Rate this book

Charles Dickens (2009)

by Michael Slater(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0300112076 (ISBN13: 9780300112078)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Yale University Press

review 1: Detailed biography of a man for whom a single day seems to have contained more details than most people live in a year. Slater covers all sides of Dickens' personality and his many simultaneous careers and it left me truly wondering what it would be like to just hang out with the guy, especially when he deals with the parts of Dickens' life that he kept secret. That is, Nelly Ternan. Or if not secret, just incomprehensible to someone who didn't know him, like his treatment of his wife. He's so hostile to her, and she's so passively accepting of it of him, one has to wonder if that had something to do with what Dickens hated so much!I feel sadly inadequate to talk about biographies, as the art of them just goes right over my head. I always want it to read more like a novel ... morewith a clear throughline, but lives just don't work that way.
review 2: I am not going to give this book a numerical rating because I abandoned it after 100 pages. The book is scholarly and well-written, but just not what I was looking for. I am not a Dickens scholar and I haven't read his minor works, so the repeated references to those works were lost on me. I have always been intrigued by Dickens, particularly by what brought him to write so movingly and passionately about the destitute and downtrodden in his surroundings, people who were otherwise mistreated or simply ignored by the 'haves' in society. While I did get glimpses of what I was looking for in the sections I read, I simply had to work harder than I wanted to work for those glimpses. What I really needed was a Dickens primer. Instead I got a doctoral dissertation. My fault, not the author's! less

Download links for: Charles Dickens

Advertising