The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

Overview

A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death.

Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them.

Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. 

Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. 

The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062954947
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	55,811
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

A. N. Wilson grew up in Staffordshire, England, and was educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is a prolific and award-winning biographer and celebrated novelist. He lives in North London.

Table of Contents

1 The Mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence 1

2 The Mystery of his childhood 51

3 The Mystery of the cruel marriage 97

4 The Mystery of the charity of Charles Dickens 143

5 The Mystery of the public readings 193

6 The Mystery of Edwin Drood 241

7 The Mystery of Charles Dickens 289

Bibliography 321

List of Abbreviations 327

Acknowledgements 329

Notes 331

Index 341

Editorial Reviews

07/13/2020

Novelist and biographer Wilson (Prince Albert) undertakes a provocative if not fully satisfying exploration of Charles Dickens’s dark side. Finding thematic inspiration in the novelist’s final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Wilson suggests the bestselling and widely feted Dickens bore a greater resemblance to its central character, the outwardly respectable but tormented John Jasper, than is generally suspected. Wilson dissects several troubling aspects of Dickens’s life, including his deep-seated antagonism toward his mother (“the defining feature of the man and his art”); his callous treatment of his wife in favor of his mistress, the young actress Nelly Ternan; and his fixation on reciting a brutal and sensationalist description of a prostitute’s murder, from Oliver Twist, during his public readings. Wilson isn’t out to damn Dickens, in his view one of the 19th century’s greatest writers, and a source of solace during his own Dickensian childhood at a draconian boarding school. The resulting volume, however, too often feels like an extended psychoanalytic session between Wilson and his subject. Nonetheless, for readers accustomed to thinking of Dickens principally as a conscientious social critic or warmhearted Victorian sentimentalist, Wilson’s uneven but intriguing study will deliver some startling insights. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

A sprightly work of reinterpretation… Mr. Wilson is a novelist, and he brings to the task of biography a shrewd sense of how creative writers operate, along with a large stock of intuitions about human nature. The results are frequently perceptive.

Wall Street Journal

Wilson has taken a…near-fictive approach to Dickens’ life — posing and investigating several ‘mysteries’ about Dickens… The solutions to these ‘mysteries’ may never be found, Wilson argues; but they divulge fascinating contradictions in a man whose work has entertained more generations of readers than any writer could ever dream of.

|Los Angeles Times

★ 08/01/2020

What makes a writer great? In the case of Charles Dickens (1812–70), posits biographer novelist Wilson (Victoria: A Life), it's a man crying inside but trying to hide it. Don't look to Dickens's public statements. He hides himself there. Look instead to the fiction where young Dickens and his feckless parents are transmogrified into some of the best-fleshed characters in English literature. Dickens's books tell of children desperate for love and not receiving it, cast out on the nightmare scape of industrial London. Ten of 15 novels (Little Dorrit is one) involve prisons; almost all unfold horror stories of marital misery and abused or neglected youth. Wilson presents his analysis as a set of mysteries: for example, coins were missing in Dickens's pocket when he took ill and died; how did his childhood affect his life and writing; how could he be so cruel a husband himself. Ultimately, Wilson argues that the memory of Dickens's own childhood trauma lifted the writer above the status of comic to tragic author. VERDICT Wilson is the perfect choice to write about this complicated soul, showing how reading Dickens, one emerges with a new appreciation of the people one encounters. Even 150 years after his death, Dickens's life and works continue to fascinate.—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

★ 2020-04-13
The mystery of the iconic novelist’s divided self as beautifully parsed by accomplished English biographer and novelist Wilson.

In this utterly satisfying investigative narrative, the author moves from Dickens’ death in 1870 back through his career and childhood trauma being sent to work in a blacking factory at age 12. It’s clear that Wilson fully comprehends the many complexities of the wily novelist, public performer, and secret lover. Beginning with the mystery of his death, the author re-creates the last day of the famous novelist’s life as he made the habitual hour’s journey from his home at Gad’s Hill, Kent, to his mistress’s house in Peckham (places have major significance in Dickens’ work). There, he suffered a seizure and was returned to his home to die a respectable death, surrounded by his estranged wife—tortured, as Wilson calls her—and some of his many adult children. Wilson gradually, engagingly unravels the circumstances surrounding his death. “Dickens was good at dying,” he writes. “If you want a good death, go to the novels of Dickens.” The novelist had been consumed by his love affair with the former actress Nelly Ternan for the previous 13 years and had bought the house where she lived with her mother and sisters. Just that morning, Dickens had been working toward the conclusion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a book that was destined to be left incomplete, and was saturated with a sense of raging passion for a young, unobtainable girl. (Wilson ably dispels the myth that Dickens did not write about sex.) Wilson writes with precision, intuition, and enormous compassion for Dickens’ senses of social justice and outrage, especially regarding children in the mercilessly materialist Victorian era. The author also charmingly conveys his own early enchantment with Dickens’ books.

A marvelous exploration by an author steeped in the craft of his subject’s elastic, elusive work.

Kirkus Reviews

Wilson has taken a…near-fictive approach to Dickens’ life — posing and investigating several ‘mysteries’ about Dickens… The solutions to these ‘mysteries’ may never be found, Wilson argues; but they divulge fascinating contradictions in a man whose work has entertained more generations of readers than any writer could ever dream of.

Los Angeles Times

Wilson’s admiration and understanding of the novelist makes this a book to debate and savor… His own alluring analysis on the mystery of Dickens could not be bettered.

Seattle Book Review

His knowledge is wide, his writing fluent… Wilson has a number of persuasive ideas about Dickens, whom he sees as not only a conflicted personality but a tragic one, despite his genius for comedy.

New York Times Book Review

[Wilson] blend[s] perceptive analysis of the novels with parallel experiences in Dickens' life… Beyond the eye-opening analysis, Wilson also offers a moving personal account of why Dickens has meant so much to him.

Booklist (starred review)

Wilson brings dazzling, far-reaching erudition to this study, drawing on unexpected, sometimes arcane sources to paint a portrait with impressive depth and nuance.

BookPage

A sprightly work of reinterpretation… Mr. Wilson is a novelist, and he brings to the task of biography a shrewd sense of how creative writers operate, along with a large stock of intuitions about human nature. The results are frequently perceptive.

Wall Street Journal

Read More