London: The Biography

Product Details

• Shape: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Faith, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and repair to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780385497718

Description

Here are two thousand years of London’s history and folklore, its chroniclers and criminals and plain citizens, its food and drink and countless pleasures. Blackfriar’s and Charing Cross, Paddington and Bedlam. Westminster Abbey and St. Martin in the Fields. Cockneys and vagrants. Immigrants, peasants, and punks. The Plague, the Great Fire, the Blitz. London at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather. In well-chosen anecdotes, keen observations, and the words of hundreds of its citizens and visitors, Ackroyd reveals the ingenuity and grit and vitality of London. Through a unique thematic tour of the physical city and its inimitable soul, the city comes alive.

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Customer Reviews

Review
This was a great book. Why? Because the author writes like a poet. The prose is, at times, lyrical. The history, as written, is always interesting. This is not really a book. Rather is a series of essays on London. Each chapter was usually a neighborhood or a topic. The topics being the prisons of London. The fairs and how they evolved. The neighborhoods. I found it interesting how the same neighborhoods were used repeatedly over the centuries by people interested in specific activities. Politics, whores, and booksellers all stayed within the same neighborhoods, or close by despite the changes in the City. I believe the author could have written a book just about the rivers that once ran above ground in London.

I bought this because we are going to London. There is a lot of reading here. I thought it was worth it. There is knowing facts about a city and then there is knowing a bit about what the city is. This book is excellent for understanding London in the same way a biography helps you understand the person rather than the dry facts.

2010-05-23 | Author (Washington, D.C.) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Does justice to the great city
London the Biography is a massive, curiously mystical pean to the great wen. It offers up a huge array of historical and cultural meditations on London themes: its weather, its buildings, its street life, its poor, its food, its noise, and so much more. Ackroyd is a native Londoner and worships the city. He is a living embodiment of Samuel Johnson's dictum that a man who is tired of London is tired of life.

In the spirit of Blake and Dickens (two of Ackroyd's heroes), Ackroyd serves up a great thick mystical soup of humanity. His views are suffused with romanticism, rather than being acutely political. For example is able to write about London's poor in the East End without grinding an axe for social reform. His writing style seems akin to composting: he piles up the research, lets it mulch down and examines the results. In particular he seems to have a sense that each neighbourhood (and even the people who dwell there) displays contemporary characteristics from a long stream of historical evolution. For example Clerkenwell was the locus of the 1381 Peasant's revolt, and has been a hotbed of radical activity ever since. I worked as a publisher in an office in Clerkenwell for 3 years and was fascinated by this.

As Ackroyd writes in the final chapter: 'the ancient city and the modern city literally lie beside each other; one cannot be imagined without the other'.

It is a fantastic historical and cultural tribute to London, albeit not the only way of approaching the city in literary terms (Iain Sinclair and Will Self are two other, very different London writers). Ackroyd packs in so much about the city that each street comes alive.

All in all a great book for anyone interested in the history of London.

2009-11-14 (London, UK) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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I Thought I Knew London Fairly Well...For a Non-Resident Anyway
This is an amazing work. Beautifully written, with chapters focusing more on themes than chronologically organized facts like a standard history book, it is nearly impossible to put this book down. It is so jam-packed with information that I should think that no reader could come away without at least a handful of new gems of trivia or a few new names to research. The author so clearly loves his city that his enthusiasm bursts through the pages. This is not simply London through rose-colored glasses however. There are plenty of tales of crime, squalor, injustice and horror mixed in with the glory and beauty of this magnificent, ancient city, as one would expect from any well-written history of such a dynamic subject. I strongly urge travelers to read this before going there (whether it is a first time trip or a revisit) as it may well change your itinerary. This book is an absolute treasure for anyone with any interest in the subject at all. A splendidly enjoyable, page-turner of a history book. Destined to be a classic.

A note of caution: I strongly urge those of you who have decided to buy it to buy the hardcover version as the paperback is of very poor quality. By the time I'd finished reading it the book had just about fallen apart, and I treat my books very well.

2009-07-10 (Somewhere in the desert, CA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Lugubrious until the final quadrant
And only mildly salutatory thence. But there are wonderful turns of phrase and vivid descriptions scattered throughout. What a frustrating, baffling writer!

2009-02-06 (Germantown, TN USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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London: The Prison and the Theater
I've only had the opportunity to spend a few days in London, so I can't claim to know the city well. But, says Ackroyd - himself seemingly a lifelong Londoner, it's been centuries since anyone can claim to really know the city. His bibliographic essay notes there are at least 21, 778 works on the city, and he doesn't claim to have read them all. Still, he has overturned a fair sized library for this book , added some personal observations, and produced an impressionistic, kaleidoscopic book.

Ackroyd eschews a straightforward chronological history. There are sections on London from its beginnings to 1066, medieval London, the Great Fire, Victorian London, and the city's destruction in the Blitz and its later rebuilding. But most of the book is essay like chapters built around themes covering every aspect of London life from its Underground and buried past to its notorious fogs and smogs, its wildlife and street life, markets illicit and licit, disasters and buildings, festivals and executions. And it's not exactly a celebration of the city. Again and again he returns to the metaphor of London as prison. The exemplar here is Jack Sheppard who escaped from London prisons six times. Yet, he never left the city for more than a few days even though it cost him his life.

London as theater is Ackroyd's other metaphor. It extends far beyond the literal stage to the garb of its inhabitants or the speeches of the soon to be hanged at Newgate. London, emphasizes Ackroyd, is a great commercial maw. All has been subsumed in trade at one time or another from the goods of empire coming in at the Thames docks to the sewer hunters and mudlarks scouring muck for treasures. Men, women, and children all played their roles. Even would-be rebels became a trade in Carnaby Street.

One of the most fascinating things in the book is Ackroyd's frequent quotes from foreign visitors. Yoshio Markino, a Japanese painter, noted that the garish colors of London's buildings became beautiful when seen in a fog. Dostoevsky remarked on Londoners haste to drink themselves insensible. (After reading the book's accounts of London riots and drinking, one is tempted to see some modern London problems as a return to some sort of default state for the city.)

How certain London neighborhoods have long been associated with certain acivities is also well told by Ackroyd. He not only talks about the famous Soho but Clerkenwell as well. The latter has, for centuries, been associated with religious heretics and revolutionaries. (Lenin lived there for a time.) And the same neighborhood has a long tradition of clockmaking. (Perhaps explaining why Hiram Maxim worked on his machine guns there.)

