A.N.Wilson.
A.N.Wilson
THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS (2020)
Winner of the Plutarch Award.
Charles Dickens (born 1812) is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. His work, which introduced some of the most famous fictional characters, was enormously popular in his lifetime and beyond. He suffered great hardship in his youth, leaving school at the age of twelve to work in a boot-blacking factory. He resumed school after three years and obtained work as a journalist. He edited a weekly journal for twenty years, wrote hundreds of short stories and fifteen novels. His literary success came early, with the hugely popular serial publication of the Pickwick Papers. This started in 1836 when Dickens was only twenty four years old.
The Spectator wrote of A.N.Wilson’s Dickens biography: ‘Fascinating... The greatest compliment one could pay this book is to say that it doesn't only read like something written about Dickens; animated by a restless, rummaging critical intelligence, and a curiosity about many of the things others simply take for granted, at times it reads more like something written by Dickens.’ The Times described the book as: ‘A brilliant denunciation of the sickness of Victorian England.[Wilson] is especially vivid on the moral horror of a self-confident, capitalist society without a safety net for those at the bottom.’
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A.N.Wilson (Andrew Norman Wilson, born 1950) is an English author, academic, and journalist. He was educated at Rugby School and at New College, Oxford University. After university he taught English and then spent seven years as lecturer in medieval literature at Oxford University. Wilson has written twenty fiction books, as well as numerous works of history and biography. The subjects of his biographies include Leo Tolstoy, Dante, C.S.Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, John Milton, Sir Walter Scott, John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Albert, and Adolf Hitler.
