Making telling use of Dickens's notes to self ("Jo. In the earlier books, Dickens wrote out of brilliant improvisation (Slater is riveting on the evolution of Oliver Twist out of a piece that was essentially a Boz sketch), but from Dombey and Son on, they were meticulously planned. would never have served me as it has but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention." He assembles a million accumulated details, minutely examining the genesis of each work and demonstrating the thing on which the writer himself so passionately insisted: "My own invention or imagination, such as it is. ![]() Michael Slater, a seasoned Dickens hand, is altogether more measured, but no whit less exciting. Recent biographies have each approached their task from a different angle, the most striking, by Peter Ackroyd, being Dickensian itself. No wonder he observed, when planning the alterations to his new house on Tavistock Square, that "a Cold Shower of the best quality, always charged to an unlimited extent, has become a necessary of life to me."Ī global, all-inclusive biography of such a man is an impossibility. On holiday in Italy, he climbed up Vesuvius in full eruption, then witnessed a public execution, getting as close as possible to the severed head. He walked 10, 12, 15 miles a day, communing with his imagination, but also seeking out the hidden truths of his society, throwing himself into the darkest recesses of human life. He flung himself into social life – dancing, horse-riding, performing conjuring tricks, and putting on shows for his family and friends. From the beginning, he took up cudgels on behalf of the socially disadvantaged. Nor did he confine himself to literature. He started Oliver Twist halfway through writing The Pickwick Papers, and halfway through writing Twist he began Nicholas Nickleby, shooting off a constant volley of journalistic fireworks the while. Even Dickens was astonished at it: "How strange it is," he said, "to be never at rest!" There are times in Michael Slater's indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject's expenditure of energy. ![]() Of the writer's external life, there is almost an embarrassment of riches. The mystery of Charles Dickens is quite as profound as that of William Shakespeare, but it is essentially the mystery of art itself and of its roots in the deepest layers of experience and personality. It is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should come out." ![]() Dickens might well have wished it otherwise: speaking of his great predecessor, he wrote to a correspondent: "It is a great comfort, to my way of thinking, that so little is known about the poet. Of Shakespeare, we know next to nothing of Dickens we know next to everything. In terms of what we know about them, the contrast between our two greatest men of letters, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, could scarcely be sharper.
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