Mullan is at his heart a critic of style, and the most rewarding parts of The Artful Dickens are those in which he turns his eye on the various maneuvers by which the novelist's prose comes alive. Even so obvious a device as the as-if construction affords a key to the working of Dickens's imagination, since he characteristically adopts the formula, Mullan shows, not to clarify a point but to fantasize.” —Ruth Bernard Yeazell, New York Review of Books
“Excellent … The closer we look, the better the novels get. The Artful Dickens is both an exposure of the trickster's methods and a celebration of close reading … Enlightening … If Mullan put into his hat a creator of gargoyles and spinner of melodrama, he pulled out an innovator who broke all the rules. The Artful Dickens made me feel that I had been in some form of trance during my earlier reading of these novels” —Frances Wilson, Guardian
“[Mullan] has a gift for synthesizing information and presenting it in an enjoyable fashion, and he provides here a dazzlingly close examination of the Dickens oeuvre with an emphasis on style and literary technique... The Artful Dickens shows us a singular craftsman who was of his time and, simultaneously, timeless.” —The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Literary scholar Mullan offers ample evidence of the 'technical boldness' and 'experimental verve' of Dickens' prolific oeuvre . . . A brisk, authoritative look at a literary icon.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Incisive … astute observations abound … This superlative, fresh collection will please stalwart fans and bring new readers to the Dickens canon.” —Publishers Weekly
“Splendid … Mullan's book is too rich to capture in a review. Each chapter shoots off in a fresh direction and illuminates it … You must, and should, read Mullan's book. Even if you know a lot about Dickens you will find revelations in it, and if you know nothing about Dickens and want to learn what makes him great it will be the perfect appetiser” —John Carey, Sunday Times
“Gloriously entertaining and astute, this lush, intimate journey through Dickens's storytelling strategies is an absolute treat. I loved it.” —Sarah Waters
“Mullan has taken the most popular Victorian novelist and, by holding different facets of his literary technique up to the light, found new angles from which to admire the work. By the end of this teacherly but readable analysis, Dickens's novels are sparkling as if spring-cleaned … Surrendering to Mullan's guided tour, we are swept into the world of Pip and Magwitch, Scrooge, the Boffins, Lady Dedlock, and a host of other familiar and much loved, loathed or pitiable characters from his extensive portrait gallery … The Artful Dickens is a fulsome tribute to a writer whose commonly perceived flaws are part of what makes him great” —Rosemary Goring, Herald
“A spritely and surprising study of Dickens … Mullan wears his formidable learning lightly in revealing how a teeming imagination made it on to the page” —New Statesman
“The Artful Dickens is full of such nuggets. Put it on your Christmas list and spend the post-goose collapse reading the good bits aloud” —Laura Freeman, The Times
“John Mullan is that rare bird, a literary critic you want to read. His vigorous prose style, his generosity and acumen, his freedom from jargon, and the fact that he is an entertainer in his own right, make him the ideal guide to Dickens' genius. This is a marvellous, endlessly illuminating book – pointing even the most knowledgeable Dickensians to scenes they hadn't noticed, sentences they hadn't remembered, “tricks and ploys” they'd never sufficiently appreciated. It doesn't go on the shelf alongside other critics; it goes on the shelf alongside Dickens” —Howard Jacobson
“In this brilliantly sharp book, John Mullan delves into all the ways in which the Great Boz grabs our attention on page one of his novels and refuses to let go until we are deposited a thousand pages later … Mullan is a professor of English literature, which means that he has a forensic eye for how Dickens produces his spellbinding effects … This vastly entertaining book gives the sense that Mullan is a man with a mission … Mullan makes us see that Charles Dickens was one of the most artful, which is to say skilled, writers the world has ever seen” —Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday
“A feast of Dickensian knowledge” —The Times
“It's an eye-opening analysis of Dickens's fiction by a distinguished scholar, and of genuine interest to first-time readers as well as devoted Dickensians. But it's also an extremely useful (and entertaining) handbook on the craft of writing, no matter the genre or the century.” —The Historical Novels Review
★ 2021-02-18
A celebration of the Victorian novelist’s cunning genius.
Based on insightful close readings of Charles Dickens’ novels, letters, and meticulously revised manuscripts, literary scholar Mullan offers ample evidence of the “technical boldness” and “experimental verve” of Dickens’ prolific oeuvre. In discrete chapters, the author highlights more than a dozen characteristics that set Dickens apart from other writers, including the use of “fantastic analogy” to evoke “people’s strangeness and self-contradiction”; the invention of comically apt names, some of which have entered the popular lexicon; the deployment of coincidences “to move the fancy, asking us to imagine what makes the improbable somehow plausible”; and the shift between past and present tense, which, Mullan asserts, anticipated modernist and postmodernist writers: “None of Dickens’ narrative tricks is stranger or more audacious than this.” Mullan highlights the literary techniques that shape the well-populated novels’ quirky characters. Dickens, who once toyed with the idea of becoming an actor and admired performers who could use different voices, was able “to make a way of speaking comically distinct without being merely laughable.” He closely attended to word choice, using clichés to his advantage, coining words and, Mullan reveals, snatching up colloquialisms, which he pitched into “orotund sentences.” In addition, he paid attention to palpable details—odors, for example—writing “as if his nose were a sensitive instrument.” For Dickens, smell became “a narrative device” that helped readers recall characters during the many months of a novel’s serialization. Besides technical devices, Dickens had particular thematic interests: in ghost stories, for one—at the time “an undeveloped genre” that Dickens promoted—and in drowning, which became more than a useful plot mechanism but emblematic of a widely shared visceral fear. Although Mullan assumes a reader’s familiarity with Dickens’ many works, his ebullient analysis may well generate new fans.
A brisk, authoritative look at a literary icon.
