Enjoyable analysis of Dicken's life through the lens of his work and a summary of more traditional biographies. Mostly for someone who has read a lot of the primary Dickens novels (Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield).

A good, albeit brief, summary of Dickens's life and work. The brevity, however, certainly left me wanting more. Just trying to decide whether that means I'm ready to attack the opposite type of bio -- Ackroyd's 1000-page tome.

This book is 70% literary criticism and 30% biography. I think this is important to know before you decide to read. I love the format, especially since the author is a great novelist herself. Smiley’s insights into Dickens’ works and his process of creation, as well as her discussion of the very meaning of the novelistic form, is (imho) far more valuable than another telling of his life. Smiley seems to have recognized this, and relies heavily of Ackroyd’s 1000+ page biography to provide the details of Dickens’ life while focusing on his works.
Still, there is enough biography here that I don’t feel a strong need to read another biography. I think this part of the book could be called psychohistory: Smiley uses a lot of Freudian terms, while also pointing out that Freud was influenced by Dickens! I think she is saying that Dickens’ work in the theater, and his own management of his image, the secrets he kept about himself, is closely associated with his work as a novelist, all parts of his personality and his genius.

I think the editors did it a disservice with the subtitle “A Life”, which does not make the critical core of the book clear.

Easy bio to read. Smiley framed her narrative around his stories and what was occurring in his life the whole time. If you want a more expansive bio full of every detail in his life, maybe look for something else, perhaps Ackroyd's.

A PDQ essay about Dickens' works and life readable in one sitting. I liked many of Smiley's observations about the novel at this time in England ("had not yet become dominant") and the details of publishing. I also liked some things about Dickens - getting names for his characters from gravestones, his love of Arabian Nights as a child, his marriage, his constant relocating, his many contradictions. Best of all is Smiley's lit crit - a living room discussion. At the end, she provides a few pages of recommended reading, including her take on what order to read what novels of Dickens' "light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens's most characteristic and accessible work."

A celebrity before the days of celebrity, Charles Dickens was a genius and an enigma who created some of the most potent novels in history. Behind the scenes, Dickens was a man unlike any other, with strange beliefs, warring passions and an eclectic lifestyle. In this biography by famous author Jane Smiley, Dickens’ life and works are explored in great depth and with generous helpings of sympathy, interest and wonder. From his secrecy about his troubled childhood to his eventual marriage to a woman whom he would one day repudiate, Smiley gives us a profound insight into the inner workings of the man whose fame seemed to be ever increasing. She shares with her readers his rapturous enjoyment of his notoriety and reveals the ways Dickens sought to eradicate society’s social and political ills through his stories. She also sheds light on how he unintentionally captured the personalities and behaviors of both himself and his counterparts in his amazingly fluid and distinctive tales. Smiley reveals all this with a deep sense of understanding and intimate knowledge that mirrors the devotion of his many fans, and even the critics who panned him. Part biography, part literary critique, Charles Dickens: A Life is at once a fascinating study of a man who was ahead of his time and also, tragically, a product of it.

Though I haven’t read Dickens’ work extensively, I do consider him to be one of my favorite authors, and I’m constantly amazed at the unique and sensitive qualities of his writing. I am, in fact, so interested in Dickens and his work that I’m trying to undertake a project where I read all his published work incrementally throughout the new year. It's a vast undertaking, for most of Dickens’ books are very long, but I hope one day to be able to complete this journey through the works of an author whom I find amazing and inimitable. When I was approached to review this book, I did a happy little dance of joy and immediately said yes, for I could think of no better way to get close to this author than to read about his life and work in biographical form. This book was entrancing from the outset, and Smiley’s manipulation of her material was both expert and alluring. I learned so much about Dickens that I felt, as I closed the covers, as if I had gotten an intimate peek into the mind of a man who defies easy description.

As many readers of Dickens will attest, there is no one who writes a story in quite the way this man did. Many other authors manage to imitate him in their rich portrayal of character, but there is truly only one Dickens, and love him or hate him, this cannot be denied. One of the things that was most interesting about this book was discovering that each story he wrote had a good deal of autobiographical material threaded through it, and as Dickens matured as an author and his perceptions of the world changed, his characters also grew more evolved and multifaceted. Many of his characters were archetypes, and many of them were based on the very people he lived with, worked with or associated closely with. I found it interesting that Dickens seemed to have only two or three versions of the women in his tales, and these women were based on the limited and very prejudicial beliefs that he held. Most of his female characters were either based on his wife (who, in later years, he held little esteem for) or took on the virginal and unsullied role of those paramours that Dickens always kept out of public sight. It's stated rather clearly that it's only at the end of his life that Dickens truly began to understand women, and this also was reflected in his work.

