Charles Dicken (1811-70), by general consent the most popular novelist ever to have used the English language, has attracted a great deal of critical and biographical writing. Dickens’s friend, John Forster, wrote the first notable biography and he relied almost entirely on personal knowledge; Dickens had told him much of his life and had written that he dewed ‘no better fix ay fame than such ft biographer and inch a critic’. Unfortunately he destroyed most of the original papers on which his work was directly founded, and this has greatly increased the difficulties of subsequent biographers. Since the Forster biography, there have been numerous memoirs, reminiscences, biographies and critical works, including studies by Bagehot, Gissing and Chesterton. Indeed, as Mr Fielding remarks, ‘more books have been written about Dickens than shoot any other English novelist’, b has been Mr Fielding’s purpose in this essay to provide a guide to the writing that has grown up around him.
The author, who is Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, has written Charles Dickens, A Critical Introduction, and edited die Speeches of Dickens. He is also one of die associate-editors of the first volume of die Pilgrim edition of Dickens’s Letters. Hit essay is a survey and assessment of what has been written shoot the novelist; and the select bibliography is among the most valuable yet published.