Dickens the Enchanter - by Peter Conrad (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

'Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.' -- Spectator World

'Marvellous... the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton's. -- A. N. Wilson, The Oldie

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's imagination and the world he created.

See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe.

As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad's book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.

Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to read him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

Review Quotes

"Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.
" --The Spectator World

"It is a marvellous study, the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton's, which was published in 1906." --A. N. Wilson, The Oldie

"Riveting." --The Times

"Nobody else can do what [Conrad] does and get away with it." --Independent

"Conrad has published criticism so sharp you can cut your fingers on it." --New York Observer

"Conrad's enthusiasm means that even readers who aren't quite sure where they are going are still likely to enjoy the journey." --The Spectator

"Conrad is stunningly well informed, compulsively allusive and equipped with the kind of imagination that transforms the base metal of history into pure gold." --Observer

"If Dickens was a unique enchanter, alert to the magic as well as the misery of this world, Conrad is a charmingly bewitched conjurer of his genius." --The Critic

"Peter Conrad draws on a lifetime's love of Dickens and an encyclopedic knowledge of his work." --Claire Harman, Literary Review

"An engrossing biography." --Martin Chilton, Independent

"An erudite study." --Publishers Weekly

"An important account of an extraordinary writer who is often misread and misrepresented." --Church Times

"[A] fluid account [in which the] titanic dynamism of Dickens [...] comes across most effectively." --Wall Street Journal

"Conrad dazzles us." --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author