The Dickens Boy

 

Tom Keneally is a most prolific writer, with 34 published novels, 15 works of significant non-fiction, and two children’s collections. Almost Dickensian in output. His 1982 Booker-prize winning Schindler's Ark is his most famous book internationally and the basis of the film Schindler's List (1993) directed by Stephen Spielberg. Keneally, now aged 86, has had a long career and knows a thing or two about writing.

The Dickens Boy is a richly imagined novel about the real-life journey to Australia by Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known to everyone as Plorn, Dicken’s tenth child. Plorn is a likeable young Englishman, only sixteen when the story begins. His first stay in Australia is at a station named Eli Elwah, and he only lasts 12 hours. Young Dickens is angered by the station manager’s rude inquiries and innuendo about his father’s personal life, and goes so far as to threaten a ‘trial of honour’ to which the station manager replies, ‘Can you believe this bloke? (p.17). Stirring high-class poms is a national sport, and this scene rings true and effectively introduces the sensitive nature of Plorn, and the challenges he will face in the rough-and-ready colony of New South Wales.

Young Dickens manages things better at his next posting, an outback station named Momba, near Wilcannia, owned and managed by two more progressive types, brothers who let him be, and care for and help maintain, the traditions of the First Peoples on the lands they now ‘own’. Frederick Bonney, both a character in the novel and an historical figure, documented and studied the Barkandji People and understood the complexity of their culture. On the station, Dickens learns to ride and muster sheep on great expanses of land, earns respect as a handy cricketer in games with other stations in the (wide) district. Most importantly, he becomes better informed about the land and its first inhabitants and rightful owners.  

As is suggested by the title, ‘the Dickens boy’ lives in his father’s shadow, and nearly every encounter with his colonial hosts means much praise for the great Victorian novelist, and a feeling of cultural emptiness in the country where the story is set, where those of British stock long for 'home'. There is an informed discussion of Australians in Dicken’s novels with Plorn’s older brother, the somewhat-bitter Alfred, who complains that (apart from his sons) Dickens sends the Peggotts, “whose simple goodness is pretty close to stupidity” and the ”criminals”, like the Artful Dodger (p.342). Later in the novel, Kenneally makes a more serious point that comes out of colonialism and its deadly pecking-order, when a massacre takes place in the outback and there is no remedy in the law. When he confronts the perpetrator Belshire and his troopers, he is told in no uncertain terms, “Our carbines have spoken the majesty of the law to the eternal rocks of Momba Station. I have been instructed to bring such majesty by my superiors and my superiors will stand by me now” (p.372).

The facts of Plorn’s life extend beyond the timeline of the novel, which ends with his young romance with Constance Desailly. The pair are joined in song, and yet Plorn is aware of the “undue influence of death” (p.390). Historically, the Young Dickens settled in Australia, tried his hand at various colonial enterprises, entered politics, and died in-debt in Moree, very much like a Dickens’ character—but away from London, lacking the family that might have given his rise and demise a sentimental meaning. The last lines of the novel aim to balance the hope of a young man for his own future with a realisation that he has already experienced the horror of colonial life: “Yet I sang the doleful lines like an anthem of praise to some proposition just beyond the teach of my hands, which reconciled the living and the dead” (p.390).