Book

Dickens / Peter Ackroyd.

Ackroyd, Peter, 1949- (Author).

Summary:

"...Peter Ackroyd brings alive as never before the best-loved writer in the English language--the consummate artist and entertainer, the man whose public radiance gave little hint of the darkness of his private life, the storyteller whose characters have beome cherished and familiar friends to generations of readers. Based upon an extensive examination of original sources, and animated throughout by the historical imagination Ackroyd displays in all his work, Dickens is a biography in which the true figure of Charles Dickens and the moving spirit of his age are for the first time faithfully combined. Dickens as a child at the beginning of the nineteenth century; Dickens the most celebrated novelist in the world while still in his twenties; Dickens the radical and the actor; Dickens the prematurely exhausted middle-aged man whose own unquiet fictions seemed to shape his life itself; Dickens the performer, who, it has been said, was killed by his own characters as he embodied them on stage; Dickens the greatest writer of his age, who more than any other human being stamped his image upon England--all these aspects of his genius are embodied in Dickens, which is as much a study of a culture and period as it is of an extraordinary man."--Jacket.