Claire Tomalin schrijft nieuwe biografie over Charles Dickens – A Life

Claire Tomalin
Charles Dickens – A Life

Viking (Penguin), oktober 2011

Hardback, 576 pagina’s, 23 x 15 cm
ISBN 9780670917679, verkoopprijs € 27,99

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There have been many biographies in the past, and no doubt more are in the pipeline as the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth approaches. But few will have Tomalin’s sympathy and insight for this tormented man. (The Telegraph)

Synopsis
Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist – the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more.

At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried – against his wishes – in Westminster Abbey.

Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children.

Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjrlqbUiZBw&NR=1

Biographer Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked in publishing for Heinemann, Hutchinson and Cape before switching to journalism, becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Wordsworth Trust, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Vice-President of English PEN.

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In 2012 wordt het 200-ste geboortejaar van Charles Dickens (1812-1870) gevierd.
Op de official site Dickens 2012 worden alle evenementen rond dit jubileum bijgehouden.