Is there anything left to disclose about Dickens? Perhaps not. You turn their pages and what you feel most of all is the thrill – piercing, but complicated – of disclosure. But they also gratify what her latest subject, Charles Dickens, called "staring curiosity" (Dickens, trembling in the certain knowledge that no man can own his life once he is dead, claimed to disapprove of the biographer's art). Her books are fantastically well-researched and, on the surface, dispassionately written. But she is also, being a biographer, a dedicated purveyor of secrets, a person whose job is to hunt down whispers and clarify them in black and white and extensive footnotes. She became a writer long before the cult of personality took publishing hostage and so believes that, in life, it is one's work that should count with the public, not one's ex-boyfriends. Tomalin is a famously formidable woman, cool, clever and not much given to spilling her guts. So it seems appropriate that it is to a landing, albeit one with chairs and a small table, that Claire Tomalin leads me when I arrive at her house in Petersham, west London. T hanks to a childhood spent poking my nose through bannisters, I think of landings as places for eavesdropping, for the discovery of shocking adult secrets.
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