Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is the most prolific and most obsessive writer about London and the English literary past in contemporary literature — a novelist who writes biographies, a biographer who writes novels, and a historian whose subject is always the same: the uncanny persistence of the past in the present, the way that certain places (London above all) and certain figures (Dickens, Blake, Chatterton, Wilde) continue to exert their influence across centuries, as if time were not a line but a palimpsest. He has published over sixty books — novels, biographies, histories, cultural studies — and the sheer volume of his output is itself a statement about his method: he writes compulsively because London and its history are inexhaustible, and because for Ackroyd the act of writing is itself a form of haunting.

East Acton

Ackroyd was born in 1949 in East Acton, London, was raised by his mother and grandmother (his father left when he was young), and grew up in a council flat. He was educated at Cambridge and Yale, where he was a Mellon Fellow. His first publication was a collection of poems, Ouch (1971), and his early critical works — Notes for a New Culture (1976) and Dressing Up (1979) — announced his interest in literary modernism and cultural theory.

But it was his biography of T.S. Eliot (1984, Whitbread Award) that established him as a major literary figure. The biography was controversial — Eliot’s estate had denied permission to quote from the poet’s unpublished letters and papers, and Ackroyd worked around the restriction with ingenuity and narrative skill — and it demonstrated the qualities that would define all his subsequent work: immense research, vivid scene-setting, and a conviction that biography is a creative act, not merely a scholarly one.

The London Novels

Ackroyd’s novels are exercises in literary ventriloquism and historical imagination, and they are almost all set in London. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983, Somerset Maugham Award) was his first novel — a fictional diary of Wilde’s last months in Paris, written in a pastiche of Wilde’s style so convincing that reviewers debated whether the book was genuine.

Hawksmoor (1985, Whitbread Award and Guardian Fiction Prize) was his masterpiece — a novel that alternated between the story of Nicholas Dyer, a satanic architect building churches in early-eighteenth-century London, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, a modern detective investigating murders at the same churches. The novel’s central conceit — that the evil embedded in the churches by Dyer continues to generate violence centuries later — expressed Ackroyd’s belief that London is a city of recurrence, a place where the past is never past.

Chatterton (1987) explored literary forgery through the story of Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century boy poet who faked medieval manuscripts. The House of Doctor Dee (1993) combined a modern story about a man who inherits a Clerkenwell house with the history of John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) was a Victorian murder mystery set in the music halls and slums of East London.

The Biographies

Ackroyd’s biographies are as ambitious as his novels. Dickens (1990) was an 1,100-page biography that interleaved narrative chapters with fictional interludes in which the biographer meets his subject — a controversial technique that demonstrated Ackroyd’s conviction that biography and fiction are not entirely separate enterprises. Blake (1995) was a biography of William Blake that captured the visionary artist’s London with extraordinary vividness. Shakespeare: The Biography (2005) attempted the near-impossible task of reconstructing the life of the least documented great writer in English.

London: The Biography

London: The Biography (2000) was Ackroyd’s most ambitious non-fiction work — a thematic history of London that treated the city as a living organism with its own character, its own diseases, its own recurring obsessions. Chapters on plague, fire, fog, crime, poverty, sexuality, and entertainment created a portrait of London as a city that perpetually destroys and rebuilds itself.

Collecting Ackroyd

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (Hamish Hamilton, 1983) is the first novel. Hawksmoor (Hamish Hamilton, 1985) is the double Whitbread/Guardian winner. Dickens (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990) is the major biography. London: The Biography (Chatto & Windus, 2000) is the London study. Ackroyd has published with many houses; first editions are generally available.