The Mystery of Charles Dickens Quotes

“Dickens’s response, to the proletariat struggle, as to those destitute and threatened with the workhouse, is broadly consistent – namely, that it was his function, as a charitable citizen and as an artist, to continue asserting the value and distinctiveness of every individual.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“It has been the surely rather obvious contention of this book that this all sprang from the inner, hidden fount of Dickens’s own suffering, and the reason he meant so much to his contemporaries – and survives, meaning so much to us – is that we respond to him differently.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“The capacity to create fiction was an artistic way of describing the capacity to self-deceive. The creative urge was the artistic way of describing the urge that used, battered and, if necessary, destroyed the loves of those closest to him.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“How Dickens always loved neatness! Cleanliness, for him, was not next to godliness, it excelled godliness.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“He always regarded himself as a Christian, impatient of doctrinal or liturgical nicety, but committed to the saying that insomuch as we have done acts of charity to the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, the vulnerable, we have done it to Christ.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“The past never stays still. It changes, which is why the task of the historian changes with each generation.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“in family relationships, sometimes bad behaviour is the only option. It is not to be excused, but it is a fact.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“This was not that two people had tried to get along together and failed: there is nothing mysterious about that. The mystery was: how could the apostle of kindliness, 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? Even if Dickens could not contain his marital hatred, how could he not have seen that by ending his marriage in the way he did, he was causing incalculable pain to the children?”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“He always distrusted institutions, found them indeed to be ridiculous, and those who open his pages today find the stories of the damaged child and wonder whether all the reforms, changes and improvements to life attempted in institutional form in East and West have changed the pain of being born, the bewilderment of being a child, or the powerful compulsions of so many malformed grown-ups to torment and ruin the infancy of their children.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“The servants of the upper classes were witnesses to the unbridged gulf between the upper class of that century and the rest of the world. Living in their country seats and their vast London houses, they never consorted with the middle classes. Their servants, too, existed in this bubble, detached from the world where people went to offices or factories to earn money, travelled on the newly invented trains or on horse-drawn omnibuses and lived in overcrowded rented rooms, with shared outdoor lavatories and very little running water, even for the more genteel types of folk. The servants of the upper class were often confused into supposing that they too were gentlefolk, or if not actual gentlefolk, more like them than they were like the majority of their fellow citizens, who were seen from carriage windows or glimpsed in the street, but never known.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“The class system is designed to make most of the people miserable most of the time, either because they are ashamed of their origins or wish they could overcome them. Those born above the Plimsoll line, the upper class, and those who cheerfully remain in the working class are alone immune from this particular form of inbuilt and systematic insecurity, which persists in Britain to this day but in the nineteenth century was so much stronger; was, indeed, the raison d’être of the entire Victorian social system.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“Dickens’s first full-length fiction began in the prelapsarian world of his childhood.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“Anyone who dies with a secret on their conscience must wonder at what juncture, if any, it will come to light.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“When he came to write novels, there is one aspect of Dickens’s genius that must trouble even his most ardent admirers: namely, his depiction of women, and his imaginative need to desex them, to eviscerate them sexually, emotionally, imaginatively.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“But Dickens was more than just a Victorian man. He was one of the greatest artists who ever chose to write in the English language.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“for the Victorians it was a crime to be a thief or a murderer; but also for the Victorians, who bought thousands of copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help and who believed that they were an Island Empire that had pulled itself up by its own boot-straps, the worst crime was to be a failure. It was the century that reversed the Sermon on the Mount. Cursed were the meek. Cursed were the poor in spirit. Cursed were the merciful.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens

“When the Brothers Grimm, whose collection of German fairy stories was published in the year of Dickens’s birth, began their researches, they were appalled to discover how many of the folktales related to incest, or to parents in one way or another neglecting, brutalizing or mismanaging their children; so in the published version, the wicked mothers were converted into wicked stepmothers.”
― A.N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens