Charles Dickens�s biography by Wilkie Collins.  

   In the 20th of January, 1890 , the Pall Mall Gazette lamented that Wilkie Collins, who died on September 23rd in the previous autumn, had not written a biography of his friend, mentor, and collaborator, Charles Dickens. His very close relations with Dickens gave him opportunities that came to no other man, and he could have told the story well. This cannot be doubted if a look is taken at the pencil and pen memoranda that are to be found in his copy of Forster's "Life"--the three-volume edition of 1872, which will be sold on Monday .

  The marginal notes reveal not only Collins's feelings about Dickens's works and life, but also about the shortcomings of Forster's biography itself. Forster, asserts Collins, is too inclined to conventional morality ("wretched English claptrap") and to eulogize Dickens. In criticizing Forster's praising his dead friend's "unbroken continuity of kindly impulse," Collins seems to imply that there was a dimension of Dickens's life that Forster was reluctant to discuss. The best Dickens biography, then, in Collins's terms would be the one that best conveys that sense of the dual nature of Dickens, whose life in some respects is a more extraordinary bildungsroman (containing more plot secrets) than any of those which sprang from his pen. Collins seems to have been demanding from a Dickens biography a critical honesty and a strength of literary judgment that Forster's (even though, until the appearance of Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph in 1952, it remained the standard work on Dickens' life) sometimes lacks.

  Although many biographers have attempted Dickens since Collins pencilled in his criticisms of Forster, two recent scalers of that English literary edifice are particularly noteworthy: American Dickens scholar Fred Kaplan, and British novelist Peter Ackroyd. Against these moderns who have been influenced alike by Freud, television, and The National Enquirer, one employs the standards set by Dickens' friend, agent, and confidant, John Forster. Forster's biography is both an epic in twelve books, an illustrated history (the first volume has thirteen illustrations, the second sixteen), a eulogy (it closes with a picture of Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner and the inscription on Dickens' grave), and an Horatio Alger story (its last word being in the appendixed will "�93,000" (II: 301). Forster was not merely the friend of the great man; he was a highly experienced journalist by the time he began to write the biography, and his experience as a writer as well as his breadth of reading shows. For example, Forster compares CD's childhood first to Sir Walter Scott's, then to David Copperfield's in "Earliest Years." The work is full of literary references, including the books CD read as a child. In the second chapter, "Hard Experiences in Boyhood. 1822-1824," Forster relates CD's experience in the blacking warehouse 'somewhere near the Strand ' to David Copperfield's. He was, in fact, the first to mention the connection, which he stumbled upon quite by accident in conversation with Dickens "in the March or April of 1847" (I: 15). From the third chapter, "School Days and Start in Life," Forster proceeds to the period 1831-35, when Dickens began his career as a writer at the age of nineteen, becoming a short-hand reporter covering parliamentary debates for the True Sun.