Thanks to a childhood spent poking my nose through bannisters, I think of landings as places for eavesdropping, for the discovery of shocking adult secrets. So it seems appropriate that it is to a landing, albeit one with chairs and a small table, that Claire Tomalin leads me when I arrive at her house in Petersham, west London. Tomalin is a famously formidable woman, cool, clever and not much given to spilling her guts. She became a writer long before the cult of personality took publishing hostage and so believes that, in life, it is one's work that should count with the public, not one's ex-boyfriends. But she is also, being a biographer, a dedicated purveyor of secrets, a person whose job is to hunt down whispers and clarify them in black and white and extensive footnotes.
Her books are fantastically well-researched and, on the surface, dispassionately written. But they also gratify what her latest subject, Charles Dickens, called "staring curiosity" (Dickens, trembling in the certain knowledge that no man can own his life once he is dead, claimed to disapprove of the biographer's art). You turn their pages and what you feel most of all is the thrill – piercing, but complicated – of disclosure.
Is there anything left to disclose about Dickens? Perhaps not. His biggest secret – the existence of a carefully closeted mistress, a one-time actress called Ellen Ternan (Nelly), with whom he may have had a child (the baby probably died) – was, after all, revealed to its fullest extent in Tomalin's groundbreaking 1990 book, The Invisible Woman. Unless more diaries or letters unaccountably turn up, a new life is a matter of emphasis, mostly. Nevertheless, her skill is such that you read her Dickens with a mounting sense of amazement (and sometimes horror), the small things taking a hold of you as much as the large. It is wonderful. Two weeks after I finished it, I still cannot get out of my mind the fact that, once it was over, Dickens's feckless parents never again referred to the year they forced him to spend working in a blacking factory (he was just 12 years old), as if it had never happened.
Nor can I stop thinking about the way Dickens signalled to his long-suffering wife, Catherine, that their marriage was effectively over (he simply got a workman in and divided their bedroom in two). Next time I see a photograph of Dickens – it won't be long; next year is the bicentenary of his birth – I will remember Eleanor Picken, who met him in Broadstairs when she was 19. Thrilled to know the famous writer, Eleanor sunned herself "in his smiles", but she thought, too, that his eyes were sometimes like "danger-lamps".
Like Dickens, Tomalin is fiercely energetic, and mordantly funny, but today she also has the slightly frail aspect of one who, having completed a vast undertaking (Dickens's life is so incredibly voluminous: his letters alone run to 12 volumes, each one some 800 pages long), now awaits the verdict of the various partisans who patrol this sacred ground. Her eye wanders to the window. "You feel exhausted, low, terrified. When I was young and books were published, no one made any sort of fuss. Now... you feel people are going to jump on you. You can't help it." It would be the same with any book, but in the case of Dickens, who induces such intense (and intensely odd) passions in his devotees, you can multiply this by five.
"The great weirdness has always been the protection of Dickens's name by Dickensians [this started early: a biographer, Thomas Wright, who dared to mention Nelly in his 1913 biography, was widely attacked] and it still goes on. They don't like the stuff about Nelly. I've already given a few talks and there was a man there with a notebook." An intentionally sinister pause. "In particular, they've never liked the stuff I suggested about Dickens's death. But I haven't changed my mind. I'm sticking to it."
Tomalin has believed ever since she wrote The Invisible Woman that it is possible that Nelly was with Dickens in Peckham when the final crisis came and that she took him home to his daughters and sister-in-law at his Kent house, Gad's Hill – possibly he was already unconscious – in conditions of utmost secrecy in order to protect both their names.
She is confounded by this desire to preserve the Victorian image of Dickens as a monogamous and kindly husband. "When Anthony Burgess reviewed Peter Ackroyd's biography [Ackroyd, whose book came out in 1990, strikingly failed to acknowledge Nelly], he said, 'Now we know. Dickens was a good man. He didn't have a mistress.' What? There are other ways of being good. All writers behave badly. All people behave badly." She agrees with Dickens's clever daughter, Katey, who believed that in the second half of his life, when he rejected Catherine and cruelly forbade her children and even her sister, Georgina, to see her, the great writer went a little mad.
