Charles Dickens : A life

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The tumultuous life of England's greatest novelist, beautifully rendered by unparalleled literary biographer Claire Tomalin.

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune.

Like a hero from his novels, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. Born into a modest middle-class family, his young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh and humiliating factory work. Yet through these early setbacks he developed his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. He set out to succeed, and with extraordinary speed and energy made himself into the greatest English novelist of the century.

Years later Dickens's daughter wrote to the author George Bernard Shaw, "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me." Seen as the public champion of household harmony, Dickens tore his own life apart, betraying, deceiving, and breaking with friends and family while he pursued an obsessive love affair.

Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature-his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being- while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great-his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination, and showmanship-finally destroyed him. The man who emerges is one of extraordinary contradictions, whose vices and virtues were intertwined as surely as his life and his art.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. xi)
• Maps (p. xiv)
• Keys to Maps (p. xix)
• Cast List (p. xxiii)
• Prologue: The Inimitable (p. xxxix)
• Part 1
• 1 The Sins of the Fathers (p. 3)
• 2 A London Education (p. 17)
• 3 Becoming Boz (p. 32)
• 4 The Journalist (p. 51)
• 5 Four Publishers and a Wedding (p. 61)
• 6 'Till death do us part' (p. 73)
• 7 Blackguards and Brigands (p. 89)
• Part 2
• 8 Killing Nell (p. 111)
• 9 Conquering America (p. 127)
• 10 Setbacks (p. 143)
• 11 Travels, Dreams and Visions (p. 154)
• 12 Crisis (p. 169)
• 13 Dombey, with Interruptions (p. 188)
• 14 A Home (p. 202)
• 15 A Personal History (p. 211)
• 16 Fathers and Sons (p. 226)
• 17 Children at Work (p. 238)
• 18 Little Dorrit and Friends (p. 252)
• 19 Wayward and Unsettled (p. 270)
• Part 3
• 20 Stormy Weather (p. 289)
• 21 Secrets, Mysteries and Lies (p. 305)
• 22 The Bebelle Life (p. 324)
• 23 Wise Daughters (p. 339)
• 24 The Chief (p. 353)
• 25 'Things look like work again' (p. 371)
• 26 Pickswick, Pecknicks, Pickwicks (p. 384)
• 27 The Remembrance of My Friends (p. 401)
• Notes (p. 418)
• Select Bibliography (p. 489)
• Acknowledgements (p. 493)
• Index (p. 496)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Tomalin (Thomas Hardy) offers what is effectively the bicentennial biography of Dickens. She examines all aspects of her subject's life and career, with an emphasis on his personality's many contradictions: he was kind and cruel, charitable and pitiless, gregarious and intensely private. Dickens's friendships, as Tomalin illuminates, were numerous and lifelong. His close friends, such as his first biographer, John Forster, loved and honored him. But in family relationships, especially with his wife and many children, he was often cold and unfeeling. Tomalin investigates and speculates on Dickens's relationship with Nelly Ternan, providing information beyond what is in her prize-winning The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1992). She praises Dickens's many accomplishments and the sterling qualities that endeared him to so many friends and readers, while also delineating his dark side and how it cast a shadow over his later years. He died at age 58. VERDICT Michael Slater's recent biography examines Dickens's literary works more deeply; Tomalin's focus is the writer himself. While it neither offers much in the way of new insights nor replaces classic studies of Dickens, Tomalin's entertaining book deserves to be the go-to popular biography for readers new to Boz and his works. (Index not seen.)-Morris A. Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Tomalin's sprawling biography of one of history's most revered literary figures-with its dizzying cast of characters and mixture of literary criticism, detailed historical record keeping, psychological insight, and human drama-would present a challenge to any audiobook narrator. Thankfully Alex Jennings is more than up to the task, successfully rendering the complicated inner struggles that shaped the temperament and life of Charles Dickens. Jennings also provides spot-on dialects and accents, particularly in sections of the book that detail Dickens's travels to the United States and dealings with his American contemporaries. Keeping pace with this audio edition requires active listening, but Jennings's narration is more than rewarding. A Penguin hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

School Library Journal Review

Adult/High School-Tomalin expertly dissects Dickens's literary career and his larger-than-life personality. Exhaustively researched, rich in historical detail and literary analysis, but still accessible, this title is an excellent choice for high-school researchers or budding Dickens fans anxious for a source that provides a more intimate portrait. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

So much is known of the life of Dickens that no biography can include everything. However, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin has covered all the essentials and provides sufficient other informative, entertaining details to satisfy even the casual reader. The book follows the novelist's family and friends past his death in 1870, to 1939. Some may object that the extensive amount of space devoted to actor Ellen Ternan, Dickens's alleged mistress, is disproportionate in comparison to the coverage of the novels, some of which get scant commentary. Tomalin is careful to note that accounts of the liaison are based on hearsay and that there is no documentation, but she sometimes refers to purported incidents as fact. The 70 pages of endnotes attest to the careful documentation. Maps of areas of London and of Rochester are helpful, as is the "cast list" of 182 relatives and friends of Dickens. The illustrations are disappointing, many being so reduced as to be unattractive. All readers will enjoy this well-written book, which sorts out the intricacies of the complicated life of England's greatest novelist. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. J. D. Vann emeritus, University of North Texas

Booklist Review

Tomalin's book competes with Michael Slater's authoritative, scholarly Charles Dickens (2009) in the run-up to Dickens' bicentenary in 2012. Her lively narrative of the familiar story, closely following the chronology of Dickens' letters, offers no new material and incorporates many pages from her previous work on Dickens' secret young mistress, Ellen Ternan, who broke up his marriage to Catherine Hogarth (mother of his 10 children) and bore him a child who died in infancy. Dickens' grim childhood experience of working in a shoe-blacking factory and spending humiliating time with his father in debtors' prison gave him a lifelong compassion for victims. Tomalin shows how the progressive crusader helped reform schools, child labor, slum housing, public health, law courts, prisons, parliament, and international copyright, all the while opposing American slavery, capital punishment, and the Crimean War. Her analyses of the novels, which are irradiated with anger and dark humor, are brief and perceptive. Dickens appears as a man of vivacity and wit, of inexhaustible energy and demonic productivity, whose strength of will became the agent of his own destruction. --Meyers, Jeffrey Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens (18121870) was an overachiever of genius, and his life was as eventful, dramatic and character-filled as any of his novels. This rich new biography brilliantly captures his world.Acclaimed biographer Tomalin (Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man,2007, etc.) has always hunted big literary game (Hardy,Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, etc.), and here she goes after one of the biggest and most complex. Dickens once told a visiting Dostoevsky that his heroes and villains came from the two people inside him: "one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite." However, there were many more dimensions to Dickens' character. Besides being a tireless writer of long, complicated novels and hundreds of articles, an editor of a succession of magazines and a frustrated actor whose public readings became standing-room-only events, he was ebullient, charming, radical, instinctively sympathetic to the poor, generous to friends but unforgiving once you got on his bad side. At home, he was a domineering husband to his long-suffering wife and a distant father to his ten children. Dickens certainly would have appreciated Tomalin's keen eye for scene, character and narrative pace. Ever the deft critic, she notes how the characters inMartin Chuzzlewitare "set up like toys programmed to run on course," and thatHard Times"fails to take note of its own message that people must be amused." Having written previously on Dickens' disastrous late-life affair (The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, 1991), Tomalin also displays considerable detective work to bolster the possibility that Dickens and his other woman had a secret child who died in infancy.Superbly organized, comprehensive and engrossing from start to finisha strong contender for biography of the year.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.