The many faces of Charles Dickens

Much like Shakespeare, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes, Dickens' story remains difficult to tell entirely; "no written account can possibly be adequate to the complexity of a real life." The author, who will publish a biography of Dickens next week, explains:

In some ways Dickens reveals the central problem with all life-writing, which is that no written account can possibly be adequate to the complexity of a real life. Every biography highlights some details and ignores others, producing a narrative rhythm of skipping and lingering that is far closer to the style of a novel than to the confusion and inconsequentiality of everyday existence. Trickier still is the fact that, whereas writing can only describe one thing at a time, most people find themselves living out several different stories at once. As Virginia Woolf pointed out in Orlando, “a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand”.

Few people lead as many lives as Dickens, who enjoyed coining extra nicknames for himself, including “The Sparkler of Albion”, “Revolver” and “The Inimitable”, and was keen to push his reputation in as many directions as possible. Novelist, playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist, amateur conjurer, celebrity – trying to pin him down is like putting your thumb on a blob of mercury.