SOURCE: “The Long and Short of It,” in London Spectator, July 20, 1991, p. 32.

In the following review, Lerner provides a brief assessment of Ackroyd's Introduction to Dickens.

Literary biographers are naturally committed to the view that an author’s life provides the best context for understanding his work; and Peter Ackroyd has followed his huge biography of Dickens with a short volume [Introduction to Dickens] that claims to be both a condensed version of it and also a genuine original, and to put forward the argument for ‘connecting the life and the work’. What, we may ask, does this fine phrase mean? We have long known that Dickens courted Dora Spenlow and met her years later to find she had become Flora Finching whom he left a lily and who had turned into a peony; or that both Mr Micawber and Mr Dorritt were based on his father. The...