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Charles Dickens |  | Author: Michael Slater
Publisher: Yale University Press
List Price: $35.00
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Seller: SecondStoryBooks
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 2568
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 720
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 2
ISBN: 0300112076
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780300112078
ASIN: 0300112076
Publication Date: November 10, 2009 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing on a lifetime’s study of this prodigiously brilliant figure, Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But the core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author, covering not only his big novels but also his phenomenal output of other writing--letters, journalism, shorter fiction, plays, verses, essays, writings for children, travel books, speeches, and scripts for his public readings, and the relationships among them. Slater’s account, rooted in deep research but written with affection, clarity, and economy, illuminates the context of each of the great novels while locating the life of the author within the imagination that created them. It highlights Dickens’ boundless energy, his passion for order and fascination with disorder, his organizational genius, his deep concern for the poor and outrage at indifference towards them, his susceptibility towards young women, his love of Christmas and fairy tales, and his hatred of tyranny. Richly and precisely illustrated with many rare images, this masterly work on the complete Dickens, man and writer, becomes the indispensable guide and companion to one of the greatest novelists in the language.
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| Customer Reviews:
What Dickens Hath Wrote November 10, 2009
Mark R. Brewer (Pitman, NJ USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
CHARLES DICKENS by Michael Slater is an excellent biography of the great writer. Slater is clearly an expert on the writings of Dickens--from the most famous novels and Christmas tales to the most obscure articles and short stories--Slater knows it all. One gets a real sense of how Dickens wrote--how scenes and characters seemed to swirl about him. The book is extremely well written and an engrossing read.
But Mr. Slater falls short in two areas. First, though he is the foremost expert on Dickens' writings, he offers no critique of them. Which are the greatest? Which are the weakest? And why? Dickens himself felt that Martin Chuzzlewit was the greatest of his novels at the time it was written, surpassing Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Pickwick Papers. But Mr. Slater has no comment on this claim. Indeed, Slater does not critique Dickens' writings at all. One wants to hear what the expert thinks. Second, Slater is so focused on the writings that he often loses sight of the man. What is the goal of a biography if not to acquaint us with the person? We get glimpses of Dickens in Slater's book, but the man is often obscured by his work. This is much more a book of what Dickens did than of who Dickens was.
Peter Ackroyd's 1991 DICKENS remains, to me, the Dickens biography for our time. After reading Ackroyd's magnificent biography, I felt as though I'd met Dickens himself. What greater compliment can one give a biographer?
a fascinating study November 6, 2009
Paul Grainger (Lincoln, UK)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Any general reader in search of a single volume covering the life and work of Charles Dickens needs to look no further than this publication. Michael Slater has written a grandiose account that considers the author from several different perspectives. Both his public and his private personae are examined in detail, revealing his social consciousness as well as things that irritated him such as female emancipation. Slater goes on to describe the interaction that provided the genesis for Dickens's work before focusing in a comprehensive manner on its evolution. The stories, essays and sketches are examined in the context of their influence on the more substantial works, the novels. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined in Writing is an intelligent portrait of a man in his element; affable yet businesslike, energetic, considerate, unbelievably imaginative and, most of all, obsessively dedicated to the profession of writing.
DICKENS WITHOUT COLOR OR ENERGY November 4, 2009
ZYBYSKO (AUSTIN TX)
4 out of 17 found this review helpful
CHARLES DICKENS, by MICHAEL SLATER, Reviewed and Skewered by Zybysko.
One must be fair to a work of great depth by a true expert immersed in his subject, but at the same time, that depth and expertise mandates meeting high standards. On that basis, this is an excruciatingly confusing, lifeless and pedestrian plod through the vividly colorful life of the one of the greatest novelists in the English language. Dickens, a great stylist and a stupendous creator of immortal characters is here reduced to a sad sack, immersed in endless petty disputes with publishers and plagiarists, afflicted by a terrible marriage, a disappointing flock of children, hangers-on, and the class distinctions of early and mid Victorian England. Perhaps the greatest failure of this enormous book is the author's entirely incorrect assumption of thorough familiarity with the theme and plot of the novels, and the distressing absence of any literary criticism of the works. This is an amazing defect given the huge volume of Dickensian studies over more than a century. t
To give a simple comparison, the introductions to the Penguin paperback Dickens editions are almost universally elegant in both style and trenchant substance. There can be no doubt that the author is a real expert on Dickens life and work, which compounds the mystery of his inability to convey the two essentials of any biography of any very well-known serious novelist, which are how coherent plot and the characterization of major and minor characters are handled, or mishandled, to explain why any given work largely succeeds or fails.
