A few years ago, I read all fifteen of Dickens' novels in chronological order. It was an absolute delight to have done so, as it revealed to me the depth and breadth of his talent that had only been hinted at by the occasional reading of his work in my younger days. But I hadn't read an overview of his life until now. Smiley wrote an accessible, informative, engaging, and smart look at the man and his work.
She places Dickens firmly as a pioneer of modernity - first as the novelist who changed the form from a document of country life to an examination of urbanity, from stories of upper classes to stories of all classes, and secondly as the original celebrity who had to figure out how to divide his public life from his private. He messed this up big time with his divorce from the mother of his ten children (in 16 years - that poor woman!). She even declares that Dickens was the first to perform violent acts of horror on stage during his late in life readings of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist. All this and insights into the construction and meaning of each of the novels. A short book, but a remarkable one.

This book has no footnotes. It's only 200 pages long. If you read it in bed and nod off, it won't kill you when it falls on your chest (unlike, say, Bleak House). It reads like an informal conversation with a very smart and well-read friend whose judgment you trust.

I was ripe for this biography after Masterpiece's Tales of Charles Dickens series. I loved watching Little Dorrit, but I felt I understood it better after reading Jane Smiley's analysis of the women in Dickens' life: his resentment of his mother--who thrust him into employment at the age of 12 to help support the family; his disgust at the beautiful young woman who obsessed him as a young man and then became a Flora Finching figure in middle age; his irritation with his wife--who seemed always to be pregnant with one of their ten children; even his ultimate disenchantment with the 18-year-old actress who was the proximate cause of his divorce.

I saw Amy Dorrit in a different light, as an idealized woman who wasn't cold and judgmental like Mrs. Clennam or unobtainable like Estella or ridiculous like Flora or emotionally dead like Lady Dedlock. No wonder Amy and Esther Summerson and Lucie Manette turn up so regularly: they are women as Dickens wished they could be, held in contrast to the real women he knew who always disappointed. (His male friends fared much better, although his sons did not.)

This book is an insightful rendering of a prolific and passionate genius. Smiley enriched my appreciation of him and made me want to return to his novels.

Ich finde es als Einstieg für eine Dickens Biografie ganz gut. Jedoch finde ich es fragwürdig, dass es (außer die Angaben zu Dickens eigenen Werken) keine Quellenangaben gibt, da die Autorin beispielsweise auch andere Dickens Biografen und/oder seine Zeitgenossen wie andere Schriftsteller zitiert. Das empfinde ich als Manko.

I have always been interested in Charles Dickens since I fell in love with his work of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. While I read his work A TALE OF TWO CITIES, I did not find it as interesting as the visitation and extreme changes in Ebenezer Scrooge. That notwithstanding I find him to be an interesting writer at the very least. I imagine, as we get older, that we become fonder of the older classics in our lives and try to grasp ahold of them. Jane Smiley brings Charles Dickens more to life than he had been in our past. She does go into some detail how he became very atuned to each and every character he created and in some small way each and every one of them became part of him.

I found this to be an extremely readable and insightful biography. Smiley does frequently refer to Peter Ackroyd’s massive biography of Dickens but do not make the mistake and think her biography is a shadow of Ackroyd.

Jane Smiley is a highly respected novelist herself and her biography of Dickens very often focusses itself through the eyes of a fellow novelist. Thus, the reader is granted a different set of eyes than the often wonderful but somewhat less creative and imaginative lens of an academic writer. Another of the strengths of this biography is how Smiley draws upon Jung and Freud to help explain the reasoning behind the development and presentation of many of Dickens’s characters.

I found Smiley’s commentary and analysis of Dickens later novels to be especially insightful and illuminating. From Dombey onwards, Smiley presents Dickens in a refreshingly interesting light. Another of the strengths of this book is how Smiley balances and comments upon the relationship that developed between Dickens and Ellen Ternan. Never preachy or excessively speculative, Smiley offers a tightly organized insight into their relationship.

This biography is written by an accomplished author. To read this book is to see Dickens’s life in a refreshingly new light. The length of this biography runs a mere 209 pages so do not expect the remarkable depth of an Ackroyd, Slater or Tomalin. What you can expect is a portal of insight and understanding of the novels of Charles Dickens.

