Thomas Keneally’s The Dickens Boy — an engrossing and transporting read

The row over Charles Dickens’s character flared up again this summer when the words “Dickens racist” were scrawled on the side of a museum dedicated to the author in Broadstairs, on the coast of south-east England. Pictures of the graffiti started something of a hullabaloo on Twitter, with people arguing over whether or not it was time Boz got cancelled.

The question of what kind of man Dickens really was forms a central theme in Thomas Keneally’s latest novel — though not with regard to his views on race, but to his role as a husband and father.

The Dickens Boy follows the life of the author’s youngest son Edward, known as “Plorn”, who emigrated to Australia in 1868 at the age of 16. He was not a good student — Keneally has said in interviews he suspects that Plorn was dyslexic — and was sent to Australia so that he might learn to apply himself.

Plorn likes riding horses and playing cricket. And, in common with a lot of 16-year-olds, he does not like reading books by Charles Dickens. In fact, he has a terrible secret, one that he tries to confess to his father — whom he calls “the guvnor” — during a tearful exchange at London’s Paddington Station: namely that Plorn has never read any of his novels.

The teenage Dickens heads for New South Wales, to a 2,000-square mile sheep station that it is hoped will make a man of him — and make him a fortune. But if he thought that by travelling to the other side of the world he could escape from under the shadow of his famous father, he is mistaken. In colonial Australia, Charles Dickens is revered like a kind of secular saint. Plorn cannot meet a new person — and he meets a lot of them, the cast of characters in this novel being enormous — without someone bringing up the old man. Drunks suddenly start quoting bits of Martin Chuzzlewit at him, and aspiring writers thrust manuscripts into his unsuspecting hands.

Keneally — who turns 85 this year, and won the Booker prize in 1982 for his novel Schindler’s Ark — retells Plorn’s story in incredible detail.
Perhaps the book is at its best when recreating the hard landscape of the Australian Outback, and the everyday lives of the drovers and the Paakantji Aboriginal tribe that live on the Momba sheep station.

The plight of the Dickens boys in Australia — for there were two at the time (Plorn’s older brother Alfred worked on a different sheep station in New South Wales and appears throughout the novel) — has fascinated Keneally for at least a decade, having written about them in a feature for the Guardian back in 2010.

In the novel we get a lot of information about Australian sheep-farming practices in the 19th century (after a weirdly gruesome scene where a lamb gets castrated, it was perhaps more than I wanted to know) and all that detail comes at the expense of pace. Keneally is also guilty of some awkward-sounding Victorianese — when one of Plorn’s male bosses gets drunk and kisses him firmly on the mouth, Plorn recoils. “Oh Christ, Dickens! You are not of that disposition,” he says, later muttering: “I wish I could annul the last thirty seconds.” Nevertheless, the rich world that is evoked makes The Dickens Boy an engrossing and transporting read.

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While we see Plorn apply himself as a stockman in Australia, his other journey in the novel is a kind of reconciliation with his father. When he leaves England, Charles Dickens is an almost godlike figure to Plorn, and he cannot bear any criticism of him.

As he grows into a man, though, and through conversations he has with his brother Alfred — who has a darker image of their father — Plorn comes to see the great author as the deeply flawed and complex human being he was. “Talk about him like a man with faults, not like an arch-villain,” Plorn tells his brother near the end of the novel: “I will never believe in the arch-villain.”

In real life, the feeling that Plorn had been a disappointment to his father seems never to have left him. In the years after the novel finishes, before he dies in poverty aged 49 in the small town of Moree, Edward Dickens was elected to the New South Wales parliament. Rising for his maiden speech, he admitted: “Sons of great men are not usually as great as their fathers. You cannot get two Charles Dickens in one generation.”

The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, Sceptre RRP£20, 400 pages

Nathan Brooker is deputy editor of House & Home

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