Literary Studies

The burdens and genius of Charles Dickens

Item: Charles Dickens
Author: Evelyn Juers

by Evelyn Juers •

March 2012, no. 339

Charles Dickens: A life by Claire Tomalin

Viking, $39.95 hb, 574 pp

Becoming Dickens: The invention of a novelist by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Harvard University Press, $39.95 hb, 389 pp

Literary Studies

The burdens and genius of Charles Dickens

by Evelyn Juers •

March 2012, no. 339

This is how Claire Tomalin closes her Dickens biography: ‘He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens’, followed by a long list of types. I consider Dickens the surrealist, or the sentimentalist, but then I pick Dickens the tireless walker. And I concede, with Tomalin, that regarding his life and work, ‘a great many questions hang in the air, unanswered and mostly unanswerable’.

Evelyn Juers

Evelyn Juers is co-founder of HEAT magazine and Giramondo Publishing. She has a PhD from the University of Essex (UK) on the Brontës and the practice of biography. As an essayist, and an art and literary critic, she has contributed to a wide range of Australian and international publications. In 2009 her collective biography House of Exile won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Her essay ‘Corner of King and Queen: Sketches for the Portrait of a Recluse’ was shortlisted for the Calibre Prize, and went on to become a book, The Recluse (2011).