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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This first major biography of Dickens in nearly 40 years is a winning mix of insight, narrative skill and shrewd judgment. Kaplan ( Thomas Carlyle ) shows how powerfully both as man and artist Dickens was shaped by the experience of his youth: on the one hand the humiliations showered on him by his penurious and feckless parents, on the other his mental escape into the bright world of the 18th-century novel which gave him his models for good and bad character. In tracing Dickens's career from "boy prodigy" to grizzled Victorian giant of letters, from the enchanted world of The Pickwick Papers to the grim and unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood , Kaplan covers his roles as journalist, novelist, social reformer and businessman, shedding considerable new light on his relations with his parents, wife and mistress, on his two trips to America and on his triumphant but exhausting public readings from his novels. Dickens was convivial, loyal, secretive and arrogant, with a "performance personality" that required applause for self-definition. He was also profoundly restless. Indeed, that word rings like a bell throughout the book. Illustrations.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
This volume received kudos from many reviewers, including LJ's who asserted that it would be "important to Dickens scholars while accessible to the general public" (LJ 9/1/88). This edition contains a new update by the author, so if your existing copy has seen the worst of times, replace it with this one.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
ON AN EXQUISITE SEPTEMBER DAY IN 1860, CHARLES DICKENS burned "the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years." Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
superfluous fierceness, own wild way, blacking factory, frozen deep, parliamentary reporter, reading tour, monthly parts

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Gad's Hill, John Dickens, Household Words, New York, Miss Coutts, All the Year Round, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Devonshire Terrace, Christmas Carol, Wilkie Collins, Daniel Maclise, Elizabeth Dickens, Mark Lemon, Covent Garden, Mary Hogarth, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, John Forster, Morning Chronicle, Daily News, Little Nell, Ellen Ternan, Leigh Hunt

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