Scan The Life Of Charles Dickens : Volume I (Illustrated) Prepared By John Forster Readable In Audio Books

very dry biography by a close friend of sitelinkCharles Dickens, the prose just doesn't flow, the only time it gets animated is when Mr.
Forster is quoting his subject, I am very thankful that Charles Dickens wrote all those letters to his friend or this would have been excruciating.


In this volume, Forster covers the yearsthat means from the birth of Dickens to histh year.
There's really interesting anecdotes and if they are an extract from a letter, very amusing, The author decided though to focus on the career and social life of CD and only in the citations do we get a little bit of the family life.


I don't know if the choice to only cover public life is a trend in Victorian biographies, I know that Princess Beatrice went slashing through Queen Victoria's diaries after her death so I can well see a pattern there.
. . I cannot be sure though because the biographies that I have read of Victorian times are all my contemporaries, I think we now tend to be more truthful since we can't hurt the person or their family anymore and also we don't have the same moral objections to human nature.


Not sure if I will read volumein the future maybe I would go for a more modern biography if I read another one, but for now since I haven't read sitelinkMartin Chuzzlewit yet, I couldn't continue reading this one without meeting major spoilers.
Yes, I think I almost forgot to say, Forster's gives away important plot points for sitelinkDavid Copperfield, sitelinkOliver Twist, sitelinkThe Old Curiosity Shop so reader beware and only read this biography if well versed in Dickens.
In, a baby was born in Newcastle, in the North of England, He was educated for the bar, but quite early he decided to devote himself to periodical writing, and grew up to be a political and historical writer.


The same year, another baby was born in Portsmouth, a port in Hampshire, in the South of England.
He too yearned to be educatedjust as his older sister Frances Fanny was, She had won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in, and their parents were paying the huge sum of thirtyeight guineas a year for her fees.
Fanny was the eldest of eight children, and this boy was the next in line, But John and Elizabeththe parents of these childrenhad not enough money to educate another of their children, Furthermore, the next year when the child was, his father was incarcerated in a debtors prison, and the boy was taken away from school to work in a bootblacking factory.
He was mortified, and never really got over it, He wondered bitterly “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”,

Fast forward another dozen years, and unlikely as it may seem, the two young mens paths now converge, as they meet for the first time.
You may well have guessed that the first was John Forster, and the second was Charles Dickens,

They happened to meet on Christmas Day, through a mutual acquaintance, the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, John Forster had started writing political articles in the “London Examiner” four years earlier which attracted unusual attention because of their vigour and outspoken honesty.
His “Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth” had also begun publication at this time in “Lardners Cabinet Cyclopaedia”.
He looked to be destined for great thingsbut as yet had no idea of his true destinyand what the world would ultimately thank him for.


Charles Dickens

also had an eventful, That year he had married Catherine Hogarth, and also begun the serial publication of “The Pickwick Papers”.
He went to theatres obsessively, claiming that for at least three years he went to the theatre every day.
He hoped to put his work as a junior clerk in the law office, and as a court reporter behind him he knew he wanted fame.
His heart was in acting, but during the previous three years he was also managing to sell pieces of journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals: “Sketches by Boz”.
But it is “The Pickwick Papers” which was the real publishing phenomenon, and which started off his rapid ascent into becoming an international literary celebrity, within only a few years.


And at his side, for the rest of his life was his truest friend and mentor, the selfsacrificing and far more wise John Forster.


John Forster was the only person Dickens trusted with his papers after he died, and the only one he wanted to write his biography.
Who could there be, any better qualified They had met up or written to each other more or less every day, and Dickens never published anything without first running it past his friend, for the rest of his life.
John Forster intervened in negotiations with publishers too, It is fair to say that in every aspect of Dickenss life he was guided by John Forster,

In these three volumes we have, carefully catalogued, a complete record of Charles Dickenss life, including a wealth of information which the author himself wrote to his friend.
John Forster does not comment on the personal areas other biographers delight in, At all times he respects his friends privacy, well aware of the honour that he had been accorded, For this reason, some readers ignore this biography, saying it is incomplete or biased, They are missing a rare treat, Here you will find hundreds of letters and notes by Dickens, written to his friend in all moods: fanciful and frivolous or deadly serious, worried and unsure or almost incandescent with anger, weary and overworked or brimming with excitement over his latest project.
It is all here, organised and linked with John Forsters fuller account of their lives,

If these two had not met, the wonderful works by Charles Dickens that we love may not have been written.
At the very least they would have been different, John Forsters sound advice shaped the genius that was Charles Dickens,

His Life of Charles Dickens is a fascinating account in three volumes, This first volume contains an account of the years before they met, and goes up to justyears afterwards.
This means that a lot of the contents are what Dickens had told Forster, In fact Dickens had felt so mortified and ashamed of his early life that he kept the details hidden from everyoneeven his friend.
John Forster had only learned about the blacking factory after the events in this volume, Charles Dickens had secretly written part of his autobiography, and incorporated them into “David Copperfield”, But that is a later part of the story,

For now, we admire John Forsters retelling of Charles Dickenss years as a child and as a young man, in the firstyears of both their lives.
Here is a brief overview of the first third,

Volume:

ChapterChildhood
ChapterHard Experiences in Boyhood
ChapterSchoolDays and Start in Life
ChapterNewspaper Reporting and Writing
ChapterFirst Book, and Origin of “Pickwick”
ChapterWriting the Pickwick Papers
ChapterBetween Pickwick and Nickleby
ChapterOliver Twist
ChapterNicholas Nickleby
ChapterDuring and After Nickleby
ChapterNew Literary Project
ChapterThe Old Curiosity Shop
ChapterDevonshire Terrace and Broadstairs
ChapterBarnaby Rudge
ChapterPublic Dinner in Edinburgh
ChapterAdventures in the Highlands
ChapterAgain at Broadstairs
ChapterEve of the Visit to America
ChapterFirst Impressions of America
ChapterSecond Impressions of America
ChapterPhiladelphia, Washington and the South
ChapterCanalBoat Journeys: Bound Far West
ChapterThe Far West: To Niagara Falls
ChapterNiagara and Montreal

Some of the writing feels as fresh as the day Charles Dickens put pen to paper.
How fortunate we are that his honest and loyal friend John Forster did not seem to throw away a single scrappy note.
And even more so that he had the skill and knowledge to create this informative, entertaining and massive tome only a couple of years after Charles Dickens had died.


There has been a “major biography” about Charles Dickens every decade since he died, and many more in addition.
It is worth remembering that this is the account which every single biography of Charles Dickens is based on.
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