The Inimitable Boz

Dickens – Peter Ackroyd

Hysterical, overactive, odd child. He was a reader and enjoyed Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield. Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and Tales of the Genii. He was also a watcher, a keen observer that remembered everything and everybody.

He was happy beyond belief until his father moved from Kent to London and ran into money trouble that sent him to debtors prison, ending his son’s happy and stable life. Dickens became a neglected child, in an insecure world of moves and money anxiety. He even for a time worked as a child laborer, an experience that so damaged him he couldn’t tell anybody about it until his secret got out and he fictionalized the ordeal for David Copperfield.

In clear prose, Ackroyd tells how Dickens was obsessive in his approach to writing and had a thing for the order of furniture, books, papers, and pens. He was so prone to expressing big emotions that his family was a little wary of him. Dickens the professional writer was determined to write successful books and methodical in his work habits. He never missed deadlines and as an editor he expected the same, even from writers with less frenetic working styles like Wilkie Collins.

Ackroyd also describes the passionate public readings that made Dickens a legend, but did his blood pressure no good at all. In fact, Ackroyd recounts interesting examples of Dickens’ health problems. For instance, Dickens developed an anal fistula due to sitting too much. The fistula became so severe that in 1841 he underwent surgery in his own house, which involved cutting along the whole length of the fistula to open it up.

Without an anesthetic.

And about five years before his death, Dickens was in a train accident that resulted in some fatalities. The PTSD that he got from this experience plagued him the rest of his life. Though he loved trains because he like moving fast, after the accident, taking trains made him nervous.

A writer himself, Ackroyd gives critical insights into the novels. So, I think this biography could be read with great interest by a reader into the Victorian era, Dickens’ novels and outstanding personalities who happen to be writers. Like the artist in The Moon and Sixpence, Dickens was a genius but hard on the people around him. His personal life was troubled and his kids were ambivalent about their father. He was hard on himself too, especially with overwork, dying of what was probably a stroke at only 58 years old – but he looked in his weary seventies.