Charles Dickens

I've read about half the books in the Penguin series and I'd rate this at the top (other favorites are the bios of Leonardo da Vinci and James Joyce). It's only 207 pages long but there is no sense that anything important was left out. I hadn't realized that Dickens was such an astounding character--Ms. Smiley brings him to life with precise detail, through knowledge, and insights that DESERVE to be called insights. She's obviously an excellent writer herself and every page radiates her professionalism.

For those who want to spend two weeks leaning about Dickens, Peter Ackroyd's book is really excellent. However if you do not have that kind of time, this work by Jane Smiley is excellent. Whoever marries the authors to the subjects should be commended. Jane Smiley is a best-selling author. Who better to write on the foremost novelist during the high noon of the novel as a medium?This book provided an excellent overview not only of the life of Dickens, which can be summed up as "poor boy makes good," but also the novels themselves. I do not agree with some of Jane Smiley's criticism ("Pickwick Papers" is a good read, despite what she says), but by and large she is on target with a great deal of what she has to say.

Smiley's lively biographical coverage of Charles Dickens paints a portrait of a convivial, astute and energetic writer who led an action-packed life as a prolific writer and family man. Blending with this highly recommended portrait of the man is a survey of his major works and narrative style, providing a fresh look at the man and his achievements.

This is one of the volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Also, each provides a concise but insightful examination of the subject's life and career. As Smiley explains in her Preface, "The literary sensibility of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history." Quite true. Smiley goes on to suggest that, over time, Dickens' readers have become further and further removed from the details of his life. Nonetheless, while they continue to read any of fifteen novels (ten of which exceed 800 pages in length) as well as stories, articles, travel pieces, essays, letters, etc., they remain "in his presence, experiencing his process of thought and imagination as it precipitates inchoate idea to particular word." It is this "miracle of literature" which Smiley finds especially interesting as she approaches Dickens in this volume with "a friendly desire to get to know him and to achieve what Victorians might have termed `a growing intimacy.'" In my opinion, Smiley's approach is the eminently correct one to take. Here are three brief excerpts from the narrative which suggest the eloquence and precision of Smiley's analysis:"Along with A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist is probably the best known of Dickens's narratives, certainly because, like many of Dickens's own works and like many other nineteenth century novels, it was reworked for the stage, where the simple and vivid story of the workhouse child who falls among thieves and then is rescued and restored to his wealthy grandfather made a dramatic and cohesive play. The arc of the narrative is fairy tale-like, but the details of Oliver's companions and surroundings come directly from Dickens's immediate world.""The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens's most interesting novel in terms of the extremes of reactions it elicits in readers. Legendarily popular and lucrative in its day, it is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians. Oscar Wilde remarked, `One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Nell without laughing.' and others have been at least as critical.""Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel -- to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way." This book will be invaluable to those who have already read several of Dickens' works wish to re-visit them within the context of his life. Others who are unfamil