Author Jane Smiley offers brevity and astute analysis in this biography of Charles Dickens from the Penguin Lives series. Its brevity (212 pages) will relieve apprehensive readers familiar with Dickens's hefty novels (DAVID COPPERFIELD runs over 800 pages). Her analysis is even more welcome. It pairs themes in his books with concurrent events in his life. What emerges is a conflicted man whose contradictions are not easily reconciled.

Smiley is critical of the lax usage of the adjective “Dickensian.” She argues that Dickens was constantly rethinking old themes and evolving throughout his long career. ”Dickens's works are often seen to be all of a piece — he did a certain sort of thing, or he employed a certain sort of technique, from the beginning to the end of his career. He was Dickensy. In fact, though, Dickens's novels, stories, plans and letters show that his ideas and his worldview were dynamic, not static....His novels propose different solutions to the dilemma of incompatibility while his analysis of the dilemma gets more and more complex and refined.” (p.204)

The most prominent theme of course is his concern with social ills. The transformation of England from a rural to an urban society magnified poverty, crime, lack of sanitation, housing shortages and class disparity. The workhouse in OLIVER TWIST and debtor's prison in DAVID COPPERFIELD are examples of society's disposal of those afflicted. Respectability is another theme. Dickens was secretive about his own unrespectable origins and the painful memories of his early life. His adulthood looks like a relentless pursuit of the ideal of Victorian respectability. He married young. Catherine Hogarth was 21 and Charles Dickens was 24 when they married in 1836. Their first child was born the following year and the family quickly expanded to ten children in close succession.

Dickens was a reformer, not a revolutionary. He believed in volunteerism and charitable organizations rather than a government managed social safety net. He was a tireless contributor and fundraiser for charitable causes. With Angela Burdett-Coutts, a wealthy banking heiress, he worked to improve Urania College, one of the “ragged schools” that existed to warehouse unwanted children. He was also an active supporter of a home for reformed prostitutes. In DAVID COPPERFIELD Dickens focuses his critique on individuals rather than institutions. The Micawbers end up in debtor's prison as much due to Mr. Micawber's spendthrift ways as his inability to find employment. The Victorian conception of marriage seems bad only because of the Murdstones's joyless self-righteousness and rigid regimentation. Salem House is a poor excuse for a school primarily because of Mr. Creakle. He pays the masters poorly, he fires Mr. Mill when learning of his mother's “disgraceful” poverty, he humiliates Traddles relentlessly, toadies to Steerforth, and disciplines the students with beatings.

Smiley points to the Crimean War (1853-1856) as a turning point in Dickens's optimism. LITTLE DORRIT (1857) was initially titled “Nobody's Fault,” and Smiley views it both as an attack on middle-class values and a rebuke of an incompetent, indifferent and irresponsible ruling class. ”Dickens's vision of Little Dorrit is not only an exceptionally dark view of human nature; it is specifically a dark view of British society and of the effects of British social and economic structure upon British citizens.” (p.125)

Dickens's attitude toward respectability was likewise ambivalent. The marital bliss promised by Victorian conventionality failed to materialize. Catherine had a loving, sedate temperament and was both compliant and fruitful. Dickens wanted more. Intellectual companionship? Artistic accomplishment? Smiley characterizes it as an oscillation between virginal and maternal figures. In DAVID COPPERFIELD the conflict is played out in the contrast between Dora and Agnes. In life, his ambivalence was played out in a succession of experiments in female relationships: An expanded family circle which included Catherine's younger sister Georgina who was only 17 when she died a year after his marriage to Catherine; a brief infatuation with 18 year old Christiana Weller, a gifted pianist, in 1844; a dabbling in hypnosis with a Madame de la Rue the following year, a meeting in 1855 with an old flame, Maria Beadnell Winter; and finally, his liaison with the 18 year old actress Ellen Ternan in 1857. The institution of marriage, at least in its Victorian form, was never suitable to Dickens's temperament. ”He expected absolute order and meticulous cleanliness, quiet when he was working, and boisterous fun, with many visitors when he was ready for it. He was, in short, something of a domestic tyrant, whose sensitivity to the needs of his wife (toward whom he still seems to have felt considerable affection at this point), and children (in whose lives he always interfered) was minimal.” (p.24) In true Victorian fashion, he repressed his dissatisfaction, at least in the beginning, and filled his time with long solitary walks, extensive travel, evenings out socializing, and of course his editing and writing.

