This review is contributed by Mads Golding, a playwright, writer, and independent scholar who focuses on Charles Dickens and the long 19th century. She is a staff writer for The Dickens Society. Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud” can be purchased at The Seminary Co-op, Barnes and Noble, and most major booksellers. Special thanks to The Dickens Society for commissioning this review and to the Chicago Humanities Festival for facilitating it.  

In a letter to the New Yorker dated July 3, 2023, Zadie Smith made one thing inescapably clear: she would kill off Charles Dickens in her next book, The Fraud. The letter lays bare her creative process, research practices, and her initial revulsion for the genre of the historical novel.

Not only does she reflect upon the proverbial dust that often encrusts the image of the ‘historical novel’ but she also decides to try to dodge the ghost that seems to permeate the 19th-century literary era;

“I was also never able to quite get out from under his (Dickens’s) embarrassing influence, as much as I’ve often wanted to. So it went with my surreptitious research. No matter where I found myself in nineteenth-century London, I’d run into Dickens.”  

Smith, The New Yorker, 2023

Smith writes Dickens as a colorful side character who, despite being somewhat marginal, still manages to be larger than life. In the New Yorker interview, it also seems that she is perhaps wrestling with a formidable artistic and cultural ancestor. Thus, as a card-carrying member of the Dickens Society, I felt duty bound to listen in on the Chicago Humanities Festival discussion about this historical novel set in the 19th century whose author had sworn not only to avoid imitating Dickens at all costs but to ignore him entirely.  Smith joined acclaimed novelist Chris Abani for a conversation that circulated around genre, race, and personal identity in the ever-changing landscape of Victorian England. It is, arguably, impossible to write a Victorian novel without a note of class consciousness, as illustrated by the case in point. Smith writes (in the first half of the book, at least) from the perspective of Eliza Touchet, the housekeeper for acclaimed novelist William Ainsworth, who has a complicated relationship with the family she serves. From this vantage point, Smith explores the various delicate layers of interpersonal, intergenerational strife that emerge in the intimate circles of great writers. Smith’s capacity to peer into the private lives of great men makes this novel a surprisingly salacious read.  

“The English seem to me constitutionally mesmerized by the past. Even “Middlemarch” is a historical novel! And though plenty English myself, I retained a prejudice against the form, dating back to student days, when we were inclined to think of historical novels as aesthetically and politically conservative by definition.”

Pictured, Zadie Smith and Chris Abani. Photo by Mads Golding.

Dickens’s appearance in the book is, frankly, surprising. There are plenty of 19th-century writers upon which to focus without mentioning The Inimitable. So, why did Smith do it? She didn’t mention Dickens during the Chicago Humanities Festival interview except to gesture dismissively at his verbosity. This is fair enough–except that he remains something of a spectral presence in the novel, even when she rather dramatically kills him 113 pages in. 

The novel follows the historic Tichborne Case, a long, dramatic case involving a claimant accused of assuming a fraudulent identity in order to claim a sizable fortune. Despite her resistance to popular culture, celebrity scandals, public hangings, and so on, Eliza Touchet finds herself breathless to discover if this particular experiment in upward social mobility will work. 

It’s clear that Dickens is able to move smoothly between and communicate effectively with both the upper and lower classes, having survived brushes with both groups. This perhaps explains why Smith kept tripping over him in her tour of 19th-century primary sources; she is sick of him precisely because he is so popular. Dickens serves as a peripheral yet perpetually irritating presence whose wealth (the protagonist feels) ought to be viewed with suspension rather than admiration;  

“‘You must admit that  our old friend Charles – as we knew him (…) was ever a friend to the weak and the poor. Famously so.'” 

 “‘You might even say he grew rich demonstrating that bond.‘”

 “‘Oh, but Eliza, that is unfair!‘”

(Smith 83).

Smith is obviously keen to portray Dickens as an arrogant young writer willing to play at interpersonal politics to advance his writing career:  

“She had no wish to appear in any more novels. But this was her first time on a train; she clutched the sides of the seat, amusing Charles greatly, weakening her own defenses. Here was an irresistible and irrepressible young man. She felt equally fascinated and repulsed by him. He was somehow too easy to talk to, and far too good at listening.” 

(Smith 357).

By analyzing him from the perspective of a character who is apparently allergic to charm (who better to dismantle English social veneers than a Scot?), Smith is able, more or less respectfully, to pay homage to Dickens without fawning.  As Smith admitted in the interview, the English are allergic to earnestness. One must never be caught trying to entertain for sport or draw attention. Compliments must likewise be understated. Just get on with it, don’t make a fuss. Thus, upon Dickens’s death, while Eliza herself remains largely unmoved  (there is even an undertone of slight relief), she, nevertheless, relays stories of genuine public grief. Thus, she need not lose face; she can merely gesture at what she views as public hysteria over the author while quietly admitting to Dickens’s undeniable psychosocial influence over his acquaintance’s readership. Smith often returns in flashback to multiple scenes showing Dickens to be an astute, acerbic social commentator, though Mrs. Touchet is not taken in by Dickens’s wit;  

 “‘He will be with us presently. He is making his own toilet.’”  

“‘A matter of no brief duration, I’m sure…’ Said Charles under his breath, amusing himself thoroughly. ‘And mustn’t it be wonderful’, thought Mrs. Touchet, ‘to be one’s own best entertainment.'”

(Smith 149).

Reactions to his death indicate his widespread reputation across Victorian social classes.

“The coal boy came by and it was ‘ain’t it awful about Mr. Dickens?’ Accompanied by a manly sniff. An hour later, a tearful disquisition of A Christmas Carol was delivered by the postman. On the high street, at sunset, he was everywhere, like a miasma. Everybody she passed seemed to have Bill or Nancy on their lips, or Gradgrind or Pegoty. She began thinking of the secondhand clothes shop on Monmouth Street, which the young Boz, merely by observing, had rendered so startlingly animate, filling all the vacant dresses and coats and shoes in the window with a cast of humans, each one convincing conjured in a sentence, overbrimming with life. What looked like life.“

(Smith 133).

According to L.P Hartley, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” I would argue that a successful historical novel makes that foreign country familiar to the reader. By populating the book with recognizable historical icons rendered human and therefore flawed, Smith renders that distant past more accessible. She shares that a new Victorian prose anthology is published every decade or so, and each new publication depicts the era as more liberal or conservative, depending on the editor’s biases.  Some authors paint the Victorians as a stuffy, repressed, sexless group of puritanical Protestants, while others claim they were drug-addled, chaotic, post-Romantic poets. One could also argue that the Victorian era constituted a string of sociopolitical revolutions and unprecedented social change. Smith’s prose manages to find a middle ground between a conservative doorstop and a romantic narrative that mostly does away with historical facts. Smith has such a solid command of her craft that sometimes, in what seems like a literary magic trick, the narrative reads like a contemporary novel, but the dialogue sounds authentically Victorian, almost as if it were written in the vernacular. For those who have not read many Victorian novels, The Fraud is more accessible than the books upon which it is modeled.  

Though Smith at first planned to ignore Dickens in her novel, she ultimately found this goal impossible to achieve. Considering her reflections on the difficulty of separating Dickens from the Victorian age in which he lived, I have concluded that this is something of a backhanded compliment to the enduring power of his cultural legacy.  

Works Cited

Hartley, L.P., The Go-Between, Hamish Hamilton, 1953.

Smith, Zadie. The Fraud, Penguin, 2023.

Smith, Zadie. “On Killing Charles Dickens”, The New Yorker. 3 July 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/on-killing-charles-dickens.