Biography

Charles Dickens by Michael Slater

Item: Charles Dickens
Author: Grace Moore

by Grace Moore •

April 2010, no 320

Yale University Press, $64.95 hb, 712 pp

Biography

Charles Dickens by Michael Slater

by Grace Moore •

April 2010, no 320

Writing a matter of hours after Charles Dickens’s death on 9 June 1870, an obituarist for The Times of London remarked, ‘The story of his life is soon told’. The publication of Dickens’s friend John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens between 1871 and 1874 soon gave the lie to these words, revealing a far more complex and damaged Dickens than the reading public had ever suspected this novelist, journalist, actor, social reformer and bon viveur to be. Since the 1870s thousands of pages have been devoted to scrutinising the life of the self-styled ‘sparkler of Albion’, including G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: A critical study (1906), Edgar Johnson’s magisterial Charles Dickens: His tragedy and triumph (1952) and Claire Tomalin’s superbly readable account of Dickens’s infatuation with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, The Invisible Woman (1991).

Grace Moore

Grace Moore’s Dickens and Empire (Ashgate, 2004) was shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier’s Award for Literary Scholarship. She is the editor of Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2011) and the co-editor (with Andrew Maunder) of Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, as well as a number of articles on Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature. She is at present working on a guide to the Victorian novel (Continuum, 2012) and a book-length study of bushfires in nineteenth-century settler literature. She teaches at the University of Melbourne, Australia.