The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Winner, Plutarch Award for Best Biography: A marvelous exploration of Dickens's life and how it shaped his extraordinarily popular novels ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review).
An exceedingly rare talent and great orator, slight of build with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Charles Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them.
Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist's extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A.N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens's creative genius and enduring popularity. As we follow his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experience—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage.
Going beyond standard narrative biography, Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens's vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth-century readers—and why they continue to resonate today.
Illustrated with 30 black-and-white images
Dazzling. — BookPage
Wilson has a number of persuasive ideas about Dickens, whom he sees as not only a conflicted personality but a tragic one, despite his genius for comedy. — The New York Times Book Review
Divulge[s] fascinating contradictions in a man whose work has entertained more generations than any writer could ever dream of. — Los Angeles Times