Synopsis:
This provocative biography tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. Focused on the 1830s, it portrays a restless, uncertain Dickens who could not decide on a career path. Through twists and turns, the author traces a double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel.
Review:
Douglas-Fairhurst's acute and incisive analysis of the contemporary reception of Dickens's journalism and then his first serialized fiction reveals how Dickens's keen observations and storytelling talent allowed him to rise above his station, as he forged his experiences into fiction...A perceptive and speculative biography.--Lonnie Weatherby"Library Journal" (08/01/2011)
A convincing portrait of budding genius.--Bryce Christensen"Booklist" (10/01/2011)
[A] subtle and searching book...Dickens is immortal and inexhaustible, and there will be more books in the lead-up to the 200th anniversary of his birth next year. If any of them outshine [this one] we shall be luckier than mere mortals deserve.--John Carey"Sunday Times" (10/02/2011)
Original and elegant...Douglas-Fairhurst, who has every line ever written by Dickens at his fingertips, inhabits them; he shows us the internal process of the writing, revealing the hidden jokes, the coded messages, the ways in which "the most central and eccentric literary figure of the age" wove his other selves into his texts.--Frances Wilson"Daily Telegraph" (10/22/2011)
[A] perceptive and original study.--Jenny Uglow"The Guardian" (10/07/2011)
[A] revealing and groundbreaking study, which succeeds by focusing, narrowly, on the early years in Dickens's career as a writer in the 1830s.--Michiko Kakutani"New York Times" (10/25/2011)
Throughout, the book is alive to [the] ways in which Dickens recycled his own experience and obsessions...In very Dickensian fashion, the book continually shimmies between subjects...From clerks and clothes we move to the idea of costume and performance, seamlessly conjuring up Dickens's passion for amateur theatricals and his early experiments with farce. And no sidestep is misplaced. The influence of the theatre proves essential for understanding the young writer, with the book charting the death of Dickens the playwright as much as the birth of Dickens the novelist...[Douglas-Fairhurst's] quirky approach brings color to scenes that too often exist only in black-and-white. For a vivid introduction to a writer and an age, I can think of few better places to begin.--Matthew Richardson"The Spectator" (11/02/2011)
[A] lively and detailed book...Douglas-Fairhurst serves as a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, yet sympathetic tour guide to the young Dickens's strange world and equally strange sensibility.--David Gates"New York Times Book Review" (11/06/2011)
[A] scintillating study...Douglas-Fairhurst...sets out to establish how Dickens became the type of writer (and, by extension, the type of man) he was. The result is an exercise in anti-teleology that, rather than showing how each step along the path of his apprentice years led to eventual triumph, explores how the roads not taken still leave their ghost trail in Dickens's art...Douglas-Fairhurst's trick...is to take the various stages of Dickens's pre-authorial life ("lost child," clerk, parliamentary reporter) and show how he projected them into his books, creating a series of "refracted self-images" that give nearly everything he wrote an ominous personal significance..."Becoming Dickens" is a high-class critical study of Dickens's technique.--D. J. Taylor"Wall Street Journal" (10/29/2011)
Douglas-Fairhurst explores how Dickens's evolution from impoverished child to middle-class professional shaped his artistic development and gave him unique insight into the Victorian zeitgeist. Characters like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are windows into the vibrant, tumultuous period that made Dickens possible. Their triumphs and travails feel real because they mirror the author's own difficult adolescence...Becoming Dickens is not just the biography of a man; it's about the birth of a particular way of life, which provided fertile ground for artistic triumphs that still resonate today. It's a reminder that talent, however great, cannot thrive in a world in which the avenues of growth are reserved for the privileged.--Michael Patrick Brady"Boston Globe" (11/12/2011)
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