About Claire Tomalin: Claire Tomalin is an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.
He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.
The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinatin...
As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.
Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.
Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.
Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies,...
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
I've behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven't behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you're a woman, you're not in a position to behave as badly, because you don't have the economic power.
I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.
After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the re...
Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write.
I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.
The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.
When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient.
My life was a sort of series of random disasters.
Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.
