Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life by Jonathan Buckmaster

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life by Jonathan Buckmaster Gillian Piggott (bio) Jonathan Buckmaster. Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life. Edinburgh UP, 2019. Pp. xii + 220. £75.00. ISBN 9781474406956. For those of you who, like me, have never known quite how to read Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, you would do well to turn to Jonathan Buckmaster's great new study, Dickens's Clowns. It is an ambitious and admirable work, because not only does Buckmaster reappraise the Memoirs (and Cruikshank's illustrations within it) as a fascinating work and a major influence upon Dickens and his output, but he ranges much further in exploring how Grimaldi's pantomime clown informs Dickens's treatment of characters, his aesthetics and philosophy of life, as well as the contours of his humor. The book will be of particular interest to those working on theater and comedy in Dickens, as Buckmaster uses theories of comedy and the mechanics of pantomime performance to read the fictions. In addition there are some fascinating insights into the relationship between comedy and violence, slapstick and reading Dickens. Dickens's characters bounce off the page and "assault" the reader, displaying the anatomy of slapstick violence, Buckmaster claims. The author even asserts that some of Dickens's sentences are constructed in the form and rhythm of a slapstick gag in performance. The political resonances of pantomime's "illegitimacy," subversion and resistance to conformity, and the appeal this had for Dickens, are also an important part of the discussion. These are big issues to handle. To do so Buckmaster divides his study into three parts. The first part, "Dickens, Grimaldi and the Pantomime Clown," contextualizes the debate within the critical tradition of pantomime and the clown, which stretches back over Dickens's formative years, to the 1720s (ch. 2). In Chapter 3, Buckmaster tackles Dickens's journalism, bringing out and elaborating upon two overarching themes with respect to the writings on pantomime: the idea that life emerges as an absurd comedic pantomime, and Dickens's notion that pantomime is a crucial source of wonder and fancy in a cynical, dark, modern world. In Part II, Buckmaster turns to the Memoirs, reminding us of the palimpsestic status the Dickens text occupies in relation to its source material. Dickens is in fact synthesizing and making additions to Thomas Egerton Wilks's abridgement of Grimaldi's own account of his life. Building on the idea that biography in the 1830s was an unstable genre, and drawing upon extant life-writing theories such as eighteenth-century century stage biography and "the relational life," Buckmaster argues in Chapter 4 for understanding the work of Dickens's Memoirs as so much more creative than all of these theories, claiming that in writing it Dickens makes genuine advancements in the notions of theatricality and identity. Chapter 5 [End Page 437] explores the importance of Cruikshank's illustrations in the reconstruction of Grimaldi's life, presenting an image/text analysis that is familiar, but extending it to the idea that Cruikshank's involvement amounts to the perfect symbiotic relationship between nineteenth-century theatrical and pictorial traditions. Perhaps the most free-wheeling and enjoyable part of the book is Part III, "The Clown at Large." Here, Buckmaster revels in creativity, identifying three tropes – the excessive consumption of food and drink; the use of slapstick violence against the vulnerable; and the transformative power of clothing – that live out a new and expanded life in Dickens's own fictional creations and comedy. As a panto obsessive from childhood, Dickens absorbed the influence like mother's milk. Pantomime, for him, was a "polysemic vehicle for his own ideas" (43). As Buckmaster puts it: "Dickens found in pantomime an artform sympathetic to his attentiveness to … the hyperbolic, the bodily grotesque, the margins between good and bad, alive and dead, mundane and magical." Dickensian traits such as "exaggeration, magnifying, intensifying and accumulating, find a natural corollary in the practices of the pantomime clown, who supersizes the world and multiplies to excess" (52). The burning question, which Buckmaster does not answer directly, is why one of the world's...