Equally notorious was Ackroyd's advance, said to have been a whopping £650,000 for Dickens and Blake, unheard of at the time but repaid, as was his "biography" of the city of London, with blockbuster sales. Some facts, thankfully, are already in the public domain: Ackroyd is one of the country's most renowned and prolific biographers, with a daunting back catalogue that includes extensive works on Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, William Blake, Thomas More and, most notably, a mammoth 1,195-page book on Dickens, which mimicked one of his subject's own sprawling, "baggy monster" narratives and controversially included concocted episodes where Ackroyd chatted to Dickens in contemporary settings such as the London Underground or commented on the process of writing the book. That sounds a bit rich from someone who has written biographies all of his life."
Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. "I'm not big on biography, as you can tell," he finally asserts. Attempts to press him for details get mired in uncomfortable silence. Questions about his upbringing and his past are batted away with gruff interjections and monosyllables.
"If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical." Sitting among the afternoon tea-drinkers in the Basil Street Hotel in London's Knightsbridge, he begins by heaping scorn on the very notion of press, publicity and profiles: "I detest self-regard," he mutters. F or a man who has made his career out of conjuring up literary life stories, Peter Ackroyd appears to have a curiously perverse attitude to his own.
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