a page-turner of tomalin

Tomalin's book, a page-turner, seems to me to be an effective reproof to those who, like Michael Holroyd, believe literary biography to be in its death throes. But what does she think? Are publishers going to dispense with fat lives? "No! I think people are always saying things are over. Fiction has been regularly over since the 19th century. You can't entirely talk about books in groups like that. Some work and some don't. Clearly, we have got a public with a shorter attention span, but there is also this great interest in history. I'm devoted to Michael. He's adorable. But I rather think he's enjoying being Cassandra about this." On the other hand, so far as her own career goes, she would like to work on slightly more manageable subjects in the future (Dickens follows Hardy, who followed her award-winning Samuel Pepys). "I have grandchildren and step-grandchildren and I would like to spend time with them. I'm 78 and Michael [Frayn, the novelist and playwright, and her husband] is 78, too, and he also needs a bit of attention." She sighs. "People say I should write a memoir, but I don't think I can." Why not? She is quiet for a moment and then she says: "Because I don't have enough sense of myself. I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am. One of the things I have done since I started writing biography is live through them. Those lives are still with me. It's as Katherine Mansfield said, 'One life is not enough.'"

Is there anything left to disclose about Dickens? Perhaps not. His biggest secret – the existence of a carefully closeted mistress, a one-time actress called Ellen Ternan (Nelly), with whom he may have had a child (the baby probably died) – was, after all, revealed to its fullest extent in Tomalin's groundbreaking 1990 book, The Invisible Woman. Unless more diaries or letters unaccountably turn up, a new life is a matter of emphasis, mostly. Nevertheless, her skill is such that you read her Dickens with a mounting sense of amazement (and sometimes horror), the small things taking a hold of you as much as the large. It is wonderful. Two weeks after I finished it, I still cannot get out of my mind the fact that, once it was over, Dickens's feckless parents never again referred to the year they forced him to spend working in a blacking factory (he was just 12 years old), as if it had never happened.

Nor can I stop thinking about the way Dickens signalled to his long-suffering wife, Catherine, that their marriage was effectively over (he simply got a workman in and divided their bedroom in two). Next time I see a photograph of Dickens – it won't be long; next year is the bicentenary of his birth – I will remember Eleanor Picken, who met him in Broadstairs when she was 19. Thrilled to know the famous writer, Eleanor sunned herself "in his smiles", but she thought, too, that his eyes were sometimes like "danger-lamps".

Like Dickens, Tomalin is fiercely energetic, and mordantly funny, but today she also has the slightly frail aspect of one who, having completed a vast undertaking (Dickens's life is so incredibly voluminous: his letters alone run to 12 volumes, each one some 800 pages long), now awaits the verdict of the various partisans who patrol this sacred ground. Her eye wanders to the window. "You feel exhausted, low, terrified. When I was young and books were published, no one made any sort of fuss. Now... you feel people are going to jump on you. You can't help it." It would be the same with any book, but in the case of Dickens, who induces such intense (and intensely odd) passions in his devotees, you can multiply this by five.