The life of Charles Dickens was as convoluted and as mysterious as any of his novels, which should not be surprising given that his novels were in many respects inspired by his life. A.N. Wilson explores all this in his 2020 book “The Mystery of Charles Dickens.”

Dickens, Wilson tells us, was in many respects as fictional a character as any he created on the page. He was, in other words, often a hypocrite, not always practicing the values in his own life that he so often preached in his fiction. His secret affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan, which did not become public until years after his death, is Wilson's prime example, to which he returns again and again. (Dickens wasn't alone in his deceit. After his death, Nelly lied about her age, pretended she had been just a little girl when she met Dickens and then married a clergyman.)

The great author hated his own mother and, after fathering 10 children, despised his own wife. He much preferred his wife's sister, who faithfully served Dickens for much of his life.

In successive chapters, Wilson writes about the mystery of Dickens's childhood, the mystery of his marriage, the mystery of his charity and so on, always paying close attention to the author's fiction to see what it reveals about each subject.

Sometimes Wilson can be as convoluted and as mysterious as anything relating to Charles Dickens, yet Dickens fans will find his book full of fascinating insights into both the man and his works. ( )

The mystery here for me is what exactly this book is about. For one thing it isn’t is an informative biography of Dickens.

The author uses the events surrounding Dicken’s final years and death as a foundation to present a series of speculative ruminations on how the true reflection of Dickens’ life is to be found in the pages of his novels.

Unfortunately it comes across as self indulgent, rambling, and pretentious, relying on an intimate knowledge of Dickens’ works and nineteenth century literature in general. ( )

Oof. A very mixed bag indeed. First: you probably really need to be a lover of Dickens's books (as I am), and know them fairly well, to be familiar with the stories, plots, and characters to comfortably follow Wilson's many allusions and references. Second: if you love Dickens's books, and even if you know quite a bit about his life, be prepared to find out even more about him that is not pretty.

Example: a peasant workers' rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 killed 20 whites and a black member of the assembly. The British governor rounded up 600 blacks and killed them, and then burned down over 1000 of the workers' huts. There was an outcry in England against this overreaction; Dickens furiously defended him and called the critics "jawbones of asses." He was a monster of control: every morning he inspected every room of the house, and woe betide the person who had left a curtain awry or a crumb on the carpet. While running Urania Cottage, the home for "fallen women," he hand-picked every young woman to be admitted, selected and directed every piece of furniture, every picture on the wall, down to the women's clothing, and dictated what they were to be taught - all in order to be shipped to Australia as obedient wives to the male colonists there. It is suggested that his secret mistress bore him at at least one child, and the lack of any death certificates suggests he may have simply taken the babies away and put them up for adoption. Given his well-known appalling treatment of his long-suffering wife Kate and his indifference and even animosity towards his own children (more than one one them pronounced him a "wicked" man who "didn't give a damn about any of us"), I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

Among the several "mysteries" Wilson muses on is what he calls Dickens's "hypersexuality." It is indeed a little creepy that his most idealized, perfect female characters are little, timid, child-like, virtually sexless beings, while even after he decided he couldn't stand his wife, continued to impregnate her year after year after year. There are hardly any healthy mother-child relations to be found in his books; he loathed his own mother, so there's a lot of unpacking to do there. Wilson is quick to jump on an offhand comment about silver nitrate in the ocean and suggest that maybe Dickens had the clap.

And Wilson does a lot of this: there is so much speculation, fantasy, imagination at work here that it's hard to sort out from demonstrable facts (as far as we can know them). There's a lot of "surely he must have," "it's not unreasonable to think that," and "what if...?" He goes so far as to posit that Dickens may not have actually collapsed at his desk at Gad's Hill, but rather in Nelly Ternan's bed and embrace at her house (where Dickens kept her for years), and then an elaborate scheme of secret carriage rides, etc., got him back home so his death would be conducted in a socially acceptable manner - all based on a discrepancy between the amount of a check he cashed that morning and the cash found in his pocket later that day. Really? Hmm.

