Could Dickens have claimed compensation for "loss of genius"

Alongside Jane Austen, Charles Dickens is undoubtedly the most popular British novelist of all time. He wrote humane and politically subversive epics, which despite their broad and complex canvasses have somehow always held immense popular appeal.

Even to a 21st century British population who are showing an increasing indifference to the novel, his stories and characters have become part of the collective unconscious through their laying down of formative archetypes. We also know him through the now yearly spate of television adaptations of his works. In fact, it could be argued that he is as relevant today as he was when he represented a literary zeitgeist to his contemporaries.

In the same way many might know little about William Shakespeare but still know that on death he left his wife his "second best bed", through received knowledge most will know about Dickens' experiences working as a child labourer in one of the era's notorious "blacking factories".

Dickens spent a number of months working in the blacking factory. His job primarily involved pasting labels onto jars of boot polish. In today's age of strict child labour laws, it is hard to believe that he was only twelve years old, working to support his debt-ridden family, and paying for squalid lodgings in Camden. Like so many other child-workers of the time, Dickens was at huge risk of suffering personal injury in a work accident, or worse, such as succumbing to one of the many deadly bronchial conditions that so characterised London's damp and dank blacking factories.

To paraphrase a little the great Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, "Whatever happens to a boy of twelve, shapes him for life", for in Dickens' case, there is no doubt that this is true. The downturn in fortunes of the young Charles was dramatic. He went from being a well-to-do rural boy who liked to read picturesque and idyllic novels to an unambiguous member of the wretched and repressed working classes. The experience stayed with him and marked all he would do in later life, from his championing of child rights right through his literature, to his own conception of his social identity.

Just think of the young Pip in Great Expectations or the eponymously named character of David Copperfield; the stories of these two young boys are both marked by direct experience of the travails of stolen childhood.

It is in many ways a troubling proposition that if Dickens had not endured such hardship he may never have come to write some of the great works of the English language. It is a proposition which shows us that the notion of "art through suffering" might not just be a fatuous and self-indulgent affectation of proud melancholiacs. It also reveals that in some ways, an artist is not entirely in possession of free will, for in being born into a particular time, place, social sphere and family, could it be that he is just a useful though accidental conduit for whatever pressing issues of humanity are shared by his contemporaries.

Such a notion would seem to be supported by another incident of Dickens' life. If you can excuse the pun, it was actually a train accident that seemed to derail his seemingly unstoppable output of masterpieces.

Although, because of his luck in being in the only carriage that remained on the track during the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865 (a tragedy which killed ten and left a further 49 with passenger injuries), the train accident seems to mark the end of Dickens' prolific genius.

Yes, he did succeed in rescuing the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend from the wreckage, but after this event his literary output was limited to a few unremarkable short stories, a number of high profile readings of his existing works, and one unfinished novel (The Mystery of Edwin Drood). One cannot help but wonder whether if Dickens were alive today he would make a compensation claim for "loss of genius".

Both Dickens' experiences in the blacking factory and his involvement in the traumatic train crash just go to show us that although many of us might be born with some capacity for genius, the ability to realise it or have it seemingly arbitrarily ended depend on accidental factors outside anyone's control. A more mystically inclined man than me might call it providence.

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