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 15 letters, and so on. Well, that’s not what I’m going to attempt to do here. Charles John Huffam Dickens (24 letters) was a white 19th-century writer, and Prince Rogers Nelson (18 letters) was a Black 20th- and 21st-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. So the one-name thing doesn’t wash. When I was thinking about linking Prince and Dickens, I had one coincidence to work with: they were both 58 years old when they died. But on closer inspection, Prince wasn’t 58 when he died. He was 57. 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 some live tracks, a few demos of the original songs, maybe a rejected song or two. Sign o’ the Times included 63 songs that weren’t on the original album. Sixty-three! That’s almost four times as many as the original album and three more than Jimi Hendrix released in his lifetime... 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 realised there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way. Maybe there were other people who were just as prolific. 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 and inspired me. I have scores of people like that, influences and role models and heroes. Donald Fagen, 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... Prince and Dickens are two among many, but they are perhaps deserving of slightly larger type than some of the others. There actually aren’t many artists with no off-switch, and there aren’t any at all, I don’t think, among My People, apart from Prince and Dickens. Oh, and money was an issue for both of them when they were growing up. There were and are so many poor people in the world that it doesn’t feel like much of a big deal, but they were truly great artists and childhood poverty should have stopped them from achieving as much as they did. Prince’s troubles seem to have stemmed from his parents’ divorce. It appears that he was abused, at least emotionally, by his stepfather. He went to live with his aunt and then eventually his father, but after some kind of row, possibly about sex and girls in the house, his father kicked him out. “By the time he was 12 he was out on the street, and… he lived in [his friend and bandmate] André’s basement… It was kind of rough. He was pretty much abandoned until he made it, and then of course everyone showed back up,”’ said Peggy McCreary, one of Prince’s engineers. Dickens’s poverty, unlike Prince’s, is well known and well documented. Twelve, once again, is the magic number: at this age, Dickens was sent to live, without his family, as a lodger in a boarding house run by unkind landlords. He was sent out to work in a blacking warehouse, while his father, his mother and the younger members of his family were living in the Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison. It’s hard to say which of the two children, Prince or Dickens, had the more traumatic time. It is fairest to say that neither of them had it easy, especially during adolescence. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe both of these young lives as Dickensian. So what did they do with their catastrophes, Prince and Dickens? When Prince still lived at home, he had access to the piano that his father, a professional pianist, had left behind. Prince’s stepfather locked him away for long periods of time, but during those hours he had something to do, something that would eventually come in very useful.A As for Dickens, the influence of these miserable and frightening years is everywhere in his books. “Little” Amy Dorrit is a “child of the Marshalsea”, but there are lots of other children in Dickens’s great novels, all suffering – poor, put to work too early, at the whim of inadequate or feckless or simply unfortunate parents. “They were not his clients whose cause he pleaded with such pathos and humour, and on whose side he got the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sense his very self,” said his friend and biographer, John Forster. It seems clear to me that Dickens was going to be a writer and Prince was going to be a musician no matter what. Dickens’s powers of observation and mimicry, Prince’s hunger for music and his aptitude for any instrument he could lay his hands on were there at an early age. But the talent they possessed was clearly shaped by their singular experiences in those formative years, and more or less the moment they ceased to be teenagers, they both caught fire, and lit up the world. They didn’t hang around. Before he was 30, Prince had written I Feel for You, Controversy, 1999, Little Red Corvette, Let’s Go Crazy, Purple Rain, When Doves Cry, Raspberry Beret, Pop Life, Girls and Boys, Kiss, Sign o’ the Times and Alphabet Street. His is the only name in the credits of For You, the first album. All tracks were written, produced, sung and played by him, and him alone – every song, every instrument, every backing vocal. Between his 24th and 29th birthdays there was a run of five albums (1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade and Sign o’ the Times ) that would match any creative hot streak in the history of popular music. One has to be careful here. Yes, he was very young when he started, but so was everybody. Pop music, even great pop music, is made by young people, and the best work is always made in the early part of the career. So was there anything different about Prince? Maybe. First of all, his run of five great albums in six years came when artists didn’t have to do what their