‘What a thing it is to have Power,’ Charles Dickens wrote to his wife after noticing that his friend William Macready, one of the most famous actors of the day, was weeping during a reading of The Chimes. The act of moving an audience proved addictive, even more than the fame and fortune that came with it; Dickens loved to make people’s flesh creep, gleefully recalling the ‘unspeakable “state”’ to which he reduced his wife when he test-read the scene of Nancy’s murder in Oliver Twist. Years later, by which point the same gruesome scene had become a set piece of Dickens’s public readings, he proved himself as susceptible as anyone to the power of his own writing and performance, frequently having to be helped off stage with his blood pressure soaring.

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. The creator of Pickwick, Fagin, Heep, Micawber, Mrs Gamp, Pecksniff, Skimpole, Miss Havisham and Scrooge (to name only a handful of the unforgettable characters) does indeed seem to have had more ‘inventive capacity’ than any novelist before or since. Add to that a punishing work ethic, an inflammable social conscience and a lust for glory, and it’s not hard to see why Dickens imagined himself as a superhero of letters, ranging ‘all over London … cognisant of everything’ and exercising ‘a sort of previously unthought-of Power’. 

Conrad weaves through the novels in loosely thematic chapters on space, the theatre, the body, darkness, sleep and dreams, anatomising the world of his ‘dark enchanter’. What he finds is a man with a voracious appetite for life and death, permanently fired up, attracted by strange states of consciousness