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​​The Artful Dickens by John Mullan

I have a very ambivalent attitude to Dickens. His novels, brilliant as they might be as far as the ingenuity of his style goes, bore me to death, I can't forgive him for leaving his wife and forbidding her to see his children, all the time professing highest morals in his novels. The only thing I really love about him is discussing the first chapter of Bleak House with my students, and now this book. Its author is worthy of the eponymous novelist as far as his manner of writing goes, and I thoroughly enjoyed every single page of it. It is a comprehensive study of Dickens's writing style, with bits and pieces about his personal life here and there.
Random facts:
- Dickens's novels appeared in monthly installments of several chapters at a time in a magazine, so it took the first readers quite a while to read the whole novel. However, it was only with Dombey and Son, that the writer started to closely plan his novels before setting to write them.
- Dickens was the first novelist to make smell a narrative device.
- He was among the first to intermix past and present tenses, first- and third-person narration, gave broad hints at the very beginning at how the events were going to unfold, always with a particular effect in mind, thus anticipating some of the modernist and postmodern narrative experiments. When I was reading a quote from Little Dorrit, Flora's dialogue, it struck me how close it is to the technique of creating Stephen Dedalus' stream of consciousness: the same sequence of associations that may lead further and further away from the original thought.
- The writer had a deep interest in the supernatural and the psychology of those who see ghosts, giving preference in his novels to the "unexplained supernatural", unlike Ann Radcliffe, whose supernatural elements always had a natural cause. As an editor of several magazines, he also commissioned many ghost stories.
- He collected unusual names, which he then used in his novels.
- In the Oxford English Dictionary there are more words derived from the names of his characters than of any other writer. Mr Pickwick, for instance, gave a name to a medical condition. The novelist is also credited with the earliest recorded use of 400 words.
- All in all, Dickens is supposed to have had ten children. All of his sons but one were named after eminent writers. The daughters got more lucky)
- Dickens was a good swimmer (a rare skill at that time), but there is a drowning in every book of his.
- When in Paris, he frequented the morgue.
- He founded and oversaw Urania Cottage, the home for fallen women who were helped to reform.
John Mullan has managed to do what I have thought impossible since my first novel by Dickens I read: he has made me want to grab another book by this writer. Don't get me wrong, I have always appreciated what Dickens did for literature, but somehow his novels have always been past enjoyment for me. And now I have really started to think I may have been too quick to judge.

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364 viewsedited  Apr 16, 2022 at 11:10

​​The Artful Dickens by John Mullan

I have a very ambivalent attitude to Dickens. His novels, brilliant as they might be as far as the ingenuity of his style goes, bore me to death, I can't forgive him for leaving his wife and forbidding her to see his children, all the time professing highest morals in his novels. The only thing I really love about him is discussing the first chapter of Bleak House with my students, and now this book. Its author is worthy of the eponymous novelist as far as his manner of writing goes, and I thoroughly enjoyed every single page of it. It is a comprehensive study of Dickens's writing style, with bits and pieces about his personal life here and there.
Random facts:
- Dickens's novels appeared in monthly installments of several chapters at a time in a magazine, so it took the first readers quite a while to read the whole novel. However, it was only with Dombey and Son, that the writer started to closely plan his novels before setting to write them.
- Dickens was the first novelist to make smell a narrative device.
- He was among the first to intermix past and present tenses, first- and third-person narration, gave broad hints at the very beginning at how the events were going to unfold, always with a particular effect in mind, thus anticipating some of the modernist and postmodern narrative experiments. When I was reading a quote from Little Dorrit, Flora's dialogue, it struck me how close it is to the technique of creating Stephen Dedalus' stream of consciousness: the same sequence of associations that may lead further and further away from the original thought.
- The writer had a deep interest in the supernatural and the psychology of those who see ghosts, giving preference in his novels to the "unexplained supernatural", unlike Ann Radcliffe, whose supernatural elements always had a natural cause. As an editor of several magazines, he also commissioned many ghost stories.
- He collected unusual names, which he then used in his novels.
- In the Oxford English Dictionary there are more words derived from the names of his characters than of any other writer. Mr Pickwick, for instance, gave a name to a medical condition. The novelist is also credited with the earliest recorded use of 400 words.
- All in all, Dickens is supposed to have had ten children. All of his sons but one were named after eminent writers. The daughters got more lucky)
- Dickens was a good swimmer (a rare skill at that time), but there is a drowning in every book of his.
- When in Paris, he frequented the morgue.
- He founded and oversaw Urania Cottage, the home for fallen women who were helped to reform.
John Mullan has managed to do what I have thought impossible since my first novel by Dickens I read: he has made me want to grab another book by this writer. Don't get me wrong, I have always appreciated what Dickens did for literature, but somehow his novels have always been past enjoyment for me. And now I have really started to think I may have been too quick to judge.

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