DICKENS THE ENCHANTER

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens s superhuman imagination from one of the greatest cultural critics of our time See Dickens as never before in this creative biography of his life through his storytelling the characters places and emotions conjured up across the entire range of his novels stories magazine articles and public readings Peter Conrad one of the great cultural critics of our time repositions Dickens as a true giant of literature a magician with the power to work wonders at his most ambitious a god like creator who formed his own idiosyncratic world and populated it with hundreds of irrepressibly lively and often terrifying characters Peter argues that Dickens alone rivals Shakespeare and in many ways outdoes him he pays tribute to Dickens s almost industrial productivity as a writer but also calculates the physical and mental strain it involved and the consequent upheavals in his emotional life The forces of creation and destruction meet in Dickens who was ultimately as he acknowledged in his unfinished murder story The Mystery of Edwin Drood torn apart by his own frenetic genius This is a celebration an examination and an exploration of the most powerfully transformative imagination in literature a force that was at once di