Dickens the Enchanter

'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.

Peter Conrad is a literary critic and cultural historian. His books include The Everyman History of English Literature; Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins; and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century.

Preface: A Visionary Companion 1 On Planet Dick 2 In the Family 3 In the Dark 4 Cabbalistic Words 5 The Great Creator 6 Devilkins 7 In Arabia 8 Species and Origins 9 In the Carvery 10 In the Forge 11 Arranging the Universe 12 Heroes of His Own Life 13 The So Potent Art 14 In the Crypt Acknowledgements Select Bibliography Index