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Revision as of 12:18, 8 January 2012
, 12:18, 8 January 2012no edit summary
With publishers falling over each other in an effort to outdo each other in celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth, it was perhaps inevitable that we should see a reappearance of what has become the modern standard life, by Peter Ackroyd. The 1200-page original was first published in 1990, while this 600-page abridged edition surfaced in 1994, and now makes another timely appearance.
Ackroyd tells the story of Dickens very thoroughly from his birth in Portsmouth in 1812. He sets the writer against his contemporary background, and the forces of early nineteenth-century England that made him very much a spokesman for the people of his time in his writings, a champion of the underdog – a boy who grew up in virtual poverty with an improvident father, becoming a young man who not only saw but experienced at first hand the hard times which were faced by most of the population in the early Victorian era. We see Dickens the son, the husband and the father as well as the prolific and celebrated author, although Ackroyd has less to say than others – notably [[Dickens by Claire Tomalin |Claire Tomalin]] – on his shortcomings as a family man and the often deeply unpleasant treatment of his wife and less favoured children. As a biographer Ackroyd is less critical of the man, and I would sense from this, just as interested in the London in which he lived, moved and more or else became a part, as in the personality himself.
He does nevertheless give full attention to Dickens’ writings, as well as the invincible power which drove a prematurely aged man on to work to the very end, partly as a means of earning a living and ensure he did not fall into the debts which often overpowered his father, perhaps partly as a distraction from the unhappiness of his marriage. A particularly illuminating moment comes in 1860, about the time Dickens began to write Great Expectations. He had more or less separated from his wife, sold one house to move into another, and with the aid of some members of his family, proceeded to make a huge bonfire of his past correspondence, including letters from fellow writers Carlyle, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Posterity, alas, is much the poorer. It was, says Ackroyd, as if in his new life there was “almost some kind of hatred of the past”.
