Books: Boz Will Be Boz

THE WORLD OF CHARLES DICKENS by Angus Wilson. 302 pages. Viking Press. $12.95.

When Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp, he requested only one kind of reading matter: books by Dickens. In mid-19th century New York, ships arriving with the latest installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop were met by anxious cries from the dock: "Is Little Nell dead?"

For a writer, such fame was unprecedented then, and has been unimaginable since. Not just fame, either, but ardor and devotion. In The World of Charles Dickens, English Novelist Angus Wilson suggests that Dickens, publishing most of his works in serial form, achieved the same intimate, regular contact with his audience as Scheherazade in his childhood favorite, The Arabian Nights. Dickens kept telling another tale. Jokes and fantasies, social and political critiques, plummy visions of Christmas swept from his pen. He even wrote a front-page article in his own magazine, Household Words, to explain and justify the breaking up of his staunchly Victorian marriage after 22 years.

Debtors' Prison. His contemporaries may well have felt they knew everything important about him. In fact, it was precisely the important things that they did not know. They did not know about the rat-ridden London warehouse that sagged over the Thames and was called Warren's Blacking Factory. At age twelve, Dickens was yanked from school and put to work there while his father and the rest of the family went into debtors' prison. So traumatic was his sense of shock and abandonment that although the experience lasted no more than five months, as a grown man he still would burst into tears whenever he found himself back in the neighborhood.

It is hardly news to Dickens specialists today that the blacking-factory episode, as Wilson puts it, "provided nearly a lifetime's impetus toward artistic creation." Wilson's scrutiny of the fierce personal drive that transformed an anonymous, victimized lad into the inimitable Boz opens the way to a shrewd, wide-ranging analysis of Dickens' life and work. The result is the best all-round book on the subject for the general reader in years. Absorbing, gracefully written, freshly thought out, it is, in addition, that rare hybrid, a coffee-table book with both brains and beauty. The glossy pages are strewn with well-selected (though skimpily captioned) illustrations that vividly reflect the squalor and especially the sentiment of 19th century England.

To Wilson, Dickens' determination to write sprang from a fear of sinking back into oblivion and poverty. His disenchantment with his parents primed him for his eventual satire of the feckless, posturing stratum of society that they epitomized. Father, an expansive but hopelessly improvident clerk, was to balloon into fiction as Mr. Micawber. Mother, with her snobbish faith in "connections" (one of whom was the manager of the blacking factory), would become not only Mrs. Micawber but later Mrs. Nickleby. "Peculiarly unfair" treatment for mother, Wilson concludes, but there was a special reason for that, too.