His bride, the former Catherine Hogarth, was, in Tomalin's words, 'a nicely brought-up and uncomplicated young woman,' whose chief appeal for Dickens seems to have been her willingness to let him have his own way in everything. Not long after that, Dickens made what he came to regard as the biggest mistake of his life by marrying more or less on the rebound. Micawber in 'David Copperfield') forced the family to move countless times and, in the defining trauma of Charles' childhood, the 12-year-old boy - a clever, industrious student - was sent off to work in a blacking factory for over a year.Įventually Dickens did get an education, and while he attempted to establish himself as a journalist and author, he fell in love with a pretty, empty-headed, flirtatious young woman who ended up breaking his heart when her parents deemed him too financially marginal for their daughter. John Dickens appears to have enjoyed some influential sponsors and he certainly cherished the impression that he was entitled to a lifestyle beyond his means. When Dickens' daughter Katey was in her 80s, she asked a friend to transcribe her memories of her parents, hoping to correct the popular image of her father as 'a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch.' (It should be said that there were times when Dickens, an enthusiastic entertainer, was very much that gentleman.) 'He was not a good man,' Katey said, 'but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful!' By the time you get to the end of Tomalin's 'Charles Dickens: A Life,' when this statement is quoted, Katey's switchbacking sentence seems right on the nose.īorn to a Naval Pay Office clerk who married the daughter of a colleague, Dickens was only one generation away from the servant class Tomalin finds reason to believe that his father's biological father was the master of the house where his mother worked as a lady's maid.

'The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters,' writes Claire Tomalin in her new biography of the author, but the portrait she paints is of a man who, to his sorrow, did not always know himself. He was admired by literary grandees and adored by the masses, who famously turned up on American docks to ask the passengers on arriving ships for news of the next serialized installment of 'The Old Curiosity Shop.' Dostoevsky was honored to meet him while visiting Britain and ordinary people thronged to see his dramatic readings of scenes from his books.

No writer better mastered the novel's delicate calculus of art and entertainment than Charles Dickens.

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