The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens

by Thomas Hauser

England, 1870: His health failing, his most important work all but done, Charles Dickens is readying for the final bed. But there is one more story that he must tell.

The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens blends a historically-accurate telling of Dickens’s life with a gripping portrait of betrayal, murder, corruption, obsession, and love. It’s the story of Dickens’s coming of age, caught between the worlds of England’s ruling elite and the seamy underside of London society. The novel captures a full range of Dickensian Dickens; the hauntingly beautiful Amanda Wingate; Geoffrey Wingate, Amanda’s scheming financial-swindler husband; and Florence Spriggs, a mutilated prostitute whose once-lovely face has been carved into a mask of horror.

Meticulously researched and masterfully told, The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens captures the voice of the beloved author, the divided city of London, and the uncertain tenor of the times.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, British Literature, Literary Fiction, American, Historical, Literature

161 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2014

About the author

Thomas Hauser (b. 1946) is the author of forty-two books on subjects ranging from professional boxing to Beethoven. His first work, Missing, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times earned numerous awards for its author, including the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism.

Reviews

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book feels like being granted an hour in a lamplit study with Dickens himself, the fire crackling, the shadows stretching long, and the great man finally deciding to exhale truths he’s kept locked away behind charm, humour, and a famously busy pen.

When I read it back in 2016, I felt that little shiver of recognition: “Oh, this isn’t just historical fiction—this is biography wearing the skin of a confession.”

What stands out immediately is the sheer care Hauser puts into the research. This isn’t the kind of novel that throws facts around like glitter. It’s the kind that quietly arranges every detail—from Dickens’ habits to his speech patterns, his temper, his moral anxieties, and even the way he walked—with a curator’s respect.

And yet, the book never feels like a museum exhibit. Hauser blends documented events and imagined introspection so seamlessly that you often forget where history ends and imagination begins.

The result is a narrative that feels intimate without being presumptuous, emotional without being sentimental, and sharply observant without ever falling into the trap of hero worship.

The conceit is simple but brilliant: an aging Dickens, looking back on his life, reflecting on the triumphs, the failures, the friendships, and the ghosts (both literal and metaphorical) that shaped him.

Hauser’s fictional Dickens sounds startlingly real—brisk but warm, self-aware but occasionally self-excusing, always wrestling with the tension between his public image and private contradictions.

It captures something biographies often struggle with: the texture of a life lived under the pressure of genius.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is how it humanizes Dickens without flattening him. Hauser gives him his humour, his theatricality, his boundless energy, but also his guilt, his regrets, his difficult relationships, and his stubborn streak that sometimes bordered on arrogance.

The Ellen Ternan thread—always the shadow trailing Dickensian studies—is handled with a sensitivity that avoids both moral grandstanding and scandal-mongering.

What we get instead is a man reflecting on an attachment that changed him, complicated him, and haunted him long after the relationship itself faded into history’s fog.

Hauser also excels at capturing the Victorian world around Dickens—its social hypocrisies, its rigid hierarchies, its fascination with progress, and its cruelty to the vulnerable. Everything feels alive, bustling, smoky, and crowded with storytellers and street children, printers and actors, and reformers and dreamers.

And through it all moves Dickens: a man who observed the world with an eye that could be tender one moment and razor-edged the next.

Stylistically, the book is a delight. Hauser writes with a calm, measured grace, avoiding the temptation to mimic Dickens’ ornate flourishes while still letting a faint Dickensian rhythm echo through the prose. It’s respectful without being slavish and imaginative without being indulgent.

The pacing is gentle; the emotional arc is quietly powerful. By the time Dickens reflects on mortality, on legacy, and on the burden of being “Charles Dickens”, the novel hits a surprisingly poignant note.

What makes the book linger — and what surely stayed with you in 2016 — is how it reframes Dickens not as a monument but as a man: brilliant, flawed, earnest, conflicted, and endlessly curious.

The novel invites us to see that behind every canonical text lies a life both richer and messier than the polished public version.

In the end, ‘The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens’ feels like a conversation across time — intimate, sincere, filled with the weight of things said too late.

Hauser gives Dickens not just a voice, but a soul.

And that’s what makes this novel unforgettable.

Recommended.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an assignment Thomas Hauser has given himself here, to write in the voice of Charles Dickens. And although that bar is too high to pull off, Hauser has penned a wonderful tale of intrigue, romance, fame and fate. And it's a page-turning mystery to boot! A hint at the content: "Society has found it convenient to distinguish between prostitutes and mistresses."

[Carolyn Di Leo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not really find this book enjoyable, but I do sometimes second guess myself, as I am only a poorly educated SAHM and never received a college degree, so what do I know about books and things like that. This author has many awards and nominations and writes for fancy magazines, so he is obviously better suited to such things.
That being said, I, honestly, could not muster up enough suspension of disbelief in order to take it that this could be the voice of Charles Dickens. Okay, maybe if you've never read a book by him before, but otherwise, you'll find it disconcerting. The author does manage to mangle a few quotes, which bother me and stood out like a sore thumb early on, and warn one to be aware of the rest. " but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." Most of us fans, know this quote very well, and it threw me to see it changed.
As a previous reviewer stated, it does tend to make you sympathize, even more than one would think possible, with Catherine Dickens. Really, as if Dickens would ever admit any wrong doing in his dealings with her. He was brutal to her until the end.
I don't think this will garner too much reader love among true Dickens fans and I don't know if non-readers are likely to chose this novel.

[Lois · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad at all. Quite a mix of facts and interesting imagined scenes in the life of Dickens, with a sort of crime drama thrown in. A few things bothered me slightly: 1) that this book made me feel even more sorry for Catherine Dickens than usual, because this book has Charles, days before marrying her, telling another woman that he would leave Catherine for her in a minute; 2) Ellen Ternan is basically given “wham-bam-thank you ma’am” treatment here, and is then totally out of the picture, while Charles supposedly pines for years over the other woman mentioned above, and 3) the worry that casual readers will read this instead of one of the many biographies about Dickens and not know which parts of it are true, and what is from this author’s imagination. It’s not the first book of its kind tho (and it does say “a novel” on the cover), so hopefully it will serve to whet the reader’s thirst for wanting to know more about the true life of the great author. As I said originally, it wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I liked it!

[Jason Furman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short novella told in the first person by Charles Dickens as he is nearing death. The focus is on 1836 when he is writing Sketches by Boz and just starting Pickwick--although it has opening and closing chapters that do a whirlwind tour of the rest of his life and career. Dickens is called in to write a puff piece about a financier but as he investigates he learns darker and darker secrets about him. Along the way we meet prostitutes with hearts of gold, earnest police inspectors and shady financiers--but not any orphans, lawyers, beautific virgins, bachelor philanthropists or spinsters. Which is to say, there is only so much Dickens you can cram into about 150 pages. The plot is reasonably interesting, the writing is reasonably good, and Dickens seems reasonably real, but none of it feels particularly special or inspired.

[Katherine Basto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written and creatively wrought novel. The author emulates the voice and style of Dickens' in the 1stc person and this really works. As a lover of Dickens, this was an impressive feat.
The story begins authentic to Dickens's life, but the plot becomes fictionalized along the way. At first it seemed logical that these characters formed the basis of many of Dickens's future novels. But when you realize this isn't true to Dickens's actual life, this could rattle many of his fans to the core.
The book is engrossing and certainly creates the atmospheric settings Dickens was know for, as well a character descriptions reminiscent of the great Master himself.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great way to experience Dickens

[Anna]

(About how seeing someone die reminds us of our own Aliveness, and the half-pleasure that comes with facing a stranger's death)

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm of a mixed mind when it comes to this book and I freely admit from the start that I'm probably going to be a total pedant about some of this. The biographical parts framing the murder/investigation/mystery weren't very well done. It took me a while to fall into the narration and to believe that this could be Dickens' voice. The opening is a rehash of the infamous autobiographical sketch and completely omits Maria Beadnell (which is only an issue in how the author is trying to frame the "romantic" background of Dickens). The ending portion feels like a laundry list of major events as the author scrambled towards his last reveal. I agree with other reviewers about the perfunctory discussion of Nelly Ternan, but understand that it's probably due to the replacement of her in this narrative, emotionally at least, by another character. I felt especially sad for Catherine - Dickens at the end had re-written the narrative of their relationship to reflect his version of events, but in the hands of another it feels somehow cruel to see Catherine relegated to such a one dimensional portrayal. The central Wingate/mystery section is very good and that's what kept me going. Even the overly melodramatic dialogue felt fitting.

If you're into Dickens, this is probably worth a look. But otherwise I'm not sure I would have given this a shot.

[Margi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part love story, part history, part crime drama. This book was really an interesting read. It took real facts and mixed them with fiction and the mix is quite a good story. The author states that this is Dickens' final manuscript from his locked box which was opened in 2013. Fans of Dickens will appreciate the characters and the city of London in this book as they are so reminiscent of the ones in his published novels. The lower classes, the working class, the wealthy, the squalor, the beauty, all living together, yet separately.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a quite different approach to the fictional biography and I found it interesting that Dickens would spend so much of the book on his true love, whom he beds only once but who remains his ideal through the rest of his life and who (more than Dicken's own experience with poverty, debtor's prison, etc.) fueled his writings on the social wrongs of Victorian society. It is a short read, but engrossing, and Dickens comes alive through this narrative told in the first person in a very believable manner.

[Crystal · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought it would be more about his life and it would be writing in the style of Dickens. The author included stories of unfair treatment of women and the poor as Dickens would have, but I found the stories… forced, and the constant defense of his bad marriage irritable. I also found his "love" for Amanda irritating… based on her beauty and her figure rather than for her person. I am going to go right now and read a few sentences from David Copperfield to make sure I am not missing something. But I am unimpressed with the work. I had high hopes for it.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book because I think it is fun to speculate on what may have made a man like Charles Dickens tick. Final Recollections is part fictional auto-biography, part Victorian detective story and part love story. It is well written and gets you engrossed to the point that you don't want to put it down (good thing that it's short enough to easily read in an evening). Not sure how much factual understanding of Dickens that I gained, but it was an interesting diversion. PS. Another fun aspect, many of the characters in the book can be seen as prototypes for characters in Dickens' books.

[Joe Slavinsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I didn't like this book more. I'm a fan of historical fiction. I've read, and enjoyed some Dickens(albeit reluctantly). This book was well-written, but I had an uncomfortable feeling while reading it. I'm not sure if I expected more, or if I just couldn't suspend disbelief enough. I grabbed this book off the "new" book shelf, at the library, while none of my reserves were available. I'm often pleasantly surprised when I do that, but not in this case. I would still recommend this book, as others will certainly enjoy it.

[Steve Kreidler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very clever and intriguing novel. The author writes the book as a last letter of sorts from Charles Dickens. It revolves around an unrequited love, a mystery, etc. Many of the fictitious characters (who might actually be real, in circumstances that are historically correct) seem hint at characters in the books he writes. The author claims that some of the book are indeed words directly written by Dickens himself and built into the novel.

All in all a truly fun read if you enjoy suspending your own disbelief from time to time.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up because it was short and though it would be good for a 5 hour train ride. It did not keep my attention. It felt sufficiently Dickensian but rushed in some spots and was overlong in others. The idea of taking facts and mixing crime and love to create a story seems to be done more often now than in the past. What I wonder is how often a reader then follows up by checking decipherable facts. At any rate, it did pass the time.

[Deyanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good period piece about the underbelly and diverse people inhabiting London during Dicken's lifetime. Obviously the author reveres Dickens. This was a bold attempt to write in Dicken's voice which didn't succeed for me. From just a factual standpoint, Catherine certainly seemed to get the raw edge of the marriage. Novel attempted to be a romance of sorts, a mystery and an autobiography. Attempted, summarizes my stance on this book.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like Dickens, then you should find this interesting. If you don't like Dickens...well...then there's no help for you. A creative imagining of Dickens' final days and the description of a grief that follows him through his illustrious life. The primary failing of the book is also the most understandable one. It would take a greater talent than Hauser's to imitate convincingly Dickens' writing, if that were possible. And it's not.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A charming and delightful short novel filled with facts about Dickens, this was a pleasure to read, and made me want to revisit Dickens's fiction, as well as read a bio of him. It was fun to see him trying to right a wrong, and at the same time, write installments of The Pickwick Papers + watch his fame grow.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is fact about the life of Charles Dickens? What is fiction about the life of Charles Dickens? I don't know enough about the man to separate the two but I tore through this book with interest. It was a quick novella that I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm thinking about re-reading some Dickens' classics and other books written by Thomas Hauser.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short work of fiction centers on an acquaintance made by Charles Dickens just as he was on the verge of becoming well-known. He is asked to investigate a man and ends up uncovering some unfavorable aspects of the man's character and actions. I enjoyed it and appreciated some of the actual facts about Dickens such as his performances of his works.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a lost short story by Dickens even though it captures some of his life. Good period piece about the London underbelly and class struggles with elevating beyond station and how the "haves" didn't want to share.

[D.L. Morrese · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fictional final word from Dickens... This short novel by Thomas Hauser is a bit like a biography, posing as an autobiography, wrapped around a fictional account of murder, corruption, exploitation, and romance (of a sort). It's not a gripping tale, but if you're a Dickens fan, it's a good story.

[Linda Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book about the time period that Charles Dickens lived. There is a murder mystery involved but also thrown into the book- how he wrote, his popularity and class system of England of his time. I enjoyed reading this book.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

a bit of a mess... the style and flavor of Dickens is there, so the author can surely write well... the murderous parts were compelling but the rest seemed a bit like filler... part bio, part fable, not enough of the latter, too much of the former...

[tinabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and imaginative look at the life of Charles Dickens, and – in true Dickensian style – a glimpse at the underbelly of Victorian London.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Received as review copy. Read my review in Library Journal.

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty audacious to attempt to speak in the voice of Charles Dickens, but the story is entertaining.

[Dru · Rating 2 out of 5]

More of a novella than a novel, it was fine and a good read but not very deep--I felt like I'd read books like this before...

[Cecilia Rodriguez · Rating 1 out of 5]

Written as a fiction, the story is too dull and dry. As for non-fiction, Hauser leaves too much out.
Better books include: "Last Dickens," by Mathew Pearl and "Drood"