![]() ![]() ![]() It was typical of his determination to see justice done. To demonstrate this, Tomalin begins the book with a Prologue in which she gives an account of his successful intervention as a juror in a trial of 1840 at which he argued passionately that a young servant girl was not guilty of murdering her newborn child, and thus saved her from a sentence in which the penalty in those days was generally death. ![]() His early experiences, and the hardships of others he saw around him, had a major influence on his thoughts and in time writing, and his sympathy for the underdog never wavered. Three years later he was employed as a junior clerk in a lawyer’s office. (Sadly, she says this will be her last large-scale book).īorn in Portsmouth in 1812, Charles Dickens was denied a formal education by his family’s poverty – his impecunious father served time in a debtor’s prison – and started work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve. Having already written biographies of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, among others, to say nothing of a study of Dickens and his mistress Nelly Ternan, Claire Tomalin is admirably qualified to produce a major life of the author to mark the bicentenary of his birth in 1812. ![]()
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