Volume 35, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1989
Best and Worst
By John Bayley
Dickens: A Biography
by Fred Kaplan
Morrow, 607 pp., $24.95
So various is Dickens, so contradictory and disconcerting, that it is natural for anyone writing about him to seek a clue to his complex genius, something for ourselves and the critic to hold on to. G.K. Chesterton, in what is still one of the best introductions to the Dickens world, stressed the immense joviality—the bacon in the rafter and the wine in the wood—a Pickwick feast of snowballs and plum puddings. Humphry House, more sober and social-minded, wrote a book with the title of The Dickens World,[1] which has lasted well, and which stresses Dickens's extraordinarily multiform relation, as personality and author, with virtually every reform and aspiration of the time, with the problems of Victorian London and the woes of industrialized England.
Review, 2906 words
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