She widens the scope, and soon she has mentioned characters from his first three novels: Pickwick, Oliver and one we have to place for ourselves, Squeers. He successfully argues for her, and later helps her to find a new job – at a time, Tomalin tells us, when he must have been ‘the busiest’ of all the jurors. To begin with he is an unnamed juror at an inquest in which a sad little maid is questioned about the death of her newborn child. The Prologue is a clever move: eight pages subtitled ‘The Inimitable, 1840’, describing an episode when Dickens was 28. But Tomalin chooses to begin somewhere else entirely. I was aware of the recent publication of Tomalin’s book as I was reading both of them, and I always intended to read it to find out more about how Dickens made use of incidents and experiences from his own life.Īs expected, Chapters 1 and 2 are full of ghostly echoes, or pre-echoes, of the novels. And I only finished re-reading Great Expectations last month, a novel in which Dickens develops a more reflective approach to the subject of growing from childhood to mature adulthood. I’ve re-read David Copperfield recently, the one Dickens called his ‘favourite child’ – it isn’t my favourite at all – and everybody knows it’s full of autobiographical elements. I don’t usually read literary biographies, but I must be in the perfect target group for this one.
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