Jason Furman's Reviews > The Mystery of Charles Dickens

The second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audiobook of the Peter Ackroyd play The Mystery Of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson extensively uses the words and works of Charles Dickens to tell elements of his life story and character and how they fused with his writing. And like the other Mystery, A.N. Wilson's enthusiasm for a writer he has clearly loved, read and re-read since childhood comes through on every page. It is not a chronological life but instead seven chapters each organized around a different mystery including Dickens' cruelty to his wife, his charity, his public readings, The Mystery of Edwin Drood itself, etc. As such, it seems better suited to someone who has read most of Dickens and has a basic familiarity with his life.

Occasionally the tendentious speculation that evidently (according to the reviews) has marred some of A.N. Wilson's other books shows up here. For example, he effectively asserts that Dickens' suffered his fatal stroke while having sex on a surreptitious visit to his mistress Ellen Ternan, who then put his unconscious body in a cab and brought it back to Dickens' house with all of it covered up by Dickens' family and household staff. Wilson doesn't name his source for this but it appears to be Claire Tomalin, perhaps the biggest authority on Dickens and especially Ternan, who in her biography Charles Dickens has both the conventional story but this one (minus the sex) with the major caveat: "It seems a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits." He also speculates that difficulty plotting out The Mystery of Edwin Drood killed Dickens. But, fortunately, there is relatively little of this.

Wilson is particularly strong on writing about Dickens' many ways of thinking about and presenting himself, his double character, the genuineness of his charity while depicting charitable hypocrites, his social commentary that often outdated, missed genuine solutions, but was powerful in its own rights, the role that public readings played etc. Ultimately Wilson argues that Dickens' grounding in pantomime and fairy tales made his books more real than the more "realistic" and journalistic fiction of his contemporaries and that it is his characters--not his plots--that have become immortal and inimitable.