Charles Dickens – My Life By Derwin Hope Is The Autobiography He Never Wrote, Told In His Own Words

On The Table Read Magazine, “the best arts and entertainment magazine UK“, for the first time in 150 years, Charles Dickens finally tells his own extraordinary life story in his own unforgettable words, in the groundbreaking new book Charles Dickens – My Life, meticulously reconstructed by Derwin Hope and endorsed by the Dickens family.

Charles Dickens – My Life

A groundbreaking new book, Charles Dickens: My Life, supported by members of the Dickens family, allows the great novelist to tell his own life story for the first time – exactly as he always wished it to be told.

When Charles Dickens died suddenly on 9 June 1870, aged only 58, he left behind an unmatched literary legacy – and one major piece of unfinished business. He had long planned to write his autobiography but never completed it. For a century and a half, the world has had to rely on biographies written by others.

Now, 150 years later, barrister-turned-author Derwin Hope has achieved what seemed impossible: he has reconstructed Dickens’s autobiography using only the writer’s own words. Drawing on more than 15,000 letters, journalistic articles, speeches, travel writings and first-hand accounts, Hope has woven together a vivid, first-person narrative that reads as though Dickens himself sat down to tell his story.

The result is a book that critics and early readers are calling “entertaining, funny, and a fantastic piece of history” – a landmark work that finally gives us Dickens unfiltered.

From Child Labourer to Global Superstar

In his own inimitable voice, Dickens recounts his descent into “acute humiliation and abject poverty” as a boy forced to work in a blacking factory, the burning determination that dragged him out of it, and his meteoric rise to become the most famous author on earth.

Readers discover surprising real-life origins behind beloved characters: how the kindly warehouse boy Bob Fagin became the model for the villainous Fagin in Oliver Twist, and how Dickens’s crippled nephew inspired Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.

The Private Turmoil Behind the Public Triumphs

The book does not shy away from the darker chapters. Dickens speaks openly about the collapse of his marriage to Catherine Hogarth, the “profound private turmoil” of his later years, and the secret life he led with the young actress Ellen “Nelly” Ternan – a relationship he once described, in a moment of anguish, as having left him “seized with lunacy”.

His two stormy visits to America are recounted with characteristic bite, along with his radical, often withering opinions on slavery, prisons, copyright theft and the social injustices he witnessed both abroad and at home.

What emerges most powerfully is Dickens the man: a stubborn, outspoken champion of the poor whose empathy and social conscience were not only fuelled his novels but drove a lifetime of real-world campaigning.

Derwin Hope

Derwin Hope brings an unusual qualifications to the task. Born in Somerset in 1944, he enjoyed a distinguished legal career: Head Boy at Leighton Park School, barrister at the Old Bailey and on the Western Circuit, author of the standard legal text on the 1990–91 Planning Acts, Recorder, and finally Circuit Judge. He served as Resident Judge at Southampton and Honorary Recorder of the city before retiring in 2014.

It was while sitting as a judge in Portsmouth – Dickens’s birthplace – that Hope’s fascination with the novelist deepened. After retiring, he devoted years to meticulous archival research, guided always by one question: how would Dickens himself have told this story if he had lived to write his autobiography?

The answer, built entirely from Dickens’s own words and shaped in the same lively, conversational style he used in his travel books American Notes and Pictures from Italy, is now in readers’ hands.

A Book Every Dickens Fan Must Read

When I was asked by Derwin Hope to have a look at his book I was instantly intrigued because it purports to be an autobiography of my famous ancestor, and we know that Charles Dickens did not in all honesty write one.

We are aware of many autobiographical snippets hidden within his works, particularly in David Copperfield, and we are most fortunate that there are a plethora of his letters which survive and are, as you would expect, full of detailed descriptions providing an insight into the minutiae of his life. There are also copies of his speeches, essays and journalism as well as fragments of information he passed on to his friends, particularly to John Forster who wrote the first biography of Charles Dickens. But he was also known for obfuscation by reinventing himself, hiding his early life, and covering his tracks, such as his relationship with Ellen Ternan.

What Derwin Hope has done is to meticulously collate all the available information and steer a careful path through it to create a fascinating and illuminating life story of the great man as told by himself. I am always amazed by the number of publications on Charles Dickens and new insights they can provide on the life of the great man.

This book does not aspire to reveal new material but does have the useful function of drawing a whole range of threads together in a first person narrative. It is also a jolly good read – but it would be of course being Dickens’ own words!

-Mark Charles Dickens (Head of the Charles Dickens family)

Charles Dickens: My Life is more than a biography – it is the rediscovery of a voice, a spirit, and a humanity that still feels urgently alive. Warm, witty, unafraid to shock, and paced like a Dickens novel, it is the closest we will ever come to sitting down with the great man himself and hearing him say: this was my life.

As Dickens’s descendants have acknowledged by lending their support to the project, Derwin Hope has honoured England’s greatest storyteller in the most fitting way imaginable – by finally letting him tell his own story.

Find more from Derwin Hope now:

Apple Book: https://apple.co/4rzQYLi

Kindle: https://amzn.to/4pG5bo2

Paperback: https://amzn.to/4rsqHhK

www.dickensmylife.com