The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (edition 2012)

The most thorough account one could possibly want, or even imagine, of the history of the "Great Charles Dickens Scandal"--that is his relationship with Nelly Ternan. The book doesn't tell very much about his relationship with Nelly Ternan (and contains no new information or definitive judgments about just what exactly occurred). It also has no literary criticism or attempt to understand how it affected Dickens' writing. Instead, it is a history of the various accounts of the scandal--starting with contemporary newspaper accounts (many of them in American newspapers because of the lack of libel laws), the coverup by John Forster and Dickens other friends, going through the explosion of the scandal following the death of the last of Dickens' children and the publication of the novel "This Side Idolotry," through the more careful modern accounts by scholars, papers in the Dickensian, and Claire Tomalin's popularizations.

An interesting point it makes is that for nearly a century now newspapers have been fascinated by the discovery and rediscovery of the scandal, printing sensationalist articles that attempt to take down the great British moralist and raconteur of home and hearth a peg. But that almost none of them are actually new.

Michael Slater, probably the leading Dickens scholar alive, does vast amounts of minute research, for example citing an article that appeared in 1874 in The Bangor Daily Whig and Courier and another story in 1885 in The Rocky Mountain News. Some of it is fascinating. Some of it is tedious. And sometimes it can be confusing because rather than presenting a unified account, it presents a large number of accounts--some of which have subsequently been falsified, some of which are grounded in clear evidence, and some of which are speculative and thus unproven.

If there is a hero for the book, it is a century of Dickensians--and their opponents--who have gone over layer after layer of minutia in an attempt to piece together events that will likely be permanently lost to history. ( )