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REVIEW OF PETER ACKROYD'S DICKENS BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
There are some oddities in the style of Mr. Ackroyd, and his book contains some, what might be called, experimental chapters, fantasies or dreams or prose poems on subjects the author associates with Dickens. Ordinarily, I would find these things a bit off-putting. <
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>But Mr. Ackroyd succeeds in giving us an overwhelmingly animated and penetrating portrait of the great Victorian author. This huge book - and no smaller effort could capture Dickens' spirit - crackles with energy, the very kind of driving energy so characteristic of Dickens himself. <
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>Dickens was a strange man with immense drives and desires going off in many directions and personal habits that might well at times be regarded as unbalanced. He was not the sentimental, storytelling Victorian father figure he is sometimes regarded, although he could be quite sentimental about family and friends and his storytelling ability had few equals. <
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>He behaved at times as a petty tyrant and was highly opinionated, always a man of immense curiosity, a traveler, a political activist, a generous man, a workaholic, a man eager for every possible shred of success and acclaim, a talented actor and mimic, a man seemingly possessed at times, as when carrying on conversations with himself, imitating his own characters in a mirror or going for walks as long as twenty miles alone or living with the ghosts of his fractured childhood. <
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>A whirlwind of experience and desires helped make this naturally talented man such a great novelist. There are similarities to the titanic storm that was Beethoven. In both cases, the young man in his first blush of success could be truly charming while the aging figure could be quite unsettling. <
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>The book contains many interesting anecdotes and details of Dickens' England, as well as Dickens' America since he made two journeys to America, a place he both hated and was fascinated by. <
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>Highly recommended to all lovers of good biography, all students of English literature, and all students of English history. <
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Unreliable and verbose
As someone with a history degree, I find this biography infuriating. The author uses the phrase "no doubt" to launch almost every other sentence. Every use indicates a speculation rather than a fact; or at least something for which the author provides zero evidence. Usually it is lengthy speculation on Dickens' emotions (including during infancy), but sometimes his actions; and sometimes the feelings and actions of his family, friends, and colleagues.

Thus the author blithely--and firmly--attributes a miscarriage of Dickens' wife, after the sudden death of her teenage sister Mary Hogarth, to jealousy over Dickens' show of grief. He insists Dickens' feelings for Mary were purely fatherly. But he gives no evidence other than Dickens' own public declarations, and Dickens is unlikely to have been candid about adulterous longings for a virginal female relative. On the other hand, I myself would speculate that Catherine Dickens may herself have grieved over her sister's death. But the author gives absolutely no evidence for how she felt about the death or Dickens' grief--no letters, no conversations reported by friends, nothing. On yet another hand, I would speculate that the miscarriage may have been due to purely physical rather than emotional causes, and its occurence after a family tragedy a coincidence--but the author does not discuss this possibility either.

And this is one of many, many instances.

I also got tired of hearing the author assert often and at length that society was different in the mid 19th century than now, which is obvious.

The author is much too fond of showing off his own prose. He even includes lengthy, boring, and uninformative fictional vignettes using Dickens as a character.

Overall, I'd say that the author is unable to distinguish among literary criticism, fiction using a historical character, and biography. He should have stuck to one of the first two genres and not attempted the third.

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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.