Toward the end, Wilson veers off into his own memory of attending a ghastly private school where the boys were routinely beaten while the master masturbated, and other hideous abuses. He suggests that Dickens's own suffering and dark side, as transmuted into his art, appeal to us because he has "been there," witnessed and experienced dreadful things, and turned them into something else: dramatic, heroic, even comedic, and resolved them into rewards for the good and punishments for the bad. Maybe so. I certainly find the books engaging, comforting, entertaining, and dazzling. But at the end, the mystery Wilson ultimately left me with is the long-standing one of how we reconcile (or refuse to) the chasm between an artist's behavior in life and his or her art. Can you love or hate, accept or reject, one or the other, when they are inseparable? This book doesn't really help with that one. ( )

Is Dickens a jerk through the lens of 2020, or is he a universal jerk? So, Rousseau giving up his 5 children to a foundling home whilst writing books about the proper way to raise children - objective jerk. But Dickens sending his wife away and threatening to disown his children if they visited her, moving his teenage mistress in, sending his sons off to the colonies if they annoyed him, does it just look bad now? Obviously in 2020 he wouldn't be able to do most of that. But would he find ways to be just as monstrous as V.S. Naipul? But let’s put all that aside. What’s the measure of Dickens as a writer? For me, it's mixed feelings: pleasure and (resigned) dislike. I don't mind the discursiveness; Dickens brings the variety together, albeit not always explicitly belaboring the unity of the world/story (even better). —nor the caricatural strokes: these, too, disclose, and, unfair though it might be to the unique inner life of every snowflake, caricature is how we grasp the periphery of complexity, the complexity we know intellectually must be there in those others at the periphery of our experience. I think it's generally fair to say that Dickens' characters usually evolve (if they do) in fits and starts and by sudden revelations, epiphanies or moral lessons learned, rather than gradual realisations. For me it's not the cheesy humour that is the most difficult thing to take but the lachrymose sentimentality that occasionally afflicts him. you have to accept it in a wholehearted manner and buy into it: a fantasy world just a few inches distant from our own with its own rules, in which everything, like a cartoon or a TV soap opera, is exaggerated. ( )

A. N. Wilson's biography of Dickens is not linear, and is the better for it in my opinion. The death of Dickens is where the book begins, and his death is the touchstone to which it returns. Dickens's death is shrouded in mystery because he may have been with his young mistress when he died.

The flaws and merits of Dickens (personal as well as literary) are all covered, drawing useful parallels to his fiction with thorough citations, yet Wilson does not stray so deep into the scholarly weeds that you must be a Dickens expert to find the book interesting. Dickens cannot be separated from his terrible childhood and the constant threat of poverty, and his compelling characters were in most cases drawn directly from real life. Dickens the author cannot be separated from Dickens the actor, and Dickens drew large characters who could be transported from page to stage. Happily for us, they lend themselves beautifully to movie and screen adaptations.

History and human progress do not reflect kindly upon Dickens as a husband to his wife Catherine, and Wilson makes sure the reader understands just how loathsome he was to her, perhaps because, the author suggests, she came to remind him of his own mother. Dickens was both extraordinarily prideful of his literary stardom, and not proud enough in thinking that his "sacredly private" domestic arrangements would be kept that way by posterity. Women are still Dickens's Achilles heel, as Wilson argues. He could not fully bring any literary woman to life, even his heroines--and so modern readers cannot help but roll our eyes at the insipid dialogue and flat characterization of Esther Summerson in "Bleak House."

The stories behind the stories of Dickens are fascinating. Dickens did not, for example, want to write the story for which he is best known, "A Christmas Carol," but he was (as ever) short of funds. Wilson explains the weird, quasi-Christian civil morality that infuses "A Christmas Carol" and other works of Dickens as well as explaining Dickens's own (sometimes weird) charitable endeavors.

Wilson surprises and shocks the reader with a bit of his own personal history in order to explain why Dickens has meant so much to him as a reader.

I enjoyed the book and the writing style and recommend it to readers like me who are into Victoriana and Dickens but neither a Dickens scholar nor interested in a lengthy biography. It is the best of Dickens, it is the worst of Dickens.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher and was encouraged to submit a review. ( )