Book Review: "Dickens" by Peter Ackroyd

According to Christopher Hitchens, Peter Ackroyd is one of the best writers of his generation and though I was pretty here and there, if I need any more evidence then this is it. Dickens is one of the most incredible books by Ackroyd that I have ever read. Starting off with a prologue which lets us encounter the death of the author, we are met with a string of events which mixes with his fictions, telling us who he really was and why. If Peter Ackroyd has ever written a great book then after London perhaps, this is it. It is an incredible text I recommend you read if you too, are a Dickens fan.

This book most obviously begins with the very start of Charles Dickens' life but doesn't just tell his story. It tells the story of his grandparents, of whom little is known and the possibility of when exactly his family can be traced back to (even though the author himself admits that this is difficult and only speculation). He goes through the fact that Dickens most definitely drew on his own childhood experiences and people he knew personally as he created storylines and characters for his novels, even going as far as to heavily satirise his own parents.

One thing I really enjoyed about this book was the way in which the author uses characters like Mrs Nickleby to show us the influences that very real people had upon characters in Dickens novels. As we travel through the book, as Dickens fans, we are met with various characters from the novels that have been based on reality or places that were used, or even events that were lifted from the life of Dickens or those around him. Honestly, it was such a great journey to go on, along with the pictures that litter the text - I was immersed from beginning to end. It's interesting that he writes it this way because in his book London, Ackroyd shows us that the city is definitely a historical force of a character - something that Dickens was also trying to show us by the use of the city in his own novels.

Another thing I enjoyed about this book is that Dickens is not only an author to Ackroyd. Dickens is a philosopher, a performer, a man ahead of his time but also a product of his time. He's not perfect but he's far from flawed. Dickens is a man of many things including being a public speaker and a very intelligent human being. Likening Dickens to Shakespeare is definitely an undertone in the book. There are these long sections which deal with who Dickens was when he wasn't just a writer and Ackroyd is definitely painting the image of a man who wanted to be the performer for London in every sense of the word.

The way Ackroyd presents Dickens, as I have said, is not to make Dickens out to be perfect but to be a human being. He is riddled with contradictions and not just in your average 'tortured genius' way. He's a man who lived very much in the public eye and yet, was really controlling about his private life. He is definitely the social reformist we know him to be, but there is so much going on in his restless private life - such as relationship failures and things that just went generally wrong. This is a man we often mythologise but he was definitely a human being. In his book about Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd does the same thing. He humanises someone we have spent so long drawing a mythology of. He also does this in his book about Charlie Chaplin. I genuinely really enjoy this about his writing because these legends are made to feel like they could be right there with us. They don't seem so far away anymore.

I bloody loved this book and if you love Dickens then you will too. It's one of those books where the first thing you think is 'woah, this book is well-researched' and then after this, you become immersed in the entirety of Victorian London. When you come out of the other side, you will literally have to readjust to reality.