SOURCE: “A Terrible Bad Cold,” in London Review of Books, September 27, 1990, pp. 17-18.

In the following review of Dickens, Sutherland expresses reservations about Ackroyd's reconstruction and interpretation of Charles Dickens's life.

In the manner of old Hollywood movies, biographies like to open at a terminal point and then flash back to the start of things. It is a device that stakes out the territory while creating a sense of overall shape—something that even famous lives lack in the day-to-day business of living. Fred Kaplan’s 1988 life of Dickens began with the vivid scene of his incinerating ‘every letter he owned not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with the manuscript holocaust of 1860 was that there was a core of Dickens’s life which we would never know. Dickens laboured tirelessly to make himself publicly...