SOURCE: Rubin, Merle. “Revisiting Dickens (and Friend).” Christian Science Monitor (25 February 1991): 13.

In the following excerpt, Rubin offers a positive assessment of The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens was an instinctive Romantic who focused his powerful and intensely poetic imagination on the grim realities of lower- and middle-class urban life in the heart of the 19th century. As his most recent biographer, Peter Ackroyd, points out, Dickens possessed in full degree the 19th century novelist's confidence in the writer's ability to describe the real world in all its solid detail. Yet for Dickens, Ackroyd claims, “nothing was real until it was written down; … in the act of composing them [his novels] they were more real to him than anything surrounding him in the actual world.”

Like Wordsworth, Dickens believed that childhood perceptions and experiences serve as a touchstone for evaluating all that...