"The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny. His wonderful glossy hair! His capacity for friendship, and for work! And then... yes, he went mad. But I know that people do go mad. I expect you do, too. Old biographers have got something extra: they've lived a long life themselves. They're more able to see things in perspective. It's not a matter of forgiving. That would be an impertinent thing to say. But it is a case of trying to understand.
"I think what he did [to Catherine] was unforgivable, but I also think it's hard to make Catherine into a heroine. She's pregnant in the first month of the marriage and they have 10 children in the next 16 years; he leaves her no space to be anything. Poor Catherine. But it doesn't make me hate him. I think Dickens had a problem with women. I think the appeal of Nelly was partly that she was difficult. As a young man, he'd had his heart broken by another difficult woman, Maria Beadnell. He thought: never that again. So he warned Catherine not to be difficult, to do what he wanted, and she did, and she did, and she did..."
But Dickens was a modern man; he made sure that Catherine received chloroform, then popularly believed to result in imbecile babies, during the birth of one of their children. Why did he not try to limit their family? (He had wanted only three babies and his attitude to his younger children was cold and occasionally cruel.) "I agree. It's a basic question. I suppose it wasn't respectable to think about it. I think he was rather embarrassed about sex. I think he thought of it as a necessary, hygienic thing."
And what she does she make of Georgina Hogarth? She is my hate figure, siding with her beloved brother-in-law as her poor abandoned sister enters a lonely exile in another part of London. "Yes, awful. But I do try to speak for her. What would have happened to her? She'd come [to live with Dickens and Catherine] at 16, her parents were poor and she'd already turned down a marriage proposal. There was nothing for her. She was completely in thrall to Dickens." Georgina ran Dickens's household until his death in 1870. She then co-edited the first published volume of his letters without ever mentioning, in her biographical introductions, the separation from Catherine. Her by now dear friend, Nelly, meanwhile, adjusted her age, making herself younger by some 14 years. She got married (to a man who knew nothing of her past or, indeed, of the fact that she was more than a decade his senior) and had children. She lived in fear of her relationship with Dickens being exposed, but on Georgina she could always rely.
Tomalin's book, a page-turner, seems to me to be an effective reproof to those who, like Michael Holroyd, believe literary biography to be in its death throes. But what does she think? Are publishers going to dispense with fat lives? "No! I think people are always saying things are over. Fiction has been regularly over since the 19th century. You can't entirely talk about books in groups like that. Some work and some don't. Clearly, we have got a public with a shorter attention span, but there is also this great interest in history. I'm devoted to Michael. He's adorable. But I rather think he's enjoying being Cassandra about this." On the other hand, so far as her own career goes, she would like to work on slightly more manageable subjects in the future (Dickens follows Hardy, who followed her award-winning Samuel Pepys). "I have grandchildren and step-grandchildren and I would like to spend time with them. I'm 78 and Michael [Frayn, the novelist and playwright, and her husband] is 78, too, and he also needs a bit of attention." She sighs. "People say I should write a memoir, but I don't think I can." Why not? She is quiet for a moment and then she says: "Because I don't have enough sense of myself. I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am. One of the things I have done since I started writing biography is live through them. Those lives are still with me. It's as Katherine Mansfield said, 'One life is not enough.'"
Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. Her mother, to whom her biography of Dickens is dedicated, was a musician. Her father, who worked for Unesco, was French. Her relationship with them was complicated. "My father didn't want another child and my mother had me against his will; he didn't like me at all for many years. Once he realised I was clever, it was fine and we were great friends, but it is a funny beginning to know that you're disliked by your father. Of course, my mother adored me. In her eyes, I could do no wrong."
