3.5
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
ByPublisher Description
An exceedingly rare talent and great orator, slight of build with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Charles 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,
looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A.N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens's creative genius and enduring popularity. As we follow his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experience—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, 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.
"Dazzling." —
"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." —
"Divulge[s] fascinating contradictions in a man whose work has entertained more generations than any writer could ever dream of." —
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Mystery of Charles Dickens Reviews
3.5
“A comprehensive biography of Victorian author Charles Dickens. If you only know him from A Christmas Carol, there’s a whole other side of him. From his impoverished childhood to the alienation of his wife and mother of his ten kids in favor of a much younger girl, the enigma of Dickens is revealed.”
“Took me forever to start and a long time to get through once I did. I was interested to read more about this famous author but the more I learned about him, the more I was disappointed in him. A cheater, a sexist, and waay to interested in "child women", he might have been a great writer but he was no great person. The writing of this book wasn't for me either; it was meandering and hard to follow, the author invoked too much of himself in a text meant to be a biography, and the non chronological order made it difficult to fit events and people together.
All together, an average biography and not the best piece of non fiction I've read this year.”
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