predecessors had done. The demands of the market were different. The Beatles released their 13 albums between 1963 and 1970 because that was what was expected and needed by a record company, certainly in the early-to-mid 60s. By contrast, Prince’s most obvious rival, Michael Jackson, produced just two records, Thriller and Bad, in the 1980s, the decade in which Prince produced nine. And yes, Thriller was the more successful record, but Prince hardly needed the money after the success of Purple Rain the album and Purple Rain the film. There was no need for Prince to make as many records as he did. And second, he was on his own. There was no John or Keith to write songs with. He knew other musicians, and by the time we get to Purple Rain, Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman played an important role. But on that first album, made, remember, when he was 20, there was nobody else even to bang a cymbal. And how do you go from working in a blacking factory to becoming a celebrated author in your mid-20s? Dickens left school at 15 – money troubles at home, again – and got a job as a clerk at a lawyer’s office in Gray’s Inn, one of London’s Inns of Court. He taught himself shorthand, became a reporter in the Doctors’ Commons, the ecclesiastical legal society near St Paul’s Cathedral – a step into the field of writing. He reported on divorces and wills, and you can almost see the work being poured into the writer’s head: lawyers, legal suits, complicated and mysterious estates, glug glug glug. He fell in love, and, in order to make himself more eligible, he started hustling an uncle for work as a parliamentary reporter (glug). Eventually he started writing sketches of London life, under the pen name “Boz”, in a newspaper. When they were published in book form they were well reviewed, and they sold. Then came The Pickwick Papers – which appeared, as would become the pattern for Dickens, in monthly instalments. They got off to a rocky start. The first issue sold 400 copies. But then Dickens introduced a new comic character, Sam Weller, a cockney, and suddenly both the serialisation and Dickens were propelled straight up in the air. Pickwick eventually hit 40,000 copies a month, and Dickens would be famous for the rest of his life. “Each number sold for a shilling and they were passed from hand to hand, and butchers’ boys were seen reading them in the streets,” says Claire Tomalin in her magnificent biography. “Judges and politicians, the middle classes and the rich, bought them, read them and applauded; and the ordinary people saw that they were on his side, and they loved him for it.” He was 24 years old. One year after Pickwick, people were reading Oliver Twist. One year after 1999, Prince released Purple Rain. The album is, at the time of writing, 38 years old, and the book 185 – which is, by bizarre coincidence, 38 in album years, which are like dog years. Even if this last fact turns out not to be a fact at all, these are two works of art that have, to date, endured. They have both, as far as one can tell, become permanent cultural touchstones. Prince seems to have succeeded in copyrighting an entire colour. Dickens wasn’t a perfectionist. He didn’t have the time. He started publishing Oliver Twist before the serialisation of Pickwick was over. He started publishing Nicholas Nickleby before he was done with Oliver Twist. In other words, he could keep two books alive in his head at once – two sets of characters (and of course the cast list in any Dickens novel is immense), two plots, two different tones. No other writer has done this, as far as I know, and nor do I know of anyone remotely capable of it. Prince was working on several projects at once while he was recording Purple Rain in 1983 and 1984. You could argue that music is music, and that therefore recording can’t be compared with novel-writing – Prince didn’t have to keep themes, plots, characters apart. But what he was attempting to do was still pretty complicated. He needed, or at least wanted, three different albums to accompany the movie of Purple Rain: Purple Rain the album, a new album by the Time, the group led by Morris Day, who plays the Kid’s arch-rival in the film; and an album from Apollonia 6, who plays the Kid’s love interest. Then there was the album he was making with/for Sheila E, his percussionist and friend, and the album he was making for the Family, a band that was formed out of the musicians he saw regularly in the studio. And he was already at work on his own Around the World in a Day, a very different-sounding collection of songs, influenced by world music. Of course, not everything is up there with When Doves Cry, or Purple Rain, or Nothing Compares 2 U. But whether it was best Prince or average Prince, that wasn’t the point. The point was that he had to do it. “He was not a perfectionist,” said Prince’s engineer Susan Rogers. “It just poured out of him.” Prince was 28 when he was recording Sign o’ the Times. Dickens was working every bit as hard at the same age. He had a young family and was living beyond his means, and as a result he had got into a mess by promising different publishers work he couldn’t possibly deliver. So he was busy turning a short story he had written into another full-length serial that became The Old Curiosity Shop. Money and business weren’t affecting either of them creatively. But there would come a time when they became consumed by both. Despite being in the top 0.1% of their profession, both felt that they