Strange bedfellows: Charles Dickens and the popstar Prince

One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts. Even so, Dickens and Prince is as strange as it sounds: an extended essay yoking together a 19th-century British novelist and a recently deceased African-American popstar.

At the start, Hornby says he won’t be looking for ‘uncanny similarities’ between the two – which might make you wonder why they’re in the same book. Or at least it would if he didn’t spend the rest of the time looking for them anyway.

In this quest, he’s on his most solid ground when stressing his subjects’ almost otherworldly levels of productivity. Over the not-untypical 30 months from February 1837, Dickens serially published the whole of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – around half a million words – keeping both plots and sets of characters in his head simultaneously. By his death, he’d written four million words of fiction, as well as decades’ worth of journalism and more than 14,000 letters. In his spare time, he walked 12 miles a day.

As for Prince, after making 42 albums in less than four decades, he left behind a vault containing enough unreleased material (as Hornby puts it with his happy knack for a startling statistic) to provide ‘a ten-song album every six months for the next three or four hundred years’. Following a live show, he usually wound down by playing a live show somewhere else, often unannounced.

So might there be something beyond the ‘genius’ of the book’s subtitle which explains such unstoppability? Well, as Hornby points out, both men had difficult childhoods that reached peak difficulty when they were 12, with Prince finding himself on the street and Dickens sent to that famous blacking factory.