Customer Reviews

Charles Dickens (Penguin Lives)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For those who want to spend two weeks leaning about Dickens, Peter Ackroyd's book is really excellent. However if you do not have that kind of time, this work by Jane Smiley is excellent. Whoever marries the authors to the subjects should be commended. Jane Smiley is a best-selling author. Who better to write on the foremost novelist during the high noon of the novel as a medium?

This book provided an excellent overview not only of the life of Dickens, which can be summed up as "poor boy makes good," but also the novels themselves. I do not agree with some of Jane Smiley's criticism ("Pickwick Papers" is a good read, despite what she says), but by and large she is on target with a great deal of what she has to say.

Jane Smiley is a leading contemporary novelist whose insight into the difficult arcane world of writing for profit is helpful in reviewing our greatest English novelist. As self-described Charles Dickens was the "inimitable." Dickens draws a broad stoke as his thousands of characters lie, cheat,[borrow], love, live and [end life] on the canvas of humanity.
As one who has read all the standard biographies of the 19th behemoth of literature that was Dickens I can highly recommend this excellent book.
Smiley provides a sketch of Dickens life including warts and all. Her dissection of the affair the middle aged author engaged in with actress Ellen Ternan was well done in looking at what may have motivated Dickens to break with his wife Catherine and thumb his nose at Victorian respectability.
Dickens is a mixture of good and bad with the humanity and essential goodness of the man on display.
This little book in the excellent Penguin Viking Biography series could be well used in an introductory course on Dickens, the nineteenth century English novel or on the art of literary biography.
Smiley made me smile and laugh as I explored the mind of a genius with this gifted biographer. It is the best biography I have so far read in this series.

This lively book provides an overview of the literary achievements and personal life of Charles Dickens. For those Amazon.com customers who, like me, don't know how to approach this writer's vast achievements, I provide this advice from Smiley, who is an intelligent, charming, and enthusiastic biographer: "But a newcomer to Dickens can do no better than to begin with a novel-my suggestions are David Copperfield, to be followed by Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, and Our Mutual Friend, in that order, light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens's most characteristic and accessible work." Bravo for Jane and her fun and concise treatment of an enormous subject!

There's no doubt that Jane Smiley has read everything Dickens has written. Her point in writing this short biography is to do a critical analysis of Dickens's major works, adding personal information where appropriate. She also emphasizes the idea that Dickens was the first modern celebrity. When he decides to divorce his wife, with whom he'd had ten children, his readers are outraged. When he goes on a reading tour, people pack the various venues as if he were a modern rock star. We see him in action, acting out the murder scene in OLIVER TWIST with such passion that Smiley arrives at the conclusion that this probably killed him.
Smiley's professorial tone and syntax is a bit off-putting. Also, when she finally gets around to Dickens's affair with actress Ellen Ternan, she claims, due to Dickens's secretive nature, there's not much to tell. Was he a kind old uncle, offering a struggling actress his support, or was it true, as his daughter seemed to think, that they had children together? It's fun to try to match Dickens's fictional characters with real life persons. Was Estella in GREAT EXPECTATIONS Ellen Ternan, or was she Maria Beadnell, with whom he had an unrequited four-year relationship before he got married?
I would have liked to have seen some pictures of his children, all of whom seemed to be ne'er-do-wells, except for his son, Henry. DICKENS, the 1990 biography by Peter Ackroyd, seems to be a good bet if you want more about his social life. One result of reading the book was that I ran right out and bought OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, the last complete novel he wrote, which Smiley claims is a near-perfect novel.

I've read about half the books in the Penguin series and I'd rate this at the top (other favorites are the bios of Leonardo da Vinci and James Joyce). It's only 207 pages long but there is no sense that anything important was left out. I hadn't realized that Dickens was such an astounding character--Ms. Smiley brings him to life with precise detail, through knowledge, and insights that DESERVE to be called insights. She's obviously an excellent writer herself and every page radiates her professionalism.

This is the first book in the "Penguin Lives" series of books that I have read. I chose it because I am a huge fan of Charles Dickens and because I've enjoyed a number of Jane Smiley's novels. Unfortunately, I have to admit to being a bit disappointed.

