The Wizardry of Boz

By Christopher Porterfield

THE CHARLES DICKENS ENCYCLOPEDIA

Compiled by MICHAEL and MOLLIE

HARDWICK 531 pages. Scribner's. $15.

Christmas is a time when people reach for their Dickens, in their minds if not on their bookshelves. The prevailing sentiments of the season, after all, stem as much from Dickens' Scrooge and Bob Cratchit as from the Christian church or Macy's. Thus this compendium of material by and about England's greatest popular novelist is timely. Not too timely, though, for it is no glossy candy box of a book. Unillustrated and unpretentious, its value will endure many Christmases.

The Hardwicks, an English husband-wife writing team, have gone against the usual practice of scholars and compilers: they have included "only the sort of information that we can imagine being of use or entertainment to someone." The book contains sketches of Dickens' family, friends and associates; a topography of his writings and life; and plot summaries of all his works.

More entertaining is a lengthy chart showing what was happening in the other, dreary world while Dickens was working on his livelier one. While he wrote Bleak House in 1852, for example, the Duke of Wellington was dying and Wells Fargo & Co. was being founded in the U.S. There is also a listing of virtually every character Dickens created (more than 2,000, if you are counting), down to the likes of Dick, Tim Linkinwater's blind blackbird in Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens' genius for names needs no underscoring, but to see so many of them together is to be dazzled -and then to be struck again by the fact that many are not so much names as implied biographies. What else needs to be said about a soldier called Captain the Hon. Fitz-Whisker Fiercy, or a chauvinist U.S. Congressman called the Hon. Elijah Pogram?

Readers may be disappointed by the dryness of the Hardwicks' plot summaries, or the emphasis on purely physical description in their character sketches (not a word about Micavvber's improvidence). But there is rich recompense in the book's final section-248 pages of copious quotations from Dickens himself. These serve the true purpose of such a reference work: to remind the reader that the original is irreplaceable.

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