麻豆社

Claire Tomalin's acclaimed biography of Britain's great novelist paints a portrait of an extraordinarily complex man.

Tomalin portrays Charles Dickens as a writer "so charged with imaginative energy that he rendered nineteenth century England crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation - and sentimentality."

The Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip and David Copperfield are just a handful of the characters he created and who continue to endure.

He was also a hard-working journalist, a philanthropist, a supporter of liberal social causes, and father of ten, and yet his genius also had a dark side which emerged with the breakdown of his marriage.

It begins with an exploration of Charles Dickens's troubled childhood.

Omnibus of five parts abridged by Richard Hamilton.

Read by Penelope Wilton.

Producer: Elizabeth Allard

First broadcast on 麻豆社 Radio 4 in November 2011.

*** Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the The New Statesman and then the Sunday Times before becoming a full time writer. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002.

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