The basics are all here--his life, his books and his death. But it's all rather dry. It reads like a Masters student's thesis as opposed to a book for popular consumption. Plus, there's very little actual biography here. It's very heavy on some rather uninsightful analysis of Dickens' novels which isn't helpful in a book that's only some 200 pages to begin with. Certainly, it's not useful for someone who knows very little about Dickens and might have read only a little by him.

This book would have been better targeted at a reader who is unfamiliar with Dickens at all. More lively stories about the man himself might actually end up drawing new readers to this fabulous author. What is needed here is a vivid picture of a man; instead we get a rather bland portrait and literary commentary. This book may be brief but it reads longer than a number of more ambitious biographies. I hope other biographies in this series are better done than this.

This is one of the volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Also, each provides a concise but insightful examination of the subject's life and career. As Smiley explains in her Preface, "The literary sensibility of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history." Quite true. Smiley goes on to suggest that, over time, Dickens' readers have become further and further removed from the details of his life. Nonetheless, while they continue to read any of fifteen novels (ten of which exceed 800 pages in length) as well as stories, articles, travel pieces, essays, letters, etc., they remain "in his presence, experiencing his process of thought and imagination as it precipitates inchoate idea to particular word." It is this "miracle of literature" which Smiley finds especially interesting as she approaches Dickens in this volume with "a friendly desire to get to know him and to achieve what Victorians might have termed `a growing intimacy.'" In my opinion, Smiley's approach is the eminently correct one to take. Here are three brief excerpts from the narrative which suggest the eloquence and precision of Smiley's analysis:

"Along with A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist is probably the best known of Dickens's narratives, certainly because, like many of Dickens's own works and like many other nineteenth century novels, it was reworked for the stage, where the simple and vivid story of the workhouse child who falls among thieves and then is rescued and restored to his wealthy grandfather made a dramatic and cohesive play. The arc of the narrative is fairy tale-like, but the details of Oliver's companions and surroundings come directly from Dickens's immediate world."

"The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens's most interesting novel in terms of the extremes of reactions it elicits in readers. Legendarily popular and lucrative in its day, it is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians. Oscar Wilde remarked, `One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Nell without laughing.' and others have been at least as critical."

"Some novelists plow the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind, emotions, symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel -- to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way."

This book will be invaluable to those who have already read several of Dickens' works wish to re-visit them within the context of his life. Others who are unfamiliar with his life or works will also find this book invaluable as an introduction and guide to both. Smiley's is a brilliant achievement, especially given the limits within which she presents and discusses her material "in an incomparably fresh and delightful way." Although she uses that phrase as a comment on Dickens, it is also true of her.

At just over two hundred pages, it is obvious that Penguin Lives' biography of Charles Dickens (written by Jane Smiley) is not going to be a complete biography. What Smiley set out to do was portray the Dickens that his contemporaries might have known, as well as offer interpretations of his novels and other writings. All in all, "Charles Dickens" is a good introductory look at this writer who claimed a definitive place in the history of the novel.

As the author of some truly weighty and well-respected and well-loved tomes, Dickens has garnered a position in English literature on par with that of Shakespeare. Elements of his life story are well known, such as being taken out of school to work in a factory when he was thirteen, and his struggle to become a success despite the financial follies of his father and siblings. Dickens, while creating vivid lives for his characters (many drawn from real life acquaintances), built a strange life for himself that caused some controversy in his day. When he finally divorced his wife, after she bore him ten children, his relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan was a cause of unwelcome speculation. Despite whispers of scandal and ailing health, Dickens continued to write and perform pieces of his writing until his death. His connection with his audience is one that can never be equalled in today's society.

Jane Smiley does an admirable job highlighting the necessaries of Dickens' life. She does not dwell on his youth or too much of his family troubles, but focuses much time on his wife and unsatisfying marriage, and perhaps too much time on Ellen Ternan at the end. (Mentions of their relationship seem redundant, especially since little is still known about its nature.) I believe Smiley succeeded in her task of depicting the man that his contemporaries would have known and opened up the familiar and unfamiliar works to readers.

Smiley's lively biographical coverage of Charles Dickens paints a portrait of a convivial, astute and energetic writer who led an action-packed life as a prolific writer and family man. Blending with this highly recommended portrait of the man is a survey of his major works and narrative style, providing a fresh look at the man and his achievements.

Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley is a fascinating, succinct portrayal of Dickens' life and works. I recommend it to all who would love to learn more about this famous, beloved author, but don't want to read an in-depth, lengthy analysis.