Dickens: Abridged

Description

The abridged edition of Peter Ackroyd's classic biography of Dickens, reissued with a stunning new cover look to celebrate Dickens' bicentenary Dickens was a landmark biography when first published in 1990. This specially edited shorter edition takes the reader into the life of one of the world's greatest writers. Here, Ackroyd attempts to peel away the mask of a man whose life was outwardly a picture of Victorian rectitude, but whose love life was as complicated (and unconventional) as any modern writer's. Dickens had everything - fame, success and riches - but he died harbouring a deep sadness he had experienced all his life. He was a man of mercurial character, had enormous vitality and humour, but he also had a sense of loss and longing that would constantly appear in his work. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life- although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should upset his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow author Wilkie Collins, and, for the last 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress.

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

I can do no more than praise, recommend, insist that you buy and read this book.It supersedes all other Dickens biographies * Anthony Burgess, Independent * A truly magnificent biography.This is the complete, the nonesuch, the definitive Dickens * Sheridan Morley * A breathtaking feat of scholarship * The Times * Landmark biography... fascinating and colourful detail... first rate * Daily Express * Can't imagine a better introduction to the life and work of the quintessential English novelist than Peter Ackroyd's superb biography -- Simon Shaw * Mail on Sunday *