Charles Dickens

Starred review from August 8, 2011
“veryone finds their own version of Charles Dickens ,” concludes award-winning British biographer Tomalin: Dickens the mesmerist, amateur thespian, political radical, protector of prostitutes, benefactor of orphans, restless walker—all emerge from the welter of information about the writer’s domestic arrangements, business dealings, childhood experiences, illnesses, and travels. Bolstered by citations from correspondence with and about Dickens, Tomalin’s portrait brings shadows and depth to the great Victorian novelist’s complex personality. Tomalin (Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self) displays her deep scholarship in reviewing, for instance, the debate about Dickens’s relations with Nelly Ternan, concluding that the balance of evidence is that they were lovers. She also highlights the contrasts between his charitable actions toward strangers and his “casting off” of several relatives from father to brothers to sons, who kept importuning him for money: “Once Dickens had drawn a line he was pitiless.” By the end of this biography, readers unfamiliar with Dickens will come away with a new understanding of his driven personality and his impact on literature and 19th-century political and social issues. Tomalin provides her usual rich, penetrating portrait; one can say of her book what she says of Dickens’s picture of 19th -century England: it’s “crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation.” Illus.; maps.

Starred review from September 1, 2011

Like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens (1812–1870) 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 in Martin Chuzzlewit are "set up like toys programmed to run on course," and that Hard 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 finish—a strong contender for biography of the year.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011

Tomalin having won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Whitbread Biography Award, among others, I don't think we'll have much quarrel with her life of Charles Dickens. Tomalin aims to show us that the perspicacious creator of Tiny Tim was a genius, yes, but also a stormy type whose obsessions drove him from family and friends. Essential if you've got literary readers.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)