Word: wilson
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...hardly news to Dickens specialists today that the blacking-factory episode, as Wilson puts it, "provided nearly a lifetime's impetus toward artistic creation." Wilson's scrutiny of the fierce personal drive that transformed an anonymous, victimized lad into the inimitable Boz opens the way to a shrewd, wide-ranging analysis of Dickens' life and work. The result is the best all-round book on the subject for the general reader in years. Absorbing, gracefully written, freshly thought out, it is, in addition, that rare hybrid, a coffee-table book with both brains and beauty. The glossy...
...writer, such fame was unprecedented then, and has been unimaginable since. Not just fame, either, but ardor and devotion. In The World of Charles Dickens, English Novelist Angus Wilson suggests that Dickens, publishing most of his works in serial form, achieved the same intimate, regular contact with his audience as Scheherazade in his childhood favorite, The Arabian Nights. Dickens kept telling another tale. Jokes and fantasies, social and political critiques, plummy visions of Christmas swept from his pen. He even wrote a front-page article in his own magazine, Household Words, to explain and justify the breaking...
...Wilson, Dickens' determination to write sprang from a fear of sinking back into oblivion and poverty. His disenchantment with his parents primed him for his eventual satire of the feckless, posturing stratum of society that they epitomized. Father, an expansive but hopelessly improvident clerk, was to balloon into fiction as Mr. Micawber. Mother, with her snobbish faith in "connections" (one of whom was the manager of the blacking factory), would become not only Mrs. Micawber but later Mrs. Nickleby. "Peculiarly unfair" treatment for mother, Wilson concludes, but there was a special reason for that...
There is no Bozolatry in Wilson's book, even though it is part of the official commemoration of the centenary of Dickens' death. A centenary can be a fete worse than death. But at best it provides a good occasion to settle accounts, not just with Dickens but with his critics and interpreters. The past century has piled up a long bill of critical complaints that he was sentimental, arch and melodramatic; that he would never do what he could merely overdo. In recent decades, on the other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation...
Nowhere does Dickens seem more modern than in his treatment of London. He prowled its streets at night so much during his lifetime that he found it hard to write without the inspiration of his "magic lantern," as he called the city. When he pulled the reader along, says Wilson, he brought the first "cinematic mobility" to the English novel: long tracking shots, like Oliver Twist's escapades in grimy alleys, where the scenes flash by like some satanic carnival; wide panoramas, like the scene in the brickyard in Dombey and Son, where the city lies on the horizon...