The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Novelist and biographer Wilson (Prince Albert) undertakes a provocative if not fully satisfying exploration of Charles Dickens’s dark side. Finding thematic inspiration in the novelist’s final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Wilson suggests the bestselling and widely feted Dickens bore a greater resemblance to its central character, the outwardly respectable but tormented John Jasper, than is generally suspected. Wilson dissects several troubling aspects of Dickens’s life, including his deep-seated antagonism toward his mother (“the defining feature of the man and his art”); his callous treatment of his wife in favor of his mistress, the young actress Nelly Ternan; and his fixation on reciting a brutal and sensationalist description of a prostitute’s murder, from Oliver Twist, during his public readings. Wilson isn’t out to damn Dickens, in his view one of the 19th century’s greatest writers, and a source of solace during his own Dickensian childhood at a draconian boarding school. The resulting volume, however, too often feels like an extended psychoanalytic session between Wilson and his subject. Nonetheless, for readers accustomed to thinking of Dickens principally as a conscientious social critic or warmhearted Victorian sentimentalist, Wilson’s uneven but intriguing study will deliver some startling insights. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Aug.)