Charles the 1st biography of michael slater

In Charles Dickens, MICHAEL SLATER draws upon a lifetime’s study to bring us a fascinating exploration of the author’s personal and emotional life, his high-profile public activities, the relentless travel and his astonishing productivity.

Here Michael Slater explains his own approach to the daunting task of writing a new biography of this prodigiously brilliant figure.

I was at first reluctant to accept Yale University Press’s invitation in 2000 to write a new biography of Dickens.

I greatly admired Peter Ackroyd’s epic Dickens and Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman, a movingly written life of Dickens’s putative mistress Ellen Ternan. Both of these books had appeared in 1990 since which date, it seemed to me, there had been no major new biographical discovery regarding Dickens, no hitherto unknown archive had come to light to justify attempting a new  full-scale biography.

Then it occurred to me that it would not be long before the appearanc