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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
Guardian Review
Near the end of The Mystery of Charles Dickens, AN Wilson quotes at length from a letter written by Philip Larkin to his lover Monica Jones. The poet has just reread Great Expectations, and is reflecting on the novelist's attention-seeking tricks: "Say what you like about Dickens as an entertainer, he cannot be considered a real writer at all; not a real novelist." It is a version of a complaint that has been made many times about Dickens the mere "entertainer". "His is the garish, gaslit, melodramatic barn ¿ where the yokels gape." Yet, at the end of all his sentences of critical deprecation, Larkin's final reflex is equally familiar: "However, I much enjoyed G.E. & may try another soon." Those with high literary standards have often enjoyed Dickens against their better judgment. In The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Wilson sides with the gaping yokels. He confesses the he has read Dickens with "obsessive rapture" since his childhood, but had to overcome the presumption, later educated into him, that his writing was insufficiently deep or sophisticated. "The death of Paul Dombey is so schmaltzy that we simply refuse to be moved, but then, damn it, we read and the tears well down our cheeks." For Wilson, Dickens is an irresistible performer. One chapter of his book is devoted to "The Mystery of the Public Readings", in which Dickens drove himself to near collapse (and made huge amounts of money) by touring America as well as Britain to perform readings from his work. In 1869, he had a stroke on stage in Chester, but still refused to stop the readings, partly because of the money but mostly because he was addicted to the instant responsiveness of his audience. The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes's murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself - some yen for sexual violence - on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. Wilson's book is, you might say, bio-critical: "Dickens's novels tell the story over and over again of his divided self," he writes. The secrets of his life lie on the surface of his fiction. The dust jacket proclaims that the book goes "beyond standard narrative biography". Which is to say that The Mystery of Charles Dickens does not reveal anything the previous biographers have not told us (indeed, it is conscientiously reliant on a small number of secondary sources). Instead, it shows, by a mixture of rational inference and I-feel-it-in-my-bones intuition, how the most powerful aspects of Dickens's fiction drew on the most painful and secret aspects of his life. The biggest secret of Dickens's life, of course, was his clandestine relationship with Ellen ("Nelly") Ternan, the young actor whom he first met when she performed at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in The Frozen Deep, a play that he had written with his friend Wilkie Collins, and in which he himself was acting. She was 18; he was 45. For the next 13 years, Dickens paid for her to live in a series of discreetly located residences, where he would secretly visit her. The last of these was Windsor Lodge in Peckham, then a pleasant village outside London, with a railway station on the line from Dickens's Kent home. Each chapter of Wilson's book is a different "Mystery", the first being what happened to most of the £22 for which Dickens cashed a cheque on the day before his death. Dickens must have given it to Nelly for housekeeping. Which means that he must have made a quick trip to Peckham and that the "seizure" that killed him must have been induced by some hyper-energetic sex with her. Which means that hasty measures must have been taken to heave the dying novelist into a carriage to be driven back to his Kent home. "Exit Nelly, stage left." (This enjoyable fiction, which has been hazarded by others before Wilson, is partly withdrawn near the end of the book.) Next is "The Mystery of his Childhood". Wilson is hardly the first to suggest that Dickens's fiction was shaped by what he calls "the grotesquely sad galanty show of his childhood". He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors' prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren's Blacking warehouse. There is less stress than usual on the improvidence of Dickens's father, John Dickens (whose self-relishing orotundity at least inspired the matchless idiolect of Mr Micawber). Instead, Dickens blamed his mother. The ludicrous (Mrs Nickleby) or monstrous (Mrs Clennam) mothers in his novels bear the imprint of "the deepest needs of mother-hate". Wilson asserts that "his flawed relationship with his mother is the defining feature, of the man and of his art". Yet his privations made him a great novelist. The Blacking warehouse "saved Dickens the novelist, just as grammar school and Cambridge would have destroyed him". Then there is "The Mystery of the Cruel Marriage". Nothing has more tainted Dickens's reputation than his public repudiation (via an advertisement in the Times) of his wife, Kate, who had borne him 10 children and suffered all his demands for 22 years. Wilson's house, he tells us, overlooks the back