![]() ![]() At a much deeper level than most, Dickens was confronting his own demons – the wretched childhood, the appalling relations with women – and turning them into melodrama, tragedy, farce, burlesque. Something much more complicated was going on than with most novelists, all of whom take versions of their own lives and turn them into fiction. ![]() ![]() One thing I wanted to winkle out, if I could, was the relationship between the life and the work. I wanted, nevertheless, in The Mystery of Charles Dickens to set down some of my lifelong obsession with his work. There have been thousands of books on Dickens. Nothing like it had been seen since John Wesley’s preaching tours. If you want to see how different he was to all his contemporaries, just try to imagine George Eliot or Thackeray or the Brontë sisters doing those reading tours, when thousands of people, the poor in multitudes, came to hear him. People have likened them to poems, to visions, to pantomime, and they are all these things. T he novels are unlike any other writer’s. ![]()
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