Boz Abounding : DICKENS: A BIOGRAPHY<i> by Fred Kaplan (William Morrow: $24.95; 592 pp.; Illustrated) </i>

A hundred and eighteen years after his death, only two biographies of Dickens stand out: John Forster’s “official” biography (1872-74) and Edgar Johnson’s monumental study, first published in 1952. Fred Kaplan’s new work deservedly joins these two; he offers us the most fully achieved biography of Dickens to date.

Forster is a biographer’s nightmare--cutting, pasting and liberally destroying invaluable manuscripts and letters bequeathed to him by Dickens--but his narrative remains powerfully moving. Lacking any semblance of balanced evaluation, Forster’s “Life” will always have enormous value as a primary source from the man nominated by Dickens, very early in Boz’s career, as his official biographer. Their friendship was the longest and most important of the great novelist’s life, from 1836 until his death in 1870.

Eighty years after Forster’s “Life,” Edgar Johnson’s two-volume (1,158 pp.) account finally assimilated the vast amount of material by and about Dickens, forging a sustained, accurate and powerful history of the life of an English writer often ranked second only to Shakespeare. Unlike Shakespeare, the self-proclaimed “Inimitable” Dickens left a legacy of almost endless information by and about himself. Johnson generally balances storytelling and evaluation. But he too often sentimentalizes the complex material he has so effectively amassed.

Since 1952, several thousand new letters by Dickens have been discovered, and the biographical information about him has grown proportionately. Kaplan capitalizes on these recent documents: he re-creates Dickens’ life with superb narrative skill and brings to bear the most sophisticated perspective to date on an author he loves, understands, but also criticizes regularly and acutely, without malice, indeed with a remarkable warmth and understanding.

Unlike the moralistic and ever-protective Forster or the sometimes circumspect, paradoxically Victorian Johnson, Kaplan marshals his evidence with the economy of a literary general; he always deals clearly and swiftly with problems of fact and conjecture before offering his own crisply persuasive conclusions. Dickens’ 13-year relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, for example, overlapping his separation from his wife of more than 20 years, has provoked more misinformation, more bizarre conjecture and more polite evasion than any other aspect of his life.

Forster, who had opposed the separation and thoroughly disapproved of Dickens’ affair with Ellen, imperiously excludes the relationship from his biography. Johnson, in spite of the information at his disposal, evades a decisive conclusion with a circumlocution worthy of a government post in “Little Dorrit.”

By contrast, Kaplan acknowledges that while there cannot, of course, be any absolute evidence of a sexual relationship, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. Their relationship, he writes, “became an intimate one, probably by late 1857 or 1858 . . . There was no reason to believe that either (Dickens or Ellen Ternan) was sufficiently rigid or perverse not to behave normally in their private world.”

Kaplan also tackles the perennial question of whether Dickens’ meeting with Ellen triggered the novelist’s separation from his wife; indeed Kaplan goes much further, speculating that Dickens’ domestic disaffection and his openness to a new romance were radical remedies against a growing fear that his social world, even his work, threatened to turn stale and empty. No one has argued this view more effectively than Kaplan, who concludes that “the primary issue” for Dickens “was not Ellen Ternan but (the salvation of) his own future.”

Kaplan notes how regularly Dickens was imposed on for money by all of his family:

“Dickens’ fear that his father’s ghost lived in all his brothers. . . . Unlike Hamlet’s father, this ghost always asked for money.” The style is almost as droll as Dickens himself on a subject so raw he regularly reduced it to burlesque hilarity:

“My mother,” Dickens wrote, “was left to me when my father died (I never had anything left to me but relations).” Senile and close to death, with poultices applied to “her poor head . . . the instant she saw me,” Dickens writes with feigned surprise and delight, “she plucked up a spirit and asked me for ‘a pound.’ ”

Kaplan pursues two broad goals: he builds a biography around the intensely autobiographical and self-dramatizing nature of his subject; further, he recognizes the complex but essential relationship between personal growth and its fictional re-enactments, experiments in mirroring and disguising oneself by acts of imagination. Consequently, Kaplan’s critical insights into Dickens’ work always concentrate on the connections between the life and related fictional projections of the self. The result is a critical reading of Dickens’ works at once original and unified, always subordinated to the primary enterprise of biography itself.

The illustrations in Kaplan’s book (107 in all) are lavish and arranged with great skill. From the earliest portrait of a youthful, almost Pre-Raphaelite, Dickens to the final picture of Dickens “dreaming about his characters,” we witness a vivid progression and disintegration, an illuminating counterpoint to the verbal account of his growth and reluctant aging. (“What a great cemetery one walks through after 40,” Dickens once remarked.)

A series of artfully arranged sketches and photographs of Catherine depict her fall from a delicate beauty toward a fatal resemblance to the slow, heavy features of Queen Victoria. In a poignant pictorial statement, two 1857 portraits are placed side by side: one, the young and alluring Ellen Ternan; the other, a startled, frightened and lumpish Catherine, who seems to be glancing in terror across the page at her rival.

Inevitably, a work as ambitious as Kaplan’s has its fair share of flaws, from simple errors in proofreading to flat-out mistakes: Kaplan’s claim that “in creating the first detective hero, Dickens originated the genre of detective fiction” is inaccurate; that distinction belongs to Poe, who 10 years earlier had introduced Dupin in two of his most famous detective fictions, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.”

Some of the larger problems of the book are inextricably tied to its virtues. Kaplan’s biographical readings of the great novels are sometimes repetitive, and the regular, obligatory inclusion of Dickens’ sense of maternal rejection is too often predictable and unrewarding.

Two broad objections. The closing section reads as if Kaplan were rushing to meet a deadline. In particular, he barely acknowledges Dickens’ final, incomplete, but vitally important novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Second, although Kaplan carefully footnotes both primary and secondary sources, his wide range of knowledge is dependent upon many more works than he is able to squeeze into the notes. Johnson’s more extensive, separate list of important secondary works serves as a model for what would be a welcome addition to future printings of Kaplan’s text.

As Dickens’ friend and mentor Carlyle once observed, “a well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” Kaplan has devoted 10 years to preparing and writing this book; his achievement is as rare, as wonderful, as the Dickens he brings to life. We are all the beneficiaries of this exceptional biography.