The Mystery of Charles Dickens, by A N Wilson Frances Wilson

FRANCES WILSON The Mystery of Charles Dickens

The day before he died on 9th June 1870, Charles Dickens was seen in his garden re-enacting the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist.

Channelling Bill Sikes, the novelist levelled blow after blow on the poor girl’s head. Apart from the friend who spotted him, Dickens’s performance had no audience; his slaughter of an imaginary woman was entirely for his own pleasure.

Nancy’s murder had become his obsession. Between December 1869 and March 1870, Dickens bludgeoned her to death during 28 of his public readings, the veins on his forehead protruding, sweat pouring down his face. His blood rate, he said, would rise during those few minutes from 72 to 112 and he needed afterwards to lie down in his dressing room until he was once more capable of speech.

During one of these readings, he suffered a stroke, watched from the auditorium by his secret mistress, Nelly Ternan, in whose bed he would soon afterwards fatally collapse, aged 58. The murder of Nancy therefore led to the death of her creator – but then, as A N Wilson argues in this utterly absorbing psychopathology of our favourite novelist, his fictions had always swallowed Dickens up, making it impossible for him to distinguish the real world from the world of his imagination.

Dickens, argues Wilson, was a profoundly mysterious man, and The Mystery of Charles Dickens is framed around the author’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. There is the mystery of his childhood, when Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory after his father was imprisoned for debt; the mystery of his marriage, which he abandoned with astounding cruelty after his loyal wife had borne him ten loving children, and the mystery of his relationship with Nelly Ternan – did they have a child who was subsequently adopted?

Even his public readings were mysterious: why was the most successful novelist of the age, a man hardly in need of self-promotion, turning himself into a vaudeville entertainer? The greatest mystery of all, however, is where Dickens’s demented energy – for walking, writing, sex, acting – came from. Did he never sleep? Aside from his 15 novels, all written in the mornings so that he could devote the afternoon to his philanthropical organisations, he ran his own weekly newspaper, supervised the household shopping and controlled the people he lived around to within an inch of their lives.

He also controlled his readers. ‘Did Little Nell die?’ the crowds on the New York docks called up to the passengers on the steamer from England; the Americans had not yet received the latest instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop. While Dickens poured everything he was into his writing, Wilson has poured everything he is into unlocking the novelist’s ‘mesmerising’ power. He uses this term literally as well as metaphorically: Dickens practised the art of mesmerism.

He was a magician, Wilson argues, but also a divided self. His ‘true’ self, the man who waged war on the Scrooges and Bumbles of Victorian England, believed in the power of kindness, while his ‘false’ self – the man who murdered Nancy – had an uncontrolled rage towards women. At the core of his mystery was his matrophobia: where in Dickens’s novels, Wilson asks, is the model of the loving mother? Whatever happened in his childhood was both unspeakably