Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens

THE STRANGE AND VARIED LIVES OF THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD'S MOST BELOVED NOVELIST

Charles Dickens, famous for the indelible child characters he created—from Little Nell to Oliver Twist and David Copperfield—was also the father of ten children (and a possible eleventh). Who those children were and what happened to them is the fascinating subject of Robert Gottlieb’s Great Expectations.

With sympathy and understanding, Gottlieb narrates the highly various and surprising stories of each of Dickens’s sons and daughters, from Katey, who became a successful portraitist, to Frank, who died in Moline, Illinois, after serving a grim stretch in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and from Sydney, who joined the Royal Navy and was banned from Gad’s Hill for his ruinous behavior, and died at sea at the age of twenty-five, to Henry (“Sir Henry”), a prominent jurist and paterfamilias who lived to be eighty-four.

Each of these lives is fascinating on its own. Together they comprise a unique window into Victorian England as well as a moving and disturbing study of Dickens as a father and a man.