Biography charles dickens book

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

From detailed biographies of Dickens to ground-breaking works of literary criticism, there have been hundreds of books published about Charles Dickens‘s life and work.

Here are five of our favourites – five of the finest books about Dickens for the reader seeking to negotiate their way through the great novelist’s work.

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Peter Ackroyd, Dickens: Abridged.

This is still one of the best biographies – perhaps the best biography – of Charles Dickens out there.

True, the biography written by Dickens’s friend John Forster and published shortly after Dickens’s death is a hugely important source of information about the novelist’s life, but Ackroyd’s detailed picture of Victorian England and Dickens’s development as, effectively, a chronicler of his time is gripping and abso