The Dickens Boy

Thomas Keneally is a prolific writer. A Booker Prize winner for Schindler's Ark, he has published more than 40 books to date. Still writing at the age of 83, he talked to the Guardian two years ago and, when asked to name "the last book that made me cry", he nominated ClaireTomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life:

She managed to convey the extent to which the genius and silly man was, in lacerating his wife and pursuing a new love, so unwittingly dedicated to his own destruction.

I was recently recommended Keneally's The Dickens Boy and borrowed the book. I thought that the story of a child of Charles Dickens emigrating to Australia was a fictional device but I soon realised that it actually happened. The book is nevertheless a novel but Edward Bulwer Lyttton Dickens, the youngest of Dickens' ten children, did in fact travel to Australia in 1868 at the age of 16 to begin a new life in the country he thought of as "the land of opportunity".

I soon came to the conclusion that I knew next to nothing about the life of Charles Dickens and that The Dickens Boy would make more sense if I read Tomalin's biography first. Which I have now started. More news in due course on both books.