Given Ackroyd's many books on literary figures, quotes from British literary figures are to be expected. (Ackroyd notes that it is exceptional for them not to have a London connection.) Dickens, Defoe, Smollett, Milton, Boswell, Orwell, and Wolfe all had things to say about London in essays, letters, and fiction. The literary minded reader may be tempted to make a game of remembering relevant quotes and writers not in the book.

As well as being associated with literature and the capitol of empire, London's bustle helped develop the theories of Darwin and Engels - though Ackroyd asserts this in passing without much proof. The instrument makers of London were crucial to developing the science of the Enlightenment.

There are three minor quibbles with the book. Some of the anecdotes do get repeated though not many in a book so long. Second and more seriously, Ackroyd exhibits some unquestioned pieties. Seeing the poor as diseased and dirty is not a totally groundless stereotype. Mental illness can underlie all three conditions as well as less pathological mental traits. And Ackroyd, in a section on immigrants to London, makes the lazy analogy that complaints about today's immigrants are the same - and equally groundless - as those of the past. That ignores the numbers and cultures of Britian's current immigrants and the corrosive effects of modern transportation and communication on assimilation. One wonders, now that Islamic terrorism has made its way to Britain and sharia law can be enforced by the state, if he feels the same eight years after the book was published. The third quibble is that sometimes Ackroyd thinks he is describing a unique trait of Londoners when it's really more universal. For instance, in what city aren't children attracted to dangerous and forbidden places?

Still, this is a remarkable book in its variety, and it almost never bores despite its length. Anybody interested in one of the great cities of the Western Mind will want to read it.

2008-10-03 (St. Paul, MN USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Thames: The Biography

Description

In this perfect companion to London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history, describing the river's endless allure in a journey overflowing with characters, incidents, and wry observations.

Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the Thames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry VIII, and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women who depend upon the river for their livelihoods. The Thames as a source of artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroyd invokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers, poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and colors.

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Customer Reviews

If all of it were as good as the first 100 pages ... 5 stars!
Ackroyd's book is like an Easter egg hunt. Within its forty-five chapters lies some delightfully written historical narrative that has one turning pages eagerly looking for more. By the second half of the book, though, one must look harder, reaching a point where entire chapters leave one wondering if there are eggs left to be found.

To be sure, if you are a fan of British history and literature - and enjoy good writing - this book will not disappoint. Stylistically, Thames, the Biography, is not presented as a conventional chronological biography. Rather, as Ackroyd lays out in Section I, he employs the device of using the River Thames as the ever-present bystander to the historical and cultural events that have taken place upon, around, and - sometimes - beneath it. He covers a lot of ground (and water) writing about those things you would expect in a book like this, and has clearly done his homework -- glaciation, the Celts and Romans, human sacrifice, the Venerable Bede, Milne, the Great Fire, the Docklands, Henry I - VIII, the Henley Regatta and, hey, even Jack the Ripper -- it's all there.

Like other reviewers have commented, though, some chapters seemed a real stretch ... as if his editor was pushing to get it to 400 pages (e.g. Chapters 27 and 28 -- "The Ancient Trees" and "And After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" left me debating whether I wanted to finish the book). And, yes, I agreed with the reviewer who observed that Ackroyd's oft-repeated baleful characterization of the River Thames begins to take its toll. All said, I'm glad I finished it.

While all of the book may not be an engaging read, if you can get past some questionable chapters and stylistic quirks it will provide you with a genuinely interesting and thorough education of the River Thames.

2010-05-03 (Mountain View, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Thames
This is a very interesting presentation of early (and more recent) history and geography of the Thames. I was interested to find the history at Abingdon and can believe it lives up to its billing as being the oldest continuous settled place in England.

2010-02-03 | nom de plume | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Meet Father Thames
Peter Ackroyd's "Thames" scours the marshes and mud flats for traces of long forgotten civilizations and dredges up waterlogged mysteries.

He shows us the inky waters; infested marshes; dense fogs; overpowering stinks. This famous river was lined with toxic pudding-like mud, and bordered by mysterious ancient earthworks. Once inhabited by mud larks, costermongers, touters, carrot crunchers, lumpers, bargees, and scufflehunters, it is celebrated for the "gross abusiveness" of its fishwives, and watermen swearing all the way from Cricklade to Gravesend.

The Thames is "a highway, a frontier and an attack route, it has been a playground and a sewer, a source of water and a source of power." As the author called it -- a "museum of Englishness."

Peter Ackroyd's book captures the story in a series of snapshots -- brief chapters on the human occupation and natural history of this storied river. Some are familiar: dangerous work on the Victorian docks, the miserable lot of rural English poor, and life in Julius Caesar's and William Shakespeare's London. Other factors are invisible today -- how the Thames once flowed into the Rhine, its banks dotted with now lost religious manors and monasteries, rickety medieval bridges blocking Danish invaders, and what about the mysterious hordes of prehistory weapons and skulls deposited into the dark waters -- for what reason?

Through most of "Thames" the author keeps a firm hand on the tiller, navigating tales of geology, the arts, geography and life in such a way as we close the book, at last, amazed that these stories have gone forgotten -- and wondering what other interesting tales might be out there.

Mr. Ackroyd, somewhat miraculously, paddles downstream through all of this in over 400 pages. His subject material is wide and varied. On the one hand, it all adds up to a curious hop-scotch journey through British civilization. On the other hand, "Thames" is an entertaining snapshot of one of the most recognized rivers in the world.

2009-11-18 (Kansas City, MO USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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"Wind in the Willows" meets "Heart of Darkness"
My great-grandfather was found drowned "in mysterious circumstances" a century ago in this river named for "dark-grey ooze." A Land League agitator from Ireland, he met with Londoners before his demise. This sort of mystery attracted me to Ackroyd's riparian biography. Equally dismal and dreamy in its descriptions, Ackroyd rambles as he did in his "London" (also reviewed by me), but the effect here alternates between delight and dreariness.

He writes well, often. Crossing London Bridge, he sees it as a songline or dreamline reminding us of Australian aborigines, a synecdoche for the great city. "For a brief passage the vehicles and the people are brought into relation with the push and flow of the sea. The wind and the dust, the noise of the traffic and the cry of the gulls, are brought together." (133) In past London: "It might seem to the observer that life for the majority of riverside people was the sum of a dark house and a dark street but, where a thousand such houses are found together, there can breathe a spirit of adventure and of wonder." (181)

One drop of Thames is drunk by eight people, he somehow estimates, before it flows into the ocean. The width of the river mid-City is about a third of what it once was; nobody has been recorded to have survived a swim in fleeing pursuers across its City stretch, so dark, oozing, and unpredictable its cold depths. Its pastoral sounds make the author wonder if these are all that connect our experience of it with its ancient flow, perhaps 55 million years ago.

