In 1995 & '96 I was traveling to London regularly on business trips. During one of my site seeing ventures the name of William Blake finally penetrated my consciousness. I became fascinated with the gallery the Tate museum (now Tate Britain) had of his work. I saw this book at the airport and picked it up and it became a London obsession for me. When I would get back to London I would look up streets and sites that I had read about in this WONDERFUL book.

This was the first book of Ackroyd's I read and became a fan immediately. Since he is also a writer of fiction and is a profound scholar of London he offers great insight into Blake and his art. I have since added many other volumes of Blake's works and other books on Blake to my library but I still have deep affection for this book. When someone asks me what book they should read about Blake I always point them to this great book.

You will get to know Blake's life and work, but you will also get to know Blake's relationship to London (where he spent almost all of his life) and to the other artists of his time such as Flaxman, Reynolds, and others. It is even worth re-reading. That is high praise!

This is a great biography. Blake is a complex character. A visionary, an artist whose writing and paintings created a total vision. Ackroyd doesn't belittle the aspirations or eccentricities of Blake, and fleshes out his portrait with interesting details and contextualizes Blake's life within the world events through which he lived.

Of course the reproductions of Blake's work don't do justice to them. Particularly the watercolors in which the luminous white comes from the color of the unpainted paper. These works come off looking clumsy in reproductions. If you have the chance to see these works in person, the effect is altogether different. Blake created a worldview, and he inhabited that (largely interior) mythos.

Find this book. Buy it, and then do anything you can to see Blake's works themselves.

Reading William Blake's enigmatic painted poems on the Web, standing before his paintings in the Tate Gallery, I wished to find a good book which could help in understanding this great artist. My dream came true when I opened Peter Ackroyd's book 'Blake'. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested (as am I) in life and oeuvre of William Blake, the beautiful mysterious English poet, painter and visionary. Mr Ackroyd does not try to decipher and explain the inner meaning of all Blake's poems, paintings and prophesies (nobody can do this!), but in the description of the great mystic's life, time and milieu he gives us important clues. In several chapters he also confides us personal insights of some Blake's masterpieces. Turning the last page of the book you will wish to reread Blake's poems and prophesies and review his paintings: this is the best an author can attain in writing an artist's biography.

This is a most amazing book. One would almost believe that, like his beloved William Blake, Ackroyd has the ability to rendevouz with the spirits and have Wilde dictate this marvelous account of his exile in Paris. A cunning pastiche of Wilde's wit and wisdom, this book charts the decent into the human condition. Littered with irony and humour, this book will leave the reader hungry for more insights into the genius of Oscar Wilde and I would reccomend it to everybody, even the few that may not be aware of the subject matter. From the dens of sin to the oppressive beauty of Paris society, the reader is on the journey with Wilde all the way.

There is humour and pathos here as Peter Ackroyd presents the voice of Oscar Wilde during Wilde's last days in Paris near the turn of the century. Though he was living in exile and was very poor, Wilde's observations are sharp and he bravely steps back from self-pity. He is able to assess his own life as an aesthete and writer. He spends his time in cafes, with English friends and with French acquaintances. As he becomes more ill the tone of the voice of Wilde becomes more poignant but till the end he is full of wit. At the very end he dies in his hotel room. This is an immensely satisfying book. All who are interested in Wilde will be drawn into Peter Ackroyd's poetic prose as he recreates from his own study and imagination the last days of the Irish wit and writer, with his degradation and dignity. In the end Wildes's literary wit triumphs and remains while his detractors and persecutors are forgotten

