what is the truth about those people, exactly? Is it this:
"The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself – some yen for sexual violence – on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. "
This does more than say Dickens was a jerk who had an affair with a younger woman and was probably abusive. It ties his abilities as a writer to a yen for sexual violence and theorizes his ability to write cruel characters was due to them being projections of his own cruelty.
With this Dickens' ability becomes an indictment of his character - he can do these great things because he is a monster, which I'm sure you can see is quite a bit different than he did great things and also monstrous things. The prior reasoning means that in the end every great thing has its wellspring in something monstrous, as I said therefore - better to never achieve anything at all.
on edit: for the record I didn't downvote you, I will upvote because, although we disagree in manner outlined here I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for a simple disagreement.
Wilson may be right or wrong or stretching (I did not cared enough to double check that claim). The actual seeming abuse of wife would might theoretically might make me more suspectfull of his female characters had his books been different, but there is enough ugly in his books about everyone that it is moot anyway.
So I kind of passed over that point as not all in all affecting. My impression from art tend to change when it is tied to real world acts (helping or harming real people), not merely wishes. For example, "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" is different knowing it was written by very much adult R.Kelly for his 15 years old wife. But it is tie to real people suffering in the process that make it different.
And not all in that reflects badly Dickens himself. I mean, this is not exactly something that I would see as tearing down Dickens, that is just having screwed childhood in way we like to pretend did not happened:
> He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors’ prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. [...] In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”.
The way Dickens treated his wife and kids (preventing them access to her) indeed sounds abusive, but to me, it is also indeed the way horrible treatment in childhood can end up being reproduced in adult hood in real life.
Even contemporary great artists/scientists can be abusers and what not. And we collectively seem to have problem to accept that, we seem to want to think that greatness in one area must imply greatness in other area.