Dickens’s keen vision

The book is an incomparable portrait of the writing life of Dickens. Cumulatively, it is profoundly moving, chronicling the constant restless interaction between the life and the work. Slater quotes to immensely touching effect the account by Forster, Dickens’s best friend and first biographer, of a day trip up river, undertaken to furnish him with material for a chapter he needed to write for Great Expectations: “he seemed to have no care, all of that summer day, except to enjoy [his friends’ and family’s] enjoyment and entertain them with his own in the shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river.”