Charles Dickens: A Life [Paperback]

Award-winning Claire Tomalin, author ofA Life of My Own, sets the standard for sophisticated and popular biography, having written lives of Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, and Thomas Hardy, among others. Here she tackles the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England, Charles Dickens; a literary leviathan whose own difficult path to greatness inspired the creation of classic novels such asGreat Expectations,David Copperfield,Oliver Twist, andHard Times.

From his sensational public appearances to the obsessive love affair that led him to betray, deceive, and break with those closest to him,Charles Dickens: A Lifeis a triumph of the biographer’s craft, a comedy that turns to tragedy in a story worthy of Dickens’ own pen."As Claire Tomalin demonstrates in hervivid and moving new biography, Dickens’s own life was rich in the attributes we call “Dickensian” — shameless melodrama, gargantuan appetites, reversals of fortune... To encompass this frenzy, Tomalin keeps the story racing. She brings Dickens to life in all his maddening contradictions...Dickens walks off the page, and the pace never flags.Tomalin accomplishes this resurrection in a mere 417 pages of text, supplemented by dozens of illustrations, several maps of Dickens’s London and a helpful dramatis personae...if you plan to read only one biography of the most popular Victorian writer, it should be this one."
--THE WASHINGTON POST

"Enormously ambitious... admirable... warmly sympathetic and often eloquent."
--Joyce Carol Oates, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOK

“Clear-eyed, sympathetic and scholarly, she spreads the whole canvas, alive with incident and detail, with places and people. She writes of publishers, illustrators, collaborators and all Dickens’s intersecting lăg