A. W. WardCritiques

This biography was written in 1902 by a retired professor of history and English literature at the University of Manchester. It is as well written as one would expect. It is interesting to read the account of someone only one generation younger than Dickens (Ward was born in 1837, the year when the first parts of Oliver Twist was published) and who had seen and heard the great man at one of his readings; his concluding chapter The Future of Dickens's Fame is a little downbeat about the author's long term legacy. His account is also, unsurprisingly for the time, coy in its treatment of personal subjects such as Dickens's separation from his wife, Catherine, which here happens almost incidentally and for no apparent reason or fault on either side; and no mention of Ellen Ternan at all (just an oblique reference that Dickens "thought it well......to rebut some slanderous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had misrepresented the circumstances of this separation"). His obsession as a young man with his sister in law Mary Hogarth is mentioned, in a way which contradicts our modern assumptions that such obsessions must be sexual in nature. So a fairly interesting read, but I would not recommend it particularly to other than Dickens completists. 3/5

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