Charles Dickens

Author Jane Smiley offers brevity and astute analysis in this biography of Charles Dickens from the Penguin Lives series. Its brevity (212 pages) will relieve apprehensive readers familiar with Dickens's hefty novels (DAVID COPPERFIELD runs over 800 pages). Her analysis is even more welcome. It pair......more

Penguin Lives was a high-quality series of short biographies written by well-known authors who had some common ground with their subjects. I enjoyed Bobbie Ann Mason’s Elvis Presley and Tom Wicker’s George Herbert Walker Bush. Novelist Jane Smiley’s treatment of Charles Dickens is another excellent......more

I found this to be an extremely readable and insightful biography. Smiley does frequently refer to Peter Ackroyd’s massive biography of Dickens but do not make the mistake and think her biography is a shadow of Ackroyd. Jane Smiley is a highly respected novelist herself and her biography of Dickens v......more

I have always been interested in Charles Dickens since I fell in love with his work of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. While I read his work A TALE OF TWO CITIES, I did not find it as interesting as the visitation and extreme changes in Ebenezer Scrooge. That notwithstanding I find him to be an interesting write......more

Several years ago, when I took a course entirely devoted to Dickens, I remember thinking that it would have been nice if he had died about 30 years sooner, just to spare me from any more of his writing. My opinion on this has changed, of course, but such are the feelings that his inexhaustible tome......more