CHARLES DICKENS

Biographies of Charles Dickens are said to number around ninety, a count that creeps steadily upward with the approach of next year's bicentennial of the great man's birth. Claire Tomalin's splendid, far from superfluousCharles Dickens: A Life is the most recent entry into the field. This fine biographer has already contributed much to the picture we have of the vexed character of the world's most famous novelist in The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Since that book was published in 1990, the author's cruel treatment of his wife and the question of his relationship with the young actress have replaced the blacking factory as the topic of paramount interest when the subject of his life comes up. But if that sorry business is the pivot around which this biography also turns, it is only because the anger, the yearning, and the ferocious will that fueled the dark half of Dickens's contradictory nature were so shockingly realized in it. 

The outline of Dickens's life is well known: a childhood blighted by his parents' improvidence and bizarre indifference; an adulthood of unremitting literary and theatrical enterprise bringing international celebrity; indefatigable philanthropic endeavor; fathering ten children on a submissive wife, then banishing and separating her from those children; his affair; and his death at fifty-eight. Tomalin sets it all before us in expansive detail, exposing what she sees as the central truth of Dickens's life. It is that, for much of it, he felt ensnared in the all-encompassing trap of "having been born with the wrong parents, supplied with the wrong brothers, married to the wrong wife, father of the wrong sons, with the result that he was surrounded by dependents."