The Mystery of Charles Dickens by AN Wilson review – uncomfortable insights
AN Wilson starts his homage to Dickens by firing off a fusillade of adjectives. The man who nicknamed himself the Inimitable was, Wilson says, “hyper-energetic, over-sexed, tormented, exultant, hilarious, despondent”, and if that makes Dickens sound mad or maniacal, so be it. His imagination was at once an uncontrollable Bedlam and a seething industrial crucible, a state of simultaneously creative and destructive chaos where muddy, foggy Victorian London was reshaped into what Wilson describes as “an alternative universe”. Here, dotty eccentrics chase severed heads, goblins stump about on wooden legs, and two spinster sisters resemble “marigolds run to seed”; houses have door-knockers that hybridise lions and monkeys, and high-backed chairs suffer from “spinal complaints”.
Astonished by this riotous fantasia, Wilson recognises that Dickens is much more than a novelist. His books have nothing in common with the sober social panoramas of George Eliot or Trollope; for Wilson they are “visionary poems, fairytales, pantomimes”. We read Dickens, he suggests, to hear the narrator’s voice, or rather to hear his polyphonic orchestra of voices as, like a ventriloquist, he projects himself into characters such as Mrs Gamp, the gin-sodden midwife in Martin Chuzzlewit, or Sam Weller, the wise, benign cockney retainer in The Pickwick Papers. That voice possessed a force Wilson rightly calls magnetic or mesmeric: exercised in Dickens’s unhinged public readings – especially of the scene from Oliver Twist when Sikes bludgeons Nancy to death – it goaded audiences to something like hysteria.
At first, Wilson piously likens this enchantment to the preaching of John Wesley; later he compares Dickens to a medium who conjures spirits at a seance, or a witch doctor casting spells. Dickens himself seemed unsure whether his genius was divine or devilish. “God”, he said in a mawkish Life of Our Lord, written to edify his children, “gave Jesus Christ the power to do wonders”, which showed that “he was not a common man”. Yet the miracle-maker could also be a killer “as malignant as the Evil One”, like the crone from the opium den when she invades a cathedral in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens once excused himself from dinner with a clerical admirer because he was busy “murdering that poor child” – lucratively prolonging the final agony of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.
David Copperfield and Great Expectations invent justifications for Dickens's sinister gaslighting of his neglected wife
A century ago, GK Chesterton honoured Dickens as the last and greatest of the mythologists. Wilson interprets that compliment in a more up-to-date, agnostic way, arguing that Dickens sneakily mythologised his life. He altered the truth about his mean social origins and touched up “the imperfections of his own nature” in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, alternative autobiographies which disown his parents or kill them off and invent evasive justifications for his sinister gaslighting of his neglected wife. Wilson finds both novels to be misleading, because they take dictation in different ways from Dickens’s “corrupted, complicated muses”. He adds that, like psychoanalysis, writing fiction allows “bruised individuals” to recover their past, or to revise it. The section on this false consciousness is the most striking in Wilson’s book, and there may be a twinge of remorse lurking behind its uncomfortable critical insights. Is he making belated amends for any white lies he may have told in his own novels, and for the techniques of “subterfuge and falsification” that fiction relies on? Novelists, he admits, are “heartless” creatures.
Exploring the dualities of Dickens’s temperament, Wilson makes much of his shamed secrecy about his ordeal as a child labourer in a blacking factory. Near the end of the book, as he broods about the damaged children in the novels, Wilson unearths a secret of his own: at his prep school he was viciously abused by a headmaster who masturbated, not always inside his trousers, as he thrashed him. Rearing out of the past, this ogre is an unexpurgated compound of Fagin, the paedophile in Oliver Twist, and Wackford Squeers, the sadistic proprietor of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. For a moment, Wilson the ageing fogey becomes as vulnerable as little Oliver or the pitiable Smike in Nickleby; then he rounds on the headmaster, calls his school a concentration camp run by a sexual pervert, and condemns the man’s wife and daughter for their gloating complicity.
Fiction, as Wilson says, enabled Dickens to exorcise his demons, and here the stark facts of Wilson’s own torments allow him to perform a personal exorcism. During his miserable boyhood, he found “what felt like salvation” or “redemption” by reading Dickens. Now the sentimental gospel propounded by Mr Pickwick and by Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol twists into vengeful black magic, as Wilson resurrects Fagin and Squeers to accuse his persecutor. There could be no more fitting tribute to the miraculous, murderous potency of Dickens’s art.
• The Mystery of Charles Dickens by AN Wilson is published by Atlantic (£17.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
