The formal innovation is the interpolation of a few, short passages of fiction, interview and meditation. Charles Dickens emerges from these 1,200 pages known yet profoundly odd, unaccountable and as finally mysterious as you or I except, of course, that his was the mysteriousness of genius. It does so, first and most obviously, by a daring and utterly successful formal innovation and, secondly, by refusing to be seduced by the hack biographical belief that to ‘know’ somebody is to trap them in some familiar landscape of psychological or historical causality. Dead men tell no tales, they ask no awkward questions and nobody can be more grateful than the hack biographer.ĭickens, happily detonates this complacency. From the giant, painfully-footnoted academic text to the slim, sensitive ‘response’ to a life, almost all founder on the deceptive simplicity of the enterprise, the easy connections that can always be made. So lives are wearily gutted for the usual debates about the usual issues: work versus life, childhood versus family, documentary truth versus imaginative identification with the subject and so on. The form is debased – as a staple of middle- brow ‘holiday reading’ its conventions have become paralysed by the necessity of not frightening the audience. Everybody writes them and ask any publisher for a book idea and he will come up with a biography. ‘To see Dickens day by day,’ writes Peter Ackroyd, ‘making his way, the incidents of his existence shaping his fiction just as his fiction alters his life, the same pattern of emotion and imagery rising up from letters and novels and conversations, the same momentum and the same desire for control – to see Dickens thus is to turn biography into an agent of true knowledge…’

Dickens by peter ackroyd summary