Claire Tomalin's acclaimed biography of Britain's great novelist paints a portrait of an extraordinarily complex man. Today's theme is Dickens' troubled childhood.

Claire Tomalin's acclaimed biography of one of the nation's literary giants is broadcast to mark the 150th anniversary of his death in June 2020. Here Tomalin portrays Dickens as a writer "so charged with imaginative energy that he rendered nineteenth century England crackling, full of truth and life, with his laughter, horror and indignation - and sentimentality." The Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip and David Copperfield are just a handful of the characters he created and who continue to endure. He was also a hard-working journalist, a philanthropist, a supporter of liberal social causes, and father of ten, and yet his genius also had a dark side which emerged with the breakdown of his marriage.

Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the The New Statesman and then the Sunday Times before becoming a full time writer. Her biographies are award winning. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002.

Read by Penelope Wilton

Abridged by Richard Hamilton

Produced by Elizabeth Allard.