Her parents separated when she was seven – "They really got on very badly" – and she didn't see her father for a long time. "My mother and sister and I, we were very poor. But I never felt poor. We had music, and we had poetry, and – this will sound very priggish – we had this tremendous high-thinking life. My mother had had a painful childhood and she said to me, 'Books are wonderful because you can always go into a book [to escape]' and she was right. The other thing was that I had a French name – Delavenay – and so I was a mysterious person who could not immediately be classified by class. I was quite confident in that way." When she did realise she had a brain? "Well, I started writing poetry when I was seven and even my father was surprised; he had some of it typed out."
Her schooling, though, was a muddle, thanks to the war, and to the custody battle fought by her parents. What can she remember of the war? "Oh, lots. I remember it being declared. I was reading Black Beauty and I said, 'Oh, the poor horses' and my father said, 'You stupid child', with great contempt. I remember people hiding the fronts of newspapers because they had pictures of Russian partisans being hanged. I remember when I was at the French lycée, we sang 'The Marseillaise' on July 14 and all the teachers had tears running down their cheeks. For a time, my mother was living in Welwyn Garden City and I remember the Italian prisoner of war camp. I used to go out on my bicycle and they were so sweet, those men in brown uniforms."
She completed her education at Dartington Hall, where she won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, the headmaster having warned her not to wear lipstick at her interview. "The sense of privilege was enormous: we [women] were only one in 10. But equally, you were a princess if you had any charms of any kind. I thought it was wonderful, though they weren't particularly happy years. There were love affairs and Newnham was rather a puritanical regime." By the time she graduated, though, she was in love with a wannabe journalist, Nick Tomalin, and together they moved to London. She rented a basement in the house of the artist Roger Hilton for which she paid £2 a week; Nick lived in a rented room around the corner, in a house belonging to the artist Patrick Heron.
This was the summer of 1954 and, as she writes in her book Several Strangers (a collection of her criticism leavened with a series of short autobiographical essays), she was "an innocent, dreamy, not to say dozy" young woman. What to do next? Her father pronounced that shorthand and typing were the thing, so she did a secretarial course, after which she applied to the BBC, only to be told – her first-class degree could go hang – "that the competition for general trainees is confined to men". So she went for a job at the publisher William Heinemann. A few minutes into her interview for this position, a man in heavy glasses walked into the office: the poet James Michie. "Later, he told me he had been awarding me marks for my looks. Seven out of 10, he gave me, just enough for the job of secretary/editorial assistant, at £5.10s a week. This was how things were done in 1954."
The following year, she and Nick, who was by now working on the Daily Express, got married: another instance of how things were done. They planned to have six children and she quickly became pregnant. She went back to work after the birth of her first daughter, Josephine (there was no maternity leave), but when her second, Susanna, arrived, she began working at home as a reader. She also began doing some journalism. But then, "disaster and sorrow". Her third child, a boy, died when he was a month old. She had another daughter, Emily, born on her missing brother's first birthday but then, more pain. Nick, her charming and successful husband, became a bolter. "And he was a real bolter. He was always off with somebody and then he would come back again. I can remember saying to my eldest daughter, 'Daddy wants to come back: what do you think? Because he'll do it again.' She was about 12, by this time, and she said, 'I want him back' and I said all right… but perhaps I shouldn't talk about my children. It's not fair."
She felt low; the bolting brought her own situation miserably into relief. In a review of Janet Malcolm's book, The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath, Tomalin wrote: "... one of my most vivid memories of the 1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes – there were no washing machines – while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. I had wanted to do something with my life – I thought I had some capacities and here they were going down the plughole with the soapsuds."
She resolved to find what a stern friend of her mother's called "proper work", landing a job first on the London Evening Standard and then a position as assistant to the literary editor of the New Statesman. One summer, said literary editor went on holiday for four whole weeks. "It was the most generous gift he could have given me. For a month, I had a headache and for a month I was the happiest person in the world. My pages, my writers, my decisions."
