Charles Dickens, aged 25 in 1837 and writing Oliver Twist, was asked to edit the memoirs of the great comic Joseph Grimaldi, who had just died, aged 58, wrecked by the hard physical labour of pantomime and a sequence of emotional catastrophes like a script for a melodrama. (Father abused him. Brother ran away to sea. Young love died. Son expired a drunkard.) Grimaldi left a first-person manuscript, which had had a choppy edit before Dickens turned it into a third-person narrative. You could call the result a celebrity biography, since Grimaldi was the most famous clown of the British stage, drawing adoring crowds across the country, and fought over by three London theatres. (He managed to appear at two in a night by running between them, sometimes in full costume and makeup). But his story comes over as truly peculiar, with an inconsequentiality unexpected of the famous - eerie crime and gory accidents mashed up with box-office returns and conversations with Byron; so very Dickens. This is a handsome, solid little edition.

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