were being robbed, and unlike a lot of artists they attempted to do something about it. In Prince’s case, he metaphorically destroyed himself because he was so angry. He wanted a $100m deal that would prove to the world and to himself that he was better than his peers, such as Madonna or Michael Jackson, and he got it. Or at least, he got a contract which mentioned that figure. In reality, it was structured in such a way that he would never see anything like that sum. When he realised this, and discovered that he didn’t own his own music, he embarked on a battle with Warner Bros and the music business that went on for years. He dropped the name that had made him famous and became an unpronounceable symbol that he had no word for. He wrote the word “SLAVE” on his cheek. Nearly everybody who had any time for him lost sight of him during this period. There were countless albums, and it was impossible to tell whether they were any good or not, because nobody seemed to write about them or talk about them. Eventually he found out what the rest of his colleagues discovered much later in the digital revolution: that the only money to be made was in live shows. He made peace with his past and reminded people what a breathtaking performer he was, first with a spectacular spot at the Grammys co-starring Beyoncé́, and then, in 2007, with the greatest half-time Super Bowl show in history. That same year he played 21 nights at the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena in London. After flirting with bankruptcy at the end of the 90s, Prince became rich again. Charles Dickens found cause to be aggrieved about the business from pretty much the time he began to publish his first book. His two main antagonists were entrepreneur and publisher Edward Lloyd, and dramaturge and producer Edward Stirling. Lloyd published The Penny Pickwick, Oliver Twiss (edited by “Bos”), Nickelas Nickleberry and Martin Guzzlewit as soon as the ink dried on the original versions. Dickens and his publishers Chapman & Hall took Lloyd to court to seek an injunction against the “fraudulent imitation” of the books. The court case got nowhere, but his sense of grievance never went away, and it leaked into the books. Similarly, as soon as the novels appeared, they were dramatised across Britain and Dickens didn’t earn a penny from it, because he hadn’t written the plays himself. Stirling, the Bluebeard of the literary pirates, was first off the starting block, staging The Pickwick Papers, or The Age in Which We Live when only 12 of the 20 parts of the book had appeared. The plays were everywhere – there were an estimated 60 productions of the first three novels. If the theatrical piracy was, in some ways, simply the way popular culture worked back then, to modern eyes the American publication of his books was much closer to straightforward theft. They were printed without Dickens’s permission, and they were enormously successful, and it was a very satisfactory arrangement as far as the American publishers were concerned – so satisfactory that they were outraged by Dickens’s argument that there was something vaguely illegitimate about it. One of the publishers did offer him $25, “not as a compensation, but as a memento”, but Dickens, understandably, seems to have been unimpressed. Eventually, in an odd prefiguring of the lesson that Prince learned, Dickens performed a lucrative reading tour of the north-east states, 76 dates in five months. He had worked out that live appearances earned him more than his books, and so he developed a stage show. He was, by all accounts, a magnificent live performer, and a popular one. “It is impossible to get tickets,” Henry James wrote to his brother. “At 7am on the first day of the sale there were 200 or 300 at the office, and at 9, when I strolled up, nearly 1,000.” Dickens earned the contemporary equivalent of £1m. Dickens was 40 when he began Bleak House, and there were many great books to come, but there was a sense that he was becoming a prophet without honour in his own country. Bleak House was ignored in the chief critical reviews, according to Tomalin, and his last completed book, Our Mutual Friend, was greeted with a stinker of a review by Henry James: “It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists…” Likewise, in the 2010s, the last few years of Prince’s life and therefore his recording career, he was no longer getting the media attention he had previously enjoyed despite – or perhaps because of – gushing out songs as if they were water from a tap. But the addiction to work went on, for both of our central characters. We know that Prince’s favourite thing to do after a show was to play another show. Sometimes these were advertised in advance, sometimes the location spread through word of mouth. I never went to an aftershow show, although I have heard recordings of several of them. I always meant to. I thought I had time. But time was in short supply, for both of them. As you may remember, neither of them lived to see 60. Dickens’s novels total something like 4m words. I am six years older than he was when he died, and I doubt I’ve got to 750,000 words yet. With Dickens, though, the novels were only a part of the job. There were the letters, for a start. Look at the 12-volume edition that Graham Storey edited for Oxford University Press. There were 14,000 letters in the most recent edition, which was published in 2002. There was the journalism, which continued until the year of his death. There was the editing