![]() His father, John Dickens, worked in the Navy Pay Office and earned a decent salary, but he was pathologically irresponsible with money, and the family was constantly in debt. The fuel that fed the furnace of Dickens’ mind was his memories of his crap childhood. It’s ironic, or at least strange, that his work has come to stand as a kind of baseline, middle-C of mainstream Victorian melodrama, because he himself was not a mainstream individual. His brain just didn’t work like other people’s. I read it because Dickens was an alien, or at least an extreme human outlier, and thus inherently interesting. So I didn’t read Tomalin’s biography because I’m a Dickens guy, although I like his novels well enough. (If you, unlike me, are a Dickens guy, you will notice the absence of Little Dorrit from this list. ![]() That’s the only reason I’ve read as much Dickens as I have, to wit: Bleak House, Hard Times (the short one!), A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, a significant percentage of Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. ![]() In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was. ![]() ![]() Follow didn’t read Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life because I’m a Dickens guy. ![]()
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