Charles Dickens: A Life

Para quem gosta de biografias, esta é uma das melhores. Certamente irei reler algumas vezes.

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Charles Dickens wrote so much and lived his life on such a scale that his most complete and definitive biographies (such as Peter Ackroyd's exuberant 1990 life study of the author) assume Dickensian proportions themselves. While this dynamic can be vastly entertaining, it can also make many of them quite intimidating for readers trying to find a simpler outline of the great novelist's life; Jane Smiley's brief 2003 biography for the Penguin Lives series sought to fill such a gap, but was judged inadequate and too chatty by many of its reviewers. Claire Tomalin, one of the best contemporary British biographers, has produced this book which is enormously readable and quite manageable in size, consisting of only about 400 pages of text narrative. This work should be seen by no means as any kind of standard or definitive biography (it is too brief for that), but is probably a much better introduction to Dickens's life for the common reader than Edgar Johnson's famous work from more than a half a century ago or Ackroyd's 1990 work (no matter how much fun Ackroyd's can be if you have the time and can find an old copy of it). It is also less invested, as other reviewers have noted, in providing full-scale readings of Dickens's novels and major novellas or short stories, though it does outline and evaluate them intelligently and provide crucial links between them and Dickens' life. Tomalin produced an account of Dickens' affair late in life with the actress Ellen Ternan, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN, many years ago, so is clearly well read in the relevant source materials from Dickens and his circle. Although she is quite clear in her belief that Dickens did consummate his affair with Ternan (which some other Dickens' biographers have disputed), she is to some extent more generous to Dickens himself than other biographers have been, who have produced a portrait of him late in his life (particularly after his break with his wife Catherine) as being obsessively paranoid, self-righteous and manic nearly to the degree of insanity. (This depiction has found perhaps its consummation in Dan Simmons' overwrought and exhausting gothic horror fantasy about Dickens' later years, DROOD.) But although Tomalin does not deny Dickens' cruelty towards his wife and his narcissism, and of the many missteps he takes with his friends and family and even his critical pieces in his journals, there's a strong sense throughout this biography of how much she strongly admires him, right to the end of his life. The book is marvelously readable and comes with some rarely seen (and helpfully annotated) images of Dickens and his family and his circle, as well as terrific illustrated maps of his and his family's homes in Rochester, central London and North London. I would recommend this highly to anyone who is first reading Dickens' novels and wants to get a full (if not fully scholarly) outline of his life and achievements.

Condidered best biography on Dickens. Read first 2 chapters and reads well. Now I've got to reread the novels. Thanks to Nick Hornby review in NY Times!

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