Suicides draw towards it as much as holidaymakers. "Tacitus relates that the Saxons, long before they colonised Britain, were prone to drowning their enemies in the river as sacrifices to the god Nerthus." (370) Its stretches contain filth, rot, pollution, and decay as well as regattas, day-trippers, and anglers. In it we see our reflection not so much mirrored as altered into a portrayal part "Wind in the Willows," part "Heart of Darkness."

However, as previous reviewers have noted, the effect as with "London" over hundreds of densely factual, or divergently lyrical passages may be one of languor. "Water is the mistress of flowing language, of language without interruption or surcease." (335) The spell of the river soothes Ackroyd as he labors to catalogue its wonders. Those of us far from its banks may or may not be enchanted by such a mass of information. This will aid historians needing a compendium of all data about the river, but it may, despite and because of Ackroyd's assemblage of detail, daunt casual inquirers.

2009-09-05 | Fionnchú (Los Angeles) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Too dry a tale for so wet a subject
I'm a huge history nerd and I couldn't finish this one! I got through maybe 1/3 of a book of rhapsodic prose about the Great River and it's Place in History and how Water is Significant to All Peoples but Especially the Noble British blah blah..Fine I get it.

I'm sure there were some interesting bits in there but they are pretty far underwater in this tedious tome.

2009-06-17 | Wendy Zdrodowski (Chicago, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Shakespeare: The Biography

Description

Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry, the animals, even the flowers–that would appear in Shakespeare’s plays. He takes us through Shakespeare’s London neighborhood and the fertile, competitive theater world where he worked as actor and writer. He shows us Shakespeare as a businessman, and as a constant reviser of his writing. In joining these intimate details with profound intuitions about the playwright and his work, Ackroyd has produced an altogether engaging masterpiece.

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Customer Reviews

Worthy of the subject
This book was fantastic or better said is ,I am still going through it on a daily basis.
It is a pleasure to read as the writer has the gift of style and scholarship.He links a myriad of facts
that surround the life of Shakepeare to give us a sense of the man in his times.Facts that relate to his life
and his family show us how many of the things we read in the works of Shakespeare spring from his lived life.
The fact that there was an alchemical strain in him is obvious and those who doubt Stratford should read this.The ability to dig into facts and infer is great and the prose is rich.This is akin to the book on St Augustine by Peter Brown in that it helps you to understand the subject by showing his times and how they differ to ours.The muses that drove on the Bard are well accounted for here and I would only disagree about Shakepeare not having a point of view.His view of life was so sublime and his understanding of human nature so profound he did not waste his breath in tampering with it.The book is a true delight and makes one wonder more and more at the country gent strolling the streets of London four hundred years ago.Truly one for the ages!

2010-07-01 | Deus Faber (Rome,Italy) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Shelve under Fantasy
One hundred years ago Mark Twain wrote on three pages all the known facts about the Stratford William Shakspere (one of the variant spellings). Ackroyd's `biography' is like the others: the meagre facts submerge in a tsunami of suggestions, speculations, `it is possibles,' `it is also likeleys,' and padding galore. Never does Ackroyd mention the extensive literature which questions the Stratford W.S. as the author of the plays and poems. From what we know, the Stratford W.S. was a very ordinary person. Ackroyd makes the strange assertion that extraordinary men and women are quite ordinary underneath. This, he says, is why contemporaries of the Stratford W.S. had `no overwhelming sense of his personality.' Whoever wrote the plays and poems must have been an exceptional person. With his intelligence and wit, he would have shone brilliantly in any company; most unlike the provincial and money-grubbing Stratford W.S. It is ironic for Ackroyd that in the year his book came out there appeared `The Truth Will [sic] Out' by Brenda James. Her claim that Sir Henry Neville was the real `Shakespeare' may not be the final word, but it certainly adds fuel to the authorship debate. Unless some amazing new information surfaces, biographies of the Stratford W.S. are redundant. They simply show 101 futile ways of trying to breathe life into a dead duck. Or should we say swan? (`swan of Avon.')

2010-03-23 (Australia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Excellent
Let me first preface this, I am by no means an expert on Shakespeare's life, times and works. In fact I came somewhat late to his plays due to a college professor who, in her infinite wisdom, decided to spend six weeks of a semester convincing us students that she was a Shakespearian "expert" and confirming just the opposite. And at least in my case, made me hesitant, if not resistant, to pursuing the Bard's works on stage. That being said I bit the bullet, grew up and have seen my fair share of Shakespeare plays performed, including Braodway, the Folger, etc. My point here is that the reader need not have a wealth of previous Shakespeare knowledge to both appreciate and enjoy this book.

To put things in perspective Shakespeare was born 300 years before the Civil War and died 300 years before World War I. Attempting to piece together his life in any detail is thus very difficult. Besides his works, which were either updated and revised continually by the playwright during his lifetime and/or collected by his peers after his death, there's a minimal Shakespeare "paper trail", i.e. questionable contemporary descriptions, church records, playbills, deeds and other documented business transactions, or lawsuits.

Shakespeare and his peers were inventing a medium - plagiarizing regularly and adding their own twist, which was not considered a bad thing at the time - and were not concerned about their historical legacy. Their goal was to entertain and make money. Shakespeare accomplished both and that his works still resonate 400 years after he wrote them is testimony to this.

The author fills in these very large biographical gaps by documenting and chronicling the times Shakespeare lived in, adding what pertinent facts history has left us, as well as reasonable conjecture. This may sound like sparse reading - it's not. By not meandering too far from his subject Ackroyd has written a very engaging book. At times the language can get a bit overwrought - Shakespeare's "white hot quill" and "cauldron of creation" - but this can be pardoned as the author is obviously more than a fan.

Conversely Ackroyd does a very good job of not over quoting contemporary sources or Shakespeare's words, which with the spelling, vernacular and syntax of the times potentially could have bogged down the reader. In a nutshell the author explains these intricacies and nuances without being condescending - unlike my college professor. The author's exuberance proved a good thing for a Shakespeare novice like me.

This is a very good book on both Shakespeare's life and times; it is not a detailed analysis of his work, which is exactly what I hoped for when I picked up this book.

