Dickens the Enchanter

Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller

By: Peter Conrad

Narrated by: David Rintoul, Peter Conrad

Bloomsbury presents Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller by Peter Conrad, read by David Rintoul and Peter Conrad

A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens’s imagination and the world he created.

See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe.

Peter Conrad’s bold rediscovery of Dickens suggests that he alone rivals Shakespeare and in some ways betters him. As well as re-examining the great novels, Conrad’s book probes the journalism in which Dickens reports on his risky ventures into the urban underworld. It also describes the celebrated but dangerously over-intense public readings in which, as at a seance, he allowed his most terrifying characters to take possession of him. Ultimately it
reveals how the forces of creation and destruction come together in Dickens, who despite his reputation for jollity and effusive sentiment found it increasingly hard to control the madness and violence of his own self-destructive genius.

Dickens the Enchanter takes us deep into an imagination whose power and originality struck some contemporaries as godlike while others thought it demonic. If you already love Dickens, it will renew your understanding of him; if you have yet to experience him, it will lure you into his astonishing, alarming, enchanted world.

©2025 Peter Conrad (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

'If you have not read Dickens for a while – or ever – this reading of the novels will convert you. Reading Conrad, who for many years taught English literature at Oxford, makes you realise why so many of his hundreds of former pupils adore and praise him.' (A. N. Wilson)

'In his new book, Peter Conrad draws on a lifetime’s love of Dickens and an encyclopedic knowledge of his work to celebrate the novelist’s magus power and the sheer fecundity of his imagination.' (Claire Harman)