Michael Slater, who passed away November 27 at age 88, was a former president of the Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America, a former editor of The Dickensian, the editor of several editions of Dickens’s works, an academic adviser and trustee of the Dickens Museum, and the author of several books about Dickens. Malcolm Andrews writes of him in The Guardian, “One of Dickens’s obituarists wrote that the master ‘brought all that he saw and felt into a magic circle of dramatic creation’. Michael had something of the same impulse, and with a similar histrionic flair. Each anecdote from his repertoire of personal misadventures lengthened over the years as he elaborated scenes and characters to the point where life seemed to be impersonating Dickens. He admitted that Dickens ‘has to a large extent been my life’.”
(Cover image for Charles Dickens by Michael Slater, copyright Yale University Press.)
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