Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens
About this book
Charles Dickens, famous for the indelible child characters he created — from Little Nell to Oliver Twist and David Copperfield — was also the father of ten children (and a possible eleventh). What happened to those children is the fascinating subject of Robert Gottlieb’s 'Great Expectations'.With sympathy and understanding Gottlieb narrates the highly various and surprising stories of each of Dickens’s sons and daughters, from Katey, who became a successful portraitist, to Frank, who died in Moline, Illinois, after serving a grim stretch in the North=West Mounted Police., from Sydney, who joined the Royal Navy, was banned from Gad's Hill for his ruinous behaviour, and died at sea at the age of twenty-five, to Henry ("Sir Henry"), a prominent jurist and paterfamilias who lived to be eighty-four.Each of these lives is fascinating on its own. Together they comprise a unique window on Victorian England as well as a moving and disturbing study of Dickens as a father and a man.