Claire Tomalin

Just as good as her bio of Jane Austen, and with the added difficulty of fighting off years of Dickens' admirers either defaming Ternan or trying to bury her existence. You will not look at Dickens the same way after this book, but you may well have a better understanding of why he couldn't write a well-rounded, psychologically full female character to save his life. As always, Tomalin tells us as much about the world in which Ternan and Dickens lived as she does about the people themselves. show more My edition is a later one, and has an added chapter which casts new light on the circumstances of Dickens' death. Tomalin's further investigations were spurred by the receipt of a letter she received following the book's initial publication, a letter describing a family story suggesting that Dickens did not die at Gad's Hill, but that his body had been transported there after his death. It is, of course, a story that at this juncture cannot be proved or disproved, but it is interesting to consider the steps that Tomalin took to investigate its plausibility, steps that show her to be a true scholar. show less

Charles Dickens. A life, the biography of Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin reads like a novel by the Victorian author himself. The biography is remarkably well-written, and just a sheer pleasure to read. In just over 400 pages Tomalin compacts Dickens's eventful life.

For readers who imagine Charles Dickens as just another dreary old Victorian, this biography would come as an eye-opener. Dickens, apparently always as busy as a bee, led a bohemian lifestyle of exhuberence and dazzle. Starting show more from a very humble background, which would later appear in many of his greatest novels, early fame in his late Twenties brought wealth and the means to enjoy life on a grand scale. Dickens is described as an unusually colourful character, literally, as he would dress in gaudy colours. His friendships were warm, and his passion for the theatre went as far as not only writing plays (who had ever heard of that?) to producing and acting in his own plays, for very varied audiences, including the Queen. The biography also shows how an initially very good match and happiness in early marriage soured under the burden of work and an ever expanding family. While Dickens regularly frequented brothels and this is characterised as not unusual even in Victorian England, while his contacts with the women not only inspired many characters in his books, but also spurred Dickens into charity and setting up a home for destitute women, these visits may have been the prelude and symptom of a deteriorating marriage, which ended in divorce.

Dickens's life was extremely eventful and busy, as he wrote very many novels, and was engaged in many other projects ranging from charity, the theatre to journalism and running a newspaper. Part of the struggle of young authors is the modest to low income as at that time copyright was either not protected or publishers would benefit most from cooperation with their authors. Fortunately, Dickens was able to negotiate better deals with his publishers over the years in England, but often lamented piracy of his works in the United States, where the Copyright Act was not concluded until the final decades of the century, and Tauchnitz (Leipzig) brough out pirated editions of his works.

Claire Tomalin has struck a very good balance between writing about Dickens life and his novels. With so much to write about, the novels are never described with too much detail, and neither are the novels analysed. There is also a very good balance between Tomalin comments and use of the novels as illustrative material and contemporary criticism, showing how Victorian critics felt about Dickens's work.

Although there a footnotes for some of the facts, Charles Dickens. A life does not feel like a scholarly work. The biography is very well-written and very readable. A short but very useful bibliography with suggestions for further reading shows that scholarly interest in Dickens is far from rounded off with a number of major publications of Dickens's Letters in 12 vols. only completely published failrly recently between 1965 - 2002 (in The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, and his collected journalism in miscellaneous writing in four vols. (1894-2000) in The Dent Uniform Edition of Dicken's Journalism. show less

Tomalin has produced a very readable biography of Jane Austen. While the source material Tomalin has to work with is limited—her sister Cassandra unfortunately destroyed many of Jane's letters after her death—she is a sensitive interpreter of what does survive. She is good at correcting the traditional image of Austen as a somewhat prim, retiring, romantic old maid, replacing that with the kind of woman we see reflected in her surviving letters: independent, self-assured, extroverted, show more and flawed. show less

Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen--the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself "formidable," a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from black depressions, who showed unfailing loyalty and, in the conduct of her own life, unfailing bravery. In an act of understanding and brilliant synthesis, Claire Tomalin reveals Jane Austen with a clarity never before achieved, one show more which makes us look upon her novels with fresh and even greater admiration.

The world she wrote about--that place of civility and reassuring stability--was never quite her own. As Tomalin shows, Jane Austen's family existed on the very fringe of the world she described in her fiction, struggling to get ahead with little money and no land in the competitive society of Georgian England, sometimes succeeding but often failing with painful consequences. New research in family papers has yielded a rich, tragicomic picture of the Austen clan--their ambitions, their matrimonial alliances, their exotic connections with India and France. At the same time, Tomalin's explorations in local archives reveal a surprising view of the neighbors the family lived among in Hampshire, more extravagant and eccentric by far than anyone depicted in Austen's books. We realize how much closer her genius lies, in its splendid artifice, to the great comic operas of Mozart than to the main tradition of the English novel.

But it is in the deeply human portrait of Jane Austen herself that this biography excels. The honesty and directness of her personality (perfect heroines made her "sick and wicked"), her strength in giving up a chance at marriage to follow the path her vocation as a writer required her to take, the warmth and long consistency of her relationship with her sister, Cassandra, the poignancy of her death--Claire Tomalin here captures, with unforgettable skill, the living character of a great writer who is read, reread, read again, and admired, now more than ever. show less