Volume 26, Number 12 · July 19, 1979
The Ten-Year-Old Man
By V.S. Pritchett
Dickens: A Life
by Norman MacKenzie, by Jeanne MacKenzie
Oxford University Press, 434 pp., $16.95
After their books on the Fabians and on Wells, the indefatigable MacKenzies have turned to a fast-moving Life of Dickens. The stress is on the character as it was formed and the life as it was lived. More succinctly than most of those who deal in Dickens criticism, they are shrewd judges of the novels as they poured out: their book runs to 400 pages whereas the spacious standard lives by John Forster and Edgar Johnson are, of course, more than twice as long—although a shorter Johnson from which long passages of criticism were cut did appear about two years ago. To these indispensable authorities the MacKenzies make their bow, but they have been impelled by the irresistible Pilgrim Edition of Dickens's letters, now running to four volumes and rich in annotation. These letters—so close to the lively detail of Dickens's daily life—have enabled them to fill in the faces and habits of the crowd of friends, actors, journalists, novelists, philanthropists, thinkers, and politicians among whom the gregarious Dickens lived.
Review, 1880 words
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