Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing
By Michael Slater
Yale University Press £25, 696 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Anyone who thinks of Charles Dickens merely as the author of 15 novels, creator of unforgettable characters and virtual inventor of the Victorian Christmas should read this new biography by Michael Slater, emeritus professor at Birkbeck College, London, and past president of the Dickens Fellowship. As Slater shows with exemplary thoroughness, Dickens was not only a successful novelist, but also a journalist, philanthropist, actor, orator and public conscience.

His achievements were all the more astounding given his inauspicious beginnings. His improvident father got into debt and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Aged 12, Dickens junior was removed from school to work in a factory producing blacking for use on boots and stoves. He stayed there, Slater reckons, for 13 or 14 months – longer than previous biographers have thought. His sufferings, Dickens later wrote, were inexpressible: “No man’s imagination can overstep the reality.”

Humiliated and hopeless, Dickens was eventually rescued, resumed his schooling and started work as a clerk, progressing to parliamentary reporting, journalistic sketches and serialised fiction. By the age of 25, he was a famous novelist. But, Slater argues, the blacking episode, which he largely kept secret, haunted him and fuelled his fictional obsessions: sympathy for the oppressed and destitute, particularly mistreated children; a concern with hunger and compensatory festivity; and a fascination with London, especially its seamier quarters.

Above all, perhaps, the episode left him with a fanatical determination to succeed. Slater is alive to Dickens’s genius but rightly emphasises his application and almost superhuman vitality. Composing novels in instalments, he would sometimes produce 33,000 words a month. He might have two novels on the go at once: Oliver Twist overlapped with Pickwick Papers , and Nicholas Nickleby with Oliver Twist. Additionally, there were stories, plays, travel writings and superabundant journalism. He not only wrote hundreds of articles, but read shoals of manuscripts, working on proofs until they resembled “an inky fishing net”.

Wherever he went, his “clutching eye” seized on impressions that got vividly transcribed in his copious letters, later reprinted in 12 volumes. He also read widely and campaigned for charitable causes, raised funds for struggling writers and collaborated with Angela Burdett Coutts working for homeless women.

Part of his philanthropic impulse was a mission “to shame the cruel and canting”, a task that his account of City merchants – “sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle” – suggests he rose to with enthusiasm. As a talented actor, Dickens was praised by spectators as various as Thackeray and Queen Victoria. His public speaking enthralled audiences of thousands. And then there was his “strenuous leisure”. To unwind, he walked 10 to 15 miles a day before organising home theatricals and conjuring displays.

This irrepressible vigour spilled over into his private life and he fathered so many children that he literally lost count: asked to list his 10 offspring for an article, he missed one out. He blamed his burgeoning family on his wife, a perversity that prefigured his later behaviour when he fell for the young actress Ellen Ternan. He ruthlessly rejected his wife , denouncing her as a bad mother.

Slater’s biography is comprehensive and reliable. Trawling the whole of the non-fictional writings – articles, essays, reviews, speeches, letters – it relates them perceptively to Dickens’s fiction, often with considerable originality. Written with appropriate scholarly caution, it cannot match Dickens for brio and colour but comes close in industrious energy.

David Grylls is author of ‘What the Dickens’ (BBC) and ‘The Paradox of Gissing’ (HarperCollins)