The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 2, 1857-1870

These are the last voices of Charles Dickens, the letters he wrote during the final thirteen years of his life, when he was no longer merely the world's most famous novelist but a man racing against his own mortality. Volume Two captures Dickens at his most prodigious: completing "Little Dorrit," acquiring the beloved Gad's Hill Place he had long coveted, and throwing himself into public readings that would ultimately kill him. Yet the letters reveal far more than professional triumph. Here we find the private Dickens mourning the death of his friend Douglas Jerrold, wrestling with the collapse of his marriage, and revealing the restless energy that drove him from his writing desk to the stage and back again. His observations from travels, his affectionate exchanges with family, his literary friendships and rivalries, his social conscience all come alive in correspondence that reads like autobiography written in real time. For anyone who has ever been consumed by curiosity about the man behind Oliver Twist and Scrooge, these letters offer an intimacy no biography can replicate: the chance to hear Dickens think aloud, unedited and unguarded, in the years before silence.