Writer By Trade

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Charles Dickens, professional novelist.

Apr 26, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 30 • By EDWIN M. YODER JR.

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Charles Dickens

A Life Defined by Writing
by Michael Slater
Yale, 720 pp., $35

To begin with a mild apology: This reviewer’s first serious encounter with Charles Dickens (apart from A Christmas Carol, which English-speaking children once heard from their cradles) was with David Copperfield, under the genial tutelage of Professor Harry Kitsun Russell in Chapel Hill, circa 1954. Since we are approaching the writer’s 200th birthday in 2012, this bicentennial reprise demands some refinement of memory, and since my last Dickens binge passed decades ago and, moreover, I feel no present urge to reread Copperfield (Dickens’s own favorite at 974 pages, his only plausibly autobiographical novel) or Bleak House (at 933 pages, one of his midcareer masterpieces), a remedy suggested itself: a first reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the detective story he had only half finished when he was mortally stricken one June day in 1870, aged 58.

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