The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY AGO, my favorite Dickens was The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), his first novel. I was thirteen and enchanted by it. Five years after, I became obsessed with Bleak House, a choice that lasted until I had read all of Dickens and was drawn in by the dank and frightening Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left a bit more than half done when he died on June 9, 1870, is even darker, but we will never know how it was to end. Dickens died at fifty-eight, worn out by his incessant and exhausting public reading of his works to large and enthusiastic audiences. Had he not become one of the greatest novelists, he could have had a remarkable career on the stage. Five years before the stroke that killed him, he and his young actress protégée Ellen Ternan had been in a train wreck that killed ten passengers and injured many, including Dickens, who did his heroic best to attend to the other victims. He had separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858, after twenty-two years of a rather difficult marriage in which she had endured ten pregnancies.

The liveliest biography of Dickens is by Peter Ackroyd (1991). I have learned a great deal from a study by Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (1971). Anyone who reads Dickens frequently and deeply will be impressed by the personal quality of his attachment to the figure of Jesus. For Dickens, Christianity was Jesus and consisted in compassion, sincerity, charity on an individual basis. Dickens felt contempt for all who professed to be Christian but loathed, exploited, or ignored the sufferings of the poor, the homeless, child laborers, outcast women, all the injured and insulted of London and the world.