Taking on the daunting task of defining the life of Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin succeeds in presenting a full-scale, enticing readable eponymous biography (Penguin; $36) of one of the foremost novelists of the Victorian era. Her meticulous research introduces us to a multifaceted character who rose to success through his own drive and ambition. Side by side with Dickens, Tomalin introduces a generous cast of those who interacted with the subject, many of whom sparked his imagination and serve as models for his characters or gave him food for empathetic thought.

Dickens was a delicate and often lonely child whose mother gave him daily reading lessons which spurred an interest in words and the shape of letters in the alphabet. From the age of 5, he began to read, including the books in his father’s library; from then on, words were associated with pleasure.

Young Dickens couldn’t roughhouse with the neighboring children due to his chronic pain, but he was not a passive child. His singing of comic songs was encouraged by the family, and he loved to perform for them using a table as his stage. His father was a friend of the landlord of the Mitre Tavern, and Charles and his sister, Fanny, were taken there to show off their performing skills.

Tomalin writes: “Once you have enjoyed performance and applause, you want to try again, and Dickens’ lifelong passion for both began here.”

Dickens’ aunt, who also was named Fanny, was courted by a doctor working at the Ordnance Hospital, with a teenage son. The doctor and his son and friends put on their own productions in a room at the hospital. Soon Dickens was writing his own plays. “I was a great writer at eight years old or so,” he joked later, and “an actor and a speaker from a baby.”

Those idyllic days came to a close when his father’s financial incompetence, and compulsion to borrow often but repay seldom, led him to debtor’s prison. The milieu into which young Dickens was thrust is described by Tomalin in graphic terms resonant of Dickens himself. She points out, though, that all these early experiences – debt, fear, angry creditors, bailiffs, prison, living in freezing bare rooms on what can be borrowed or begged – were impressed on his mind and were used again and again in his stories and novels.

When Dickens was 15, his formal education came to an end. He finally found work as a clerk in a solicitor’s office in Gray’s Inn, having pleased a potential employer by his neatness and gentlemanly manner. He became popular with his colleagues for his humor and had them laughing with his imitations of people he heard on the streets. On his half-hour walk to work each day, he often encountered middle-age men plodding steadily along to dingy offices where they slaved from dawn to dusk for tiny paychecks to feed their ever-increasing families. This became the model for Bob Cratchit in “A Christmas Carol.” Many sad sights and broken spirits Dickens saw each day touched him deeply; he did what he could for them, and many ended up as principals in his stories.

In one section, Tomalin takes us with Dickens through the mid-1830s when the author’s star was soaring and he had permanent work more to his liking: political reporting for The Morning Chronicle, a paper that set out to rival the London Times. From then on, he signed his popular London sketches using the name Boz. With this larger readership, he began to attract more attention. Tomalin brings in the frenetic pace of Dickens’ output; he juggles a biography of the clown, Grimaldi; works on “Oliver Twist”; finishes “The Pickwick Papers”; and is at work on “Nicholas Nickelby.” While all this is going on, he still found time to promote what so deeply touched his heart, social reform.

There are chapters in the book that read as though they were novels rather than the truths so meticulously researched for this biography. Dickens’ separation from his wife despite his feeling that a coherent family life is essential; his long-time liaison with a young actress; his relationship with his children despite his long absences; and his tendency to take his friends and their loyalty for granted are among the matters dealt with by Tomalin, since they are so much a part of the man.

The book includes a prologue; a list of the Dickens’ family members, in-laws and children, a 15-page cast of individuals who played significant roles in Dickens’ life, illustrations, portraits, photographs, maps, notes, a bibliography and an index.

Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times before devoting herself to writing full time. She is author of eight previous biographies. In 2002, her biography of Samuel Pepys was Whitbread Book of the Year. She lives in England with her author-playwright husband, Michael Frayn.