BIOGRAPHY: Charles DickensBy Michael Slater Yale University Press, 696pp. £25

MOST READERS only imperfectly in touch with the major events of Charles Dickens’s life will be able to cite at least one ingredient of his up-and-down childhood: the blacking factory episode. This early (and brief) experience of drudgery continued to rankle with the author until well into his years of prosperity and celebrity, and coloured his attitude to many things: to the youthful wage slaves of London, to the humiliation of the weak, to flaws and inequalities in society’s arrangements, even to his mother, who was never quite forgiven for recommending a return to Warren’s factory once the young Dickens had got out of it.

It loomed in his mind as a stark horror, all the more so in comparison with an idyllic infancy before his father’s fortunes took a downward turn, and before the family’s removal from cheerful Chatham, in Kent, to four bleak rooms in London’s Camden Town.

Dickens’s early life was a matter of vicissitudes, then, with his factory employment at the age of 12 a particularly low point. A year later, in 1825, he was back at school, following his father’s release from Marshallsea debtors’ prison. John Dickens’s life, indeed, from this point on, is a constant story of debts and night flittings, with a growing family to support and only his eldest son, Charles, to act as a mainstay rather than adding to the burden.

By the time he is 15 Dickens has become a junior clerk in a law firm; the next minute he's a freelance shorthand reporter, and shortly afterwards we find him engaged in writing the earliest of the Sketches by Boz, which form a taking-off point for his subsequent stupendous career.

And all the time he is observing and absorbing every facet of street life and social gradations in the capital, in preparation for “his later emergence as the supreme novelist of London”, as his current biographer puts it.

You could say Dickens exemplifies a mid-19th-century culture of abundance, in literature as in life: abundance of miseries, evils, machinations, opportunities, comforts, wealth, all kinds of advances in public and private arenas, plots, comeuppances and emancipations. And Michael Slater’s huge new biography has a comparable abundance, of scholarship, adroitness and insight. If the book covers no startling new material, it marshalls all the existing information to enlarging effect. Its author is particularly alert to complexities and contradictions in his subject’s character, and to the subtle interactions between fiction and lived experience – the transformations of the creative process.

A good deal of emphasis rightly falls on the work, and it is fascinating to ponder the extent to which, for example, Dickens's incorrigibly improvident parents served as models for the Micawbers, the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt got inserted into Bleak Houseas the dilettante Skimpole, or Dickens's old love Maria Beadnell achieved a cameo role in Little Dorritin the person of flirtatious, middle-aged Flora Finching. The last is a benignly comic portrayal, very far in spirit from the anguish Dickens suffered at 19 when Maria turned him down.

The rejection, perhaps, drove him into the arms of Catherine Hogarth, who – after 10 children and a good many years of domestic life – was judged in the end to have been a hopelessly inadequate choice for a writer's life partner. And, unlike Dora in David Copperfield, Catherine thoughtlessly went on to outlive her by then estranged husband.

Slater re-creates with gusto the heady days of Dickens's earliest successes, when Sketches by Boz, Pickwickand so forth chimed with a certain kind of contemporary jocularity and made their author a star. He shows a growing darkness, matched by breathtaking structural ingenuity, entering into the later incomparable novels, such as David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Bleak Houseand Our Mutual Friend. Dickens the satirist, Dickens the social critic, Dickens the prodigious plot maker, the drama enthusiast, the affable friend, the family man, the suspected adulterer . . . All these aspects of a protean personality come under informed and conscientious scrutiny.

There are limits, though, to what can be known. Slater hasn’t established the exact nature of Dickens’s relations with the young actress Nelly Ternan, with whom the famous author became acquainted in 1857 when he was 45.

This remains as much a mystery as the ending of Edwin Drood. True, he provided her with a London house and an allowance (taking on another financial commitment on top of his already proliferating hordes of dependants), but her mother was a beneficiary of his generosity, too, which slightly undermines Ternan's "mistress" status. Slater is tactful about the ensuing domestic upheaval, neither condemning nor condoning. We don't know, either, whether the Ternan attachment precipitated Dickens's marital breakdown or occurred as a consequence of it. In any event, Catherine Dickens ended up banished and deplored.

What Slater’s biography brings out, above all, is the astonishing energy Dickens brought to everything he tackled: to the gruelling lecture tours in the US and at home, to crusading journalism (calling for an end to public executions, among other things), to every side issue spawned by his teeming imagination.

And, of course the novels, with their ever-increasing richness and density. And the ever-grander habitations. Just as the feckless parents sank lower and lower with every house move (until their son finally, and with some exasperation, installed them in a cottage in Devon), with the industrious author it was a question of upward progress: from Doughty Street to the 18-room Tavistock House, and eventually back to where he’d started from, in vastly different circumstances.

One of Dickens’s autobiographical fragments recalls himself as a young child being intrigued by a handsome house at Gad’s Hill, outside Rochester – a house his father told him he might aspire to one day, if he was a good boy and applied himself to his lessons. And so it proved. Gad’s Hill became Dickens’s last home, the place from which his funeral cortege left for Westminster Abbey in June 1870. He was 58 years old, and had left in his work a monument to Victorian England.

A Life of Charles Dickens, by his friend John Forster, appeared almost immediately – the first of many. But the topic is inexhaustible, as Slater's biography indicates.

It’s a work of considerable cogency and finesse: the Dickens story has never been better told or more thoroughly investigated.

Patricia Craig is a critic and author. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, was published by Blackstaff Press in 2007