In bookstores and libraries, literary classics are a dime a dozen. There are so many different editions available of each that the problem becomes one not of finding a good read but of selecting the edition of it that's right for you. Charles Dickens is perhaps the most popular of the past masters. All his books are enormously entertaining, whether he's writing about the tragedies of this world or its travesties. His eye for the ludicrous is faultless; his representation of it in print is perfection. He never fails to paint on the canvass in our mind, with a few simple strokes, a comic character that resembles someone we've met somewhere, sometime in our lives. His characters are so real that he needs to do nothing more than describe their appearance briefly and then let them speak for themselves. They speak with all the dignity and importance we all feel in ourselves, yet they unwittingly disclose for the reader all the foibles we all possess ... and mistakenly think known only to ourselves. Likewise, when introducing tragic characters, Dickens prefers to offer brief but unerringly accurate descriptions of their build, demeanor, and dress, and then allow their own words and actions to speak for themselves. His creations elicit mirth and misery in us without fail as Dickens masterfully plucks the strings of our hearts.

Unlike most writers, Dickens is equally at home in both the short story and the full-length novel format. This is because his novels were serialized in periodicals in their first publications. Only later were they edited for book form. "Sketches by Boz" is an offering of Dickens's first attempts at writing for a living. It consists of 56 passages, most of which can be read in a single sitting of less than half an hour. These are divided into four sections: "Our Parish", "Scenes", "Characters", and "Tales". Of these, only the last contains fiction. The 44 nonfiction accounts are just as entertaining as their made-up brothers. In fact, I found them even more fun to read at times. Dickens only thinly disguised the identities of his victims while lampooning them, and as editor Dennis Walder so rightly points out, many of these descriptions would surely result in lawsuits for libel if they were published about public figures today.

This was my first experience reading a Penguin Classics edition of Dickens, and I was extremely pleased with it. The editor introduced "Sketches" with a few notes of academic and historical interest, a particular one of which I found to be of great interest as it finally answered a question I'd had for half my life: namely, where Dickens had acquired his nickname of Boz. But more important for today's reader of Dickens is the "Notes" section at the back of the book in which Mr. Walder defines Dickensian slang and explains the author's references to people, events, and places of early nineteenth century London. Much of Dickens's wit is lost on today's reader without such disclosures.

One of my favorite ways of reading a classic author is to collect all of his or her works and then read through them at a leisurely pace in the order they were written. I did this with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with the intention of noting how his style developed over the years. I was surprised to find an unexpected benefit of that project: I was transported to those times and felt as I imagine one of Doyle's contemporary fans must have felt as he read each new Sherlock Holmes story. After finishing Doyle, I immediately began collecting Dickens for a similar project. "Sketches by Boz", being a collection of Dickens's first literary efforts, was of course the first in this series. The second Dickens book is "The Pickwick Papers", of which I have the Library of the Future edition. But after reading the Penguin Classics "Sketches", I'm determined to first replace "Pickwick" with the Penguin edition. The Penguin books are reasonably priced and well worth every penny.

This was a wonderful collection of all of Charles Dickens works! I highly recommend!

Dickens' Christmas Books might be some of his most overlooked works, except for, of course, "A Christmas Carol." But in these stories he has captured the season's spirits of reflection and faith better than any other work I've read. "A Christmas Carol" is an acknowledged masterpiece; "The Chimes" and "The Battle of Life" are particularly moving as well. Four of these five stories bring me to tears by their ends.

I started in 1991 to read one story per year in the published sequence, (for Christmas 2000, I'm reading The Haunted Man again) and this has made December and its holidays more enjoyable and meaningful for me. I hope to continue the cycle and look forward to reading "this year's Christmas story" aloud to my family as my kids grow up.

Oxford Press/World's Classics publishes excellent quality paperbacks, and they do justice here to Dickens' powerful works. I highly recommend this work (and especially this publisher) to anyone; if you're looking for "A Christmas Carol", get this volume of all the Christmas Stories and enjoy even more of Dickens' masterful ability to weave the human condition into such moving short stories.

It is to be expected that any book written as long ago as 1845 is, in and of its very nature, dated; that's a given. Humor, alas,dies the death of old age far faster than other forms of literature. But, except for certain words and expressions, (which might be difficult at any age, given the difference between American and British English), this book was still vastly humorous to me; it is still easy to see why the original publication of these "lectures" was the making of the British humor magazine "Punch". It is as fine an example of well-written humorous fiction as I would hope to find.

