Charles Dickens (23 page)

T
HE INTERESTED READER
could well read all Dickens, all the time, for several years.
The Oxford Illustrated Dickens
runs to twenty volumes and includes all the novels, Christmas books, and stories, as well as
Master Humphrey's Clock, A Child's History of England, American Notes, Pictures from Italy,
and selected journalism. Many publishers offer most or all of Dickens's novels in a uniform edition. The Clarendon Press has also published the Pilgrim Edition of
The Letters of Charles Dickens
. Volume 11, 1865–1867, was published in February 2000. At $140 and more per volume, these books are not cheap or easily available, an unfortunate publishing choice! Also from Oxford University Press, the 1999
Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens,
edited by Paul Schlicke, is invaluable and packed with information, pictures, interpretations, charts, and so on.
Dickens,
the 1990 biography by British novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd, is compendious and highly readable, especially good on Dickens's social context. Ackroyd takes a somewhat more benign view of Dickens than does Fred Kaplan, whose
Dickens: A Biography
was first published in 1988. Claire Tomalin's
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan
(1990) will probably not be superseded, simply because Tomalin seems to have unearthed all the information there is to find about Ellen Ternan. The
grandfather of all Dickens biographies, John Forster's
Life of Charles Dickens
(1872–1874), was reissued by J. M. Dent in the mid-1970s but is now out of print. Criticism and interpretation of Dickens's works is voluminous, and several journals are devoted entirely to Dickens studies, including
Dickens Quarterly
and
The Dickensian
. The Dickens scholarly industry seems to be an infinitely branching tree, bolstered by films of novels as well as shows and even novels about Dickens (for example, Peter Ackroyd's play
The Mysterious Mr. Dickens,
which ran in London in 2000, and Frederick Busch's 1978 novel
The Mutual Friend
). But the newcomer to Dickens can do no better than to begin with a novel—my suggestion is
David Copperfield,
to be followed by
Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities,
and
Our Mutual Friend,
in that order, light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens's most characteristic and accessible work.