SOURCE: “The Exaggerator,” in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 301-08.

In the following review of Dickens, Pritchard finds shortcomings in Ackroyd's “rhetorical habits” and the biography's contribution toward greater understanding of Charles Dickens.

On his second reading tour of America in 1867–68, Dickens met Emerson, and although the sage of Concord was later assured by Dickens’ hosts that the novelist was a man of great cheerfulness and high spirits, Emerson demurred: “You see him quite wrong, evidently, and would persuade me that he is a genial creature, full of sweetness and amenities and superior to his talents, but I fear he is harnessed to them. He is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left. He daunts me! I have not the key.” A brilliant observation, and by that time (Dickens was to die within three years) it’s fair to say that...