PETER CONRAD’s Dickens was with him in his Australian childhood and throughout a distinguished teaching career in Oxford and elsewhere. Then came a comprehensive re-reading of the Enchanter as a solution to the “contagious jitters” associated with the pandemic.

We should be grateful that it was Dickens to whom he turned during lockdowns rather than one of the many other authors on whom Conrad has written, because this is an important account of an extraordinary writer who is often misread and misrepresented. Yes, Dickens stands in a tradition that includes Chaucer and Shakespeare: all three of them created a huge number of vivid characters. But Dickens’s world is darker, more anarchic, and more radically unsettled and unsettling than those of his great precursors. It needs a Conrad to bring this out.

The tone is set in the opening chapter, in which Dickens is said to be as intrepid as the 19th-century scientists who “unriddled” what the astronomer John Herschel called the “mystery of mysteries”, by “setting geology and zoology to question Genesis”. The novelist probed a mystery that was psychological and aesthetic, and just as profound. Imagination endowed him with second sight: “he could entice a secret or spectral life out of the most ordinary objects, as when a door knocker in A Christmas Carol turns into Marley’s living face and then, in a ‘dismal light’, becomes ‘a bad lobster in a dark cellar’”.

Dreams, metamorphosis, and regeneration are considered in later chapters, where biography and literary criticism intermesh. Chapter 3, for example, considers the ghostly/ghastly world of dream, and the crepuscular gaslit scene of Dickens’s night walks, which he compared to flights. In Chapter 5, we learn of Dickens’s desire to “regenerate the weary world”, not through faith, but through the imagination of a Promethean resurrectionist.

Dickens’s characters have always demanded an explanation. The fascinating figures who swarm around the rather dull heroes and heroines are often grotesque and absurdly idiosyncratic, partly because the reader of monthly parts needed to recall them after a gap of perhaps eight weeks. But why do his characters not grow and change? For Conrad, this is because he saw life as circular rather than developmental: “Beginning and end conjoin to squeeze the middle. Mrs Skewton, for instance, wears a travelling robe ‘embroidered and braided like an old baby’s’, and Little Nell’s grandfather naïvely falls prey to gamblers because he is a ‘grey-haired child’.”

Dickens is variously described in this book as a sorcerer, a mesmerist (which he literally was), and an Aladdin, whose fascination with words creates a sense of “ebullient chaos”, in sharp contrast to the ordered world created by the Word of the theologians. Waxworks, puppets, and “cheekily priapic” umbrellas clutter a world created in the forge of industry, and are reanimated by the panoptic author who takes Prospero as his role model. A story that begins with a small boy condemned to work in a blacking factory and ends in the murky crypt of Rochester Cathedral is as unpredictable as the overheated brain from which it leapt, fully armed. Unusually, Conrad does not consider the development of Dickens’s fiction.

The lucky few who have read all the novels and short stories, and all the playscripts, journalism, and letters, will find here a figure whom they recognise, but who demands revaluation. For those who are newish to Dickens, however, Conrad’s technique of placing each of his myriad examples in its context in the original text offers an opportunity to survey the whole oeuvre alongside a brilliant guide. Both kinds of reader will hurry back to the first Dickens novel that comes to hand and read with fresh eyes.

Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Southampton. He will be speaking about his latest book, William Ewart Gladstone: The heart and soul of a statesman (OUP, 2025), at the Festival of Faith and Literature.

Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the explosive imagination of the great storyteller
Peter Conrad
Bloomsbury £22
(978-1-3994-0919-3)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80