THE ARTFUL DICKENS

THE TRICKS AND PLOYS OF THE GREAT NOVELIST

JOHN MULLAN

Bloomsbury, 432pp, £16.99

John Mullan is a dependably entertaining scholar and critic dedicated to shedding light on how the writers he admires achieve their effects. What Matters in Jane

Austen? examined the intricate machinery of Austen’s novels under the guise of solving a few puzzles. The

Artful Dickens has more of an argument than its predecessor, pushing back against all those who damn Dickens with faint praise.

Mullan quotes Iris Murdoch as typical of this approach: ‘Gosh, he is good — though so careless,’ and he sets out to show just how careful Dickens was. We learn that the manuscripts teem with revisions, which continued in proof form when the monthly numbers came back from the printers. Each of the 20 chapters explores a field where Dickens’s innovations have either not been recognised or have been criticised as somehow sloppy. Did he, as Trollope complained, use words ‘created by himself in defiance of the rules’? Absolutely, writes Mullan, and offers abundant examples of his subject’s vivid and poetic inventions. Other chapters are given to Dickens’s use of smell – he was the first novelist to make this sense a narrative device, and another explores why all the books contain references to drowning.

John Carey in the Sunday Times singled out a brilliant section on cliché which shows how Dickens revels in it, inventing characters who mix clichés up, such as Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend: ‘He’d be sharper than a serpent’s tooth, if he wasn’t as dull as ditch water.’ Frances Wilson in the Guardian hailed the book as ‘both an exposure of the trickster’s methods and a celebration of close reading’. Laura Freeman in the Times was alone in striking a mildly querulous note, complaining of ‘a tendency to Dickensian excess. Two or three illustrative quotes become four, five, six, seven… Please, sir, I want some less.’

Dickens was the first novelist to make smell a narrative device