It was the literary equivalent of Gordon Brown’s Arctic Monkeys moment. Disgraced American politician Michael Steele was asked to name his favourite book. ‘War and Peace,’ he said, aghast that anyone could have imagined anything else. He then illustrated his mastery of Tolstoy with the following quotation: ‘It was the best of times and the worst of times.’
This must be the age of foolishness rather than wisdom. To have misattributed a famous quotation is one thing, to have bastardised it another. Anyway, this slip reminded me of Robert Gottlieb’s wonderful and extensive examination of Dickens, published by the New York Review of Books last July.
Drawing on recent biographies and a love for Dickens that was kindled by his ‘exposure’ to a Tale of Two Cities in the fourth grade, Gottlieb dispels the enigma that has collected around that most famous of Victorians.
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