I found this book challenging to begin with, but so rewarding once I stuck with it. Wilson unravels seven mysteries of Charles Dickens’s life and singular talent, beginning at the moment of the author’s death and circling around and around his experiences and influences to create a full picture of his work. The result is a very unusual and enlightening biography that is as much about his work as his life; deeply engaged with the Dickens novels since his own horrific public school experience, Wilson uses his knowledge of the works to reflect on—but not quite psychologize—the author’s unique vision. “[T]his is what happens in the ‘Life’ of a novelist... [A]lmost all biographies of novelists do indeed consist of this juxtaposition of supposedly ‘real’ experiences and the reproduction of these experiences in fictive form” (271). “The question is where all this stuff is coming from,” Wilson wonders, “what are the wells from which he is drawing water?” (274). Unforgettable insights, not just into Dickens, but into how an author works.