This short book, largely in the form of Socratic dialagues, is jam-packed with powerful satire. Set in the distant future, it reminds us that every age, indeed every generation, has always been convinced it was something special, that it alone had finally sussed out the universe (more or less), and that their ancestors must've been feeble-minded half-wits not to have seen what is so obvious to them.

I found it an excellent antidote to the implicit universal view that we've just reached the zenith of significance and sophistication, just because we happen to be alive in this era. (This view is like the Anthropic Principle applied to history; the book punctures it sweetly and efficiently.)

The laughs point both ways - how wrong the "past" (present) age was about the world, but also how wrong the "present" (future) age is about its understanding of the "past" (present) age. The interpretations from the future of the few surviving fragments of the present age in the far future are slyly hilarious, while the "our ancestors must've been chuckleheads to believe THAT" philosophy (that we would apply to the ancients' geocentric astronomy, for instance) is applied with great effect to some of the foundations of our current world-view.

There are echoes of Ackroyd's theories about personality of place as expressed in his London: A Biography, Plato's philosphy and Socrates' life, and a poetry of perspective.

The identity and future interpretation of the handful of cultural artifacts from our era that survive is one of the incidental joys of this work, I'll just hint at one of the early ones: that classic comedy, The Origin of Species, by Charles Dickens...

Highly Recommended!

This little book is about Shakespeare's sonnets, but more than that it is a book about nineteenth-century young men and their obsession with Shakespeare. Two in particular become completely engaged by a particular literary interpretation--that Shakespeare wrote his beautiful sonnets not for a wealthy patron, but to his Rosalind, or rather to the actor who played all his lovely strong women--that is, to an adolescent boy. The book is a cautionary tale about heightened involvement in literary ideas. A literary idea can possess one as completely as opium, and can be just as dangerous

David Copperfield, Dickens' favorite child, is an experience. Forget what your high school teacher or college professor told you. Forget all the terribly bad film representations of this book. Forget the glib one-liner reviews about Dickens people being caricatures instead of characters. READ this book. This book is one of the few Real Books in this world.

The great storm scene alone will thunder forever in your memories. You will encounter with Copperfield:
• the evil, chilling Uriah Heep,
• the mental and physical destruction of his mother by a Puritanical,untilitarian step-father,
• the always in-debt Mr. Mawcawber who somehow transcends his economic and egocentric needs into something noble,
• the betrayal of Copperfield by his best friend and Copperfield's shattered emotions by this betrayal,
• the ruination of another close friend's reputation, and her step-by-step climb back out of the mire,
• Copperfield's own passionate step into marriage while too young with an irresponsible, yet innocent child-woman, her death,
• Copperfield's own rise from poverty and orphanhood into worldly success but empty life until mature love rescues him.

Dickens has a real gift for creating people that irritate you, yet gradually you come to love them - just like folks in real life. If you never have read Dickens, come meet David Copperfield. You'll find that your impressions of David from the brief snippets by critics, teachers, reviewers, professors and know-it-alls completely different than the Real Thing.

In an age when we have not much time to read one short book from cover to cover, few long books will ever be good enough to read twice; David Copperfield is one of them. It has, perhaps, the most unforgettable cast of characters ever assembled in a work of fiction: Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the Murdstones, Mr. Dick, Peggotty, and, of course, David Copperfield himself.

The story is simple enough to start. David's mother marries a man, Murdstone, who makes life hell for her and young David. David has the courage to rebel against the tyrant and is sent off to boarding school and later to a blacking factory. For readers who want to compare childhood rebellion to authority in the movies, Alexander's defiance of the Bishop in Ingmar Bergman's great movie, Fanny and Alexander, is equally dramatic and sad.