As a combination of artist, agent and impressario, Dickens was ill-suited for Victorian conventionality. His flamboyant attire was criticized as déclassé. His search for interesting names took him through cemetaries. His curiosity led him through tenements and red-light districts. He had a sharp ear for mimicry and great dramatic talent, which he applied in public readings that elevated him from author to celebrity and forged an energizing collaborative connection with his audience more comparable to the performance of a stand-up comedian than an author on book tour. Friends urged him to desist from these performances on the grounds that they were undignified. Birth, temperament and talent condemned him to an outsider status, the very vantage point that honed his understanding of class differences and human nature.

Dickens was creatively active between 1833 when his first sketch, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” was published and his death in 1870 while he was working on the novel EDWIN DROOD. Smiley views his career as a bridge between the romanticism of Sir Walter Scott (one of Dickens's famorite authors) and later Victorian authors. It is easy to forget that he began his career four years before Victoria was crowned. Smiley notes that there was a big difference between the early and later Victorian years.

Inevitably, readers and critics are drawn to view Dickens's work in a historical context. Yet, Smiley highlights a modern sense of Dickens. He was outraged to learn that his works were being freely printed in America without payment of any royalty to him. Despite his success he always harbored a sense of financial insecurity. Through DAVID COPPERFIELD his observations of Parliament could have been written today: ”Night after night, I record predictions that never came to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify.” (p.606 of DAVID COPPERFIELD) The creepiness of characters like Uriah Heep continues to feed a psychological longing for memorable villains. The lively humor in Dickens's prose continues to entertain and delight readers today.

I came to this book familiar in detail only with DAVID COPPERFIELD, as obvious from the examples I have cited. Smiley covers the full spectrum of Dickens's work,making this a book with appeal to both the novice and the knowledgeable reader.

Several years ago, when I took a course entirely devoted to Dickens, I remember thinking that it would have been nice if he had died about 30 years sooner, just to spare me from any more of his writing. My opinion on this has changed, of course, but such are the feelings that his inexhaustible tome of works inspires in students.

At a little over 200 pages, Smiley’s biography of Dickens is shorter than all of Dickens’ novels, even the unfinished Edwin Drood. Dickens, who led such a prolific and public life, left plenty of fodder for biographers to work with, so Smiley should be commended for squishing and condensing the inimitable Dickens into a biographical postscript.

I appreciated that Smiley concentrated on the evolution of Dickens’ female characters and I enjoyed getting a sweeping overview of his novels. I thought she did a good job of balancing analysis, literary theory, facts, and some of the seedier, unsubstantiated parts of Dickens’ life, most notably, his relationship with Ellen Ternan.

I did think Smiley overused Ackroyd as a secondary source. I’m sure that the information she gleaned seemed small in comparison to the amount of information Ackroyd’s 1990 biography offers (it’s over 1000 pages), but her frequent references to Ackroyd made me wonder if what I was reading amounted to an abridgement of Ackroyd’s work.

Anyone who has ever read a Dickens biography comes away from it with mixed feelings. Much of Dickens’ actions in his public and private life seem contradictory, selfish, and misogynistic. At times he appears to be a loveable philanthropist and at other times obnoxious, melodramatic, and unbearably tyrannical. I was relieved to find that even his contemporaries often felt his writing was too “Dickensy.” However, despite my ambivalent feelings towards Dickens, I keep coming back to him again and again. Whether one finds him frustrating or fascinating, Dickens will not be ignored.

I've read several biographies of Dickens over the year. This one is my favorite. Jane Smiley is a novelist who takes a look at the life through the works. The idea behind this book and the series it is a part of, is essentially an "appreciation" of Dickens' works. Although the books covers the main biographical details of the life, what has been covered by other books, it looks individually at all the works. It is, in some respects, a critical study of Dickens, but more for the average Dickens reader.

This is a good book to refer back and forth to, whenever you happen to be reading Dickens, for some insights and understandings -- written in a very natural, easy prose. Coupled with Claire Tomalin's work, it presents a good "side by side" of the life and work.

