Harper, 368 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0062954947
“The power which he proceeded at once to exhibit was the one power in letters which literally cannot be imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative energy, the enormous prodigality of genius…an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence”. Thus was the pronouncement of one brilliant writer, G.K. Chesterton, about another, Charles Dickens, and after reading A.N. Wilson’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens one will perhaps be better able to determine just where that inexhaustible creative energy and so forth came from (hint: it wasn’t a good place). The adjective “Dickensian” is well on its way to becoming overused (just like “Kafkaesque”), but it won’t go away anytime soon.
Just over 150 years after his death, Dickens is as omnipresent as ever, so be prepared to hear it over and over for the foreseeable future, as well as one adaptation after another of his works. Wilson’s work is nonlinear, beginning as he does with Dickens’s death and recreating that last day of his life as he makes the habitual hour’s journey from his home at Gad’s Hill to his mistress’ house in Peckham; there, he suffered a seizure and was returned to his home to die a respectable death, surrounded by his (estranged) wife and (some of) his many adult children. Wilson is also much focused on the final novel, the half-completed The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he sees as a kind of ne plus ultra of his subject’s life and work – his life, especially.
In the last half-century or so, biographers of Dickens have chosen to focus on highly specific areas of his life and accomplishments – i.e., his relationship to family, to society, to the theater and so on – but the most incisive works have explored the man’s convoluted psyche. And oh, brother is it convoluted, for Dickens seemed to know and understand everything and everyone, a talent he displayed across fifteen novels, countless articles and not one, but two, magazines. But for all that, he seemed to lack self-awareness: today, with the benefit of history and hindsight, we can recognize how “the enormous prodigality of genius” that animated his writing and his life served not only to conceal, but to smother a profoundly conflicted nature – a “divided self”.
Exploring the dualities of Dickens’ temperament, Wilson makes much of his shamed secrecy about his ordeal as a child laborer in a blacking factory and his hatred of a mother who, he felt, did not love him. It would seem that, no matter how much Dickens accomplished in life, or the fact that he was probably the most famous and beloved writer in England, he could not escape the buried anguish of his early history: “I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back” he states in an autobiographical fragment published after his death, and bitterness over this episode may illuminate why so many of the maternal figures in his novels are hateful. But this divided self was a two-edged sword, as Wilson makes clear:
But the divided self is also a source of creativity. Dickens could see that the gallery of characters who had been buzzing out of his head since ‘Boz’ first ventured into print had not come from a calm, happy place, but from a cauldron of self-contradiction and self-reproach, a bubbling confusion of moral centres. The capacity to create fiction was an artistic way of describing the capacity to self-deceive. The creative urge was the artistic way of describing the urge that used, battered and, if necessary, destroyed the loves of those closest to him. It has been rightly said that the murderer in Dicken’s last novel [The Mystery of Edwin Drood] is himself a kind of novelist. He is shaping his own story.
Wilson is more than alert to Dickens’ tendency to punish fictional characters for the offenses committed by people in his real life, and combs the novels for evidence of these many dark impulses. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is not intended to be a comprehensive biography, and it contains little to no new information about its subject; rather, it is a work of reinterpretation (as dirty as that word can be) of Dickens and his work as it seeks to delve into the man’s sometimes impenetrable psyche to see what can be found and draw forth all that he can. Wilson has a keen sense of how writers operate and, combined with a seemingly natural intuition about human nature, has managed to create a perceptive and lively portrait of an obviously immensely creative and deeply disturbed artist, one whose work is with us now and will be for all time.
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