Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his 58 years when he died. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, award-winning biographer A. N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity.

For more than six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire at the height of its power. Beside her for more than 20 of those years was the love of her life, her trusted husband and father of their nine children, Prince Albert. But while Victoria is seen as the embodiment of her time, its values and its paradoxes, it was Prince Albert, A. N. Wilson expertly argues, who was at the vanguard of Victorian Britain’s transformation as a vibrant and extraordinary center of political, technological, scientific and intellectual advancement. Far more than just the product of his age, Albert was one of its influencers and architects. It is impossible to understand 19th-century England without knowing the story of this gifted visionary leader, Wilson contends.

With the publication of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin --- hailed as the man who "discovered evolution" --- was propelled into the pantheon of great scientific thinkers, alongside Galileo, Copernicus and Newton. A. N. Wilson challenges this long-held assumption. He argues that Darwin was not an original scientific thinker, but a ruthless and determined self-promoter who did not credit the many great sages whose ideas he advanced in his book. Furthermore, Wilson contends that religion and Darwinism have much more in common than it would seem, for the acceptance of Darwin's theory involves a pretty significant leap of faith.