John Forster

John Forster was Dickens's closest friend, his literary adviser and executor, and the biographer who left Nelly Ternan out of the Life entirely. He was a Newcastle butcher's son who came to London for the law and went into journalism instead, editing the Examiner and becoming the most influential literary critic of his generation - he read and advised on nearly everything Dickens wrote from Pickwick onwards, negotiated his contracts, and was trusted with the autobiographical fragment about the blacking factory that Dickens showed to nobody else. He wrote lives of Goldsmith, Landor and Swift, but The Life of Charles Dickens, published in three volumes from 1872, is the work that matters: it printed long stretches of letters, established the childhood story that shapes every reading of the novels, and set the account of the man for a century. It also silently omitted the thirteen-year relationship that Forster knew about, and softened the separation from Catherine into an unfortunate incompatibility. That is not a small editorial choice - it is the reason the concealment held until the twentieth century. He was a difficult, loud, generous man whom Dickens caricatured affectionately as Podsnap. He left his library and Dickens manuscripts to the South Kensington Museum, where the Forster Collection remains a principal source for both of them. He was appointed a Commissioner in Lunacy and did the work conscientiously for twenty years. Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson were friends. The Life was written while he was already ill and he died four years after finishing it.

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