Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby Joel J. Brattin (bio) Nick Hornby. Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. Riverhead Books, 2022. Pp. 171. $18.00. ISBN 978-0-593-54182-1 (hb). Novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby has tried his hand at nonfiction before, writing books, essays, and book reviews on pop music and football. Here, he proposes links between Charles Dickens and the Minneapolis performer and recording artist Prince Rogers Nelson, more commonly known as Prince (1958–2016). This short book is written in an engaging style, offering information about both title figures in an accessible and often colorful manner. The two men have quite a lot in common, according to Hornby: among other things, both died at age 58 (except for Prince, who was only 57), overcame childhood poverty and deprivation, met with extraordinary success in their twenties, worked on multiple projects at once, achieved great financial success but were convinced they were being robbed, failed to make their marriages work, were outstanding performers, and had a remarkable work ethic, with “no off switch” (15). Hornby suspects there are few artists as prolific as Dickens and Prince. I thought of Anthony Trollope and of Telemann, but Hornby shut me up by saying “maybe you’re reading this and shouting Wagner! Picasso! If you are, you’ll have to write your own book” (7). Much of what Hornby tells us about Dickens will be familiar to readers of this journal, and perhaps few of those readers will care deeply about Prince. But there are interesting tidbits along the way. Of Prince, we learn that he recorded a Jehovah’s Witness album, and that he liked not only Led Zeppelin, but Grand Funk Railroad. We also learn that Robert Christgau said, in the wake of Prince’s album Dirty Mind, that “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home” (43). Hornby offers some arcane bits of Dickensiana, too, noting that a business called “Havisham[’]s Wedding Centre” operated, and then didn’t, in Rochester (Kent); that a young Davy Jones, later of Monkees fame, played the Artful Dodger on Broadway; and that novelist Stephen King juiced up the old urban legend about crowds in New York waiting on the dock to hear a report of little Nell’s death by moving the locale to Baltimore and by drowning several of the crowding Dickens fanatics. He also says that Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy drove himself to the Marble Arch cinema to see an adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hornby has a unique comic perspective. He says if your nine-year-old child is reading David Copperfield, “please stop them. It will kill any future enjoyment they might get from those extraordinary novels. And also, you’re a terrible parent” (7–8). Referring to Prince’s often embarrassing interviews, Hornby says “Sometimes, to be a fan of Prince was to be cast back to one’s [End Page 257] school days, struggling to defend an inarticulate and possibly malodorous guitar hero while he postured and pranced on TV in front of my witheringly scornful mother” (45). He says that Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop “is so clearly an influence on Wodehouse that Bertie Wooster would have been entitled to a DNA test” (90). And he notes that “there are, regrettably, a number of movies called A Tale of Two Titties, but these do not seem to follow the plot of the book” (156). Hornby never really identifies what he means by “a particular kind of genius,” but I suspect he’s primarily thinking about hard work. Finally, Hornby concludes that his book is “about work, and nobody ever worked harder than these two, or at a higher standard, while connecting with so many people for so long” (159). The book is light reading: fun, interesting, and often provocative. Hornby makes a variety of mistakes of fact and has a less nuanced view of Dickens than, say, many a university professor. But he makes no claims to expertise: he’s a fan, of both Dickens and Prince. It’s unfortunate that Hornby misspells Dickens’s full name...