The Last and Latest Dickens
Matthew Pearl’s historical thriller The Last Dickens, published in 2009, can be considered as a contemporary reappraisal of Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and of the last phase of Dickens’s life and literary activity. A brief comparison with Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2012-01-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/12417 |
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| Summary: | Matthew Pearl’s historical thriller The Last Dickens, published in 2009, can be considered as a contemporary reappraisal of Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and of the last phase of Dickens’s life and literary activity. A brief comparison with Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s re-writing—The D. Case (1989)—reveals a change of perspective, linked to recent trends in criticism and to contemporary topicality. While the Italian writers’ approach was metafictional and parodic, à la Lodge, Pearl’s approach is thematic and biographical, and highly sensational. The central theme is opium and drug addiction—a contemporary obsession: it is an interesting coincidence that an essay by Robert Tracy focusing on this aspect (‘Opium Is the True Hero of the Tale’) was published in the same year as The Last Dickens. As regards Dickens’s life and personality the focus is on the novelist’s frantic effort to assert his vitality and histrionic virtuosity in spite of aging and bad health, as already highlighted by his first biographer and more recently by Peter Ackroyd both in his life of Dickens and in the monologue The Mystery of Charles Dickens. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |