Dickens: A Biography - Softcover

Kaplan, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340506148 ISBN 13: 9780340506141

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1989

Synopsis

Acclaimed well-documented biography of the great English Victorian writer & novelist, Charles Dickens. Minor rubbing at cover edges & corners, spine creased, white back cover slightly discoloured, pages tanning slightly with some light foxing at edges, no inscriptions, binding secure

About this title

Product Description

This biography on Dickens is written by the author of the biography "Thomas Carlyle", which was nominated for the American National Book Critics' Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Review

"Dickens by Fred Kaplan may do for our greatest writer after Shakespeare what Ellman did for Oscar Wilde... A brilliantly readable work and one essential for all of us who care about the man who, for all his faults, remained 'The Inimitable' and 'The Sparkler' to the end."

(John Mortimer Spectator)

"Fred Kaplan's Dickens ... would be valuable if only because it takes into account the reams of research that have been published in the intervening years; but it is also well proportioned, persuasive in its judgments and consistently, grippingly readable."

(John Gross New York Times)

"Kaplan has spent ten years preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of this exceptional biography."

(A. D. Hutter Los Angeles Times)

"A winning mix of insight, narrative skill and shrewd judgement. Kaplan shows how powerfully both as a man and artist Dickens was shaped by the experience of his youth: on the one hand the humiliations showered on him by his penurious and feckless parents, on the other his mental escape into the bright world of the 18th-century novel which gave him his models for good and bad character."

(Publishers Weekly)

"Kaplan is particularly good... on the shape and perspective of Dickens's career, his relation with his younger siblings, all of whom he outlived, and with his own children and their developing private lives. To be fully understood as a writer he needs to be put in this sort of family frame."

(John Bayley New York Review of Books)

"Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Mr. Kaplan's biography is its picture of Dickens's professional life and friendships: one senses anew the extraordinary competitive vigor of the Victorian imperial personality. Mr. Kaplan's objective presentation of the facts about the colossus of the age gives us a far better sense of its shape and scale than any facile charm might conjure up. His clarity is the highest form of respect and affection for his astonishing subject."

(Richard Locke Wall Street Journal)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0340506148
• ISBN 13: 9780340506141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 608