Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller

by Peter Conrad

Overview

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's imagination and the world he created.

See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe.

Peter Conrad's bold rediscovery of Dickens suggests that he alone rivals Shakespeare and in some ways betters him. As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad's book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.

Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to read him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399409193
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	05/06/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Peter Conrad is a literary critic and cultural historian. His books include The Everyman History of English Literature; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Visionary Companion

1 On Planet Dick

2 In the Family

3 In the Dark

4 Cabbalistic Words

5 The Great Creator

6 Devilkins

7 In Arabia

8 Species and Origins

9 In the Carvery

10 In the Forge

11 Arranging the Universe

12 Heroes of His Own Life

13 The So Potent Art

14 In the Crypt

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

03/03/2025

This erudite study from Conrad (The Mysteries of Cinema), a former literature professor at Oxford University, explores the social, political, and literary inspirations behind Charles Dickens’s novels. Tracing how contemporaneous debates over evolution trickled into Dickens’s work, Conrad argues that Bleak House’s descriptions of the Smallweed family as leeches, grubs, and spiders reflect the Darwinian idea that humans are merely one animal among many, rather than rulers over all other species. “For Dickens, The Arabian Nights’ Tales qualified as a sacred book,” Conrad contends, suggesting the writer viewed Scheherazade’s feats of imagination as akin to the inventiveness he aspired to in his own work. Elsewhere, Conrad discusses how Dickens’s skepticism regarding the existence of a higher power shaped his portrayals of poverty as the product of bad luck rather than divine retribution, and how his many allusions to Shakespeare show his admiration for the playwright he considered “his only rival.” The astute elucidation of the many intellectual currents that informed Dickens’s work demonstrates the complex ways in which novelists transmute the real world into the fictional. Conrad also weaves in revealing insights into Dickens’s character, noting, for instance, that his personal writings show he was often fonder of his characters, whom he considered “family,” than his actual children, whom he viewed as spoiled. This is sure to please Dickens’s admirers. (May)

Publishers Weekly

If you have not read Dickens for a while – or ever – this reading of the novels will convert you. Reading Conrad, who for many years taught English literature at Oxford, makes you realise why so many of his hundreds of former pupils adore and praise him.” —A. N. Wilson, The Oldie

“Riveting…Conrad plunders Dickens's novels, essays, journalism and diaries for illuminating details that he artfully weaves together into something akin to a series of inventories.” —The Times

“Peter Conrad is a dancer and acrobat whose brilliance, audacity and courage forever defy our ungenerous hopes of a pratfall. Nobody else can do what he does and get away with it.” —Independent

“Conrad has published criticism so sharp you can cut your fingers on it.” —New York Observer

“There is little Conrad doesn't notice, making his book seem less like a traditional critical account than the result of someone who has managed to get inside Dickens's head and have a good rummage… Conrad's enthusiasm means that even readers who aren't quite sure where they are going are still likely to enjoy the journey.” —The Spectator

“Conrad is stunningly well informed, compulsively allusive and equipped with the kind of imagination that transforms the base metal of history into pure gold.” —Observer

“If Dickens was a unique enchanter, alert to the magic as well as the misery of this world, Conrad is a charmingly bewitched conjurer of his genius.” —The Critic

“In his new book, Peter Conrad draws on a lifetime's love of Dickens and an encyclopedic knowledge of his work to celebrate the novelist's magus power and the sheer fecundity of his imagination.” —Claire Harman, Literary Review

“An engrossing biography. Dickens the Enchanter is a treat. It offers a fresh understanding of his genius to new readers and is a highly rewarding reminder to devoted fans of Dickens of why he remains such a colossus of literature.” —Martin Chilton, Independent

“An erudite study… Sure to please Dickens's admirers.” —Publishers Weekly

“Exactly the kind of attention Dickens's writing demands and deserves, at once intimate and encyclopaedic. A compelling portrait of a writer who lived his work to the limit.” —David Trotter, Emeritus Professor of Literature, University of Cambridge

“An important account of an extraordinary writer who is often misread and misrepresented.” —Church Times

From the Publisher