Dickens was more astute than most liberals. Although he did a lot to help others (and then whinge about it) and indeed set up a hostel for "fallen" women in which he took a close interest, he wasn't naive. He had a sound knowledge of human nature and understood that some people simply can't be helped. His hostel was run with firm regulations and those ladies who didn't or couldn't abide by them were shown the door.

The blacking factory is the episode in Dickens's childhood that has become a commonplace, but Tomalin skilfully demonstrates how it exerted a powerful influence on both his behaviour and his writing, the sense that hell is only just round the corner. Driven, difficult, but good company, Dickens mostly comes over well. To borrow a line from J.D. Salinger, he was the sort of writer you'd want to phone up. The shame about Dickens is that he didn't write one novel for the drawer, for posthumous publication, where he could have shed all concerns about the public and propriety and just concentrated on reality.

The most entertaining moment in the biography is something of which I was completely unaware. Tolstoy was a huge fan of Dickens (he'd have loved the moralising and do-gooding) but Dostoevsky visited Dickens in London in 1862. Somehow I would have wagered that Dostoevsky would come off wittier or at least weirder. Dostoevsky described the meeting in a letter. Dickens explained how the good characters in his novels were a reflection of what he would like to be, and the villains were a slice of his dark side, that there were really two people inside him. "Only two?" queried Dostoevsky.