The Little Dickens

Janet Maslin reviews the new Robert Gottlieb book about my man, Charles Dickens, and his many children.  Okay, not the greatest of Dads--they lived in an often bleak house--though his fictional kids were the greatest such characters ever.   Review concludes:

Mr. Gottlieb also finds nothing but “slim pickings” when he tries to link the indelible children in Dickens’s novels to the more forgotten figures who really bore the Dickens name.  Charley Dickens said it better. “The children of his brain,” Charley said of Pip, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and the rest, “were much more real to him at times than we were.”