Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16187 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

P D James
'This is an absolutely essential book for anyone who has ever loved or read Dickens'

The Times
`A breathtaking feat of scholarship'

Sheridan Morley
`Truly magnificent…a book that ranks alongside Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde. This is the complete, the nonesuch, the definitive Dickens'

Customer Reviews

Unsatisfying and frustrating
Without realising it I picked up the abridged version of Peter Ackroyd's Dickens, and perhaps this is why I cannot agree with the good reviews of this book. It is well written and goes into great detail about all happenings- every story, every periodical, every novel, however the abridged version (of around 600 pages) refuses to talk about the important emotional relationships in Dickens' life. Just over 4 paragraphs are given to his break up with his wife (and most of these concern the legal settlement rather than any meaningful analysis of the break up). His relationship with his mother and father are mentioned at the beginning of the book but nothing pays off further into the book. Ackroyd asserts that Dickens had an ambiguous and not altogether good relationship with his mother and then proceeds to produce not one piece of evidence or feeling to back this statement up. Ackroyd is happy to make fatalistic assumptions; for example Dickens thinking train carriages were tilting to the left side after his crash 'because he had a swollen left foot' but is not willing to explore in any detail his relationship with Ellen Ternan, or track IN ANY WAY his falling out of love with his wife. Ackroyd also fails to explore Dickens' relationship with his children in any meaningful way- mentioning that his sons always felt inadequate but again not giving us any indication or evidence to suggest this was the case.

After 600 pages I was so dissatisfied I felt like going to read the primary source material myself in order that I could understand Dickens not in the context of his periodical, his stories and his books but as a man who had relationships with people around him.

Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as a historical biography (it is worth pointing out that this was actually written by a historian instead of a journalist, novelist and literary critic) shows a greater command of the material available and is able to plot relationships and feelings. In the abridged edition of Dickens, at least, Ackroyd fails spectacularly to do so. I don't know whether I wish I had picked up the full version, if I was to get through 1200 pages with the same conclusion I can only imagine my further frustration.

Brings Dickens utterly to life
I know that Peter Ackroyd has researchers working for him, so I assume the facts which he offers about Dickens are true. That being so, I greatly admire the way he so brilliantly weaves his material together, creating a picture of a living, breathing man - a genius who was irritating, temperamental, likeable, egocentric, self contradictory and generally almost impossible. Not only this but he puts Dickens in his period: he shows us what public life was like at the time and sketches in many individuals that Dickens knew, lived and worked with. He suggests what Dickens might have been aiming for at various times of his life, and what he might have felt and thought. There is inevitably some guesswork in this but after all, nobody can REALLY know another person, and Ackroyd's portrait, based as it is on research, probably contains more truth than the social front Dickens presented to most of the people who knew him personally. So I do believe this is the nearest we will ever get to understanding him, and highly recommend the book. By the way, this is the abridged version, but it is so illuminating and fascinating that I will now go and investigate the longer version.

Astounding
I am in the perhaps somewhat bizarre position of never having read any novel by Dickens himself, and regardless of that, finding myself utterly captivated by this biography. Is it correct? I wouldn't know as I've never read other Dickens-biographies. Is it complete and exhaustive? Probably not, no biography can be. All I do know is that it's truly magnificently written, and had me completely spellbound for all of its 579 pages (in my edition).