Product Description

This special abridged edition takes the reader into the fascinating life of one of the world's greatest writers--Dickens' penurious and painful childhood, the triumphant reception of his first novel and other significant events in Dickens' life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #272921 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Ackroyd ( The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde ) is a master biographer with a seductive prose style, and this massive volume is likely to stand as the Dickens biography for decades to come. Ackroyd moves around with authority in the world of the ebullient, ambitious, insecure, haunted, theatrical genius, which is also the world of early and mid-Victorian England assimilated and transformed to a stupefying degree. We read about Dickens's penurious and painful childhood; the triumphant reception of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers ; the prodigious flow of subsequent novels which, though increasingly somber in tone, continued to reflect a mind whose primary reaction to experience was anarchic laughter; the two trips to America, for the most part wildly successful; the scandal surrounding Dickens's desertion of his wife. And Ackroyd pinpoints Dickens's two great innovations: he was the first to introduce the language of the romantic poets into the novel; and his dramatic public readings from his novels constituted a new art form. Illustrations. Major ad/promo; BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"Dickens saw reality as a reflection of his own fiction," contends Ackroyd, novelist and biographer of T.S. Eliot ( T.S. Eliot: A Life , LJ 11/15/84) and Ezra Pound ( Ezra Pound , Thames & Hudson, 1987). This massive life and times attempts to re-create Dickens's internal and external realities. Ackroyd makes better use of the autobiographical memoranda first published in John Forster's Life (1872-74) than did Edgar Johnson in his Charles Dickens (S. & S., 1952), and the interweaving of critical comments with his presentation of Dickens's personal and social preoccupations often yields more insights than does Johnson's technique of interlarded essays. The same vast mental and physical energies that led Dickens to triumph drove him to an obsessive need for total control of all aspects of his personal and professional life. Furthermore, his sensibility was formed in a pre-Victorian England that was often squalid and brutal, and which frequently relied on role-playing as a guide to conduct. Ackroyd's great strength is his ability to draw the reader into a sensory apprehension of this world. A lack of footnotes will keep scholars turning to Johnson and Fred Kaplan's shorter and far less evocative Dickens: A Life ( LJ 9/1/88), but this engrossing work is enthusiastically recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Barbara J. Dunlap, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
In this remarkable new biography, Ackroyd offers a different view of Dickens to that presented in his earlier study of the author. Dickens had everything - fame, success and riches. He was mercurial, had enormous vitality and humour, along with a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life: although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins and kept a secret mistress, Ellen Ternan. Ackroyd vividly conjures the reality of Victorian life, the issues that sparked Dickens' fervent calls for social reform which profoundly affected his life and work.

Peter Ackroyd's writing is never less than compelling - one of his gifts is saying in a sentence that which would take someone else a paragraph - and this biography of Dickens is no exception. Published to accompany the BBC television series, the book's aim - and achievement - is to get inside the skin of the contradictory man who was indisputably one of the great writers of his time. His affinity with the underclass was derived from an uncomfortable period at the age of 12 when he was forced to work in a London blacking factory after his father, who drank, ended up in prison for unpaid debts. It was only through his phenomenal talent and frightening energy that the young Dickens, fortunately allowed to attend school again once his father was released, completed a three-year shorthand course in just three months, and embarked on a career as a parliamentary reporter. The author's marriage to Catherine comes under the microscope, as does his obsession with his sister-in-law, who lived with the couple until her tragic early death. We follow the couple on their successful, if controversial, tour of America and sympathise with Dickens over his ever-increasing financial responsibilities, with an expanding family of children and feckless parents and brothers to support. It seems that a childhood-instilled fear of penury, his passion for storytelling and that for exposing the poor living conditions of the working class all combined to produce Dickens's prodigiously energetic and passionate approach to his work. The passions were as private as they were public; a long-standing affair with the bright and beautiful actress Ellen Ternan precipitated the end of a marriage that had become lacklustre and stultifying. There was no divorce, but the couple formally separated. Ackroyd sums up the contradictions of the author's life perfectly on the last page, noting that while his death was mourned by the great and the good worldwide, and the British public queued in their thousands to pay their respects, neither Catherine Dickens nor Ellen Ternan attended his burial. A good read, and all the erudition one would expect from a writer of Ackroyd's calibre. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

One of the best (and most unusual) biographies in English
It's absolutely shocking Peter Ackroyd's magisterial and magical biography of Charles Dickens has fallen out of print: I think I had more pure readerly pleasure reading this work than just about any biography or novel I've read in the last fifteen years. This is really a one-of-a-kind work: Ackroyd writes his life of Dickens as if it were a Dickens novel, and the descriptions of Dickens's London and Rochester spill out in page after page of densely glorious prose. It's a long book, and it is not lightly undertaken, and Ackroyd does some very out-of-fashion gestures here (like profess his belief in Dickens' genius, as other reviewers have noted) very readily. But I can't think of a biography I would recommend more highly.

