THE ARTFUL DICKENS

A celebration of the Victorian novelist’s cunning genius.

Based on insightful close readings of Charles Dickens’ novels, letters, and meticulously revised manuscripts, literary scholar Mullan offers ample evidence of the “technical boldness” and “experimental verve” of Dickens’ prolific oeuvre. In discrete chapters, the author highlights more than a dozen characteristics that set Dickens apart from other writers, including the use of “fantastic analogy” to evoke “people’s strangeness and self-contradiction”; the invention of comically apt names, some of which have entered the popular lexicon; the deployment of coincidences “to move the fancy, asking us to imagine what makes the improbable somehow plausible”; and the shift between past and present tense, which, Mullan asserts, anticipated modernist and postmodernist writers: “None of Dickens’ narrative tricks is stranger or more audacious than this.” Mullan highlights the literary techniques that shape the well-populated novels’ quirky characters. Dickens, who once toyed with the idea of becoming an actor and admired performers who could use different voices, was able “to make a way of speaking comically distinct without being merely laughable.” He closely attended to word choice, using clichés to his advantage, coining words and, Mullan reveals, snatching up colloquialisms, which he pitched into “orotund sentences.” In addition, he paid attention to palpable details—odors, for example—writing “as if his nose were a sensitive instrument.” For Dickens, smell became “a narrative device” that helped readers recall characters during the many months of a novel’s serialization. Besides technical devices, Dickens had particular thematic interests: in ghost stories, for one—at the time “an undeveloped genre” that Dickens promoted—and in drowning, which became more than a useful plot mechanism but emblematic of a widely shared visceral fear. Although Mullan assumes a reader’s familiarity with Dickens’ many works, his ebullient analysis may well generate new fans.

A brisk, authoritative look at a literary icon.