Review by 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."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.)
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Review by 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
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Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
