It's 200 years since Charles Dickens was born. I grew up in a house that had every copy of Dickens' novels bar one that had somehow been lost. I think they had probably been bought while Dickens was still alive.

I've only read a few of them all the way through, although a Christmas Carol has a special place in my library.

While Dickens still exerts a powerful influence I think it is on balance not for the best.

His view of 19th century England, driven as much by personal insecurities derived from childhood poverty as anything else, has coloured our view of how the world should work so that Dickens' caricatures are often invoked to support a sentimental nostalgic view of how the world should be rather than how it can be.

I think that was why I preferred other writers from the era. Thackeray, for example, while less of a moralising writer is more interesting, and probably ultimately more instructive. Hardy lifts the lid on the "rural idyll".

I know mine are minority views, but I can't let the day pass without some observance on OLO!

And as I know our recent feature on book reviews attracted new readers, perhaps some of those might join in.

Great thread, Graham....(I'm sure Squeers will be along any moment :)

I'll have a ponder on this one. Dickens drew attention to the inequities existing at a particularly crucial juncture in the development of industrial society - one of my special interests - and he did so in superb fashion.

More from me later, no doubt.

I love reading books, and many of my favourites were written by Charles Dickens, especially 'Great Expectations', 'Oliver Twist', 'Bleak House',and 'A Christmas Carol'.

In fact, I think I have read 'Great Expectations' at least 10 times!
I love historical novels that talk of the hardships of the 'common' people of yesteryear, as well as the upper class folk, and Dickens was a master in that craft.

Think of all the movies, TV series and plays that have been based on Dickens' books.
He really was a great talent.

Happy Birthday to ya :)

I also grew up with the novels of Charles Dickens.
And I must admit that although Dickens turned to
more serious themes and plots - he introduced
enough humour to keep his books entertaining.

I've always considered Dickens one of the major
figures in English Literature.

Some books have qualities which widen the mind's eye:
they take the reader far beyond the ordinary to a new
and exciting experience. This experience can be of a
sensory kind in which one sees or hears new things: it can
ne of an intellectual kind in which one thinks new things:
it can be of an emotional or moral kind in which one
feels and understands new things.

The books of Charles Dickens, to me, were those kind of
books. They were so absorbing in their overall
quality that I was drawn to the imaginative world that
was created with no problem of suspension of disbelief.

His books created enjoyment for me at many levels, in
many ways and at many times.

Happy Birthday Charles Dickens!

Well yes, and no, Poirot.

>>Dickens drew attention to the inequities existing at a particularly crucial juncture in the development of industrial society...<<

He most certainly did, and I think that the "crucial juncture" part might be the source of Graham's concerns as to his current relevance.

>>Dickens' caricatures are often invoked to support a sentimental nostalgic view of how the world should be rather than how it can be...<<

I've only just "come back" to Dickens in the last couple of years, having been somewhat indifferent before - my youthful taste for literary characters ran more towards Raskolnikov than Pip.

But on re-reading, I discovered that while times may change, and circumstances change, people don't. That historical crucial juncture was in many ways just the prop that Dickens used upon which to hang his observations on human nature.

Why Pericles during the Industrial Revolution was there so much poverty amongst so much new technology and wealth?

Dickens had a great passion for righting the injustices then,but we today lack the courage and vision to do likewise now.

Yeah, I like Google reminders too. They initiate so many conversations across the webs.

Any conversation about authors 'greatness' is really a dead end, as it always devolves towards opinion with no real objective evaluation possible. Dickens could be be great or not depending on ones subjective point of view. No resolution possible.

But here's a hypothesis that can be objectively discussed: He is only really famous in the modern world (and thus remembered) because his stuff has been reinterpreted and updated so much that it has become a part of the social fabric.

And to make an observation more relevant to our times and the medium in which we find ourselves: if his stuff was still properly subject to copyright law we would be massively poorer as a society.

The internet must not be censored for the same reason that Dickens' stories can be made into movies etc. without having to pay his estate (i.e. family) 50% of the profits.

