As Charles Dickens lay in his coffin, his will was read out to the assembled mourners. ‘I conjure my friends,’ he sternly instructed them, ‘on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or testimonial whatever.’ It’s an appeal that later generations have studiously ignored, as can be seen in the piles of commemorative merchandise that are available to purchase online. These range from a fully poseable Dickens action figure (‘with quill pen and removable hat’) to a T-shirt featuring his face and the slogan ‘I put the lit in literature’.
They can also be seen in the shelfloads of biographies and critical works published every year. Indeed, if a mark of an author’s success is that more books are written about them than bythem, then even the prolific Dickens has a good claim to being one of the most successful authors of all time. But it is still worth pausing over the phrase ‘I conjure my friends’, because it reminds us why he is such a remarkable figure in the history of storytelling. He is a literary enchanter.
By the time of his death, Dickens – who also liked to refer to himself as ‘Boz’, or ‘the Inimitable’, or ‘the Sparkler of Albion’ – had attracted a new nickname: ‘the Great Magician’. That may have been partly a crafty wink at his love of stage magic, which led him to commission articles for his journal Household Words on subjects such as ‘Out-Conjuring Conjurers’.
It was also reflected in the time he spent practising conjuring tricks like ‘The Pudding Wonder’, which involved him pouring various ingredients into his hat before – ta-dah! – tipping out a fully steamed pudding.
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