Dickens

Charles Dickens was a complex personality. Fame, success and wealth could never assuage the shame and sadness of his father's bankruptcy and imprisonment which fuelled his great fiction. In this abridged edition of his acclaimed biography, novelist and cultural historian Peter Ackroyd offers a fresh view of Dickens's life, demonstrating how the novels are set in places where he lived, peopled with characters he knew, and inspired by the dark preoccupations that haunted him.