To start off my Dickens discovery I read this fabulous biography of Charles Dickens, written by one of my favourite biographers Claire Tomalin. You can see my review of her book about Samuel Pepys here. Tomalin had already covered Dickens in her previous book The Invisible Woman, a biography of Dickens’ mistress Ellen Ternan, which is being made into a film as we speak. So she covers this subject heavily in this book. In Charles Dickens: A Life, Tomalin does a tremendous job. Not only does she cover his family background and personal life but also includes helpful summaries of all his writing and draws comparisons between events in his life and his writing. The ties between Dickens’ life and writing bind the book together perfectly. She writes sympathetically of his sufferings during childhood, sent out to work at a very young age with big gaps in his education, his father being sent to debtors prison, moving continuously from house to house. She brings the reader back to these early years throughout the book, so that we can see the influence these events had on Dickens in later life. We also see how he keeps his early life a secret […]