Peter Ackroyd's novels and biographies have consistently hovered on the boundaries of conventional literary form. While his historical novels characteristically assume the disguise of an imaginary journal or confessional narrative presented as a "discovered" manuscript, his biographical works have increasingly made use of the devices of fiction-most conspicuously in Dickens (1990), a predominantly nonfiction work that includes significant fictional and autobiographical interludes. The majority of Ackroyd's novels share an overriding preoccupation with an individual who is imaginatively in touch with the past of London, or of England in general. These fictions usually employ some element of the magical or the supernatural to effect an intense, hallucinatory convergence of past and present.

Ackroyd offers his readers a series of almost spiritual meetings with a bygone England. His histories have consistently refused to confront the uncomfortable realities of industrialized England and of its attempt to construct a global empire. These aspects...