1. Childhood

Claire Tomalin's acclaimed biography of Britain's great novelist paints a portrait of an extraordinarily complex man.

It begins with an exploration of Charles Dickens's troubled childhood.

He’s portrayed as a writer "so charged with imaginative energy that he rendered 19th 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.

Read by Penelope Wilton.

Abridged in five parts by Richard Hamilton.

Producer: Elizabeth Allard

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.

*** Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the The New Statesman and then the Sunday Times before becoming a full time writer. 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.