Also by Nick Hornby

  Fiction

  Just Like You

  State of the Union

  Funny Girl

  Juliet, Naked

  Slam

  A Long Way Down

  How to Be Good

  About a Boy

  High Fidelity

  Nonfiction

  Shakespeare Wrote for Money

  Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

  The Polysyllabic Spree

  Songbook

  Fever Pitch

  Anthology

  Speaking with the Angel

  Screenplay

  An Education

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in hardcover in Great Britain by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2022

  First American edition published by Riverhead, 2022

  Copyright © 2022 by Nick Hornby.

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  Image credits: photo © André Cymone; photo Louis James Collection; photo © Science Museum Group; photo Daily Star/Mirrorpix cover image with photos by Max Mumbly/Getty Images, fabio formaggio/Getty Images, Stephen Frink/Getty Images, EPN/Newscom, and a photo courtesy of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hornby, Nick, author.

  Title: Dickens and Prince : a particular kind of genius / Nick Hornby.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022021919 (print) | LCCN 2022021920 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593541821 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593541838 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. | Prince. | Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870—Appreciation. | Prince—Appreciation. | LCGFT: Biographies.

  Classification: LCC PR4581 .H57 2022 (print) | LCC PR4581 (ebook) | DDC 823/.8—dc23/eng/20220822

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021919

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021920

  Jacket design and art: Vi-An Nguyen

  book design by lucia bernard, adapted for ebook by maggie hunt

  pid_prh_6.0_141716077_c0_r0

  To John Forrester, with thanks from everyone

  He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version . . . The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man . . . the demonic worker . . . The hater and lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler . . . The dancer . . . the actor, the ham . . . The irreplaceable and unrepeatable . . . The brilliance in the room.

  —Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Childhood

  Their Twenties

  The Movies

  The Working Life

  The Business

  Women

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  Select Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Chart showing what Dickens and Prince did in their twenties

  Prince and Grand Central, 1974

  Advertisement for Havishams Wedding Center

  Front cover for part 4 of Edward Lloyd’s Oliver Twiss

  Photograph of Charles Dickens in his later years

  Front page of Daily Star, January 2022

  Introduction

  There used to be a thing that did the rounds, a meme before memes existed, which pointed out the uncanny similarities between Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy: both were elected to Congress in ’46 and became president in ’60; both were shot in the head on a Friday; both lost a son while living in the White House; both were succeeded by Southern Democrats called Johnson; both were assassinated by men with three names, each composed of fifteen letters, and so on. Well, that’s not what I’m going to attempt to do here. Charles John Huffman Dickens (twenty-five letters) was a white nineteenth-century writer, and Prince Nelson Rogers (eighteen letters) was a Black twentieth- and twenty-first-century musician. Dickens never heard anything that Prince recorded, and there is no evidence to suggest that Prince ever read any Dickens.[*] I suppose one could argue feebly that they were and still are known by one name, but actually that’s true of most famous artists. Yes, you have to say both Emily and Brontë, because of her siblings. And you have to say Michael and Jackson, a man who famously had siblings too, but whose extraordinary fame was never quite enough to stamp ownership on his very common surname. Using both names distinguishes him from Stonewall, and Jesse, and Samuel L., and Shoeless Joe (cf. Will and Maggie Smith, Tom and January Jones, Wilkie and Phil Collins, Jimmy and Rod Stewart). The one-name thing doesn’t wash. When I was thinking about linking Prince and Dickens in an extended essay, I had one coincidence to work with: they were both fifty-eight years old when they died. But dying at fifty-eight in 2016, as Prince did, is not the same as dying at fifty-eight in 1870, as Dickens did. In the early nineteenth century your average life expectancy was forty years old on the day you were born, seventyish if you lived until your fortieth birthday. And on closer inspection, Prince wasn’t fifty-eight when he died. He was fifty-seven. So I don’t even have that.

  But here’s what started it. In 2020, Prince’s 1987 album Sign o’ the Times was given the commemorative special boxed-set treatment. Usually, the rerelease of an iconic album will include anything extra that the record company can drag up—some live tracks, a few demos of the original songs, maybe a rejected song or two. Sign o’ the Times included sixty-three songs that weren’t on the original album. Sixty-three! That’s almost four times as many as the original album, three more than Jimi Hendrix released in his lifetime, two more than the Eagles recorded in the twentieth century . . . and they were nearly all produced around the same time. (They weren’t all produced for the same record, but we’ll get to that.) The fan site PrinceVault has 102 entries in the category “Songs recorded during 1986.” And we are beginning to learn that 1986 was not an atypical year. When I read about the boxed set, I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way.

