Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

by Nick Hornby

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Nick Hornby! Charles Dickens! Prince! Prince? Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius is the dinner party of your dreams. Hornby’s book of essays makes such splendid introductions between Dickens and Prince that we can’t wait to be invited to the table. Goose quill pen on the right, guitar on the left. Cheers!

“An ardent fan letter from Hornby that makes you want to re-read Great Expectations while listening to Sign o’ the Times.” —Vogue

From the bestselling author of Just Like You, High Fidelity, and Fever Pitch, a short, warm, and entertaining book about art, creativity, and the unlikely similarities between Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and modern American rock star Prince

Every so often, a pairing comes along that seems completely unlikely—until it’s not. Peanut butter and jelly, Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, ducks and puppies, and now: Dickens and Prince.

Equipped with a fan’s admiration and his trademark humor and wit, Nick Hornby invites us into his latest obsession: the cosmic link between two unlikely artists, geniuses in their own rights, spanning race, class, and centuries—each of whom electrified their different disciplines and whose legacy resounded far beyond their own time.

When Prince’s 1987 record Sign o’ the Times was rereleased in 2020, the iconic album now came with dozens of songs that weren’t on the original— Prince was endlessly prolific, recording 102 songs in 1986 alone. In awe, Hornby began to wonder, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? He soon found his answer in Victorian novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, who died more than a hundred years before Prince began making music.

Examining the two artists’ personal tragedies, social statuses, boundless productivity, and other parallels, both humorous and haunting, Hornby shows how these two unlikely men from different centuries “lit up the world.” In the process, he creates a lively, stimulating rumination on the creativity, flamboyance, discipline, and soul it takes to produce great art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593541821
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	160,795
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nick Hornby is the author of seven bestselling novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down, as well as several works of nonfiction. Many of his books have been turned into successful films and TV series. He has been Oscar nominated twice, for his screenplays of An Education and Brooklyn. His ten-part short-form TV series State of the Union, directed by Stephen Frears, was recently broadcast by Sundance TV and the BBC and won three Emmy Awards. He lives in London.

Date of Birth:

April 17, 1957

Place of Birth:

Redhill, Surrey, England

Education:

Jesus College, Cambridge University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction 1

Childhood 17

Their Twenties 29

The Movies 55

The Working Life 71

The Business 93

Women 117

The End 135

Acknowledgments 163

Select Bibliography 165

Permissions 167

Credits 169

Editorial Reviews

10/10/2022

What did writer Charles Dickens and musician Prince have in common? “They have both lived on, of course, but more vigorously than one might have expected,” according to this breezy take on creativity by Hornby (Just Like You). For Hornby, both men are sui generis talents, and he finds no shortage of parallels between them as he unpacks the artists’ lives, the movies (or Dickens’s case, musicals) their work inspired, their mid-career productivity, and their business conflicts (Prince battled with his record label, Dickens railed against intellectual theft). A mixture of speculation and research comprises the section “Women,” which explores Dickens’s and Prince’s wives, lovers, and muses. Hornby writes that Prince was a “relatively rare creature, the androgynous heterosexual,” while Dickens’s penchant for younger women was a “weakness.” At the end of their lives—Prince died from an accidental painkiller overdose, and Dickens was felled by a stroke—Hornby concludes that both had become cultural touchstones, but were hopelessly addicted to work. Hornby’s admiration for his subjects is infectious, though readers who come to this with a basic knowledge with either artist will find much of the terrain covered here familiar. Even so, it’s a zesty tribute to two cultural legends not often spoken about in the same breath. Agent: Georgia Garrett, RCW Literary. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Dickens and Prince:

“This pairing—two magnificent creatives, centuries and genres apart— makes stunning sense in the hands of their wisest, wittiest fan.”—People
 
“’The truth is that nobody can stay hot forever,’ Hornby observes, and so the trick is to always remember that the real prize is ‘a lifetime spent doing what you want to do.’ This feels like the solid kernel of the book’s wisdom, and an insight that Hornby is grounded enough to have arrived at in earnest. . . Hornby isn’t a genius like his two subjects, but his charming, intelligent novels have a common sense both Prince and Dickens lacked, and no artist is well advised to abandon his strength.”—Slate
 
“If you care about how and why art is made. . .Dickens and Prince was written with you in mind. . . It's hard to think of a contemporary author better equipped to write this book.”—Star Tribune

“Beneath the surface of this fascinating biography, there lies a warm and wise craft book about what it takes to make great art in any century.”—Esquire

“Smart, witty and weirdly convincing… Pop culture is political to Hornby. Beneath this latest book’s stocking-filler-light surface, you can sense a subtle sort of crusade. By pairing these two artists, he’s making a couple of implicit assertions — that Prince is as important as Dickens and that Dickens is as fun as Prince.” —The Times (London)
 