Stupendous . . .
. . . but no adjective, or string of adjectives, can do Ackroyd's massive, majestic biography justice. Dickens is, with Victoria, the archetypical Victorian, and he is here fully realized, in all his contradictory dimensions: the best-known and best-loved writer of his day, but perpetually insecure and ashamed of his "ungentlemanly" background; wealthy yet financially ever insecure and working feverishly for material advancement; outgoing and flamboyantly dramatic, yet profoundly interior and haunted by irrepressible demons; the great celebrator of hearth and home who sired 10 children but who abandoned his wife of 22 years for a curious relationship with an actress more than half his age; the man who toasted Shakespeare's birthday as the anniversary also of the Bard's gallery of immortal characters, who saw himself as a similar progenitor but who would "write" his friends, compulsively objectifying them, family, and acquaintances into manipulable, construed, understandable "characters" - indeed, the most capacious literary imagination since Shakespeare but a jittery control addict for whom everything, and everybody, had to be in its right place.

Ackroyd has read every word Dickens wrote - the novels, stories, journalism, letters, inscriptions - and apparently, and more astonishingly, everything ever written ABOUT Dickens - by his circle of literary and profession friends, rivals, reviewers and critics, acquaintances, memoirists who encountered him but once, otherwise unknown British, Scottish, Continental, or American diarists who happened to note a Dickens "sighting" whether or not words were exchanged. All these gleanings Ackroyd shapes convincingly into cumulative aspects of character, incidents that inform Dickens's work, information about the author's public bearing, mannerisms, speech, likes, dislikes, behavior in almost every imaginable range of situations - "in short" - to call on Micawber - a full portrait. And with remarkable efficiency and literary felicity, Ackroyd situates Dickens within his rapidly changing era, as long-distance horse-drawn coaches give way to rail travel, as the stench and filth of pre-Reform London yields to reformist impulses of every stripe, as the Empire advances and London is transformed into a great capital of monuments and squares and Imperial architecture. (And, as with his engrossing biography of Thomas More, Ackroyd introduces London as a major character and influence on his subject, a conceit Ackroyd, himself the author of a knowing, loving "biography" of London, pulls off beautifully.)

Most important for devotees of Charles Dickens - and if you're searching for a 1200 page (scandalously) out-of-print biography, you are surely that - Ackroyd demonstrates convincingly how the work reflects the life, the personality, the influences, the environment, and all the contradictions of Dickens the man. Ackroyd carefully walks the line between reading too much into the life from the work, but draws careful correspondences between the tensions of the life and their realizations in fiction. The chapters devoted to Dickens in the throes, or ecstasies, of creation - for so does his creative moods and energies vary - are among the book's most compelling passages. Scarcely ever has the sinews of literary creativity been laid so believably bare, by a biographer who is himself a prolific, and highly imaginative, writer. The most powerful impression one draws from Ackroyd's matchless story is the extent to which a protean Dickens embodied to a great degree all his mightiest creations, the dark and the bright, and not merely the plainly autobiographical Nickeby, Pip, and David Copperfield.

When I finally closed Ackroyd's Dickens, I was nearly inconsolable at the loss of someone I felt I had come to know so well. A brilliant life, radiantly told, and a book that deserves to be - and, I pray, will soon be - back in print.

As definitive as biography gets
It's a rare biography that leaves you with the feeling that there's nothing more that could be said about its subject. This is one of them. It helps that Ackroyd has so much space to work with. (In this respect, it's like Jackson J. Benson's "The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer" - also shamefully out of print.) But utimately it's a function of Ackroyd's profound understanding of the various aspects of Dickens' character and genius. The occasional veering into fantasia is a bold experiment that, in my opinion, fails decisively but these brief chapters are infrequent and simple to skip. They are a trivial blemish on the face of this monument of scholarship and imagination.