David runs away and finds his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who takes him in and supports him, with a little help from her wise/fool companion Mr. Dick. This is story enough for many novelists, but it is only the beginning for Dickens. David has yet to meet one of the great villains in literature, that "Heap of infamy" Uriah Heep. Uriah's villainy is terrible because it is hidden under a false pretense of humilty and service to others. The final confrontation between Heap and Micawber is one of the great scenes in literature.

None of what I have said answers the question, Why read this book more than once? The most important answer to this question for the nonacademic reader is "for the fun of it." From cover to cover this novel gives so much pleasure that it begs to be read again. We want to revisit David's childhood and his confrontation with the terrible Mr. Murdstone. Mr. Micawber is one of Dickens's great creations and anytime he is part of the action we can expect to be entertained. When we pair Micawber with Heap we have the explosive combination which results in the confrontation mentioned earlier in this review.

These brief examples only scratch the surface of the early 19th century English world Dickens recreates for the reader. Some other of Dickens' novels like Bleak House may be concerned with more serious subjects, but none lay claim to our interest more than Dickens' personal favorite "of all his children," that is, David Copperfield. Turn off the television, pick a comfortable chair, and be prepared to travel along with David Copperfield as he tells us the story of his life.

Charles Dickens has been one of my favorite authors since I was forced to read him in high school. I had not picked up one of his stories since, but upon reading that David Copperfield was Dicken's personal favorite book he had authored, I decided to try him again. I was not disappointed. Dicken's creates an incredible cast of characters and paints a vivid portrait of 19th-century England. Aside from fulfulling those crucial elements of writing a novel, Dickens tells a terrific story. The initial serialization of the story into 19 monthly parts required Dickens to create many dramatic buildups and twists and turns that kept the audience buying the next installment. When it is all put together the novel is an unexpected roller coaster that has many climbs, dives, loop-the-loops, and sharp curves. In the end everything of course comes together beautifully and the characters all get their just desserts. This is yet another clinic by Dickens in how to write a well organized, though unpredictable, novel that maintains the interest of a reader through approx. 900 pages of writing. It is a wonderful experience that all lovers of good fiction should at least attempt.

"Our Mutual Friend" is the last of Dickens's completed novels, and apart from "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", the only one of his novels I had hitherto not read. The more I've read Dickens, the less impressed I've been. Before I began "Our Mutual Friend", I thought that "Little Dorrit" was his worst, but I'm afraid "Our Mutual Friend" now takes the top spot in my list of Dickensian horrors.

It's not the length of the novel that's the problem (it being of average length for Dickens's larger works), nor the usual limitations of the author's writing style (the utterly unconvincing portrayal of female characters, the grindingly forced humour, the welter of two-dimensional characters, the inevitable surfeit of padding by an author writing to quota), rather I felt that Dickens was guilty of one of two fatal errors. Either he was over-ambitious in trying to develop simultaneously, and with the same importance, several plots within the novel, or he was incapable of deciding which plot and which set of characters should be the main driving force of the novel.

That's a pity, because "Our Mutual Friend" starts off well: a night scene on the Thames, a drowned man, a mystery concerning an inheritance. Unfortunately, I soon became bogged down in a lattice work of characters as Dickens skipped from one plot to another, failing convincingly to develop those plots and the characters in them.

There are interesting themes in the book - a febrile economy based on stock market speculation, a glut of rapacious lawyers, the contrast of private wealth with public squalor - 140 years later, has England changed that much? But such interesting social criticism died quickly, along with my interest in this book.

G Rodgers

An interesting assumption undergirds George Orwell's fascinating essay on Charles Dickens, that everyone reading his essay will have read and remembered nearly every word and certainly every character of Dickens. Once upon a time, this was likely true. We're all familiar with the story of eager readers waiting at the dock to greet the ocean liners that were bringing the next installment of Great Expectations. If memory serves, it is also a book by Dickens that the womenfolk read aloud to themselves in Gone With the Wind, while the men are out on their first Klan raid. It was undoubtedly the case, particularly when the art form of novel was itself young, that everyone used to read all of Dickens enormous oeuvre. Today though, I doubt whether many of us get past about four or five of his most popular works: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. At least, I know I've got about five others sitting on a shelf collecting dust, their daunting size defeating my mild wish to have read them. But recently PBS ran a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Our Mutual Friend and it was terrific, which proved sufficient motivation to read it too.

