There’s no question Dickens belongs in the ranks of mystery writers, and not just for Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. His whole life and career embodied a succession of mysteries, thus A.N. Wilson’s seven chapter titles, covering the mystery of his childhood, his cruel marriage, his charity, and his public readings, with the penultimate one devoted to the unfinished Edwin Drood.

Throughout, Wilson explores a constant theme of the duality of personality, asking for example, “How could the apostle of kindness, the novelist who more than any other extols the virtues of charity, who waged war on Scrooge, and Bumble, and Bounderby, how could he, of all the people in the world, have been so furiously unkind, so vindictively, pointedly, and quite unnecessarily cruel, to the woman who had borne his children, and whose faults in so far as anyone has noted them, were trivial?”

This is an excellent and insightful book that serves as a compact biography of its subject. (Reviewed from ebook edition.)