  Maybe there were other people who were just as prolific, although I doubt it, especially since Prince did a lot more than just record, and Dickens did a lot more than simply write novels. But I yoked them together in my mind at that moment because they are two of what I shall have to describe, for want of a more exact term, as My People—the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work. I have scores of people like that, influences and role models and heroes. Galton and Simpson, Donald Fagen, Preston Sturges, Barbra Streisand, Robert Altman, Pauline Kael, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen Sondheim, Mavis Staples, Arsène Wenger, Joan Didion, Anne Tyler, Jerry Seinfeld, Rickie Lee Jones, Aretha Franklin, Thierry Henry, Elizabeth Strout, Raymond Carver, Frederick Exley, Joe Henderson, Lorrie Moore, Edward Hopper, Liam Brady, Peter Blake, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Duke Ellington, Elizabeth McCracken, Larry McMurtry, Roddy Doyle, Tom Verlaine, Peter Wolf, Dave Eggers, Al Green, and many, many others. I won’t go into detail about what they have all meant to me: sometimes it was their taste, sometimes their thinking, or their soul, or attention to detail, or audacity, or comic timing, or arrogance, or commitment, or bravery, or the way they have lived their lives. Anyone who has spent a lifetime consuming culture in all its forms at a possibly unhealthy rate has a similar list, and if you have spent your adult life creating something during the working day, that list is likely to be even longer, because you need the input (and, let’s face it, you have time that someone working on a production line or in a comprehensive school or a bank doesn’t have). Prince and Dickens are two among many, but they are perhaps deserving of slightly larger type than some of the others. If anyone else did produce such a staggeringly enormous body of work, then it isn’t someone I know much about. Maybe you’re reading this and shouting, Wagner! Picasso! If you are, you’ll have to write your own book.

  I didn’t read Dickens until I was at university, and I am grateful for that fluke of the mid-1970s school syllabus. If I had been forced to study him at school, then his greatness would have eluded me, as it has eluded lots of people I’ve met who are resistant to him, almost always because he was forced down their adolescent throats. “I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield,” George Orwell said in an essay from Inside the Whale. “The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child.” Well, those days are gone, George. They were gone when I was at school, and there won’t be many nine-year-olds reading David Copperfield in the foreseeabl
e future, either. (And if you are the parent of a child who is doing precisely that right now, please stop them. It will kill any future enjoyment they might get from those extraordinary novels. And also, you’re a terrible parent.)

  When Orwell was nine, David Copperfield had been around for about sixty years. Orwell’s temporal relationship with the novel was the same as ours with To Kill a Mockingbird (published in 1960), another book that tells us a great deal about childhood—or one childhood, anyway. The language of the mid-twentieth century, however, is much more intelligible to us, and certainly to younger people, than the language of the Victorian novel, with its extended metaphors and the piles of subclauses. Harper Lee’s novel is still read in schools because her child’s-eye first person is extremely user-friendly, and its length is unintimidating (a hundred thousand words, compared to David Copperfield’s three hundred and fifty thousand).

  It’s just about possible to imagine a super-smart, Orwell-smart kid becoming engrossed in the story of Scout Finch, although of course the relationship between our young people and books has changed profoundly since Orwell’s childhood, and since my own, and since the childhood of anyone who grew up in a pre-iPad age. I read everywhere, on interminable car journeys, and on trains, and in dentists’ waiting rooms, and on wet Sunday afternoons, mainly because I was bored stupid. I would not be a reader without the excruciating, never-ending, no-football-on-TV, shops-closed boredom that drove me toward the local library and, later, bookshops—neither open on Sunday, of course. My younger sons, both born in the twenty-first century, have never found themselves in the kind of stupor that would cause them to look upon literature as an escape, and though this is a cause for regret, I am also happy for them. Part of me wishes that I hadn’t been bored enough to spend half my life with my head stuck in a book. Even so, desperate as I was, Dickens had the whiff of polite BBC early-evening costume drama clinging to him, and I gave him a wide berth.

  I was twenty or twenty-one when I started Bleak House. Old enough. I’d read E. M. Forster at school, and Vonnegut and Nathanael West and Chandler at home, and the Dickens assignment, as I remember, came shortly after we—or my fellow students, anyway, because I didn’t bother with very much of it—had been trudging through the Gawain Poet and Piers Plowman and probably something else that my Clash-loving younger self had found Heimlich-maneuver-level indigestible. And I remember two things: one, it was funny, and Dickens’s turns of phrase and comic imagination were a complete surprise to me. Making people laugh, I realized incredulously, was important to him. Who knew? Not me. The first time I laughed was in chapter 8, when Esther Summerson goes to visit the local poor with the do-gooder Mrs. Pardiggle. They invite themselves into the home of the local brickmaker; it’s “one of a cluster of wretched hovels,” a sock to Esther’s system; there are “pigsties close to the broken windows,” a “poor little gasping baby by the fire,” a girl doing some kind of washing in dirty water, and the brickmaker lying on the floor, covered in filth, smoking a pipe. So far, so Dickens—or the Dickens I had imagined before I started reading him, describing poverty with anger and sympathy. But what comes next is a savagely comic tour de force, in which the brickmaker anticipates the do-gooder’s questions and spits back the answers. “Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it. How have I been conducting of myself? Why, I’ve been drunk for three days; and I’d a been drunk four, if I’d a had the money . . . And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a lie!”

