Barring special subject cases like serial killers and/or genocidal dictators, biographies tend to err on one of two extremes: either they're hagiographies, blending out much if not all that's disagreeable about the subject, or they're bashfests magnifying the flaws to the nth degree and hardly bothering with anything not contemptible the person in question might have done. Of course, the platonic ideal of biographies is basically one which on the one hand is empathic and makes it clear in non-abstract terms why the reader should care about this person but on the other doesn't shy away from depicting the flaws in a non-prettifying manne. If you feel up to the task, I congratulate you: I'm not sure I could in a non-fictional manner. Not least because there's the additional trouble of actual lives rarely following a good narrative arc with a clear climax and a convenient ending, and the narrative pretense of objectivity (whereas novels never claim to be objective to begin with; they're fiction).

All the same, every now and then you come across a biography that comes very close to or even fulfills said ideal. The latest one I have read is Claire Tomalin's take on Charles Dickens, and since she gets into the ring there with some classics of the biographical genre, not to mention with the fact her subject was someone famous for his memorable characters and superb atmospheric descriptions, this is an even more remarkable feat. Speaking of Dickens' work, one of the Victorian cross connections Claire Tomalin makes which had never occured to me before is that Jane Eyre was published two years before David Copperfield, and that while we have no written down comment from Dickens on the former, he very likely read it (his best friend John Forster did, who suggested to write David Copperfield as a first person narrative like Jane Eyre, something Dickens had never done before; and of course his friend and biggest rival, Thackeray, who praised it to the skies). The childhood chapters of both Jane Eyre and David Copperfield are among the most remarkable in 19th century literature, managing to put the reader firmly in the pov of a child, sharing the outrage of said child when confronted with adult injustice, the vivid imagination taking flight from small details. For her part, Charlotte Bronte read David Copperfield and though she wasn't a Dickens fan per se (she prefered Thackeray and had some justifiable criticism of Dickens' female love interests), she did love David Copperfield and was delighted when her publisher suggested to her that there were similarities between it and her own earlier novel. (You could also add that both Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, like many later authors of children's books, actually did not get along particularly well with children as adults - they drew on their own childhood memories to create the intense child's povs in their novels.)

But what makes Tomalin's biography really outstanding is that she pulls off the next to impossible: selling the reader on Dickens' non-literary good qualities - most prominently his passionate, life long outrage at social injustice and fight against it, not "just" by writing about it but by campaigning, creating alternatives (his most remarkable achievement there lay in persuading the millionairess Angela Coutts to create a home for prostitutes and to remain involved with the organization and supervision), and always being open for individual cases as well - while also describing, in full, his dark side, most prominently his marriage and separation from his wife, which was a Victorian patriarchal nightmare, but also his, to put it mildly, uneven track record when it came to his children. In many ways he was like the cliché of a social worker, fighting tirelessly for strangers but being incapable of dealing fairly with his family. And yet both the Dickens are real: the one who by chance ends up in the jury of a case where a maid, herself born in the workhouse, gave birth on the stairs of the home where she was serving between letting visitors in and having to serve at dinner and who was accused of having killed her baby. (Her defense was that the baby had been born dead.) This was presented to the jurors as a typical case of female immorality, and one of the jurors called for the utmost rigour of the law. Dickens managed to talk the rest of the jury around to a "found dead" verdict re: the baby, got the young maid a good barrister, sent her some food to prison and persuaded a previous employer of the girl's to promise to take her in again after the trial. This was Dickens at his best: "determined in argument, generous in giving help, following through the case, motivated purely by his profound sense that it was wrong that she should be victimized further", as Claire Tomalin puts it.

On the other hand, you have Dickens at his worst: the Dickens who, when he falls in love with a young actress and reaches the breaking point of his marriage, isn't content to simply leave his wife (or rather, make her leave - he was the one who kept the house and family), no, after twenty two years of marriage, eleven children and two miscarriages, he has to punish her for existing, declaring her a bad mother who only fakes her affection for her children (because that was the only reason he could think of to give to the public for the separation), making the children choose, attacking her in the press and not even writing her as much as a condolence letter when one of their children dies. The Dickens of whom his favourite daughter, who had an intense love/hate relationship with him, said: "My poor mother was afraid of my father. She was never allowed to express an opinion - never allowed to say what she felt. (...) We were all very wicked not to take her part. Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time, and does not realize the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper. We like to think of our great geniuses as great characters - but we can't. (...) My father was like a madman when my mother left home, this affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home."

