Charles Dickens: A Life

Lots of detail about an interesting man.

Worth the read

This book has surely been a tour-de-force by the author in reconstructing the life of Charles Dickens. In fact the man behind the most celebrated novels of the Victorian age (and of all times) was what we would call today a hyper-active dude, both in personal life and in public and literary life. Always restless, and probably harbouring a tangle of un-resolved conflicts with his family of origin, Dickens spent his life in so many activities that it is difficult to understand how he found time for everything: novelist, journalist, editor, dramaturgist, more-than-amateur actor, social and political activist, philantropist, socialite and more, having a family menagerie with a score of children, living and possessing several houses in England and abroad, travelling throughout Europe and America. Actually I cannot imagine how the biographer could reconstruct all those details from the available documentation. The book is above all a description on how in Dickens personal life and literature are so inestricably entangled that it is difficult to understand what came first: private experiences or literary fantasy. For those who love Dickens and his works this is a book not to miss.

Charles Dickens wrote so much and lived his life on such a scale that his most complete and definitive biographies (such as Peter Ackroyd's exuberant 1990 life study of the author) assume Dickensian proportions themselves. While this dynamic can be vastly entertaining, it can also make many of them quite intimidating for readers trying to find a simpler outline of the great novelist's life; Jane Smiley's brief 2003 biography for the Penguin Lives series sought to fill such a gap, but was judged inadequate and too chatty by many of its reviewers. Claire Tomalin, one of the best contemporary British biographers, has produced this book which is enormously readable and quite manageable in size, consisting of only about 400 pages of text narrative. This work should be seen by no means as any kind of standard or definitive biography (it is too brief for that), but is probably a much better introduction to Dickens's life for the common reader than Edgar Johnson's famous work from more than a half a century ago or Ackroyd's 1990 work (no matter how much fun Ackroyd's can be if you have the time and can find an old copy of it). It is also less invested, as other reviewers have noted, in providing full-scale readings of Dickens's novels and major novellas or short stories, though it does outline and evaluate them intelligently and provide crucial links between them and Dickens' life.Tomalin produced an account of Dickens' affair late in life with the actress Ellen Ternan, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN, many years ago, so is clearly well read in the relevant source materials from Dickens and his circle. Although she is quite clear in her belief that Dickens did consummate his affair with Ternan (which some other Dickens' biographers have disputed), she is to some extent more generous to Dickens himself than other biographers have been, who have produced a portrait of him late in his life (particularly after his break with his wife Catherine) as being obsessively paranoid, self-righteous and manic nearly to the degree of insanity. (This depiction has found perhaps its consummation in Dan Simmons' overwrought and exhausting gothic horror fantasy about Dickens' later years, DROOD.) But although Tomalin does not deny Dickens' cruelty towards his wife and his narcissism, and of the many missteps he takes with his friends and family and even his critical pieces in his journals, there's a strong sense throughout this biography of how much she strongly admires him, right to the end of his life. The book is marvelously readable and comes with some rarely seen (and helpfully annotated) images of Dickens and his family and his circle, as well as terrific illustrated maps of his and his family's homes in Rochester, central London and North London. I would recommend this highly to anyone who is first reading Dickens' novels and wants to get a full (if not fully scholarly) outline of his life and achievements.

In the run-up to Dickens' 200th birthday this year, there have been a number of biographies of the writer published. As a big fan of Dickens, I have read a number of them and most of them are quite good. I've yet to come across one I'd describe as the "best" or "definitive" as they all seem to have their strengths and weaknesses. Tomalin's biography is no different. In some ways it is very good but it also has its irritations.Let's start with the strengths. This is one of the most readable of the recent biographies of Dickens. It is of manageable length, though it covers his entire life, and the prose pops along very energetically. Mainly this is because she controls the fount of detail. Unlike many biographers, she doesn't overwhelm us. She gives us enough to get a good outline of his story.The weakness of this biography comes from her fairly obvious desire to take The Inimitable down a few pegs. Her analysis of every novel contains sentences that make me wonder whether she even likes his work. And, of course, there is her desire to beat up Dickens over his treatment of his wife and bring to the fore his mistress, Nelly Ternan. (In fact, she's already written an entire book on Ternan, The Invisible Woman.)In and of itself, this is not a problem. I am not a fan of worshipful biographies because every human is flawed. For example, no one would argue, I think, that Dickens treated his wife horribly. It is the way Tomalin makes her points that is the problem. In particular, she is a master of saying "there is no proof" of something and then subtly taking that thing for granted as fact later in her book. She does this often but one instance should suffice here: on p. 327 she writes, "There is no proof that it was Nelly who took Dickens to France the summer of 1862, or that the reason for her being in France was the she was pregnant..." and then follows on p. 405 with, "They [Nelly and her husband, George Robinson] had two children, Geoffrey, born in 1879, the adored son who filled the place of the son she had lost, and a daughter, Gladys, in 1884." (My italics.)Still, if you can take some of Tomalin's "facts" with a grain of salt, this is a pretty good biography. It takes you through Dickens' story briskly and informatively, which is not a quality of all the biographies out there.