I thought this book was both though-provoking and enjoyable. I liked the structural concept of the book as showing parallel between what was happening in Dickens's novels and in his life, though I thought she ran out of steam at the end. As a writer herself, Jane Smiley's observations about the novel as a form and about Dickens's books in particular, were rich and insightful. She makes an interesting and I thought persuasive case that, although Dickens writes often about the challenges and unfairness experienced by the "underclass," his ultimate goal was to achieve social order and that he was deathly afraid of unrest. She suggests that his social vision is "formed by the recognition that in the world around him there are few bonds of social responsibility or generous humanity linking class to class or individual to individual, and that the government speaks and acts only for a small portion of the citizens" - a theme which certainly has resonance today. On the subject of where social change must come from, she asserts that Dickens believed it was "not enough to seize power or to change where in society power lies. With power must come an inner sense of connection to others..." She notes, however, that "we should not interpret him as the sort of left liberal we know today -- he was racist, imperialist, sometimes anti-Semitic, a believe in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions."

This book is not just for those who have read many of Dickens' novels. While she makes many allusions to passages from the books, she generally does a good job of placing them in context for the reader. I hope and believe that most people who read this book will be compelled to reread, or enjoy for the first time, the works by this pivotal author.

Jane Smiley manages to gives us a "big view" of Dickens' huge contribution to literature, while also probing more personal incidents in his life. I felt like her analysis and viewpoint were greatly enhanced by her own experience as a novelist. She helps the reader understand the emotional and psychological changes that occur internally as a writer lives and breathes his vision into the pages of his creation. The writing can be cathartic, a sort of unburdening of the soul, perhaps even a psychological exercise in addressing latent trauma. But the work does not leave the creator unchanged.

Dickens' acting abilities were entirely intertwined with his writing, and his hugely successful readings combined his talents perfectly. One of his daughters noted that she observed her father, during a writing session, making weird faces in the mirror as he experimented with phrases and descriptions of characters and their emotions. His acting out enhanced his descriptive abilities.

I felt Smiley balanced the winsome vs. the tortured aspects of Dickens' complex nature quite well. We see his playfulness, warmth, joviality contrasting greatly with his deep discontent--- which sullied his domestic life.It did not cause him to be entirely unlikable, just human.

I enjoyed the references to the literary friendships that Dickens engaged in, with significant authors such as Wilkie Collins and Thackeray. He seemed not to get bogged down by critics or petty jealousy.

Dickens was one of the first to be an international celebrity, forging new inroads for authors in the post industrial world. His serial offerings in periodicals changed the way the public consumed stories. His dramatic readings were a sensation.

Yet, the success did not extend to his home life and he experienced the sorrow of divorce, disappointment with his children, and a cloaked affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter. This was such a contrast to the warm, domestic scenes he portrayed in his books. It marks the difference between what is envisioned and what is actually attained.

I plan to read more about Dickens, including _My Father As I Recall Him_, by his daughter Mamie Dickens, and his published letters, which have now been made available on Kindle. Dickens is endlessly fascinating, and knowing some of his life story helps one to understand how he projected bits of his acquaintances' quirks into his fictional characters. It's fascinating to unravel the threads that intertwine his private life with his fictional characters.Thank you, Jane Smiley, for this valuable contribution to my understanding of Dickens and his world.

In depth overview of Dickens as novelist. Consideration given to his personal life, his charitable works, his larger than life personality. Well researched, interesting read.

I very much enjoyed this brief biography of Charles Dickens (about 200 pages). It's in the Penguin series of bios (which encompasses a strange-ish mix of topics). Not only gives structure to my thinking about Dickens' work but also makes me eager to re-read some of the novels that I recall liking when I read them many years ago, for example Dombey and Son. Sweetly, much of Dickens' long fiction is available free for Kindle, so I've already started downloading. Smiley offers a good mix of basic biographical info gleaned from the more notable biographical sources (Ackroyd and friends), historical context, and commentary on the novels themselves, for readers who don't want to deal with thousands of pages. As a solid and thoughtful novelist herself, she writes with insider, writerly confidence about Dickens interior life and appears to be fair, if not non-partisan, when it comes to describing the controversies surrounding both Dickens' divorce from Catherine and his secret affair with Ellen Ternan.