Robert Patten, recently appointed the first fellow of the Dickens House Museum and considered the leading scholar on Charles Dickens and his relationship with publishers, narrates the fierce struggle Dickens had to create an alter ego, Boz, and how he then struggled to contain him.
Dickens's rise to fame and his worldwide popularity were by no means inevitable. He started out with no clear career in mind, drifting in and out of the theatre, journalism and editing before finding unexpected success as a creative writer.
Patten's revision of Dickens's biography in the context of early-Victorian social and political history and print culture opens up a more unstable, yet more fascinating, portrait of Dickens.
Reproduced courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
For further information, please contact Vicky Westmore at press@cambridge.org
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