Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller

This erudite study from Conrad (The Mysteries of Cinema), a former literature professor at Oxford University, explores the social, political, and literary inspirations behind Charles Dickens’s novels. Tracing how contemporaneous debates over evolution trickled into Dickens’s work, Conrad argues that Bleak House’s descriptions of the Smallweed family as leeches, grubs, and spiders reflect the Darwinian idea that humans are merely one animal among many, rather than rulers over all other species. “For Dickens, The Arabian Nights’ Tales qualified as a sacred book,” Conrad contends, suggesting the writer viewed Scheherazade’s feats of imagination as akin to the inventiveness he aspired to in his own work. Elsewhere, Conrad discusses how Dickens’s skepticism regarding the existence of a higher power shaped his portrayals of poverty as the product of bad luck rather than divine retribution, and how his many allusions to Shakespeare show his admiration for the playwright he considered “his only rival.” The astute elucidation of the many intellectual currents that informed Dickens’s work demonstrates the complex ways in which novelists transmute the real world into the fictional. Conrad also weaves in revealing insights into Dickens’s character, noting, for instance, that his personal writings show he was often fonder of his characters, whom he considered “family,” than his actual children, whom he viewed as spoiled. This is sure to please Dickens’s admirers. (May)