Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London, England: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990. Ackroyd says that the first biography by John Forster is too dull in places and that Edgar Johnson in his 1952 biography is frequently wrongheaded. Accordingly, he provides all the known facts about Dickens and enlivens his account with a "Prologue," describing the reaction in England and America after the writer's death, and several chapters which include a mock interview he has with Dickens during the author's lifetime, another chapter featuring Dickens in a fictional conversation with T. S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Chatterson, and another chapter in which Ackroyd himself is interviewed about how he wrote this biography. A thorough and entertaining book.

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. A full study of the genre from its origin in Europe through the major British authors who have...