As beloved as Shakespeare, Charles Dickens has suffered no dearth of biographies, beginning with the ponderous but indispensable three-volume tome produced by his friend John Forster, and including estimable efforts by G.K. Chesterton, Fred Kaplan and Jane Smiley -- not to mention Peter Ackroyd's provocative italicized interludes, in which Dickens and other literary greats are revived in the mode of a historical novel. What, then, is there left to say? Plenty, notes Michael Slater, already the author of a short Dickens biography. A renowned Dickens scholar, Slater hands us Dickens the journalist and knockabout everyday writer, who spends his days editing magazines and elaborating on sketches that burgeon into episodic, serialized novels, which in turn transform the structure of English fiction forever.

Slater's meticulous method pinpoints the very moment -- indeed the very sketch -- when Dickens builds "an idea of himself as a writer." The breakthrough occurs in Chapter 16 of "The Pickwick Papers":

"We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day [Christmas], a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so joyfully then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped grown cold; the eyes we sought had hid their luster in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days."

This passage evokes an elegiac picture of Christmas, establishing the sentimental, wistful and even melancholic nature of a holiday ritual that united a nation in the writer's rhetoric.

Writing was Dickens' passion, his very life -- such that the notion of, say, retiring to the country, as Shakespeare did, was unthinkable. Dickens, who started out as a court reporter racing to beat other journalists to a story -- all the while absorbing London's teeming and eccentric atmosphere -- thrived on urban life.

No writer has ever thrown himself into the world as wholeheartedly as Dickens. He held back nothing. His life itself is a literary work. And Slater's biography takes the same pains with Dickens as Dickens took with himself and his creations.

Carl Rollyson is a biographer and journalism professor at Baruch College, City University of New York.