2010-02-17 | Reader (Arlington Hts, IL) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Well written, non-biography
Ackroyd's is surely a better read than Greenblatt's, but, as is typical of the genre, it only succeeds to the extent that it makes things up. Should be titled: Shakespeare, The Novel.

2009-11-25 (apo, ae United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 2

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The DEFINITIVE Biography!
This is the best biography of the Immortal Bard that I have ever read - and I've devoured a number.

Peter Ackroyd places William Shakespeare squarely in his time, the late 16th and early 17th Centuries - Elizabethan England, with all that implies. He makes Shakespeare come alive, as a bright schoolboy in Stratford-Upon-Avon, knowing everyone in the small town and familiar with all those things that go to make up rural living. Later, we see him marrying at 18, to a woman eight years older - possibly due to an "early" pregnancy, possibly for some other reason. A few years hence, the young Shakespeare travels to London to seek his fortune - but always, over the years, sends home ample money to his wife and three children.

Did Shakespeare, a novice actor in London's theaters, discover almost by accident that he had a phenomenal gift for dramatic writing? Ackroyd examines that proposition, as well as the circumstantial evidence that the Bard had an "eye for the ladies," marriage or no, and probably spent some nights in beds not his own. But the author points to other comments by his contemporaries that Shakespeare was discreet, avoided public scandals, and "would not be debauched."

Flash forward a few more years, and the still young man from Warwickshire was rising rapidly in the ranks of London playwrights, and often took some of the less prominent roles in his own works, sometimes when they were played at Court for the queen.

Shakespeare the hard-headed, practical businessman also emerges - buying a share of his acting company, purchasing property in London and back home in Stratford. He is even alleged to have been accused of "hoarding" grain for sale when times were hard.

As befits the greatest writer in the English language, he was a man of many parts. Ackroyd tells us of Shakespeare as a convivial companion, a loving father who mourned his son Hamnet, dead at age 11, in "coded" lines in plays written just after his death; a good friend who provided well for his fellows in his will. Two of them, John Heminges and Henry Condell, in 1623, seven years after the playwright's death, published the irreplaceable "First Folio" of his works. A number of his plays were thus preserved for the ages, as several exist in no other source material but the Folio.

If one compiled a list of the 10 most extraordinary men who ever lived, Shakespeare would surely rank in the top two. Peter Ackroyd has done him proud. Immerse yourself in this biography. It will be time well spent.

2009-10-15 (Madison, IN United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling

Product Details

• State: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-reliance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and overhaul to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780670021222

Description

A fresh, modern prose retelling captures the vigorous and bawdy spirit of Chaucer's classic

Renowned critic, historian, and biographer Peter Ackroyd takes on what is arguably the greatest poem in the English language and presents the work in a prose vernacular that makes it accessible to modern readers while preserving the spirit of the original.

A mirror for medieval society, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales concerns a motley group of pilgrims who meet in a London inn on their way to Canterbury and agree to take part in a storytelling competition. Ranging from comedy to tragedy, pious sermon to ribald farce, heroic adventure to passionate romance, the tales serve not only as a summation of the sensibility of the Middle Ages but as a representation of the drama of the human condition.

Ackroyd's contemporary prose emphasizes the humanity of these characters-as well as explicitly rendering the naughty good humor of the writer whose comedy influenced Fielding and Dickens-yet still masterfully evokes the euphonies and harmonies of Chaucer's verse. This retelling is sure to delight modern readers and bring a new appreciation to those already familiar with the classic tales.

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Customer Reviews

Faithful and approachable retelling!
I am completely enamored of this retelling! Mr. Ackroyd does a wonderful job of updating the language into modern prose while remaining incredibly faithful to the words of the poetry. Bear in mind that when Chaucer is crude, Mr. Ackroyd follows suit wholeheartedly (you will definitely figure that out about a third of the way through "The Miller's Tale"). Those who are reluctant to read this classic will find it to be the longed-for approach. Those who are already fans will have a wonderful time rereading the Tales in this new form.

2010-04-13 (Columbus, OH) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Crude Translation
I'm sorry to rain on the parade of positive reviews here, but this "translation" of the "Canterbury Tales" strays too far from the original to be characterized truly as a translation (Ackroyd himself calls it a "retelling").

Chaucer is a suggestive poet, ambiguous, ironic; he can be crude at times, but he is always cleverly reversing himself and hiding his intentions from the reader. That (and the amazing poetry) is what makes him such a complex and delicious poet to read. Ackroyd's prose, larded with the f-word and other expletives, just doesn't capture the sense or the spirit of the original.

Examples could be multiplied endlessly, so let me pick just two. In the infamous pear-tree scene in Merchant's Tale, a randy squire copulates in a tree with May, the young wife of January, the old blind owner of the manor. January's sight returns at the crucial moment and he witnesses his own cuckolding, which both he and the narrator have some trouble describing, until the gullible old fool lapses into a paroxysm of euphemism ("I thought your smock had lain upon his breast") as he apologizes to his deceitful wife. At one point January does blurt out "He swyved thee!" (which is as close as Middle English comes to the f-word). Ackroyd uses this scene though as a pretext for exploding the f-bomb three times in less than a page, thereby missing most of the comedy that comes from shifting registers and the poet's struggle to be explicit and delicate at the same time. Ackroyd also completely misses the hints in this same scene that May is pretending to be pregnant in order to get January to let her climb into the tree so she can satisfy her food-craving (J longs for an heir). Thus, the reader completely misses the significance of January's stroking her belly at the end, since she may by now be with child by another man.

Let me finish with an example that all Chaucer lovers will recognize -- those famous opening lines (loosely paraphrased): "When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root and bathed the sinews of every plant in the liquid whose force engenders the flower; when the Zephyr wih his sweet breath has inspired the tender crops in every wood and heath...." Nature is the point here; man comes in later. But not in Ackroyd! He translates, "When the soft sweet showers of April reach the roots of all things, refreshing the parched earth, nourishing every sapling and every seedling, then humankind rises up in joy and expectation."

If Chaucer had wanted humankind in these opening lines, he would have put humankind there. He didn't. Instead, he is building up an expectation for a certain kind of poetry, teasing us, testing us. Of course, we expect men to appear in this spring setting, but Chaucer is staving off the moment when nature gives way to man, just as later at the end of this verse paragraph, he reverses direction again and surprises us with, of all things, pilgrimage as the natural outlet for the impulses of spring ("Thanne longen folk to goon on [wait, wait, wait] pilgrimages")! Of course we know that pilgrimages can be excuses for boondoggles, but that's an implication that emerges from the shift in tone in Chaucer and all the more tantalizing for being left unstated. Not so with Ackroyd, who mentions general tourism before he even gets to pilgrimage: "This is the best season of the year for travellers. That is why good folk then long to go on pilgrimage." He thus loses all that delicious play and reversal of expectation. Boo!

