An unfathomable mysteryGetty Images

Charles Dickens. By Michael Slater. Yale University Press; 720 pages; $35 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OVER dinner once an American friend quizzed Charles Dickens about the workings of his imagination. Where on earth did those wonderful characters come from? “What an unfathomable mystery there is in it all!” replied the creator of Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, Pip, Pickwick and the rest. Raising a wine glass, he continued: “Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, and becomes instinct with life.”

Scholars have pondered this mystery for well over a century. Michael Slater’s biography begins with two key events in Dickens’s childhood: the imprisonment of his father for debt and the boy’s own humiliating experience working in a boot-polish factory. More than 600 pages later the ageing Dickens, by now rich, famous and almost universally revered, is to be found hobnobbing with the queen, making genteel small talk about servants and “the cost of butchers’ meat and bread”.

In between came an enormous amount of hard work. From the time he published his first story in 1833 till his death in 1870, Dickens was frantically busy, not only with his writing but also with a crammed social diary and taxing commitments to charities, causes and campaigns. He was ruthlessly disciplined, versatile and prolific, and thrived on pressure. The attention Mr Slater gives to Dickens’s less familiar writings—the short stories, journalism and essays—is one of the things that distinguish his excellent biography.

Dickens’s family life was as emotionally charged as anything in his fiction. His marriage did not survive his introduction, in 1857, to Ellen Ternan, an actress. He was 45, she was 18. It remains unclear exactly what sort of affair they embarked on, but Dickens was sufficiently besotted to banish his wife of 22 years, Catherine, who had given him ten children. He spoke of her as a “page in my life” that had become “absolutely blank”. Meanwhile he set Ellen up in love-nests in England and France, where he would visit her as often as possible. Having worked tirelessly to achieve a position of gentlemanly respectability, neither a divorce nor an open affair was an option. In the end the great love of his life may have been the one he shared with his adoring readers.

Mr Slater, a professor emeritus of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College, London, has probably forgotten more about Dickens than most people will ever know. The challenge of compressing such a rich and well-documented life within a single volume must have been immense.

Two things stand out. He is good at relating events in Dickens’s life to his books. This is especially useful in his discussion of “David Copperfield”, the most autobiographical of Dickens’s novels (and his “favourite child”). He is good, too, on the composition of the major works. He reproduces snippets from Dickens’s “mems”, the terse notes that he used to keep track of his large casts of characters and multiple storylines. “Esther’s love must be kept in view, to make the coming trial the greater and the victory the more meritorious”; “Jo? Yes. Kill him.” That such jottings were all Dickens needed to keep the spaghetti-tangle of “Bleak House” straight in his head is astonishing. Still more astonishing is the fact that with some of his later novels, such as “Great Expectations”, he saw the plot so clearly from the outset that he did not bother with notes of any kind.

Mr Slater has written an authoritative and engaging biography. Perhaps he might have done more to capture the sheer weirdness of Dickens’s fictional world. The life is expertly described. But the fundamental mystery of what fired that unique and extravagant imagination remains, as Dickens told his American friend, unfathomable.