Starred review from August 8, 2011
“veryone finds their own version of Charles Dickens ,” concludes award-winning British biographer Tomalin: Dickens the mesmerist, amateur thespian, political radical, protector of prostitutes, benefactor of orphans, restless walker—all emerge from the welter of information about the writer’s domestic arrangements, business dealings, childhood experiences, illnesses, and travels. Bolstered by citations from correspondence with and about Dickens, Tomalin’s portrait brings shadows and depth to the great Victorian novelist’s complex personality. Tomalin (Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self) displays her deep scholarship in reviewing, for instance, the debate about Dickens’s relations with Nelly Ternan, concluding that the balance of evidence is that they were lovers. She also highlights the contrasts between his charitable actions toward strangers and his “casting off” of several relatives from father to brothers to sons, who kept importuning him for money: “Once Dickens had drawn a line he was pitiless.” By the end of this biography, readers unfamiliar with Dickens will come away with a new understanding of his driven personality and his impact on literature and 19th-century political and social issues. Tomalin provides her usual rich, penetrating portrait; one can say of her book what she says of Dickens’s picture of 19th -century England: it’s “crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation.” Illus.; maps.
Starred review from September 1, 2011
Like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an overachiever of genius, and his life was as eventful, dramatic and character-filled as any of his novels. This rich new biography brilliantly captures his world.
Acclaimed biographer Tomalin (Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, 2007, etc.) has always hunted big literary game (Hardy, Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, etc.), and here she goes after one of the biggest and most complex. Dickens once told a visiting Dostoevsky that his heroes and villains came from the two people inside him: "one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite." However, there were many more dimensions to Dickens' character. Besides being a tireless writer of long, complicated novels and hundreds of articles, an editor of a succession of magazines and a frustrated actor whose public readings became standing-room-only events, he was ebullient, charming, radical, instinctively sympathetic to the poor, generous to friends but unforgiving once you got on his bad side. At home, he was a domineering husband to his long-suffering wife and a distant father to his ten children. Dickens certainly would have appreciated Tomalin's keen eye for scene, character and narrative pace. Ever the deft critic, she notes how the characters in Martin Chuzzlewit are "set up like toys programmed to run on course," and that Hard Times "fails to take note of its own message that people must be amused." Having written previously on Dickens' disastrous late-life affair (The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, 1991), Tomalin also displays considerable detective work to bolster the possibility that Dickens and his other woman had a secret child who died in infancy.
Superbly organized, comprehensive and engrossing from start to finish—a strong contender for biography of the year.
(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
May 1, 2011
Tomalin having won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Whitbread Biography Award, among others, I don't think we'll have much quarrel with her life of Charles Dickens. Tomalin aims to show us that the perspicacious creator of Tiny Tim was a genius, yes, but also a stormy type whose obsessions drove him from family and friends. Essential if you've got literary readers.
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 15, 2011
Tomalin's book competes with Michael Slater's authoritative, scholarly Charles Dickens (2009) in the run-up to Dickens' bicentenary in 2012. Her lively narrative of the familiar story, closely following the chronology of Dickens' letters, offers no new material and incorporates many pages from her previous work on Dickens' secret young mistress, Ellen Ternan, who broke up his marriage to Catherine Hogarth (mother of his 10 children) and bore him a child who died in infancy. Dickens' grim childhood experience of working in a shoe-blacking factory and spending humiliating time with his father in debtors' prison gave him a lifelong compassion for victims. Tomalin shows how the progressive crusader helped reform schools, child labor, slum housing, public health, law courts, prisons, parliament, and international copyright, all the while opposing American slavery, capital punishment, and the Crimean War. Her analyses of the novels, which are irradiated with anger and dark humor, are brief and perceptive. Dickens appears as a man of vivacity and wit, of inexhaustible energy and demonic productivity, whose strength of will became the agent of his own destruction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
September 24, 2012
Tomalin’s sprawling biography of one of history’s most revered literary figures—with its dizzying cast of characters and mixture of literary criticism, detailed historical record keeping, psychological insight, and human drama—would present a challenge to any audiobook narrator. Thankfully Alex Jennings is more than up to the task, successfully rendering the complicated inner struggles that shaped the temperament and life of Charles Dickens. Jennings also provides spot-on dialects and accents, particularly in sections of the book that detail Dickens’s travels to the United States and dealings with his American contemporaries. Keeping pace with this audio edition requires active listening, but Jennings’s narration is more than rewarding. A Penguin hardcover.
Starred review from September 1, 2011
Like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an overachiever of genius, and his life was as eventful, dramatic and character-filled as any of his novels. This rich new biography brilliantly captures his world.
Acclaimed biographer Tomalin (Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, 2007, etc.) has always hunted big literary game (Hardy, Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, etc.), and here she goes after one of the biggest and most complex. Dickens once told a visiting Dostoevsky that his heroes and villains came from the two people inside him: "one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite." However, there were many more dimensions to Dickens' character. Besides being a tireless writer of long, complicated novels and hundreds of articles, an editor of a succession of magazines and a frustrated actor whose public readings became standing-room-only events, he was ebullient, charming, radical, instinctively sympathetic to the poor, generous to friends but unforgiving once you got on his bad side. At home, he was a domineering husband to his long-suffering wife and a distant father to his ten children. Dickens certainly would have appreciated Tomalin's keen eye for scene, character and narrative pace. Ever the deft critic, she notes how the characters in Martin Chuzzlewit are "set up like toys programmed to run on course," and that Hard Times "fails to take note of its own message that people must be amused." Having written previously on Dickens' disastrous late-life affair (The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, 1991), Tomalin also displays considerable detective work to bolster the possibility that Dickens and his other woman had a secret child who died in infancy.
Superbly organized, comprehensive and engrossing from start to finish--a strong contender for biography of the year.
(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
October 15, 2011
Tomalin (Thomas Hardy) offers what is effectively the bicentennial biography of Dickens. She examines all aspects of her subject's life and career, with an emphasis on his personality's many contradictions: he was kind and cruel, charitable and pitiless, gregarious and intensely private. Dickens's friendships, as Tomalin illuminates, were numerous and lifelong. His close friends, such as his first biographer, John Forster, loved and honored him. But in family relationships, especially with his wife and many children, he was often cold and unfeeling. Tomalin investigates and speculates on Dickens's relationship with Nelly Ternan, providing information beyond what is in her prize-winning The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1992). She praises Dickens's many accomplishments and the sterling qualities that endeared him to so many friends and readers, while also delineating his dark side and how it cast a shadow over his later years. He died at age 58. VERDICT Michael Slater's recent biography examines Dickens's literary works more deeply; Tomalin's focus is the writer himself. While it neither offers much in the way of new insights nor replaces classic studies of Dickens, Tomalin's entertaining book deserves to be the go-to popular biography for readers new to Boz and his works. (Index not seen.)--Morris A. Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology Lib., CUNY
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.