Both sides of Dickens are real, and Claire Tomalin somehow manages never to lose sight of either, and not to use one to negate the other. She also manages to make the whole marriage up to the point of the situation feel like the type of disaster which is brought about by both the characters of the participants and the society they live in. Catherine never was very clever, but she lived in a world where feminity was more often than not defined as being pretty and ornamental. She often suffered from post natal depression and grew stout, but with eleven full term pregnancies, two stillbirths and an increasingly estranged husband who on the one hand made it clear he didn't want more than three children but on the other despite having medical friends and a curious mind never seems to have tried methods of contraception while continuing to see her as his only morally acceptable way to have sex, it's hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Not so coincidentally, the high point of the Dickens marriage, the one time where all of Dickens references to Catherine in his letters are unambigously affectionate and approving without even hidden sarcasm, was the time of his first journey to America, the only time in their twenty two years of married life together when she wasn't pregnant or just post birth, their children and his friends were absent back in England, and they could share something other than sex (indeed Tomalin speculates the reason why Catherine wasn't pregnant during all those months in the US as opposed to all the other time of their marriage might have been that Dickens decided they shouldn't risk even the possibility), discover America together and be companions rather than the husband and wife they were at home.

Given that Claire Tomalin has written a biography of Ellen Ternan (Dickens' later day mistress who was the trigger but not the cause for the separation) before, it's surprising but perhaps inevitable (so many letters destroyed!) Ellen "Nelly" Ternan remains the most shadowy women in the story, with virtually everyone else from Dickens' mother to his first love Maria Beadnell to the unfortunate Catherine to her two sisters who had their own peculiar relationships with Dickens to Katey, Dickens' daughter coming across much more vividly. Claire Tomalin is also good with the social and literary context, with unearthing some against-cliché details as Dickens' love and respect for for French literature, France and many of the French (his youngest son even said he liked them better than the English), which given Dickens is usually cast as of all the Victorian novelists the most English of the English is fairly amusing. (Also, he didn't have much time for the monarchy and had to be persuaded to go when Queen Victoria eventually wanted to meet him. He used the opportunity to cut loose about the evils of the English class system, which seems to have impressed her enough to mention it repeatedly afterwards in her diaries.) When the real life characters have obvious counterparts in Dickens' novels, she's good with both the parallels and differences, notably with Dickens' parents, whom he split up in the lovable Micawbers (who have their mannerisms and eternal in-debt-ness but who are in now way to blame for David Copperfield having to work, and thus are unambigously loved by him) and the hateful Murdstones (putting David to work, which Dickens' real life parents did when he was ten, near eleven, and he never forgot or forgave that while struggling with the fact a benevolent family novelist shouldn't remain angry at his parents). Mr. Micawber can finally turn over a new leaf and emigrate to Australia; John Dickens remains in England, continues to slide from financial disaster to financial disaster, no matter how much his now famous son supports him, and eventually even forges Charles' signature on cheques so Dickens has to put an add in the papers saying he won't stand for cheques written by his father. Ouch. Given his deeply ambigous feelings about his parents, it's probably logical Dickens had a shaky hold on fatherhood. As mentioned before, he hadn't wanted more than three children, and preferably no sons (he wanted daughters and got both sons and daughters). Eleven children arrived, only one of whom died as a toddler, and the connection between that (the survival, not the death) and all the fictional children being killed off to great effect in Dickens' novels was drawn by biographers far earlier than Tomalin. As long as they were small, he did play with them and show interest, but later the younger boys were sent off to a boarding school in Boulogne and remained there despite all of them disliking the school immensely, which makes Dickens' public accusation of Catherine as the parent unable to care for her children even more infuriating than it already was. Of the older children, he quarelled violently with his namesake Charley because Charley was the only one of the Dickens children to openly defy their father and choosing to live with his mother when they separated, and both resented and blamed himself for the marriage Katey made, because he thought (correctly) she married mostly to get away from home, not because she was in love with the man in question (his friend Wilkie Collins' brother). (Cue deeply Freudian scene where Dickens younger daughter Mamie finds him weeping into Katey's marriage dress the morning after she left for her honeymoon.) Katey's memorable outburst about her father decades after his death comes at the end of Claire Tomalin's biography and thus ends it as it begain, in complete shades of grey:

"I know things about my father's character that no one else ever knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful! (...) I loved my father better than any man in the world - in a different way of course - I loved him for his faults. My father was a wicked man - a very wicked man."