Dickens biography aykroyd of films

‘To see Dickens day by day,’ writes Peter Ackroyd, ‘making his way, the incidents of his existence shaping his fiction just as his fiction alters his life, the same pattern of emotion and imagery rising up from letters and novels and conversations, the same momentum and the same desire for control – to see Dickens thus is to turn biography into an agent of true knowledge…’

The market in biographies is crowded.

Everybody writes them and ask any publisher for a book idea and he will come up with a biography.

Ackroyd actor

The form is debased – as a staple of middle- brow ‘holiday reading’ its conventions have become paralysed by the necessity of not frightening the audience. So lives are wearily gutted for the usual debates about the usual issues: work versus life, childhood versus family, documentary truth versus imaginative identification with the subject and so on.

From the giant, painfully-footnoted academic text to the slim, sensitive ‘response’ to a life, almost