work he did, and the committees he sat on, and of course the punishing readings, which frequently led to him lying on the floor after the more dramatic performances. Tomalin tells us that his complicated love life involved “at least 68” trips to France between 1862 and 1865. Of course all this killed him, as it would kill any of us. Indeed, the index of Peter Ackroyd’s biography makes you marvel that he lived as long as he did: under the HEALTH heading there are entries for bilious attacks and nervous prostration, depression and near-breakdown, erysipelas (a skin infection), facial pains, headaches, illness after attack by horse, inflamed ear, kidney trouble and much, much more. Tomalin, through some careful decoding of the letters, suggests that he had gonorrhoea too, apparently as a result of the time he spent without a regular sexual partner before things had properly got going with Nelly. Look at the photographs taken of him towards the end of his life, and you don’t see a man in his 50s. He looks at least 20 years older. And when death came, it came both suddenly and in slow motion, with lots of indications of its arrival. In the last year or two there was a stroke and haemorrhages from piles, and a meeting with Queen Victoria, and laudanum, and his energetic, exhausting readings, and lameness, and blurred vision, and then, eventually, a collapse. Prince’s death was foretold, too. A few days before he died, his private plane had to make an emergency landing in Illinois after a concert in Atlanta, and he was reportedly given a shot of the anti-overdose drug Narcan by local emergency services. The night before he died, someone on his staff phoned a doctor in California called Howard Kornfeld who specialised in treating addictions. Because he was unable to respond immediately himself, he sent his son Andrew, a colleague at his practice, to Minneapolis that night. But when Prince overdosed for the second time that week, he was found dead in his own private elevator, on his private estate, too far away from everybody, too hidden, to receive the magic shot. Very few people knew Prince was addicted to painkillers, an addiction that probably began when he was trying to deal with a painful hip condition. He didn’t even seem to know himself – those in his circle suspect he didn’t know quite what he’d got himself into. He was famously clean-living, anti-drugs, vegan, and drank a little red wine in moderation, as per the teachings of his church. If Dickens looked like a septuagenarian when he died, Prince looked like a man in his 30s, although maybe you can see a little puffiness in his face during the last shows. Thirty-five or 75, it doesn’t matter. Those extraordinary creative brains must have been 1,000 years old. They have both lived on, of course, but more vigorously than one might have expected, and in surprising ways. For example: Noel Fielding mentioned Prince after eight minutes of the first episode of The Great British Bake Off 2021; 14 minutes later, he referred to Dickens, too. Neither of the references seemed weird, or forced, or in response to a financial inducement from the publishers of this book. They were used for jokes about outlandish glamour and the class divide, respectively. There have been four movie or TV adaptations of Great Expectations in the past decade, including the Indian film Fitoor, and Armando Iannucci’s brilliant The Personal History of David Copperfield, with a marvellous colourblind cast. Claire Foy played Amy Dorrit before she was old enough to play the Queen, for the BBC; there is simply no counting (I have tried) the number of 21st-century adaptations of A Christmas Carol across all media – animated films, puppet dramas, the works. Meanwhile Prince is effectively alive, as far as his recording career goes. Postmortem, we have been given special editions of Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times, a solo demos album called Piano & a Microphone 1983, and an album called Originals. At the same time, a team of archivists have moved his vault from Paisley Park to a climate-controlled Iron Mountain storage facility in Los Angeles. Nobody knows how much material is in the vault, but the estimates range from 5,000 to 8,000 unreleased songs, or a 10-song album every six months for the next 300-400 years. I’ll bet there are some good ones in there. I have lived long enough now to see the reputations of dead artists rise and – more usually – fall over decades. Does anyone still talk pretentiously and in absolute ignorance about Sartre and the existentialists, as my fellow teenagers and I did in the last year of school? Has Bellow crossed over into the 21st century from the 20th? Is Dalí beginning to look a bit daft? Dickens has won his case. If he dies out, if his novels cease to be read, it’s because novels too are dying out, which of course may yet happen. And at the moment it’s hard to see Prince fading away, especially if he releases two good albums a year for the next few centuries. But it doesn’t matter to me whether they last or don’t last, or whether you like them or not. What matters to me is that Prince and Dickens tell me, every day: not good enough. Not quick enough. Not enough. More, more, more. Think quicker, be more ambitious, be more imaginative. And whatever you do for a living, that’s something you need to hear, every now and again. That’s why I have photos of them both on my office wall. They will stay there for as long as I need them, which will be for the rest of my life.