This unsubtle version is unworthy of the deft and evasive poet it follows. It may be fun to read (and maybe even a bad Chaucer is better than no Chaucer at all). But don't mistake it for the real thing.

2010-01-26 (Boston, MA) | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 2

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A workable translation of a classic, and easy to read aloud
I studied "The Canterbury Tales" for several weeks in college many years ago, and from time to time re-read it -- or tales from it -- with the old pleasure and without the pressure of earning a grade that would keep my scholarship alive. The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale has always been a great favorite -- she seems to epitomize some of the powerful farm women I knew as a child.

This new translation comes at a time when I've been regularly reading aloud to my wife, and we have greatly enjoyed this version -- my Middle English accent is incomprehensible, even to me. My well annotated college Modern Library version of the original and the Coghill translation are always close at hand to deepen our understanding; the Ackroyd version is very easy to read aloud and to understand in modern terms.

Which version you prefer will depend on your own interest and objectives in reading this classic of English literature. These short extracts from the Wife of Bath's Prologue give a flavor of each of my favorite versions:

Chaucer:

"Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve,

Withouten other companye in youthe ...

In felawschip wel coude she laughe and carpe.

Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce,

For she coude of that art the olde daunce."

Coghill:

"Five husbands have I had at the church door,
Yes it's a fact I've had so many.
All worthy in their way, as good as any. ...
The gift of laughter and fun was mine.
Love's remedies I know, and not by chance;
I know first hand the art of that old dance.

Ackroyd:

"She had been married in church five times but, in her youth, she had enjoyed any number of liaisons. ... She had performed in that game before. She knew, as they say, the ways of the dance."

The "Times" [of London] discusses why reading this great book has relevance today:

"Chaucer may be said to stand at the head, or source, of the great English tradition. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that he considered it extraordinary "that Chaucer should have been so unmistakably English almost before the existence of England". But it is perhaps not so extraordinary of a poet who seems to define or sum up the English genius, with his personal modesty and broadness of feeling, with his respect for tradition and his inventive diversity. Translating The Canterbury Tales into contemporary English is another way of affirming its centrality and its continuing life. It can be reborn in every generation."

All three versions have their charms, and Chaucer still lives for those that love the English language and good literature.

Robert C. Ross 2010

2010-01-03 (New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 23 | Rating: 5

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A Great Translation
While the Tales don't usually translate well, this is about as good as any could be. Avoiding the painfully flat literalism of most adaptations, Akroyd gives, instead, a real sense of the flavor and tone of the original Middle English.

2009-11-16 (Michigan) | Helpful Votes: 29 | Rating: 5

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A Gem, Just in Time for the Holidays
When I first heard about this, I was a bit skeptical, not to mention feeling a bit of an intellectual snob remembering the hours we spent learning, decoding, memorizing, and translating the original Tales back in school. But I couldn't resist taking a peep under the cover and was immediately seduced. Ackroyd's language perfectly captures the tone of each tale, and the characters leap from the pages as their stories unfold. I expect it is now only a matter of time before it's adapted for the screen; we can only hope HBO or Showtime get a hold of it first and spare us squirming through Keanu Reeves as the Pardoner or Carmen Electra as the Wife of Bath. In any case, give this book a chance, and stuff it in the stocking of anyone who claims to love literature. Just don't expect to see them until they've turned the last page.

2009-11-14 (Homer, AK USA) | Helpful Votes: 57 | Rating: 5

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The Lambs of London

Description

From the author of Chatterton and Shakespeare: A Biography comes a gripping novel set in London that re-imagines an infamous 19th-century Shakespeare forgery.

Charles and Mary Lamb, who will in time achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for Children, are still living at home, caring for their dotty and maddening parents. Reading Shakespeare is the siblings’ favorite reprieve, and they are delighted when an ambitious young bookseller comes into their lives claiming to possess a ‘lost’ Shakespearea play. Soon all of London is eagerly anticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the play not knowing that they have all been duped by charlatan and a fraud.

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Customer Reviews

Tales from Ackroyd
N.B.: FOR ANYONE NOT ALREADY ACQUAINTED WITH THE STORY OF MARY LAMB AND OF WILLIAM IRELAND, THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A SPOILER.

In a note at the beginning Peter Ackroyd gives fair warning that `This is not a biography but a work of fiction. I have invented characters, and changed the life of the Lamb family for the sake of the larger narrative.' I do not myself object to fictionalized biography so long as it credibly fills in details of speech or incident, does not depart too far from what is known, and does not deliberately contradict what actually happened. Ackroyd credibly invents speech and the incidents of daily life; but in the depiction of the relationship between Mary Lamb (whose life is well documented) and William Henry Ireland (ditto) he invents a connection for which there is no historical warrant; and in the case of the Shakespearian scholar Edmond Malone and in the dates he gives he runs directly counter to the known facts. This may not trouble most readers; but it irritated me and considerably reduced my appreciation of what is a well-told tale, with the atmosphere and the literary scene of late 18th century London being knowledgeably conveyed with Ackroyd's usual skill and light touch>

The novel gives us a good picture of the principal characters: of Mary Lamb and her brother Charles; of their parents; and of William Ireland and his father Samuel, a bookseller and collector of historical memorabilia. Mary is very close to Charles; she is at times mentally disturbed, and is driven mad by having to attend on her old father, who has lost his mind and whose talk is completely inconsequential, and on her controlling old mother.

Brother and sister are devoted to the works of Shakespeare; and that makes for the invented bond with William Ireland, who claimed to have discovered a hoard of Shakespearian manuscripts, including a hitherto unknown play, `Vortigern'. He had forged them all; but he fooled his father, Mary, Edmond Malone (in historical fact it was Malone who exposed the forgeries) and many others into believing in their authenticity. This is the spoiler referred to at the top of this review. The reader who does not already know of the forgeries will, when reading this novel, be as taken in by the charm and enthusiasm of William Fielding as were, for a while, so many others.

Those readers who already know the dreadful deed Mary Lamb committed will yet be surprised by what Ackroyd produces as the trigger for it. The final chapter contains a few more deliberate conflicts with the historical facts, for no artistic reason that I can make out.

