Charles Dickens�s biography by American novelist Edgar Johnson.

  The second great biography of Charles Dickens is that of American scholar and novelist Edgar Johnson, published in two volumes in 1952, then revised and abridged in 1977. Whereas Forster was content to anecdotalize and quote his friend, Johnson narrates with considerable sympathy Dickens' life as though it were a novel. Like Forster in the two-volume edition, Edgar Johnson in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952) sees the year 1846 as the natural division between the earlier and later stages of the author's career and life. The two parts of the later biography, taken together, total 1158 pages of text, plus eight pages of genealogical charts, fifty pages of notes, a 16-page bibliography, and an extensive (80-page) index. Johnson's thoroughness is undermined only slightly by the fact that one must wade through 16 pages of illustrations at the start of the second volume before one encounters "Part Seven: At Grips with Himself, 1846-1853."

  Johnson's point of attack is novel, for he begins not with Dickens' birth but with the rambling, old Georgian mansion still called Gad's Hill Place . This is both Dickens's destination as a mature Victorian pater familias and a symbol of his artistic and financial success. Halting at page 10, towards the end of Dickens' second year on earth, one is brought to a halt by 16 pages of illustrations, cramped three to a 5" x 7.5" page. Then the narrative continues with Dickens' childhood in Rochester ("The Happy Time"), followed by the contrasting recounting of his time at Warren's Blacking, Hungerford Stairs, in "The Challenge of Despair," and assessing the impact which that five-month period (coinciding with the time that his father spent in the Marshalsea for debt) had upon his childish soul. Dickens as office boy, as reporter, a youth in love with the banker's daughter, and finally as writer, begins in the fourth chapter, "Ambition's Ladder." From birth to age fifteen has taken us just 46 pages.

  A touchstone to both the biographer's and biography's biases is the handling of Dickens' first American visit (1841-442). Forster devotes an entire 'book' (seven chapters) to this topic, quoting extensively from the letters that Dickens directed to him (and later borrowed back in order to write American Notes). Dickens' stand on the copyright question Forster presents through quoting a number of letters, especially that of 24 February, in which CD comments upon how Americans are reacting to his oft-publically-stated position and reminders of the melancholy fate of Scott, whose life would have been both happier and longer had he been able to enjoy royalties from sales of his works in the United States. Johnson, too, feels that the first American tour marks an important stage in Dickens' life: he devotes all of the fifth 'part' (five chapters totalling 89 pages) to the subject, his titles signalling the novelist's gradual disillusionment with the great experiment in democracy and a classless society: "The American Dream," "Conquest With Undertones," "'Not the Republic of My Imagination'," "Return Journey," and "Home Again: Valedictory on America."

  Whereas Forster is reluctant to express his own feelings about the copyright question--still very much a subject for acrimonious trans-Atlantic debate in the 1870s--Johnson explores the issue from both sides, stating that in the States "native no less than foreign writers were injured by the lack of an international copyright agreement" (367), so that although they might read European authors, as it were, 'for free', Americans by their parsimony would impede the growth of an indigenous literature.