Dickens was also very adept at making social statements and addressing pressing public concerns in his work, and used the platform of his novels to share his disgust and sadness at the failure of the system to adequately provide for the lower class. Much of his work has the hallmark of broaching topics of public sanitation, the workhouse, orphanages, and other systems where people fall through the cracks and are forgotten. Though these are topics he includes in his books, these aren’t the subjects of his books, and in his own way Dickens creates a pastiche of narrative, character and drama with an underlying and low level admonishment of the system that so many found themselves at the mercy of. Dickens sought to entertain but also to educate, and in this light, his work takes on a new meaning and portent that most modern readers remain unaware of. Not only was Dickens a very successful author, he was arguably the first celebrity to ever take the stage, with dramatic readings and recitations punctuating his literary work.

The one area where I have a bone to pick with Dickens is in his abysmal treatment of his wife. While it's true she wasn’t his first choice, as time went on and she made the gradual transition from paramour to maternal figure, Dickens seemed to gradually devalue her and make increasingly impractical demands of her. It seems he could only think of women in very limited ways, and her gradual transition from one type of woman to another drew his ire and ill-concealed hatred. It's also worth noting that Dickens’ life was marked by considerable restlessness and a desire for concealment and movement. The fact that he had scores of children and a wife who was more content to stay put was just another annoyance that he seemed to never get over. As an artist, Dickens was sublime, but as an everyday man, he was irascible and demanding, and I doubt I would have wanted to know him personally, though at times he was known to be generous, kind and exciting.

I had the time of my life with this book, getting to know both the very private and illustrious public sides of Dickens’ life. I would recommend this book to readers who are fans of his work or are just curious about the legendary artist who swept the country by storm and created the “domestic drama,” a type of novel that had never been attempted before. It was a pleasure to read this biography because, while it was clear that Smiley much admired and touted Dickens and his work, she was not blinded by his stardom and was able to paint the man behind the words with realism, honesty and impartiality. A very solid biography. Recommended.

I learned that Dickens was a dandy, short, and very energetic. He typically walked twenty to thirty miles every day and still found the strength to write a dozen novels, edit magazines, give readings to huge audiences, travel, beget ten children, and carry on a shady relationship with an actress nearly half his age. Smiley's life of Dickens is a very quick, very informative read that leaves you feeling you know Dickens the celebrity as well as many of his contemporary neighbors would have. Smiley is a novelist herself and has written extensively on the theory of the novel: at times in this book I got bogged down in her theorizing and Freudian interpretations of the affairs of Dickens' life. I guess I wasn't looking so much for an interpretation of Dickens' work and life as I was hoping for a civil introduction to the man. And for the most part, that's what Smiley delivers. She also suggests a short list of the novels that a Dickens neophyte should begin with: David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend.

rating 3:
i had to skim a lot because it contains plot details of each of Dickens work. But there are some details about his life, his marriage,divorce his affairs, his influence on his contemporaries which was new to me - i found those details interesting.

Might be useful to some one who has read all of his works.

Charles Dickens is famous for depicting the lower class to the middle and upper classes of England and eventually the world, an existence most would prefer to acknowledge. But few realize how driven Dickens was to produce social results that would put an end to the evil and devastating consequences of poverty and ill-treatment far too many poor people endured in that revolutionary time. Jane Smiley, a scholarly and best-selling author, presents the entire life of Charles Dickens in a way that enhances our admiration and respect for this prodigious author.

He is revered for the way he combined artistic vision with social action in a new world of capitalism rapidly expanding. Thus he presents new ideas: "care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications."

Smiley then proceeds to depict the familial and authorial characteristics of this man who penned novels, short stories, and plays, often in serial form. We learn how his style evolved as he developed an uncanny sense of what people responded to, a sort of early understanding of the power of advertising. By placing the humorous with the tragic, he forced readers to face social inequalities and the consequent suffering therein. Smiley sees his weakness in providing a connective understanding of this world rather than providing a collective solution that is more political in nature. We also realize something heretofore unknown, that it was Dickens' own background that he was forced to dig into and expose, with the revelation of past experiences in social context. It led him to greater awareness of the power of important individuals that often expressed itself in what were truly moments of weakness rather than strength.

