'I think it might have been a plague pit. 'This place was called Bone Hill even before it was a cemetery,' A cold, low-lying mist drifted among the plots and monuments. We went first to a place called Bunhill Fields and walked over the grave of William Blake, whose biography he is writing. The streets of the city he calls 'an area of, or an arena for, the past.'

PETER ACKROYD, A SOLID, prosperous-looking man with incandescent blue eyes and the sweetly brutal charm of a brilliant character actor, left his penthouse on Notting Hill in London to take me down into ISBN: 9781856190008 SKU: 1406525 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.The New York Times: Book Review Search Articleĭecember 22, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final This 1990 Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd Hardback is in good condition. Although he insisted that nothing in the newspapers he edited should offend his middle-class readers, he regularly indulged in dubious night-time escapades with fellow-author Wilkie Collins and, for the final 13 years of his life, kept a secret mistress, Ellen Ternan. Like many eminent Victorians, he led a double life. He apparently had everything - fame, success, wealth - but he died harbouring the great sadness he had carried with him all his life, and he was humble enough to forbid a grand funeral. Ackroyd highlights the reality of Victorian life, warts and all, and the issues that sparked Dickens's fervent calls for social reform and he also charts the influential landmarks of that era, such as the coming of the railways, the effects upon society of the industrial revolution and the expansion of the British Empire. Dickens's novels brim with references: they are located in the places he lived in and visited, peopled with characters he knew, and inspired by the preoccupations that haunted his mind. Here the author offers a fresh view of Dickens's remarkable life story.

Indeed, Dickens drew strongly on his own experiences as the source for much of his fiction. Charles Dickens's life is a story of rags to riches, complete with bankruptcy, prison, forced child labour, and fame and fortune overshadowed by guilt and secrecy - rather like the plot of one of his novels.

Ackroyd dickens