Publisher's Synopsis
In this book Mr Pipes gives us a wonderfully vivid month-by-month account of Dickens's public and private life during 1867, the year which ended with his second visit to America - this time as a spectacularly successful public reader of his own work. As a result of his losing his pocket-diary at the end of the year (it is now in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library), this is the only year of Dickens's crowded existence for which we have such detailed day-by-day information about his movements and activities, including those involving his secret love-relationship with Ellen Ternan. Mr Pipes begins each chapter with a remarkably succinct but also vivid account (clearly based on much in-depth and original research) of the main news items of that month, thereby giving us a useful social and political background for Dickens's multiple activities, both private and professional, during that period, as described in the rest of the chapter. Mr Pipes has written a book that will fascinate anyone at all interested in Dickens and his phenomenal way of life and add considerably to their sense of the man 'in his habit as he lived' -- Professor Michael Slater
