative also reveals the proto-cinematic way in which they juxtapose and sequence similar but marginally different Dickenses, in order to create the sense of a figure temporally, physically and mentally in motion. From Forster’s text onwards, Dickens is thus produced materially as well as verbally as a ‘restless’ subject, continually poised between stasis and movement. The recurring biographical use of montage, collage and compilation in order to put the subject in motion suggests a previously unconsidered dimension to the ancestry of cinema. It also works to extend our understanding of the media available to Victorian biography