Product Description

From a bitter and poverty-stricken childhood to a career as the most acclaimed and best loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels of life in Victorian England. His well-documented life - the enormous quantity of work, his public readings and his difficult relationships - has always made fascinating reading. We see Charles Dickens as his contemporaries would have done and get to know him more intimately than ever before. At the same time Smiley offers interpretations of almost all of Dickens' major works, showing how 'his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #508359 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Inside Flap
Charles Dickens was a phenomenon by any standard. From a bitter and poverty-stricken childhood to a career as the most acclaimed and best loved writer in the English speaking world, he led a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels. With the delectable wit, unforgettable characters, and challenging themes that have won her a Pulitzer Prize and bestseller status, Jane Smiley naturally finds a kindred spirit in the literary colossus. As a novelist herself, she approaches her subject from a fresh perspective, evoking Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporaries: charming, astute, boundlessly energetic - and, above all, an endlessly witty man, for whom words were a permanent delight. But, as Smiley makes clear, Dickens was not only a prolific writer, he also led an action-packed public life as an editor, social theorist and passionate campaigner for the common good. Balancing the artistic and the commercial in his work, he consciously sustained his status as the first true celebrity of the popular arts Charles Dickens offers brilliant interpretations of almost all the major works and an exploration of Dickens's innovative voice and themes. It touches, too, on controversial details that include Dickens's obsession with money, squabbles with publishers, his unhappy marriage, and the rumours of an affair. Because 'his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels', Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive biography of the great master and a fascinating meditation on his extraordinary writing life. 12.99 in UK only Jane Smiley is the author of ten works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love, Good Will, Moo, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and most recently the bestselling Horse Heaven (which was shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize). She lives in Northern California. Jacket credits: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Orion Publishing Group Orion House 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane London, WC2H 9EA

From the Back Cover
'Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Sussex and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel - to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way.' Jane Smiley

About the Author
Jane Smiley is the author of nine novels including Moo, The Age of Grief, Horse Heaven and A Thousand Acres (which won the Pulitzer Prize). She lives in Northern California.

Customer Reviews

A SOLID MODERN LOOK AT DICKENS
Jane Smiley's biography of Charles Dickens is not a lengthy book that describes the great man's life from cradle to grave.If you want to read such a life story Peter Ackroyd is your man.Instead Smiley concentrates on Dicken's adult life, putting him forward as the first true celebrity, showing how his subsequent lifestyle affected him and his family's wellbeing.She also depicts his novels, from Pickwick to Edwin Drood, showing how they sold, were received and how his style developed.
Biographies of Dickens are numerous, so where does this version stand?As you would expect of a Pulitzer winner, it is very well written, and serves well as an initial read of Dicken's life and a very modern look at the man and his work.

Dickens: The "Paradigmatic Great Novelist"
This is one of the volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Also, each provides a concise but insightful examination of the subject's life and career. As Smiley explains in her Preface, "The literary sensibility of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history." Quite true. Smiley goes on to suggest that, over time, Dickens' readers have become further and further removed from the details of his life. Nonetheless, while they continue to read any of fifteen novels (ten of which exceed 800 pages in length) as well as stories, articles, travel pieces, essays, letters, etc., they remain "in his presence, experiencing his process of thought and imagination as it precipitates inchoate idea to particular word." It is this "miracle of literature" which Smiley finds especially interesting as she approaches Dickens in this volume with "a friendly desire to get to know him and to achieve what Victorians might have termed `a growing intimacy.'" In my opinion, Smiley's approach is the eminently correct one to take. Here are three brief excerpts from the narrative which suggest the eloquence and precision of Smiley's analysis:

"Along with A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist is probably the best known of Dickens's narratives, certainly because, like many of Dickens's own works and like many other nineteenth century novels, it was reworked for the stage, where the simple and vivid story of the workhouse child who falls among thieves and then is rescued and restored to his wealthy grandfather made a dramatic and cohesive play. The arc of the narrative is fairy tale-like, but the details of Oliver's companions and surroundings come directly from Dickens's immediate world."

"The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens's most interesting novel in terms of the extremes of reactions it elicits in readers. Legendarily popular and lucrative in its day, it is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians. Oscar Wilde remarked, `One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Nell without laughing.' and others have been at least as critical."

"Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel -- to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way."

This book will be invaluable to those who have already read several of Dickens' works wish to re-visit them within the context of his life. Others who are unfamiliar with his life or works will also find this book invaluable as an introduction and guide to both. Smiley's is a brilliant achievement, especially given the limits within which she presents and discusses her material "in an incomparably fresh and delightful way." Although she uses that phrase as a comment on Dickens, it is also true of her.