The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally

Published in Australia in 2020; published by Atria Books on March 8, 2022

The Dickens Boy is Edward “Plorn” Dickens, Charles Dickens’ youngest son. Having shown no talent for anything beyond cricket, and having failed to confess to his famous father that he never managed to read any of the great man’s novels, Plorn feels both guilt and relief when his father sends him to Australia, a country in which Plorn's brother Alfred already resides. Plorn hopes he can apply himself in a new land and become the kind of man his father might admire.

Plorn quickly discovers that Australians venerate his father just as much as the British. Some have memorized long passages from their favorite Dickens novels. Still, Plorn rejects the employment that was arranged for him on the ground that the employer asks too many dishonorable questions about his father’s dalliance with Plorn’s aunt. The employer to which Plorn next applies, Momba Station in New South Wales, becomes the “place that concentrated the forces of his soul.”

Plorn has experiences he could not have imagined in his father’s sheltering embrace. He is shocked when a man tries to kiss him, but his refusal is polite. He gets high on a substance provided by an Aboriginal friend. His first pleasurable reading experience comes when Dandy Darnell gives him a manuscript in the hope that Plorn’s father will publish it. When Dandy writes of his attraction to his aunt (who has been mistreated by her husband), his writing may be autobiographical. Plorn is coming into his own understanding of sexual desire (15-year-old Constance Desailley is often on his mind) and it is probably for that reason that Dandy’s innuendo-free writing speaks to him. Plorn cannot muster interest in the socially acceptable poetic and indirect descriptions of sexual attraction that are favored by his father’s generation. He is quite taken, however, by Dandy’s references to Blake’s argument that men and women both require “the lineaments of Gratified Desire.”

It is a matter of history and thus not a spoiler that Charles Dickens died while Plorn was still a teenage resident of Australia. The novel takes place before and in the immediate aftermath of that death. In his acknowledgements, Thomas Keneally notes that history does not reveal how Plorn learned of his father’s death. Unfettered by history, Keneally invents a brilliant scene that involves the notorious bushranger Frank Pearson, a/k/a Captain Starlight. Perhaps for good reason, Keneally imagines Plorn undergoing the standard denial stage of death. “The resurrection of Christ was easier to believe in than the death of Charles Dickens.”

Historians seem to regard Plorn, like nearly all of the Dickens children, as a failure. The novel’s sympathetic portrayal imagines Plorn as a person who, living in his father’s constant shadow but lacking his father’s gifts, does his best to live up to his father’s expectations. Keneally imagines that Plorn’s love for and devotion to his father was fierce. Regardless of his successes and failures, Plorn’s steadfast defense of his father makes him an admirable character. The novel ends while Plorn is still young, well before he enters politics and succumbs to debt. Yet it ends on a sad note, perhaps to foreshadow the life that was to follow.

The atmosphere of cricket matches and wool shearing, emus and kangaroos, is vivid. One of the novel’s themes is prejudice against the native “darks,” a prejudice not shared at Momba Station and that Plorn instantly rejects. An open-minded priest who befriends and lives among the Aboriginals plays a modest role in the story. He is indirectly responsible for the coming-of-age moment that causes Plorn to realize that he “had been fatuous trying to grow up into manhood in a measured way.”

One of the delights of reading The Dickens Boy is the discussion of Charles Dickens’ novels and stories, including some passages that characters recite from memory. Dickens’ melodramatic plots are disfavored in the post-modern world, but I still regard him as one of the best storytellers in the history of literature — and certainly one of the best creators of memorable characters. Trollope dismissed Dickens as “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” an insult that (in the novel) Alfred holds against Trollope’s son, who has been relegated to Australia like the Dickens boys.

Alfred parses his father’s work for clues about his father’s views of Australia, a topic that likely of particular interest to Keneally and to Australian readers of Dickens' work. Is Australia a land of convicts or a land where criminals have the opportunity to remake themselves? In his books, Alfred observes, Dickens sends criminals and prostitutes and stupid people to Australia. Does that mean Dickens thought Alfred and Plorn were stupid? The boys have differing opinions, but they aren’t certain of the truth. They also disagree, to an extent, about their father’s moral character. Plorn reads one of his his father’s essays to reaffirm his belief that Charles Dickens was generous in his love for the lowliest members of society (although Plorn hasn’t yet encountered Uriah Heep). One of the novel’s burning questions is whether Plorn will ever read David Copperfield, a question that had me thinking, “Just read it and ask yourself whether you recognize something of your father’s life in its pages.”

Keneally avoids Dickensian melodrama but writes with sentiment about Dickens and his influence upon Australians. Keneally is a skilled storyteller in his own right. The story loses some of its voltage after Plorn’s father dies — eulogies and memories slow the story’s pace as it limps to a conclusion — but the novel as a whole is engrossing.

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