Overview

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. Peter Conrad’s bold rediscovery of Dickens suggests that he alone rivals Shakespeare and in some ways betters him. 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.

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9781399409193

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Peter Conrad is a dancer and acrobat whose brilliance, audacity and courage forever defy our ungenerous hopes of a pratfall. Nobody else can do what he does and get away with it. * Independent * Conrad has published criticism so sharp you can cut your fingers on it. * New York Observer * 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 *

Exactly the kind of attention Dickens's writing demands and deserves, at once intimate and encyclopaedic. A compelling portrait of a writer who lived his work to the limit. * David Trotter, Emeritus Professor of Literature, University of Cambridge * Peter Conrad is a dancer and acrobat whose brilliance, audacity and courage forever defy our ungenerous hopes of a pratfall. Nobody else can do what he does and get away with it. * Independent * Conrad has published criticism so sharp you can cut your fingers on it. * New York Observer * 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 * In his new book, Peter Conrad draws on a lifetime’s love of Dickens and an encyclopedic knowledge of his work to celebrate the novelist’s magus power and the sheer fecundity of his imagination. -- Claire Harman * Literary Review * An engrossing biography. Dickens the Enchanter is a treat. It offers a fresh understanding of his genius to new readers and is a highly rewarding reminder to devoted fans of Dickens of why he remains such a colossus of literature. -- Martin Chilton * Independent *

Author Information

Peter Conrad is a cultural critic and historian, who has published more than 20 books on a wide variety of subjects and writes regularly for the Observer. He taught English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford for more than three decades and has lectured throughout the world. He lives in London and New York.

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