2010-08-19 (London United Kingdom) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Quick read with surprising depth
I'm not a scholar of Shakespeare nor historic England, but I found the combination of a book that delved into Shakespeare and life 200 years ago to be an irresistable combination. In this novel, author PEter Ackroyd takes a true event -- the forgery of some Shakespeare letters, poems, and a play -- and brings the perpetrators and other early 19th-century Shakespearians to life.

For me, the most entertaining thing was to try to inhabit the minds of people who literally seemed to have Shakespeare at-hand in their everyday speech and perception. They could quote him as easily as we'd quote lines from a sitcom or commercial. And "they" were not necessarily scholars and children of nobility. These were shopkeepers and clerks -- but with ambitions, intelligence, and intensity. I'd like to think that I would have been able to do so, if I had been raised in that environment, too.

The pace of the story never slackens. We first meet Mary Lamb (an old maid, destined to care for her senile father) and Charles Lamb (her brother, a clerk with the East India company who dreams of glory as a literary critic and essayist). Since childhood, these two have been close, and they have shared a love of language and intellectual conversation. While Mary is house-bound, due to the restrictions of her era, Charles works and goes drinking with his friends several night a week. He's found a boisterous, reasonably literate crew of pals, and they respect the small articles he's been able to place in literary publications. Charles meets -- or rather, is baited by -- William Ireland, an ambitious and possibly genius 17-year-old son of a bookseller. Ireland begins to share with William and Mary a series of Shakespeare pieces -- a letter, a poem -- that he has forged. When these are declared by scholars to be genuine, William presents his greatest forgery: an entire play. The play is produced, and it's met with derision and closes in six nights, as, perhaps, the public senses that it's not really Shakespeare. The forgeries unravel, and lives unravel. Ironically, William did it to impress his father and to test his literary skills, but not for glory or money (which are the reasons his father pursued the verification to its ultimate failure).

The author does a deft job of sketching scenes and then leaving them before you get everything you want. You want to hear more from Charles' cronies, who are witty and foolish at the same time. You want the mini-play that Charles tries to produce to be done more than once (in front a inmates in an asylum). You want Mary and William to fall in love and read plays and poetry together for 40 years. You want Charles to achieve his ambition as a literary critic. And so on.

The only clunker in this book is a two-page visit that William and his father make to a pair of clerics who are Shakespeare scholars, and who become crucial to the deception because they are pleased that the newly found works "prove" that Shakespeare was not a secret Catholic. Those clerics are described as owning a black foundling boy, a former slave, who they molest every night. It's a dumb, unnecessary detail -- as neither the clerics nor the boy appear again in the book. So why does the author go out of his way to make those insults?

2010-06-26 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Seedy and unappealing
I didn't care for this book at all. Too speculative, and the characters were not especially likable.

2009-08-06 (Chicago, Illinois) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Some wonderful literary fiction in a historical setting
In the enthralling (literary fiction) historical novel, The Lambs of London, scribed by renowned British novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the author hooks his readers on the discovery of a new dramatic script that might have been William Shakespeare's unknown literary treasure.

Set in London of the Romantic Period (late eighteenth/early nineteenth century), the novel gives a fictitious account of how Charles and Mary Lamb make acquaintance with a young bookseller who claims to have found Shakespeare's yet unknown work. The enthusiasm and skepticism that follow make this story a captivating read.

The author tells you upfront that the situations are purely fictitious. The real historical figures like the Lambs, Thomas de Quincey, and R.B. Sheridan only support the ambience of the literary environment of London at the time of the novel's events. However, the incorporation of these characters provides solid grounds for performing this literary march in which the name of Shakespeare leads the lives of its followers.

As the plot unfolds through the forays of William Ireland into Shakespeare's world, readers get a chance to take a close look at London life that is blanketed by ennui and unanimity at large. For the middle-class literary figures and businessmen dealing in books, Shakespeare's name signifies a boom that would shake people out of their dormancy. Whether it is turns out to their good or ruin is the point illustrated so cogently in the book's ending.

Peter Ackroyd proves to be skilled at `showing' instead of `telling' about a historical situation. As manifest in The Lambs of London, he shows how history can be created and made credible. However, the title of his novel calls critical thought to questioning of its relevance. William Ireland remains the dominant character in the story and precedes the Lambs in both attention and character development. The book's ending, though, makes it a story of the Lambs for a moment.

Armchair Interviews says: Ackroyd's novel is definitely a memorable creation for lovers of literary fiction.

2007-08-31 (Minneapolis, MN) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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The Lambs of London
The Lambs of London is the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, authors of Shakespeare for Children, and the great literary hoax that was played upon London in the first few years of the 19th century by William Henry Ireland, son of a book seller.

Charles is a clerk at the East India House. He's bored with his job and spends his free time in taverns drinking with his friends. In fact, when we first meet him, he is slightly less than sober. His sister Mary, is a fragile young woman who is emotionally and physically unwell. She idolizes her brother and puts up with Charles's coming home drunk at odd hours. They live with their parents, their overbearing mother and their slightly senile father.

They soon become acquainted with Ireland, who at the age of 17 is already a writer. To suit his own fancy, he "discovers" a lost Shakespearean work called "Vortigern" as well as a testament allegedly written by Shakespeare's father. Its pretty obvious that both works are forgeries; the text of the play uses too many 19th-century phrases and it only has four acts. The documents were also found under suspecious cercumstances that Ireland refuses to discuss. But London, caught up in this extraordianry new "find" recognizes the work as real and the play is performed.

While the major facts of the book are true, there is a lot that is not and there are a few misleading things as well. The dates are slightly off: in the book, the forgery and Mary's death take place in or before 1804; in real life, the forgery took place in 1796. In real life, also, Mary survived her brother. Shakespeare for Children was written in 1807; and while this book does not cover that time period, it might have been nice for the author to have at least mentioned it in his afterword. Also, before I learned very much about the Lambs, I'd assumed that Charles and Mary were much closer in age than they actually were (in realy life they were born nine years apart, she being the elder). Also (and this is a spoiler), when Mary attacks her mother and kills her, Ackroyd makes no mention of the fact that Charles did everything his power to prevent her from being sent to an asylum, including declaring himself her guardian. Aside from these historical details, which makes the book confusing in some places, this book is an excellent depiction of London in the pre-Victorian period. It's a quick read but well written and extremely fascinating. I also recommend reading Ackroyd's Shakespeare: a Biography.

