Charles Dickens: A Life [Hardcover]

Charles Dickens has created thousand of unforgettable characters, and he was also known as a hard-working journalist and as a writer of essays. He was buried-against his wishes-in Westminster Abbey.
His life was short. He died at the age of 58. But one can really doubt whether other writers who lived-or would live-longer-could achieve what Dickens had managed in such a short time. In 1862 the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, an ardent admirer of Dickens who read "The Pickpick Papers" and "David Copperfield" in prison, visited Dickens in London. Dickens told the Russian that there "were two people in him: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people, I asked?", added Dostoyevsky.
In fact, he was right: Dickens had many personalities in him and Claire Tomalin did a wonderful job in trying to describe the many faces of this titan of literature. She writes about his successes and failures. Dickens was extremely successful everywhere and his tour to the United States only proved this. But there were also those, among them his daughter Katey, who despised him and regarded him as an evil man.
Another Russian writer, Tolstoy, confessed that all of Dickens' characters were his friends, adding that he kept a portrait of the novelist in his room and considered Dickens to be the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century.
This book is splendid, with many new revelations about Dickens' family. The very qualities which made Dickens would eventually destroy him. A gem of a book and highly recommended!

Like another reviewer, I came to this biography with high hopes, which were disappointed. I've read most of the biographies of Dickens, and this is just not very good. It is quite superficial in the real sense: it is all about the surface of Dickens' life -- the book is all about his movements from here to there, one damn thing after another, one contract after another, one publication after another. There's no depth to it. The books are hardly dealt with at all, we get a couple of paragraphs on each (one is reminded of the Woody Allen joke about how, after taking a speed reading course, he was able to read War and Peace in 15 minutes, and when asked what the book was about, replied, "Russia"). After a while, you just get bored with what, on any measure, was one of the most interesting lives ever. The book is also uneven: the beginning is quite expansive, with a couple of nicely written descriptive passages, and stage setting (e.g. Rochester and environs), but all of that then disappears. Probably Tomalin started to write a richer biography and then realized that it would be 1000 pages long, and started cutting, which (if true) was a mistake. Dickens is worth 1000 pages, if it is INTERESTING!

There's a nice discussion of Dickens' work with Angela Burdett Coutts to assist prostitutes in London (a deliberate counterpoint to his mistressing). And the late domestic situation is told quite deftly (which one would expect from Tomalin). But overall, disappointing.

So at the moment, we are left with no "go to" up-to-date balanced, well-rounded biography of Dickens. Slater is about the writer, mostly, and is a slog to get through (he's sort of the "fill in the writer" gap of Tomalin). Ackroyd gets some of the feel of the wildness of Dickens' world, but is kind of crazy (sometimes crazy good, and sometimes just self-indulgent). Kaplan's bio is ok but not inspiring. I haven't read "Becoming Dickens" which could be good, about the first part of his life. We'll see. Maybe all these writers should be put together in a room and tasked with writing a team bio. That may be what Dickens requires.

Claire Tomalin is an unfailingly wonderful writer. She has told familiar stories very well (Hardy, Shelley, Jane Austen); has brought unknown stories to life (Mrs. Jordan's Profession; An Unknown Woman) and re-introduced us to the amazing Samuel Pepys.

Her Charles Dickens is a fantastic book on a great subject. There are other lives of Dickens (many of them much longer). In Tomalin's, Dickens seems to leap off the pages. He is boundlessly energetic; he is inconceivably brilliant; he binds friends to him for life. But he treats his children horribly, and not them alone.

It is a well-known story, enriched by Tomalin's unique understanding of the life of Nelly Ternan, Dickens' late-in-life mistress. Nelly is a complicated story herself, but the reader comes to share the author's admiration for her character and for the difficult choices she made (all but one, perhaps).

This book is a splendid introduction to two great writers: Charles Dickens and Claire Tomalin. Read it, and go on to any of her other books (I particularly recommend Pepys and Mrs. Jordan)