In barest outline, John Harmon is the heir to a junkman's fortune. But his father conditioned the inheritance on his marrying a young woman, Bella Wilfer, whom the elder Harmon had once met in the park when she was a mere child. Harmon rebels at the notion, for her sake as much as his own, and when fortune presents him with the opportunity to stage his own death, he takes it. A corpse, later identified as Harmon, is found floating in the Thames by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, whose trade it is to loot such bodies. With John's "death," the fortune reverts to Nicodemus Boffin, who had been an assistant at the junkyard. Boffin and his wife bring Bella to live with them, in hopes of alleviating her disappointment at not receiving the fortune. The avaricious Bella is indeed determined to marry money and so has little inclination, at first, to humor the affections of John Rokesmith, the mysterious young man (and eponymous Mutual Friend) who comes to work as Boffin's personal assistant.

Meanwhile, while Gaffer Hexam has a falling out with his old partner Rogue Riderhood, Lizzie gets her bright but selfish young brother into a school, where his teacher Bradley Headstone develops an unhealthy love for Lizzie. She is also being pursued by the young lawyer Eugene Wrayburn, despite the obvious difference in their social stations.

While the first story line features the moral development of Bella and the growing love between her and John Harmon/Rokesmith, the second soon degenerates.... Beyond the two basic plots, the book is completely overstuffed--with ridiculous coincidences and impossible happenings; with characters who are little more than caricatures, some too virtuous, some too malevolent; with subplots that peter out and go nowhere. Running it's course throughout the story, like a liquid leitmotif, is the River Thames and brooding over it are the enormous piles of "dust," the garbage on which the Harmon fortune is founded. It all gets to be a bit much, but it's also really refreshing to see the great novelist at work.

This is what Tom Wolfe meant when he urged modern authors to get out and look around and write about what they found, instead of penning the increasingly insular and psychological novels which have become the staple of modern fiction. Dickens got the idea for the body fished from the water by seeing rivermen at work, for Charlie Hexam after seeing such a bright young boy with his father. The "dust" piles were in fact a real source of wealth, in a society where the refuse of the well to do could be used again by the poor. If Dickens writing is ultimately too broad for us to think of the book as realistic, it at least attempts to capture the flavor (or the stench) of a time and a place and it is animated by the society that teemed around him. If Dickens ultimately seems to have tried to do too much, better a novel like this where the author's reach exceeds his grasp than to settle for one where the author ventures little. Sure it could stand to lose a couple hundred pages, a few subplots and a dozen or so characters, and it's not up to the standard of his best work (there's a reason after all why we all read the same few books) but it's great fun and, even if just to watch the steady growth of Bella Wilfer and the steady disintegration of Bradley Headstone, well worth reading.

GRADE: B

Elusive in a good way, of course. Our Mutual Friend, his last novel, shows some decidedly modernist techniques and situations that were very much ahead of their time. This novel would have been at home if written in, say, the early twentieth century. The twin images of the River and of Garbage (not just decay and dust, but also recycling and renewal) permeate the beginning of this book, and carry through with characters that don't fall into easy categories. All of the requisite Dickensian elements are here, but the reader is also presented with an ending that is both an epiphany and a recognition that the story REALLY doesn't end, after all; storytellers just move onto different subjects. In other words, there isn't the neat bow at the end of the novel that is so prevalent in Victorian literature--one more reason this novel remains somewhat apart from Dickens' other works, while at the same time being a fresh, engaging read. Probably not the best work to begin with, if you're new to Dickens, but if you have the rhythm of his prose down from other, shorter works, you'll certainly enjoy the greater complexities of Our Mutual Friend.