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’s past, from which he would have been happy to be free. (And was during much of his lifetime. Only a few intimates knew of Dickens’s tortured past, although others could have divined it through the telltale mixture of confidence and self-doubt he carried always with him. In an 1885 book on the history of English literature, for example, the writer is described as merely moving from Portsmouth to London with his family. No blacking factory, no debtors’ prison.) No wonder the London of his novels is both a place in which fortune can be found and in which degradation lurks as well. “Midnight had come upon the crowded city,” he wrote in Oliver Twist. “The palace, the night cellar, the jail, the madhouse—the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid faces of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child—midnight was upon them all.”

In Buss’s portrait, Dickens sits near a handsome wooden desk with a slant top. It is the same desk that is pictured in an engraving in the Dickens house with the sentimental title “The Empty Chair,” an engraving done on the day of Dickens’s death in 1870. And the selfsame desk sits in what was the writer’s study in the Dickens House Museum, entombed in a glass case like a fragment of the True Cross.

The case bears witness to the other Dickens, the opposite number of the impoverished boy tormented by his father’s disgrace. Critics have often found the writer’s novels unpersuasive because they tend to divide into two parts, the black hole of poverty, despair, and decay, and an inordinately satisfactory salvation, usually by the good people of the new middle class. (Unlike many English writers, almost no one with a title or an estate turns up in Dickens. The well-to-do tend to be the sort of people that Jane Austen’s characters describe as “in trade.”) The man himself found this formula persuasive because it had been the story of his life, and its reality must have been as real to him as the enormous and ornate Spanish mahogany sideboard that sits against one wall of the dining room in Doughty Street and which Dickens lugged from one home to another after buying it in 1839. Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Dickens was able to leave his past behind.

But his liberation came not through the salvation of spirits but through that most modern mechanism of re-creation: He became a self-made man, then a celebrity, that thing that makes a person simultaneously both more and less than they truly are. This was comparatively rare before the age of mass communications, and rarer still for writers. Rare indeed for writers of any literary merit—by contrast Jane Austen wrote under the pseudonym “A Lady,” and Milton’s first publisher of Paradise Lost was a bookseller who gave the writer five pounds up front and promised another five after 1,300 copies of the first edition were sold.

In his own lifetime, Dickens milked his notoriety for all it was worth in a way recognizable even to today’s readers of tabloids and Hello! magazine (in the U.K.) or People (in the U.S.). Copies of the sheet music for the David Copperfield polka and the Pickwick quadrille are framed and hung on the walls of the Doughty Street house, along with theater programs of plays based upon his work and others in which he appeared. He loved to participate in theatrical productions; he dressed extravagantly and socialized constantly, did reading tours in both England and America at which he was mobbed by fans. He even was pestered by that recognizable celebrity accoutrement, the sycophant relation; Dickens’s impecunious father, who had forced him into the blacking factory as a boy with his spending habits, dogged him when he became a public figure. As soon as Pickwick became a success, the elder Dickens turned up at his son’s publisher, cadging a loan he would never repay.

The Doughty Street house, to which the writer moved his family when only the first of his ten children had been born, was just a way station in his meteoric rise. It was vacated for a larger house just south of Regent’s Park, a rich man’s house Dickens himself