Dickens the Enchanter

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller by Peter Conrad, read by David Rintoul and Peter Conrad

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.

Critics Review

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.
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.
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.
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

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