Dickens believed that mental attitude was to prevail over whatever challenging and daunting experiences life throws one's way. When it came to family, however, Dickens was unable to apply this recognized philosophical truth. He had a relatively content relationship with his wife and multiple children yet at times was guilty of not only negligence but perhaps of infidelity, amply described in these pages. Smiley then takes us through the plot and characterizations of each novel, describing what worked and failed to work; we note how Dickens learned from his mistakes and lack of connection, always driven by the financial elements driven by his increasing or dwindling sales. His love of the theater is recorded, a fact few know about this creative writer, a love that was actually a preference that remained relatively unfulfilled except for some short-lived projects in that genre.

All in all, Jane Smiley has given the world a comprehensive, fascinating portrait of a writer who was known as England's first novelist and whose novels continue to be read and dramatized in movie and play form throughout the world. Excellent biography, Ms. Smiley!

I've read all of Dickens' novels and several biographies (Peter Ackroyd's is the best), so I wasn't expecting anything new here. Smiley is a fan of David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend; I'm more partial to Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers and Hard Times. She may not have closely read Barnaby Rudge...not that I'd blame her that much.

Es una biografía fácil de leer, cargada de anécdotas (aunque muchas ya sonarán a los fans de Dickens) y con mucha carga de interpretación de la vida y la obra de Dickens por parte de la autora.
Le doy sólo tres estrellas por varias razones. La primera es que peca mucho de extremismo para mi gusto. Al principio de su vida, Dickens parece poco menos que un santo varón, y la autora repite una y otra vez los tópicos sobre "el genio creativo" del autor victoriano y lo pinta poco menos que de semidiós. Sin embargo, una vez llegados al episodio del divorcio de Dickens y Catherine Hogarth (con la cual tuvo nada menos que 10 hijos), el escritor pasa a transformarse en poco menos que el Demonio encarnado. De repente no comprende a la gente, es excesivamente sensible, etc. Si bien la dicotomía de carácter de Dickens es bastante conocida (especialmente entre la esfera privada y la pública), me cuesta creer que todo sea tan blanco-negro como lo describe Smiley. Ya en las primeras páginas de la biografía la autora dice que "su objetivo no es poner de relieve las contradicciones de la figura de Dickens", algo que me parece básico en el género biográfico. Por otra parte, me ha parecido que en muchas ocasiones la autora ha atribuido a Dickens adjetivos o ideas algo desafortunados, por ejemplo, lo tilda de "proto-freudian", se acerca mucho a aseverar que Dickens se adelantó a Marx y, en un alarde de sinsentido, llama a Dickens "un teórico del capitalismo". Todas estas atribuciones ideológicas a Dickens me parecen desacertadas y además incurren en la noción romántica de que el secreto de la obra de un autor está en el propio autor, y no en el texto y el contexto de dicha obra. Si bien el autor es una parte clave para comprender los textos, supeditar toda su obra a lo que él vivió, como lo plantea Jane Smiley, me parece un poco descabellado.
Recomiendo este libro a quien no quiera leerse una biografía exhaustiva ni académica de la vida de Dickens, pero esté interesado en conocer algunas de las anécdotas relevantes de la vida del autor. El estilo es accesible y sencillo, y el libro se lee con bastante rapidez.

I really love to sink in to a deep, many-hundred-page biography about a fascinating person, but I don’t always have time to do so. Jane Smiley’s biography of Charles Dickens (a part of the Penguin Lives series) is the opposite of a deep biography: it’s a succinct but relevant overview of Dickens’ life by looking at the works he created and his correspondence with associates.

To be honest, now that I’ve learned even just 200 pages worth about the man, his personality, and his life, I’m not sure I want to delve deeper. This is a testament to Ms Smiley’s ability to focus on the most important aspects of the author’s life, for her volume satisfied many of my curiosities. It also managed to frustrate me because as I got to know this remarkable author I so admire for his writing, I found he was a rather unpleasant and unforgiving person to his family and friends.

That's not to say that Charles Dickens is portrayed as all "bad" in this book. In the past, I've read a children's biography of Charles Dickens that focused on his childhood difficulties, his later charity work, and the ways in which his novels promoted social change, all of which are fascinating in considering his impact on society. Ms Smiley likewise reviews these public influences of the author. Yet, Charles Dickens was obviously a complicated man, and learning about his more private life was not as inspiring.

In the future, I’d rather approach Charles Dickens simply through the novels he wrote.

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