Dickens by Fred Kaplan may do for our greatest writer after Shakespeare what Ellman did for Oscar Wilde . . . A brilliantly readable work and one essential for all of us who care about the man who, for all his faults, remained 'The Inimitable' and 'The Sparkler' to the end.

Fred Kaplan's Dickens . . . would be valuable if only because it takes into account the reams of research that have been published in the intervening years; but it is also well proportioned, persuasive in its judgments and consistently, grippingly readable.

Kaplan has spent ten years preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of this exceptional biography.

A winning mix of insight, narrative skill and shrewd judgement. Kaplan shows how powerfully both as a man and artist Dickens was shaped by the experience of his youth: on the one hand the humiliations showered on him by his penurious and feckless parents, on the other his mental escape into the bright world of the 18th-century novel which gave him his models for good and bad character.

Kaplan is particularly good . . . on the shape and perspective of Dickens's career, his relation with his younger siblings, all of whom he outlived, and with his own children and their developing private lives. To be fully understood as a writer he needs to be put in this sort of family frame.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Mr. Kaplan's biography is its picture of Dickens's professional life and friendships: one senses anew the extraordinary competitive vigor of the Victorian imperial personality. Mr. Kaplan's objective presentation of the facts about the colossus of the age gives us a far better sense of its shape and scale than any facile charm might conjure up. His clarity is the highest form of respect and affection for his astonishing subject.