I really struggled with this book throughout February but I’m glad I finished it. Apparently, this is an abridged version of the original text. As it runs to 570 pages I’d hate to see the original!

Ackroyd provides a blow-by-blow account of Dickens’ life from cradle to grave. He also includes quite a lot of analysis of Dickens’ writing and tries to show how the author’s life shaped his work. There were times when I felt he made rather a large leap from known fact to supposition and didn’t back up his theory with much evidence. I think this bothered me more because the book reads like an academic text and I, therefore, expected the content to live up to that standard.

In all, this is an interesting, if heavy, book which does exactly what it says on the tin. ( )

A truly massive book well written and well researched. I’m sure that there is nothing that happened to Dickens that Ackroyd does not cover. Each novel, magazine, reading tour, vacation, friendship, hissy fit, and wretched medical condition is fully laid out. (The anal fistula business was not pleasant.) I now know a lot more about Charles Dickens than I did before and I found that I would not have liked this man at all. I think that is one of the reasons that it took so very long to finish the book. I kept having to break away in order to gnash my teeth over him. Talented though he was, Dickens was petty, self-involved, rotten to his wife, obsessed with money, controlling (so controlling!), stubborn, racist and insensitive. (Not to mention his really odd obsession with his dead sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth.) And he was so exhausting! The man could not seem to stay in one place. His adult life seemed constantly to be spent moving from one location to another. I did not count them, but I feel confident saying that he customarily moved five or six times in the course of a year. From his main residence in London to the seaside in England to some location in Europe, then back to London, then to a house or rooms rented for just himself, then back to the London house yet again, out to a house in the country or some little town and then back to London – the man never seemed to be able to stay still. Who knows how much writing time he lost with all that shifting about? Then there were the dinners and parties, the reading tours that eventually killed him and the numerous plays (private and public) that he staged. (Given his choice, I think Dickens would have almost preferred to have been an actor.) Then there was poor Catherine, his wife. I always thought of Dickens as a man who cared so much about the unfortunate and downtrodden. None of that empathy, if he really did possess any, extended to his wife. Catherine was a woman who suffered from severe post-partum depression yet she delivered nine live babies descending each time into the depths of misery. On each occasion, Dickens seemed not to feel very much for his wife beyond a kind of irritation with her, if that. Most of the time beyond deriding what he liked to think of as her dullness, he really just ignores her. On one of his tours in Scotland, he drags the heavily pregnant Catherine along with him. She suffers a miscarriage along the way, is put to bed and her husband demonstrates his compassion for her by going on about his business opining that he has “never enjoyed myself more completely.” Years later, he throws her out of the house in favor of the actress, Ellen Ternan (who is his daughter’s age), separating her from her children, the youngest of whom is only six. Yes, Dickens was self-centered indeed.

This is not to take away anything at all from the job Ackroyd did. He makes a pretty good case for the argument that Dickens and Ellen were not having a sexual affair; that Dickens was not interested in that sort of thing, but he was rather more likely to have been carrying on a more platonic love affair with the woman – even something more in the nature of a brother-sister relationship. Still, whatever it was, Dickens most definitely was unfaithful to his wife and family.

I do wish that I had read all of Dickens’ novels before reading this biography; probably I would have gotten more out of Ackroyd’s discussion of the ones I haven’t read and would be able to better judge if he knew what he was talking about, but at least I know that I will probably not read The Pickwick Papers – that book does not sound like my cup of tea.

The only thing that I found to be odd were these little three or four page interludes (seven of them in all) sprinkled throughout the book where, in the first six of them, various of Dickens’ characters had these little dialogs. I confess that I skipped over them as they did not seem to me to add anything to the book at hand. I may have been wrong to do that, but with 1,083 pages to read I really wanted to get on with things.

A recommended, if exhausting read. ( )

anthony burgess said it is to be praised without reservation. that it supersedes all other dickens biographies. and who's to say he is not right? not i. ( )

Although I'm yet to read this book in its entirety, I find it a very useful reference whenever I'm reading any of Dickens' works.

A wonderfully readable biography. ( )