2006-08-25 (Radnor, PA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion

Description

This special abridged edition takes the reader into the fascinating life of one of the world's greatest writers--Dickens' penurious and painful childhood, the triumphant reception of his first novel and other significant events in Dickens' life.

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Customer Reviews

There is evidently no middle ground
There is evidently no middle ground about this book, people absolutely love it, or despise it. The oddity about this reaction to this very odd and in my opinion very great, biography of Dickens is that I can sympathise with a lot of what the 2 (so far) negative reviewers say. The most honest criticism cannot be disputed at all: in books as in theaters and concert halls a loud snore says more than a thousand of the most carefully considered words. If it doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you because Horace is right about matters of taste.

The fascinating fact is that one of the 2 people who have written negative reviews seems to intend to finish it. For him the immense tome (and how can Amazon have shrunk the paperback to a bit over 200 pages?) has to have something to recommend continuing. For myself it feels like a very long and very good novel. I've read both Edgar Johnson's and Acroyd's work twice, as well as all of Dickens's novels once. Acroyd replaced Johnson on my shelf. Johnson would be the better introduction for people who have only read one or two of the novels and for anyone in need of scholarly apparatus. For someone who downright loves Dickens I have to say that my initial reaction on finishing Acroyd was a sense of loss because I would never again be able to read it for the first time .

It is a unique biography in my experience, and as a truly great effort to understand a man in the context of his times stands directly next to the finest 20th century academic biography I have read: Peter Brown's Saint Augustine.

2010-08-15 (Phoenix, Arizona United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Garrick's Review
This is an outstanding biography. Extremely well researched and written by a devoted author who is expert on the subject, culture, country, region and local environs. I have read many other of Peter's books and have come to consider his work quite excellent.

My experience with biographies of great men such as Charles Dickens is that you need the space of at least 1,000 pages. The approach here is far from being too academic. I savored every colorful chapter. The bibliography and chapter notes have me continuing my friendship with CD.

2010-08-08 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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While I read this book very late, I am glad that I read it.
This is a book I should have read when it first came out in 1990, but did not buy it until the paperback edition came out. And then it sat on my bookshelf with my Oxford illustrated Dickens. Why didn't I get to it earlier? My best guess is that not only is reading all of Dickens a big chunk, this book is almost 1,100 pages long. I had so much else I wanted to read that getting into that much material as carefully as I wanted to read it caused me to put it off. Now that I have read the book and begun my perusal of all of Dickens rather than just that books with which I was already familiar show me what a mistake I have made. So, I urge you to not put off treating yourself to this biography or diving deeply into the writings of Charles Dickens.

Why do I like this biography? I think there are several basic approaches to telling the story of a life. Two that I do not like are the mere chronology of events from beginning to end and the other extreme that assimilates the author into the intellectual fashions of the present and does nothing to help us see the life and work in the context of the times in which it was created. This latter type is most often seen in academic biographies where English departments have become political advocacy and indoctrination programs and no longer deal with our language and its history in a serious or thoughtful way. Its easier to simply dismiss everyone who doesn't share your political philosophy and pretend that your being "right" also means you are of superior intellect and learning. For me, this is like travelling to a foreign land and then judging it against your own culture and finding its differences to be deficiencies.

This biography is of the kind I appreciate most. Ackroyd not only helps us see the life of Charles Dickens and how the author used his own life and times to create his art, but also the times, social settings, and evolving culture in which Dickens lived and worked. For me this has the benefit of travelling to a foreign land and by coming to appreciate its culture for what it is and how the people there express their lives in that culture you learn to see your own life and home culture with new depth. Our intellectual shorthand calls Dickens a Victorian, and of course he was in his maturity. However, his early life which formed much of what he was, was pre-Victorian. The London of his maturity was quite different than the London of his childhood and it is that earlier London that he used in most of his writing. I also found Ackroyd's discussion of the Charles' early family life and his relationship with his parents to be most helpful in seeing more deeply into Dickens' novels and the way he lived his life.

Ackroyd also provides seven little interludes that help us see his perspective on this biography. He admits his likely faults and where he might be pushing his ideas a bit too far. Still, I think this work is a fine accomplishment. As Ackroyd notes many times and as his friends noted, Dickens was an odd man. His friends loved him and if their relationship with him was broken off, more than a few grieved at the loss for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, he was so driven by his inner needs, his burning energy, his need to work hard, and to work out his life and world through his art that he was very hard on those around him. Not least his wife, Catherine. After she bore him ten children and suffered horribly from what we know as post-partum depression after each birth, he eventually separated from her. Yes, he set her up so she lived well, but she was terribly harmed by being pushed away. And he was, too. But he didn't see it that way. His relationship with Ellen Ternan is discussed in this book at length and Ackroyd takes the position that it was not sexual, but of the same deeply emotional attachment of similar nature to the one he had with Mary Hogarth (his wife's younger sister) who died at seventeen. But some have disagreed with this book's conclusions on this subject. I am willing to go along with the author, but for me the serious issue is less whom he took up with than those whom he abandoned. But that is my own view of life. Dickens was one of those driven men whose inner need to accomplish and work more deprive his family of a supportive father as his children grew. Frankly, Dickens was disappointed in most of his sons and was quite open about his favorites among his daughters. Very few of them had lives that worked out well. Of course, his presence was such a powerful force that the descendants to this day live in part to protect and perpetuate his legacy.

I also appreciated learning the way each of his works of fiction began, the way he worked through them, and how the public received them. Among the many things I did not know before reading this book I found Dickens' lifelong devotion to theater and the theatrical surprising to me and also quite helpful in understanding his work. Ackroyd also shows us how his works were constantly dramatized with or without Dickens' support and involvement. We also get a better sense of what melodrama meant in the context of that culture rather than our own perceptions of it. Ackroyd also guides us through the layers of artistic culture and how Dickens' popularity with the masses in some ways denied him acceptance in the more elite artistic circles. Still, Dickens knew what he was aiming for and his success was so great that these exclusive circles could hardly deny him. I also enjoyed learning how his works were serialized. While there were several different ways, in most cases the monthly installments were little books containing only that work and some advertisements (to increase profitability). While a few of his works were serialized in publications, particularly in Household Words and All the Year Round, most were handled as independent monthly serials. Oliver Twist and his Christmas books were issued as single volume publications, but that was not his usual way of publishing his works. As she worked his copyrights, he did print his works as bound novels and often revised them when issuing them in these editions.

