I've enjoyed Claire Tomalin's other biographies, so I knew this one would be good too. It's excellent. It really is a life, not primarily literary criticism. None of Dickens's 15 novels gets more than about 5 pages of analysis, which keeps the book manageable instead of the thousand-page volume it might have been. The most startling thing I learned about him was that he wanted no more children after the third one, yet went on to have TEN. I enjoyed the treatments of each child's life (although most of the ten lives were quite depressing), and his biographer Forster's life, and the very interesting connection with the family of his fellow novelist Anthony Trollope. But my favorite thing in the book might be the photo of clean-shaven Dickens!

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