garden of 70 Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, whence Catherine Dickens was exiled, with the company of only one of her children, Charley, their eldest son. The others were forbidden to see her. We have found out recently that Dickens tried to have her certified insane, so that she would be put in an asylum. Not only did he want to be free to pursue an affair with Nelly Ternan, he wanted somehow to declare that it was all his blameless wife's fault. He was the wounded party. But all the fury and resentment that he felt towards first his mother, and then his wife, inspired his greatest fiction, Wilson thinks. We should be grateful that he was so screwed up. Great Expectations, he believes, was a masterpiece of self-torment, formed from his own ruthlessness, his hunger for money and status, his family hatreds - all handed down to the novel's narrator, Pip. "A helpful course of cognitive therapy, such as our contemporaries would have urged on a middle-aged man who had just visited such absolute mayhem on his wife and children" would have destroyed his creativity. Just as Pip owed his fortune to a violent criminal, Magwitch, its author owed his lucrative brilliance to "a secret, violent criminal": himself. Or rather, the dark and nasty secret self that he never consciously acknowledged. Wilson concedes all the contradictions and hypocrisies anatomised by John Carey in his brilliant, often openly exasperated study of Dickens, The Violent Effigy - but forgives him. Dickens had to contend with the "vast, smoky, cruel, boundlessly energetic, steel-hearted nineteenth century", which made him variously cruel and sentimental. He was, after all, a nobody, who had grown up "with nuffink". Alone among all great writers of the 19th century, he had "not merely looked over into the abyss. He had lived in it." His lifelong insecurity was another creative asset. If you are a Dickens aficionado, you will think that much of the book's biographical narrative is well-known material, though here revisited in a sprightly manner. Yet its last, highly personal section suddenly shifts your sense of Wilson's commitment to his subject. In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was "in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts". The teacher who introduced him to Dickens was himself utterly sinister and Dickensian, the skill with which he impersonated Fagin and Squeers "all too convincing". The shards of Dickens sustained his spirits among the privations and abuse visited on him by the paedophile headmaster and his monstrous wife, uninhibited sadists in Wilson's vivid, detailed account. After this, nothing would convince him that Dickens should be condescended to as insufficiently "realistic". And in returning him to the "abject terror and hopelessness" of childhood, but with that strange Dickensian stir of laughter (Fagin and Squeers, those comic turns), the novelist, hypocritical and self-deceiving as he might have been, has done him some matchless kindness.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
With numerous full-dress biographies of Dickens on offer to modern-day readers, Wilson wisely takes a different tack. In focusing on what he calls the "mysteries of Charles Dickens"--mysteries surrounding his childhood, his charity, his wildly popular public readings, and his relationship with his mistress, actress Ellen Ternan--Wilson explores Dickens' "divided self." Blending perceptive analysis of the novels with parallel experiences in Dickens' life, the narrative argues convincingly that "the gallery of characters" who buzzed about inside the author's head "had not come from a calm, happy place, but from a cauldron of self-contradiction and self-reproach, a bubbling confusion of moral centres." He is particularly strong in explicating that "bubbling confusion" as it applies to Dickens' attitudes toward women and his hidden obsession with sex, from his hatred of his mother and, later, his wife to the ways the novels pulsate with sublimated sexual feelings--feelings that nearly reach the surface in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, finding in that unfinished book, "the novel that killed Dickens," a courageous attempt by a conflicted genius to unite those divided selves. Beyond the eye-opening analysis, Wilson also offers a moving personal account of why Dickens has meant so much to him. Dickens' novels, he concludes, possess the power of a mesmerist, convincing us that, despite the horrors of the external world, "every man, woman, and child goes on being not only an individual but, potentially, a comic individual."
Library Journal Review
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
Table of Contents
| 1 The Mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence | p. 1 |
| 2 The Mystery of his childhood | p. 51 |
| 3 The Mystery of the cruel marriage | p. 97 |
| 4 The Mystery of the charity of Charles Dickens | p. 143 |
| 5 The Mystery of the public readings | p. 193 |
| 6 The Mystery of Edwin Drood | p. 241 |
| 7 The Mystery of Charles Dickens | p. 289 |
| Bibliography | p. 321 |
| List of Abbreviations | p. 327 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 329 |
| Notes | p. 331 |
| Index | p. 341 |