Getting to grips with the incredible life and work of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens: A Life

CLAIRE TOMALIN is one of the most accomplished biographers. She has written acclaimed lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Pepys, the latter of which won a Whitbread prize in 2002. Tackling the life of Charles Dickens has been quite a different proposition, though. The man was a whirlwind.

“It’s like writing five lives in one,” she says. “He was doing all these different things at the same time. ‘Meanwhile’ is the word you need more than any other — meanwhile, he’s writing a book. Meanwhile, he’s editing a magazine. Meanwhile, his wife is having another baby. Meanwhile, he’s quarrelling with his publishers. Meanwhile, he’s setting up some theatricals to raise some money for the orphaned children of a friend.”