There are surely many things to be gained from becoming one of the world’s great authors: fame, influence, earthly immortality, possible (though not inevitable) wealth. But there are disadvantages as well. The trouble with becoming a great author is that one almost always gets put on a pedestal. And then, explains British historian and cultural critic Peter Conrad, one has “no defense against … appropriation.” Great authors, because of their unquestioned greatness, are safe authors. We tend to stow them away in a mental cubbyhole as inoffensive, the kind of authors who – to quote one of them – could “never bring a blush to the cheek of a young person.” They are tamed into “national treasures,” commercial enterprises, providers of innocuous gifts to be ceremoniously bestowed on politicians on state occasions.

Conrad is especially put out to see this fate visited on Charles Dickens, the author I just quoted, and a novelist so eccentric, so unique, so “Inimitable” – to use his own nickname for himself – that taming him is a travesty. “Up on his pedestal,” Conrad complains in his new book, “esteemed as a harmlessly genial comedian, he also forfeits the capacity to captivate and alarm that made him such a dark enchanter.”

Conrad is out to change all that with his book Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller. He’s here to resurrect Dickens in all his bizarre glory, re-establishing him not just as a supreme talent but as the creator of an entire vibrant world, teeming with characters whose existence can feel as real as – if not more real than – our own. One of the strengths of Conrad’s book is how he conveys that this world is, for the devoted reader, both endlessly exciting and a comforting place to be, even with the darkness that, as Conrad specifies, so often accompanies his enchantment. This great author, Conrad shows us, doesn’t have to be stale to be soothing. On the contrary, he writes, recalling how Dickens helped him through the Covid-19 pandemic:

The novels re-enlivened a locked-down London; they also reinvigorated me, getting my head if not my legs out of the house. Coming and going as I pleased, I could inspect the lair of a taxidermist who also articulates skeletons, a castellated suburban villa with its own little moat, a nouveau-riche household stickily redolent of varnish and French polish, and a hundred other caverns of fantasy…. Although Virginia Woolf snootily described Dickens as “a public thoroughfare trodden dusty by a million feet,” I was only too glad to accompany his characters on their treks across a terrain that for me was out of bounds.

Conrad invites us in turn to journey through this Dickensian terrain, mapping out regions both predictable (family, religion, death) and more fanciful (magic, theater, demons). He throws light on them in firework-like bursts that illuminate thematic connections between the various works and characters. In the course of a single sentence, he whisks us from one tale to another to yet another at a dizzying pace.

This scattershot approach is highly reminiscent of one of Dickens’s own characters, the fast-talking Alfred Jingle from The Pickwick Papers, from whom Conrad includes this immortal quotation: “Heads, heads – take care of your heads…! Terrible place – dangerous work – other day – five children – mother – tall lady, eating sandwiches – forgot the arch – crash – knock – children look round – mother’s head off – sandwich in her hand – no mouth to put it in – head of a family off – shocking, shocking!” Like Jingle’s elliptical style, Conrad’s may take some getting used to, especially for the reader new to Dickens who tries to follow Conrad from quotation to description to quotation. But the breakneck speed suits the tireless subject of this book, who somehow managed to pair his inexhaustible energy with a keen eye for detail. “Every living thing receives Dickens’s fascinated attention,” Conrad reminds us, “as do innumerable things like door-knockers that are strictly speaking not alive.”

The result, as Conrad displays for us in this tour of the works, is that Dickens, with unmatched verve and curiosity, plunges deep into the minds and souls of his characters and even manipulates their bodies rather like the mischievous cartoonist experimenting on an annoyed Daffy Duck in the Chuck Jones classic Duck Amuck.

But it must be said that this style and pace don’t always work for Conrad quite as well as they do for Dickens. While they help him showcase connections that might never have occurred to us, they also sometimes tempt him to write in a slapdash manner, making mistakes about the stories (like saying that Esther in Bleak House marries her guardian, when in fact they break their engagement) and conflating the author and his characters (as when he holds David Copperfield personally responsible for all the bad things that happen to the characters in the novel about him). Dickens rarely let himself lapse into superficiality, but Conrad occasionally does, and these lapses can unfortunately lead him into inaccuracy.

This happens most noticeably in the chapter on “The Great Creator,” in which Conrad declares, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that Dickens “found it hard to believe that the universe had a divine overseer.” While Dickens held some unorthodox ideas about Christianity, sometimes failed to live up to its teachings, and frequently held up religious hypocrites to ridicule, he did these things from inside the camp, so to speak. He consistently professed his belief in Christianity – and, most relevant to a discussion of his work, he insisted that his belief influenced his writing. But you wouldn’t know it from Conrad, who casts a skeptical eye on Dickensian passages that portray faith in a good light, such as Arthur Clennam’s determination, in Little Dorrit, to break with his mother’s cruel creed and to “have hope and charity.”

It seems to fit Conrad’s narrative best to suggest that, in creating his own world, Dickens was trying to usurp the Creator for good. But in this case, he’s letting his narrative get in the way of the known facts. And the superficiality I mentioned earlier hampers his handling of religion in general, as when he remarks, “G. K. Chesterton, otherwise so staunchly Catholic, gazed into the inferno of Dickens’s imagination and declared that the rhyming refrain of ‘mud-stains, blood-stains!’ [in Oliver Twist] was ‘one of the highest moments of his hellish art.’” Anyone who’s familiar enough with Dante to make an Inferno reference must surely realize that faith in Christ and a literary interest in hell are not mutually exclusive. And similarly, such faith does not preclude an interest in pagan tales or scientific developments, or creative genius, or any of the other interests and abilities Dickens had that Conrad believes took the place of religion in his life.

Conrad is at his best when he’s not trying to probe too deeply into Dickens’s psyche but instead concentrating on his literary art – an art that was indeed inimitable in its brilliance and its vision. If his portrait of Dickens as an “enchanter” falls short when applied to Dickens’s actual beliefs, it is nonetheless a fitting term for his creative genius, a mind that accepted a greater Creator but nonetheless took the world He had made and transformed it into something utterly new. Conrad lets Dickens himself offer us a glimpse into this process:

Dickens himself was only once outsmarted – though not for long – by a reality that had already turned itself into a simile. On his arrival in Venice in 1844 he told his friend and future biographer John Forster, “I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe.” The task took courage, because description always involved altering what he saw. Venice, however, was so extravagantly strange that it defied him. “Opium couldn’t build such a place, and enchantment couldn’t shadow it forth in a vision,” he said. “All that I have heard of it, read of it in truth or fiction, fancied of it, is left thousands of miles behind. You know that I am liable to disappointment in such things from over-expectation, but Venice is above, beyond, out of all reach of coming near, the imagination of a man.” Of course, Dickens was far from incapacitated, and in these protestations he gears up to recreate the scene, first citing the drug that gave romantic poets access to an artificial paradise, then setting enchantment and vision to replace dull observation, and almost casually equating truth and fiction. He also accuses himself of over-expectation, the aspiring itch that later motivates Pip in Great Expectations. Inevitably he surmounts every obstacle, and in Pictures from Italy he fantasticates the city’s canals, palaces, and underwater prisons until, as he triumphantly announced to Forster, Venice becomes “a bit of my brain.”

If the world we know today has taken much of its shape from becoming a bit of Dickens’s brain, so much the better for the world, and for us.