Dinah Birch’s recent review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens celebrates the “exuberant variety” and “multiplicity” of his life. He reinvented himself constantly – child labourer, solicitors’ clerk, journalist, editor, actor, philanthropist, social reformer, and a novelist who like Chaucer and Shakespeare, came to represent his age. Birch could easily have defined Dickens in terms […]