Wilson points out that his generosity towards the poor and suffering was also a form of personal therapy, an attempt to deal with the unhappy period in his childhood which he spent working in a blacking factory, and which he kept returning to in his fiction as if touching a painful bruise ... what makes Wilson’s version of it so fascinating is the personal and committed way in which he approaches it ... Wilson has a fellow novelist’s understanding of what makes a piece of writing work on the page, and the happy knack of bringing it to life in his own prose.
Wilson has taken a personal, almost memoir-ish approach to a writer who comforted the biographer at key points in his life, especially the gauntlet of British boarding school ... Like Dickens’ last major biographer, Ackroyd, Wilson notes that the mere facts of Dickens’s hyper-productive life never make clear what a complicated man he truly was; and just as Ackroyd embellished his book with intermittent fictionalized passages (for which Ackroyd was often criticized), Wilson has taken a similar, near-fictive approach to Dickens’ life.
Here, to put it bluntly, is a highly peculiar biography—peculiar not for what it says about Dickens but for what it says about Wilson himself. He is a strong presence throughout his book ... 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 ... The Mystery of Charles Dickens has judicious things to say about Dickens, but then, suddenly, Wilson veers into autobiography, as his own internal pressures rise to the surface ... The kind of carelessness that blemishes Tolstoy is also on display in The Mystery of Charles Dickens. And there is at least one serious error, the statement that Dickens forbade his and Catherine’s children to see her after she was banished ... The greatest geniuses are inexplicable, but they share an amazing fecundity of invention ... How to begin comprehending such a phenomenon? Alas, not through A. N. Wilson’s Mystery of Charles Dickens.
... is not intended as a comprehensive biography, and it contains little fresh research. Instead it’s a sprightly work of reinterpretation. Besides being a prolific popular historian who has produced lives of Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler, C.S. Lewis and Jesus, 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, though colored by a desire to provoke ... The opportunity is available to him because there is much about Dickens’s life that we simply don’t know. Each chapter sustains the promise of the book’s title by unpacking an at least partly obscure aspect of it, in a style that’s a mix of brisk exposition and expansive psychological inquiry ... Mr. Wilson, borrowing a term made popular by the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, diagnoses a 'divided self,' though he analyses his subject’s contradictions with more subtlety than this well-worn phrase suggests ... Unlike some of Dickens’s best-known biographers, Mr. Wilson is keenly attentive to the books themselves and to parsing their effects. He is an observant reader and, as he makes clear, an avid re-reader, forever developing new insights into familiar stories ... Mr. Wilson is often happy to make his case with peppery audacity ... while Mr. Wilson’s speculations are sometimes clumsy, most are rooted, as becomes increasingly clear, in the emotional truth of his response to the novels.
Wilson’s methods are unlike those of his army of predecessors, whose research he credits appreciatively — he mostly eschews new detective work in favour of a reinterpretation of the existing material. That includes the evidence of fervent admirers as well as those who harboured misgivings ... Wilson’s attempt to pin down the Dickens we don’t know is energetic. He leads the reader by the hand, like one of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, to visit various moments in the writer’s life ... But as he draws his compelling portrait Wilson is continually confounded by his subject’s inconsistencies ... The thesis is only partly satisfying. It helps explain the outright hypocrisy of much of Dickens’ behaviour, but only insofar as it recasts it as evidence of another perversion.
Rather than shying away from the seedier aspects of Dicken’s secret life, Wilson revels in exposing the double standards of the man and the times in which he lived ... Wilson builds a nuanced picture of the marriage and its breakdown ... While the book’s subject matter is fascinating and the research impressive, there are technical flaws – unnecessary reiteration of established facts and Wilson’s over-fondness for certain words. Who knew that 'pantomimic' could be used so often in one book? ... Faulty editorial decisions aside, this book will be an exhilarating read for both Dickens aficionados and those who have only a passing familiarity with his work. For the former, it’s a truly detailed examination of the author’s life, works and times. For the latter, the story of a strange and mysterious life led in the public eye may encourage the reading of Dickens’s work.
... [a] rich narrative ... Wilson brings dazzling, far-reaching erudition to this study, drawing on unexpected, sometimes arcane sources to paint a portrait with impressive depth and nuance.
The section on this false consciousness is the most striking in Wilson’s book ... Exploring the dualities of Dickens’s temperament, Wilson makes much of his shamed secrecy about his ordeal as a child labourer in a blacking factory ... Fiction, as Wilson says, enabled Dickens to exorcise his demons, and here the stark facts of Wilson’s own torments allow him to perform a personal exorcism ... There could be no more fitting tribute to the miraculous, murderous potency of Dickens’s art.
What gives the book power is, in part, Wilson’s personal impressions, as well as his surefooted analysis of how Dickens translated his life into his art ... whether one has read his extensive oeuvre recently, or at all, is not critical to enjoying this biography, which is also a social history of the Victorian era ... Wilson calls [DIckens] a 'mesmerist' and a 'visionary,' and in The Mystery of Charles Dickens he gives ample proof of both.
Often, Wilson uses well-known facts about Dickens’s life to help illuminate particular storylines from the novels. At other times, his speculations about the connections between life and art seem farfetched. Occasionally, Wilson uses particular characters or plotlines from the novels as evidence for what must have happened in Dickens’s life. For example, the biographer reads the frequent presence of inadequate mothers in the novels as evidence that Charles despised his mother Elizabeth Dickens, blaming her entirely for his difficult childhood. Perhaps Wilson is correct, but this kind of argumentation based upon instinct is neither elegant nor persuasive ... The Mystery of A. N. Wilson is why the author seems obsessed with ideas about Charles Dickens’ sex life ... the reader is left thinking that this biography has more to say about what Wilson took from Dickens’s novels than it does about whatever biographical reflections Dickens put in them.
In place of the baggy, inclusive tome, here is a more shapely and original approach that invites a biographer to explore the truth at spots where life and work are known to converge ... Dickens can create the pure of heart and their humility as a counterpoise to the evil that Wilson investigates with keen acumen ... To explore the nature of evil makes for an absorbing read and a subject that adds weight to biography itself. This is an ambitious and now and then strained attempt to lift the genre into line with the moral depth of Dante’s Inferno and with Conrad’s fictional counterpart lurching about a sepulchral city, almost maddened by his encounter with the 'horror' of what lurks in men’s hearts.
Wilson’s book is, you might say, bio-critical ... 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 ... 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.
The best chapter in AN Wilson’s book about Dickens is the last, and it is mostly about Wilson ... His schoolboy sufferings can distort his reading of Dickens ... As a novelist Wilson must surely appreciate the subtlety of the relationship between an author and his characters. But in his treatment of Dickens it is crudely simplified ... These clumsy attempts to match creator and creation contrast with Wilson’s more perceptive moments ... Wilson has kept up to date with, and acknowledges, recent Dickens scholarship. He has also done research himself.
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 ... Beyond the eye-opening analysis, Wilson also offers a moving personal account of why Dickens has meant so much to him.
... utterly satisfying ... It’s clear that Wilson fully comprehends the many complexities of the wily novelist, public performer, and secret lover ... 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.
... provocative if not fully satisfying ... 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.