Meanwhile, her precarious marriage somehow endured. She and Nick decided to have another baby and, in 1970, their second son, Tom, was born. But he had spina bifida; this time, she could not go straight back to work. Instead, with her new baby in a basket beside her, she began work on her first biography, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft. She started to feel a little happier. However, in September 1973, Nick was killed by a Syrian missile on the Golan Heights, where he was reporting on the Yom Kippur war, and the world turned again, although Tomalin has always been clear-sighted about what his death meant for her. "It was... a huge drama," she says. "It was absolutely appalling... his parents and his children. And I've always said that I wish terribly that he hadn't been killed. But I have also said that our marriage was effectively at an end by then. I tried not to put on any inauthentic displays of grief."
It was the editor of the New Statesman, Tony Howard, who insisted that it would be better for her to work than to stay at home (she became the magazine's new literary editor) and years later, her eldest daughter, Jo, told her that it was during this period that she became recognisably the person she is now. She commissioned Clive James, Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, Alison Lurie and Victoria Glendinning, and her assistants included Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. She acted confident and, in doing so, her confidence grew and she loved it. Even so, it must have been tough. She was a widow, with four children, one of whom was disabled. How did she do it? "I don't know. I used to bicycle back and take my bike into the kitchen and start cooking supper, I remember that. Adrenaline flows and that's what you live on. My children remember that at Christmas, when I had some time off, I was always ill." Did she feel guilty? "Not really. They were at school. Though with hindsight... my youngest, Emily, who is an engineer, said she wasn't going to work when her children were little and that's because she can remember coming home and finding someone else there, not me." And work was a balm? "Yes, absolutely. That's what I do. If I'm upset about something, I go into my study and I work."
She was by now in her 40s, the period she thinks of as her youth: liberated and busy. The Mary Wollstonecraft book came out and was a huge success, so in 1977, she left the Statesman, thinking she would be a full-time writer. Only once she had left did she realise this was a mistake: she missed office life. So she accepted a new job as literary editor of the Sunday Times under Harold Evans ("We were all, men and women, a little in love with him") and all was well until the arrival of Andrew Neil as editor in 1983. They didn't get along. She eventually left in 1986, shortly before the newspaper moved to Wapping, writing in her letter of resignation that Neil was "a mouthpiece for a ruthless and bullying management". She was, she says, lucky to be able to afford to leave. "I feel in general that I belong to a very lucky generation. We had birth control, and mothers' helps were affordable, and the value of our houses – I had owned mine since 1963 – went up and up. I can see why the next generation might feel quite bitter."
She married Frayn in 1993 (though they'd got together years before, following a bit of uncertainty on his part; he was married to someone else) and, eight years ago, shortly after they were both shortlisted for the Whitbread (now Costa) book of the year (she won), they moved from north London to this fabulously comfortable house – it has the biggest garden I have ever seen – where their studies, his neat and hers rather messier, are separated only by a small room full of box files. They are each other's first reader, though he is the strict one. "No, he's not kind. And he's been absolutely savage about my public speaking! I used to read my talks and he said, 'Don't do it, it's so boring, it's absolutely ghastly.' And he was right."
She has, she says, long since come to terms with the isolation of writing; these days, she likes nothing more than "to sink down into the mud", undisturbed. "But my default mode is melancholy. It's partly because of losing my daughter [Susanna committed suicide when she was an undergraduate]; there are things that you never get over. But it's also that writing induces melancholy. It is lonely. You're alone, alone, alone, a hermit, an absolutely intolerable person, and then you finish, and what's coming towards you is talking, talking, talking. I'm in a misery thinking about it."
Except she doesn't look miserable. Her cheekbones glow. My hunch is that she is as close to being contented as any writer can be. Then again, as she knows better than anyone, this might not be saying very much. Dickens – "the meteor... the brilliance in the room, the inimitable" – loved his creations, Smike and Sam Weller, Ebenezer Scrooge and Sissy Jupe. But he could no more have rested on his laurels than he could have become a clergyman or a Cistercian monk.
Claire Tomalin will be discussing Charles Dickens: A Life at the Southbank Centre on 18 October, southbankcentre.co.uk
