Charles Dickens. Chesterton G.K.

In the minds of contemporaries, Gilbert Kit Chesteron was, first of all, not an original prose writer and poet, as we know him today, but a bright publicist, a subtle and witty critic, capable of challenging generally accepted cliches and catching the true spirit of things. Full and consistently, this talent of the English writer was expressed in a number of his literary biographies, among which the book about Charles Dickens occupies a special place.

Chesterton himself believed the key to the success of this literary form, the merger with the subject of biography, and in the case of Dickens, this merger took place. Hence the oddity of this biography, neglect of the factual accuracy in favor of the wide, historical view of the work of the classic. Before us is not the scrupulous work of the scientist, but an attempt by the power of love and intuition to comprehend the essence of the phenomenon in all his integrity-or, as it sensitively remarked by Andre Morois, one of the best written biographies ever written, and above all because it is not a biography at all.