Dickens - Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a celebrated novelist and biographer who brings to Dickens his proficiency in both disciplines. Based upon an extensive examination of original sources, and animated throughout by the historical imagination he displayed in Hawksmoor and Chatterton, Ackroyd’s latest work is one in which the true figure of Charles Dickens and the moving spirit of his age are for the first time faithfully combined. Dickens as a child at the beginning of the nineteenth century; Dickens the most celebrated novelist in the world while still in his twenties; Dickens the radical and the actor; Dickens the prematurely exhausted middle-aged man whose own unquiet fictions seem to shape his life itself; Dickens the performer who, it has been said, was killed by his own characters as he embodied them upon the stage; Dickens the greatest writer of his age who, more than any other human being, stamped his image upon nineteenth-century England. All these aspects of his genius are embodied in Dickens which is as much a study of a culture, and of a period, as it is of one extraordinary man.

Ackroyd’s biography is an imaginative and scholarly tour de force. There are few biographies which can at once lay claim to major literary status; Dickens is one of them.