The two major and correct criticisms of Charles Dickens' novels are his maudlin and excessive sentimentality and long detours from a clean plot line. The latter is explained by the peculiar method of publication in serial parts in cheap editions, in an era when hardbound books were available only to the very wealthy and through nonpublic and fee based lending libraries, and by stuffing irrelevancies into an otherwise connected narrative. By way of fair comparison the recent short pop volume by Norrie Epstein is not presented as either scholarly or complete, nor as p biography or literary criticism, yet succeeds as both, in a clear and interesting way. Her wonderful explanation of the four Pickwickians, whose life is a child's dream of snacking, odd encounters with the opposite gender, and interesting travels, just one long school vacation, and her excellent survey of the deep black terrifying midnights of oppressed children, ill fated Poor Smike, Tom the street sweeper, and Little Nell, the cruelest
baby sufferings of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and the high comedy of minor characters like Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Mr Pecksniff, Captain Cuttle, Mrs Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, Mr Mantalini, and Wilkins McCawber are clearly outlined in such a way as to whet the reader's wish to read the novels in which they appear. Mr Slater is a great Dickens expert, yet seems to assume scholarly familiarity and good recall of the plots and characters of all the Dickens major novels, as he dispenses with any handholds for those new to the wonders of a novelist who wrote the bulk of his important long fiction about 150 years ago, yet seems as fresh today as the day the paperback serial hit the London streets. This is a fatal error that is not balanced by any analysis of style . Instead we buy pages on end devoted to minute details of day to day and year to year non-events, and the dreary business of writing and publishing. This is a common failing of all sorts of biographies today, where the mere accumulation , molecule by molecule, of every event, without any filtration of the perhaps meaningful from the utterly meaningless. One of the main virtues of human memory is our ability to forget, and even to willfully mistake or inaccurately recall, the infinite mass of detail of any life. Nor are these glaring defects excused by the economics of justifying a hefty retail sales price per book by sheer number of pages, rather than putting the whole elephant on the stove and boiling down and condensing the hidden flavors by reduction , not by putting more insipid dishwater into the pot. The last fair question is why this book is needed, given the six more or less modern long form Dickens biographies, each of which deals in a modern way with the Ellen Ternan question, the odd and repellent relation of Dickens to very young women in his wife's family, and to his probably manic-depressive, semi-educated, money haunted, and quarrelsome nature. How one man could father so many children, give hundreds of stage performances on rock star type concert tours, edit a magazine, do other journalism, keep two novels in process at once, engage in far travels, watch his money, battle copyright piracy, and still produce at a high level very long and complicated fiction for a long time is a mystery yet unexplained. The impact of the "blacking warehouse" incident, which was actually short and not really extraordinarily punishing, was already explored at length 100 years ago. The explanation is the commonplace of psychology, that events are not remembered or weighted according to actual significance, but reaction of younger and stupider personalities, unable at the time go get perspective, and then freezing the event as first misperceived. This author raises no new questions nor supplies any new answers not already in the canon. As more trenchant critics long ago brilliantly observed, Dickens is not of mere historical interest, nor a boringly long, often discursive manipulator of his readers emotions, but a supreme stylist, a past master of immediate depiction of his characters dress, manner of speech, open and secret intentions, reaction to life events, and often, the weather itself. Martin Amis hit the very center of the bulls-eye with his critique of the current sad state of the English and American novel, which is airless, all internalized, and "lacks weather". This book, in those terms, "lacks weather". First get the Norrie Epstein volume and read the introductions to Pickwick, Bleak House, and Copperfield in the Penguins. Then the other long standard bios will do, as this does not. Once again a great expert has just published his notes, not created by synthesis and analysis, a valuable addition to knowledge. Slater is not much of a stylist and utilizes the current Mid Atlantic choice of wording, thereby leaching out some color that would have given the bite of strong old British Tea to a work. How peculiar that the London of today, populated by large numbers of persons of Pakistani, Commonwealth Africa and Caribbean origins, not its poor Midlands and Irish immigrants and Native Cockneys of 100 years ago, now descends to writes its books in bland Mid-Atlantic diction. When will these writers learn how to construct a paragraph with a topic sentence as a road map for the reader, and then meander down the path and on the detour back to the highway to fill out that theme? (Probably never, due to lazy thinking and the ever present immersion in mere bulk of detail piled on detail.) Lastly much of the blame must fall on the editors who failed here, as they so often do, to just cut, and to re-shape, and force deeper and more meaningful material out of a nonfiction author, who is immersed in minutiae and cannot see, nor convey "the weather". Are they simply afraid of authors? And a flosk in der pisk if not a poche in der tuches to the academic friends who provide jacket endorsements, high praise where such is not deserved, a kind of Gresham's Law of nonfiction publishing today. ZYBYSKO NOV 2 09
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