Dickens on the couch
A N WILSON
Dickens the Enchanter
By Peter Conrad Bloomsbury Continuum £22
The poet’s task is to purify the language of the tribe – so Eliot said in Four Quartets. The novelist’s task is different – to hold up a mirror to society; to tell tales; to depict character. There are some novelists, though, such as Joyce and Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and P G Wodehouse (who died 50 years ago on Valentine’s Day, 1975, aged 93), who are language-purifiers and, in that sense, poets. Of this category of novelist, Dickens was king. He even spoke of himself as a planet. On his birthday, he once wrote to a friend, ‘On this day two and thirty years ago, the planet Dick appeared on the horizon.’ Those who love what could be called mainstream fiction sometimes have no time for Dickens. They find his voice, his exercise of total mastery over his creation, overwhelmingly distasteful. Peter Conrad is not one of them. His new...
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