Dec 072012
Robert Gottlieb takes up the story of the Dickens children, seven sons and two daughters, about whom Dickens woefully observed: “You don’t know what it is to look round the table and see reflected from every seat at it … some horribly well remembered expression of inadaptability to anything.” Dickens’s conviction of his children’s “failed lives” contradicts the legend of his domestic saintliness.
via Elaine Showalter Reviews Three Books About Charles Dickens’s Personal Life | The New Republic.