“His book is both a love letter to two artists who have nourished him and the story of how they 'caught fire and lit up the world.'" —The Guardian

“If you’ve forgotten what a distinct pleasure it is to read Nick Hornby, may I suggest Dickens and Prince.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“I love this. It's smart and funny and elegantly persuasive.” —Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens

“An ardent fan letter from Hornby that makes you want to re-read Great Expectations while listening to Sign o’ the Times. This slim, companionable volume combines biography—Dickens’s impoverished childhood, Prince’s bruising battle with his record label—as it champions the creative impulse to always make more: more novels, more songs. A love letter to maximalism.” —Vogue

“[Hornby’s] love for the work, for the sheer unbelievably prodigal output of both artists, is intense. And when he does write about Prince and sexuality, he is almost jarringly illuminating, particularly when he wrestles with Prince as shapeshifting sexual avatar.”—Daily Beast

“The point is to be in the company of Nick Hornby, which is always a pleasure. His writing is so quick and generous and conversational and breezy that he could write an entertaining and informative book on the history of mayonnaise. Luckily, he’s chosen two of the most captivating artists of the last 150 years instead.”—Datebook
 
“No one else could have gotten a book like this published, but no one else could have pulled it off, either.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Hornby’s admiration for his subjects is infectious… a zesty tribute to two cultural legends not often spoken about in the same breath.” —Publishers Weekly


Praise for Nick Hornby:

“Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent, and emotionally generous all at once.” —The New York Times

“The clever British storyteller …[has] excellent taste and a smart, irreverent sense of humor.” —The Boston Globe

“Hornby just makes it look easy.” —The Washington Post

From the Publisher

2022-09-10
Comparing the lives of two protean geniuses and gleaning the lessons thereof.

Hornby considers together the lives of two of "My People—the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work." This exercise will interest a particular Venn diagram of readers. You don't have to be a fan of Prince, Dickens, and Hornby, but 2 out of 3 would help. Among the qualities that unite Hornby’s two heroes is that they had "no off switch," continuously pouring out work until their deaths, both at the same age, 58. Both had truncated, difficult childhoods; both hit a spectacular creative zenith in their 20s; both went to war with their publishers and damaged their reputations considerably by doing so. Hornby also takes on the idea, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, that virtuosity requires 10,000 hours of practice, putting the focus instead on reading, listening, watching, and bringing himself into the picture, as he does from time to time. "I am closer to being Dickens than being Prince, although of course that's like saying I'm closer to Mars than to Saturn,” he writes. “But I suspect my degree of passion for books, music, TV and movies has never been ‘normal.’ ” In an interesting section on Prince's androgyny, Hornby points out that "Prince's sexuality came from the future”—i.e., now, when the notion of nonbinary gender is part of mainstream culture. Dickens' sexuality “came from the future” only in the sense that he went through a public shaming in the media when his relationship with an 18-year-old girl became public. Most importantly, writes Hornby, “Prince and Dickens tell me, every day, Not good enough. Not quick enough. Not enough. More, more, more. Think quicker, be more ambitious, be more imaginative."

No one else could have gotten a book like this published, but no one else could have pulled it off, either.

Kirkus Reviews

The beguiling irony in this affecting audiobook begins with the juxtaposition of creative giants who seem at first to be from different planets. But Nick Hornby uses his detailed knowledge of the nineteenth-century English writer Charles Dickens and the late American pop star Prince to show what they shared—extraordinary artistic drive and productivity. During their creative years, they expressed their groundbreaking ideas at an astounding rate. Alex Jennings, with classic British restraint and an appealing range of emotional tones, delivers the author’s research and love of his subject with uncommon vocal appeal. His performance is supremely sensitive to another juxtaposition—that of the two artists’ extraordinary achievements and the challenges they overcame, specifically their childhood deprivation and lower social status. A must-hear for lovers of Dickens and Prince who are interested in the creative process. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

The beguiling irony in this affecting audiobook begins with the juxtaposition of creative giants who seem at first to be from different planets. But Nick Hornby uses his detailed knowledge of the nineteenth-century English writer Charles Dickens and the late American pop star Prince to show what they shared—extraordinary artistic drive and productivity. During their creative years, they expressed their groundbreaking ideas at an astounding rate. Alex Jennings, with classic British restraint and an appealing range of emotional tones, delivers the author’s research and love of his subject with uncommon vocal appeal. His performance is supremely sensitive to another juxtaposition—that of the two artists’ extraordinary achievements and the challenges they overcame, specifically their childhood deprivation and lower social status. A must-hear for lovers of Dickens and Prince who are interested in the creative process. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2022 - AudioFile