Dickens was also an astute and hard driving business man. He valued his copyrights and worked them. Part of his hard feelings about America was the way his works were printed and sold here without any payments to him. Dickens was also very hard with his publishers at home. He would extract the lions share of the value of his work, which makes sense, and leave the publishers with enough to make them happy. However, when a publisher tried to push back that was often the end of their relationship. Dickens would not accept any slight or indignity; real or perceived.

While I knew that Dickens did do public readings of his works, I had no idea how extensive they were and how big a role they played in his later career. Nor did I realize how many of his works he developed for this type of public performance. Ackroyd does a fine job in showing us how carefully and even tentatively he developed the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes for public reading. Many of his family and friends told him not to do it because of the shock it would give his audiences. Once he did it and the shock was profound but popular, they urged him to stop because of the terrible physical and emotional strain it put on him in his frail condition. His children and friends believed that the strain of these readings shortened his life considerably.

The latter years of Dickens life are, frankly, sad. He only lived to be 58. How much of his health decline was caused by actual illness that he treated with medications such as laudanum and how much was caused by the treatments I do not know. But many of his friends and associates died by their late fifties, as well.

I think this is a very successful biography and provides wonderful information and insights for us, its readers. I not only recommend this biography to you, but encourage you to treat yourself to a more patient and deep reading of Dickens, who was, I believe, one of the great English writers. When we dismiss him, we cheat ourselves and blind ourselves to all his strengths, his wonderful humor, and indelible characters.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

2009-01-13 (Ann Arbor, MI) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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REVIEW OF PETER ACKROYD'S DICKENS BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
There are some oddities in the style of Mr. Ackroyd, and his book contains some, what might be called, experimental chapters, fantasies or dreams or prose poems on subjects the author associates with Dickens. Ordinarily, I would find these things a bit off-putting.

But Mr. Ackroyd succeeds in giving us an overwhelmingly animated and penetrating portrait of the great Victorian author. This huge book - and no smaller effort could capture Dickens' spirit - crackles with energy, the very kind of driving energy so characteristic of Dickens himself.

Dickens was a strange man with immense drives and desires going off in many directions and personal habits that might well at times be regarded as unbalanced. He was not the sentimental, storytelling Victorian father figure he is sometimes regarded, although he could be quite sentimental about family and friends and his storytelling ability had few equals.

He behaved at times as a petty tyrant and was highly opinionated, always a man of immense curiosity, a traveler, a political activist, a generous man, a workaholic, a man eager for every possible shred of success and acclaim, a talented actor and mimic, a man seemingly possessed at times, as when carrying on conversations with himself, imitating his own characters in a mirror or going for walks as long as twenty miles alone or living with the ghosts of his fractured childhood.

A whirlwind of experience and desires helped make this naturally talented man such a great novelist. There are similarities to the titanic storm that was Beethoven. In both cases, the young man in his first blush of success could be truly charming while the aging figure could be quite unsettling.

The book contains many interesting anecdotes and details of Dickens' England, as well as Dickens' America since he made two journeys to America, a place he both hated and was fascinated by.

Highly recommended to all lovers of good biography, all students of English literature, and all students of English history.

2005-02-28 (Citylights, Ontario) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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Stupendous . . .
. . . but no adjective, or string of adjectives, can do Ackroyd's massive, majestic biography justice. Dickens is, with Victoria, the archetypical Victorian, and he is here fully realized, in all his contradictory dimensions: the best-known and best-loved writer of his day, but perpetually insecure and ashamed of his "ungentlemanly" background; wealthy yet financially ever insecure and working feverishly for material advancement; outgoing and flamboyantly dramatic, yet profoundly interior and haunted by irrepressible demons; the great celebrator of hearth and home who sired 10 children but who abandoned his wife of 22 years for a curious relationship with an actress more than half his age; the man who toasted Shakespeare's birthday as the anniversary also of the Bard's gallery of immortal characters, who saw himself as a similar progenitor but who would "write" his friends, compulsively objectifying them, family, and acquaintances into manipulable, construed, understandable "characters" - indeed, the most capacious literary imagination since Shakespeare but a jittery control addict for whom everything, and everybody, had to be in its right place.

Ackroyd has read every word Dickens wrote - the novels, stories, journalism, letters, inscriptions - and apparently, and more astonishingly, everything ever written ABOUT Dickens - by his circle of literary and profession friends, rivals, reviewers and critics, acquaintances, memoirists who encountered him but once, otherwise unknown British, Scottish, Continental, or American diarists who happened to note a Dickens "sighting" whether or not words were exchanged. All these gleanings Ackroyd shapes convincingly into cumulative aspects of character, incidents that inform Dickens's work, information about the author's public bearing, mannerisms, speech, likes, dislikes, behavior in almost every imaginable range of situations - "in short" - to call on Micawber - a full portrait. And with remarkable efficiency and literary felicity, Ackroyd situates Dickens within his rapidly changing era, as long-distance horse-drawn coaches give way to rail travel, as the stench and filth of pre-Reform London yields to reformist impulses of every stripe, as the Empire advances and London is transformed into a great capital of monuments and squares and Imperial architecture. (And, as with his engrossing biography of Thomas More, Ackroyd introduces London as a major character and influence on his subject, a conceit Ackroyd, himself the author of a knowing, loving "biography" of London, pulls off beautifully.)

Most important for devotees of Charles Dickens - and if you're searching for a 1200 page (scandalously) out-of-print biography, you are surely that - Ackroyd demonstrates convincingly how the work reflects the life, the personality, the influences, the environment, and all the contradictions of Dickens the man. Ackroyd carefully walks the line between reading too much into the life from the work, but draws careful correspondences between the tensions of the life and their realizations in fiction. The chapters devoted to Dickens in the throes, or ecstasies, of creation - for so does his creative moods and energies vary - are among the book's most compelling passages. Scarcely ever has the sinews of literary creativity been laid so believably bare, by a biographer who is himself a prolific, and highly imaginative, writer. The most powerful impression one draws from Ackroyd's matchless story is the extent to which a protean Dickens embodied to a great degree all his mightiest creations, the dark and the bright, and not merely the plainly autobiographical Nickeby, Pip, and David Copperfield.

When I finally closed Ackroyd's Dickens, I was nearly inconsolable at the loss of someone I felt I had come to know so well. A brilliant life, radiantly told, and a book that deserves to be - and, I pray, will soon be - back in print.

2004-04-07 (Reston, Va. USA) | Helpful Votes: 17 | Rating: 5

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