The Mystery of Charles Dickens
A.N. wilson
(ATLANTIC BOOKS, 368 PP, £17.99)
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Charles Dickens lived fast for 58 years. At the age of 24 he demonstrated, in the second chapter of The Pickwick Papers, a complete command of how to write comedy. Unprecedentedly popular – for the laughter and tears he provoked, for his angry satire of institutions, for his vivid projections of unvisited parts of society – he became the ringmaster of the world of entertainment. As an older man, he gave powerfully dramatic public readings of his most riveting scenes. Privately, in his own household, Dickens was also master, with less happy results.
Dickens’ vast popularity lasted well into the schooldays of many of today’s adults. A.N. Wilson tells us that, at his preparatory school, a master of grotesque appearance stalked the classrooms reciting and performing passages of Dickens. Favourites were Fagin, and Mr Wackford Squeers, master of Dotheboys Hall. (Squeers “had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two”). Wilson says that these alarming recitals, and his reading of selected extracts of Dickens, helped redeem what was otherwise a miserable time for him. At secondary school, he read all the novels except Pickwick, a later discovery.