  I am trying to remember whether a book had ever made me laugh at that point in my life. Books, it seemed to me, weren’t, as a rule, funny. My experience of humor in literature to date was articulated by Rowan Atkinson’s withering schoolteacher in a brilliant sketch from around that time. “Don’t snigger, Babcock! It’s not funny. Antony and Cleopatra is not a funny play. If Shakespeare had meant it to be funny, he would have put a joke in it. There is no joke in Antony and Cleopatra . . . What play of Shakespeare’s does have a joke in it? Anyone? The Comedy of Errors, for God’s sake! The Comedy of Errors has the joke of two people looking like each other. Twice.”

  That, to me, was the perfect summation of literary humor: people looked like each other, and we were supposed to laugh. Morecambe and Wise made me laugh, and Taxi, and Fawlty Towers, and my friends, but not books. That passage made me laugh out loud, however, and it seemed to be at the cutting edge of comedy. It wasn’t cozy showbiz comedy; it was as cruel as Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, yet in Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby, it also contained acute observation of a recognizable contemporary type. We have always been surrounded by people whose commitment to good works makes them crass, patronizing, and insensitive; we all know people whose commitment to the greater problems of the world has led them to neglect their own families, as Mrs. Jellyby does.

  And the second thing I remember during my initial exposure, just as I was realizing that I might have got Dickens wrong, is that there was this incredible moment when I felt the narrative start to move, like a giant tanker. The book was so monumental that it didn’t occur to me that movement would even be possible; I thought I’d just be walking around on it idly until it was time to write an essay about it. I wasn’t sure I would even finish it; my three years at university were littered with similar shipwrecks. But once it started moving, I could tell that it was just going to take me where it wanted to go, and I could neither stop it nor get off. I was a Dickens fan.

  * * *

  —

  Like a lot of people who listened to contemporary American R&B in the 1970s and 1980s, I became aware of Prince through his first hit, “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” The ecstatically spring-heeled opening few seconds were all you needed to hear, if you already liked the Isley Brothers and Chic and Sly Stone. The song was the first track on the album Prince, which sounds like an introduction but wasn’t: there had already been a first album, For You, which flopped. Writing this, I can see that I came across Prince and Dickens in the same eighteen-month period, but of course it doesn’t feel like that now, and it didn’t feel like that then. Prince was a new musician, more or less a contemporary, not yet a big deal, and I was discovering someone like that every couple of weeks at the end of the 1970s. Dickens was part of the fabric of British life. He had his own adjective, and his characters have entered the language. So even though Prince and Dickens became two of “My People” during the same period of my life, I didn’t know there were going to be “People,” really, in that I didn’t know that artists I liked were going to be used as ingredients for my own work, and I certainly wouldn’t have known how to put a twenty-one-year-old R&B singer from Minneapolis alongside a one-hundred-and-sixty-seven-year-old writer from Portsmouth.

  Anyway, I lost touch with Prince for a while after that album. I didn’t think I was going to be very interested in a record called Dirty Mind. I began to suspect that Prince might prove to be a one-trick pony, and that the sex stuff was the one trick, a schtick, a smutty showbiz ruse during a time when I prized authenticity, whatever that meant. I was wrong, of course. The sex was authentic, a part of him, which ran through him like writing in a stick of rock,[*] but as the decades went on, loving Prince meant having to ignore some loweringly lewd lyrics. (Before he died, he told at least one interviewer that he was celibate, a state possibly connected to his being a Jehovah’s Witness, but I suspect that isn’t how we’ll end up thinking about him.) So he drifted from my vision until 1999 and, in particular, “Little Red Corvette” came out. “Little Red Corvette” still asks us to imagine a love object who keeps used condoms in her pocket without seeming to recognize that, for many of us, such a discovery would result in an early night alone and a long, nervous shower, rather than hours of erotic ecstasy. But the song is magnificent, with its dazzling singing, its irresistible hooks, its rather brilliant extended metaphors which manage to acknowledge both the excitement of the one-night stand and its dangers, and its sixties backbeat underneath a wash of post-disco synths. I loved the album Purple Rain, and I went to see the movie on the day it opened, but it was so bad, despite the music and the enthralling performances (have you tried to watch the movie since 1984, now that those great songs are no longer unfamiliar?), that he still wasn’t ushered into the VIP room of my brain.