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

Peter Conrad

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Book cover for Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller
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Book cover for Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller
Image for variant 9781399409209

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

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

Peter Conrad

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Description

'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.

About the Author

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.

Critical Reviews

"Dickensian is a language, not an adjective. Conrad speaks it fluently.
" --The Spectator World

"If you have not read Dickens for a while - or ever - this reading of the novels will convert you. Reading Conrad, who for many years taught English literature at Oxford, makes you realise why so many of his hundreds of former pupils adore and praise him. It is a marvellous study, the best book on Dickens since G.K. Chesterton's, which was published in 1906." --A. N. Wilson, The Oldie

"Riveting...Conrad plunders Dickens's novels, essays, journalism and diaries for illuminating details that he artfully weaves together into something akin to a series of inventories." --The Times

"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

"There is little Conrad doesn't notice, making his book seem less like a traditional critical account than the result of someone who has managed to get inside Dickens's head and have a good rummage... Conrad's enthusiasm means that even readers who aren't quite sure where they are going are still likely to enjoy the journey." --The Spectator

"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

"If Dickens was a unique enchanter, alert to the magic as well as the misery of this world, Conrad is a charmingly bewitched conjurer of his genius." --The Critic

"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

"An erudite study... Sure to please Dickens's admirers." --Publishers Weekly

"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

"An important account of an extraordinary writer who is often misread and misrepresented." --Church Times

"[A] fluid account [in which the] titanic dynamism of Dickens [...] comes across most effectively." --Wall Street Journal

"Reading this volume has a curiously dizzying effect. Conrad dazzles us with quotations illustrating his subject's dynamism, animism, anthropomorphism and scale of invention." --Times Literary Supplement

"Marvellous" --Sunday Times

Publishing Information

Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Pub date: 2026-10-27
Length: 304 pages

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