... excellent ... The Artful Dickens is both an exposure of the trickster’s methods and a celebration of close reading. The book is divided into 13 essays which can be read separately, but whose impact is greater when taken together ... If Mullan put into his hat a creator of gargoyles and spinner of melodrama, he pulled out an innovator who broke all the rules. The Artful Dickens made me feel that I had been in some form of trance during my earlier reading of these novels.
Whether you think modern critical theory a triumph or a travesty—or, alternatingly, both—John Mullan, in The Artful Dickens, has something to offer ... Without academic pretense, [Mullan] offers a careful reading of Dickens’ work that will illuminate the joy fans already experience and assist those who struggle to find a way into these long, old-fashioned novels. Mullan doesn’t claim to have parsed the entire Dickens canon; indeed, this volume reads like an enthusiastic list of favorites ... One of the pleasures to be gained by this book will come after reading it, when you return to Bleak House, Great Expectations, or David Copperfield and find yourself newly able to identify techniques that Mullan did not assess ... on page after page, The Artful Dickens shows us a singular craftsman who was of his time and, simultaneously, timeless.
... splendid ... The chapter on naming is one of the book’s most fascinating ... Mullan’s book is too rich to capture in a review. Each chapter shoots off in a fresh direction and illuminates it. There is a brilliant chapter on cliché — how Dickens revels in it, inventing characters who mix clichés up ... You must, and should, read Mullan’s book. Even if you know a lot about Dickens you will find revelations in it, and if you know nothing about Dickens and want to learn what makes him great it will be the perfect appetiser.
Mullan has taken the most popular Victorian novelist and, by holding different facets of his literary technique up to the light, found new angles from which to admire the work. By the end of this teacherly but readable analysis, Dickens’s novels are sparkling as if spring-cleaned ... What at first feels like a primer, with an over-excited leaping from one example to the next, gradually exerts its hold ... By examining how Dickens used supernatural occurrences to indicate a person’s state of mind, or took coincidence to preposterous lengths, or used the present tense in a manner then unheard of, Mullan with one hand tears the books limb from limb, and with the other stitches them back together ... a fulsome tribute to a writer whose commonly perceived flaws are part of what makes him great. It creates a rich kaleidoscope, as the same faces and stories whirl repeatedly before our eyes.
Rather than advance a consistent argument about Dickens’s artistry, Mullan responds to the novelist’s multifariousness with an appealing miscellany of his own ... Some of these feel more random than others: it’s hard to think of Dickens’s obsession with death by drowning, for instance, as a sign of his artfulness, though Mullan has arresting things to say ... Not all Mullan’s attempts to argue for Dickens’s distinctiveness are quite as persuasive. Though he is undoubtedly right to observe how haunted the novels are by intimations of the supernatural, he exaggerates the degree to which this marks them out from their contemporaries ... Mullan comments sensitively on how 'Dickens makes us hear what is repressed,' but he is hardly alone among Victorian novelists in thus exploiting the unsaid, and it seems odd to include what this book must concede is the least daring side of Dickens’s art among the 'tricks and ploys of the great novelist.' But Mullan is at his heart a critic of style, and the most rewarding parts of The Artful Dickens are those in which he turns his eye on the various maneuvers by which the novelist’s prose comes alive.
Put it on your Christmas list and spend the post-goose collapse reading the good bits aloud ... Mullan, the Lord Northcliffe chair of modern English literature at University College London, is the best of professors ... The tone is less ivory tower, more doublestout at the Magpie & Stump. The book’s fault is a tendency to Dickensian excess. Two or three illustrative quotes become four, five, six, seven… Please, sir, I want some less ... Mullan is a brilliant noticer. He leads you from individual words, crossings out, inky amendments to sweeping themes of haunting, drowning, foreseeing or coincidence. Many of his insights come from close comparison of manuscript and printed text ... There are some wonderful lines.
His method in each chapter is to define a specific feature and produce examples. Some readers will find that expedient, but Mullan is a brisk and observant writer. He is happy to be taken in by Dickens’s sorcery ... Mullan’s book could almost be an old-fashioned Appreciation: anyone who enjoys Dickens is invited to the magic show.
Mullan wants to argue—ambitiously—that Dickens’s sleights of language amounted to a ‘formal daring’ or ‘experimental verve’ which ‘gave prose new dramatic powers’ and thus transformed the novel as a genre ... Mullan...rightly insists that the purpose of the performance is to tell a truth that could not otherwise have been told ... ‘Another kind of novelist might tell you Merdle’s thoughts,’ Mullan observes, ‘or at least the symptoms of his anxieties.’ Dickens, by contrast, insists on seeing him ‘only from the outside’, by means of fantastic analogy. Mullan finds plenty of evidence to support this contention. His argument thus reinforces the long-held assumption that Dickens, unlike Eliot, say, or James, wasn’t very good at representing the ‘inner life’ ... Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations—‘haunting’, ‘laughing’, ‘foreseeing’, ‘knowing about sex’, and so on—are as incident-packed as those that have to do with technique, but sometimes lack their clarity of focus. A romp through the many incidents of drowning in the novels leads to the splendid conclusion that Dickens was an ‘epicure of fear’ ... Mullan devotes a thought-provoking chapter to Dickens’s fondness for describing the sort of ‘visceral event’ staged, above all, by olfaction. Of that, too, he can be considered an epicure ... I’m not sure that it helps to describe this proliferation of visceral event as artful, let alone as a trick or ploy. Orwell seems closer to the mark when he notes that Dickens’s imagination overwhelms everything like a kind of weed.
... incisive ... Astute observations abound ... Mullan convincingly suggests that writers including Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Muriel Sparks draw from the best of Dickens’s techniques ... This superlative, fresh collection will please stalwart fans and bring new readers to the Dickens canon.
Based on insightful close readings of Charles Dickens’ novels, letters, and meticulously revised manuscripts, literary scholar Mullan offers ample evidence of the 'technical boldness' and 'experimental verve' of Dickens’ prolific oeuvre. In discrete chapters, the author highlights more than a dozen characteristics that set Dickens apart from other writers ... Although Mullan assumes a reader’s familiarity with Dickens’ many works, his ebullient analysis may well generate new fans. A brisk, authoritative look at a literary icon.