I'm a little tardy but predictable it seems, Poirot.
Being a Londoner myself, I've read Dickens fairly extensively, and the mammoth biography by Ackroyd, and with one exception found him a joy, that being The Old Curiosity Shop--sentimental beyond belief. I found Hard Times rather laboured in its sentiment, but a wonderful critique of utilitarianism. Hard Times is Dickens' only industrial novel and is downright ignorant as far as being any kind of artefact of the times, the inner city and the legal fraternity being his proper niche. I've written undergraduate essays on Hard Times, Great Expectations--whose message few people seem to get--and David Copperfield--in which I defended Uriah Heap against the supercilious namesake of the novel (Dickens himself of course). My favourites are The Pickwick Papers (I often use Pickwick for a password) and Barnaby Rudge.
I agree, Pericles, that Dickens is a writer who seems to improve with age and funnily enough I've been thinking of late that I should get back into him.
I've also read and written about Thackary's Vanity Fare (the long BBC version is splendid) and I'd have to argue that he's more moralising than Dickens, indeed downright pietistic, at least in Vanity Fare (the title says it all). Thackary invented one of the greatest anti-heroines in English literature, up there with Moll Flanders and the Wife of Bath, yet he hates Becky Sharp and adores his precious Dobbin. Conservative to the hilt, I'm not surprised you like him Graham. Indeed all his characters are moral caricatures and, with the exception of Becky, every bit as flat as Dickens'. A timeless classic of course all the same.
Dickens' greatness is like Wodehouse's for me, they're both masters of the language rather than characterisation, though Dickens' characters have sledgehammer messages and Wodehouse's have none.
Thanks for the thread, Graham, though I'm a little late for his birthday.

Just read your post Bugsy and agree that "The internet must not be censored for the same reason that Dickens' stories can be made into movies etc. without having to pay his estate (i.e. family) 50% of the profits", though I don't think it's censorship or copyright we have to worry about, it's the privatisation and commercialisation of the net that's the biggest threat to the realm of free and equal expression.

Dickens was exceedingly famous in his own day and commanded huge audiences at his public readings. To give Dickens some credit, I think what has kept him alive in the modern era is partly that his stereotypes are timeless. And it isn't so much the movies as canonicity and cultural capital that make him so familiar, if not widely read.

I agree with Squeers and Pericles that Dicken's mastery was in his use of language and his genius at characterisation. As you say, Squeers, his sterotypes are timeless. And while the era of rapid industrialisation was his prop, what better vehicle in which to place his characters for a man who had experienced the deprivation of the factory system.
Apparently, in the wake of Nicholas Nickleby, he received correspondence from several "northern schoolmasters" - whether out of outrage of flattery - each considering that Dicken's had based Wackford Squeers upon themselves, so accurate was his rendering.

We have to keep in mind also that Dicken's work was initially published in serial form - the equivalent today of waiting for next weeks episode of a TV series.

The other point is that mass education wasn't yet implemented at the time. Dicken's writng was read by the educated middle-class and assisted in raising perceptions of conditions experienced by those at the bottom of the pile. My own thought is that he "humanised" the poor and wretched. If someone is able to empathise with an orphan as character in a book, then he is awakened to it in in reality also. These orphans were regularly shipped to the northern factories and flogged and beaten - to death sometimes (I have a book with documents pertaining to this treatment). In the wash-up, Dicken's work was thoroughly entertaining for the educated class, but also helped to raise consciousness as to the diabolical inequities that existed at the time.

(I love Wodehouse too - probably because he has no message - and he makes me laugh)

Just a slight demur, Poirot. I don't think Dickens was good a character, but caricature, at stereotypes that is, at satirising society rather than inventing genuine subjectivities. As E M Forster famously wrote, his characters are flat rather than rounded, with the possible exceptions of Pip and Copperfield. Same with Thackary's characters, though as Harold Bloom famously argues Becky, like so many of Shakespeare's characters, is fully formed and to a certain extent derails Thackaray's polarised morality, just as Iago and Falstaff and Hamlet and others tend to transcend the page. But yes I do think his stereotypes are timeless, so perhaps it's the mould rather than idiosychratic character that he was master of.

Yes, Squeers...caricature.
You're most certainly correct - the equivalent effect as we experience with a good political cartoon. And again, satire is the perfect lens through which to view human foibles and their often resulting inequity.

Exactly, Arjay.

>>Why Pericles during the Industrial Revolution was there so much poverty amongst so much new technology and wealth?<<

For the same reason that poverty and injustice survive to this day, also "amongst so much new technology and wealth". While the world changes, people remain the same - some heroic, some venal, and in between the vast majority of folk who like to read about them.

>>Dickens had a great passion for righting the injustices then,but we today lack the courage and vision to do likewise now.<<

Dickens was able to draw attention to the inequities that existed back then, but to suggest that he was actually able to do anything about them is a little fanciful. Trade Unions were the major catalyst for positive action against worker exploitation, and their rise to a position of power was most definitely post-Dickens.

You must have read a bowdlerised version of Vanity Fair Squeers. While caricature is certainly present in the characters, there is a lot more real character than in Dickens.

Dickens seems to take his cue from music hall, or perhaps it was vice-versa. You always know who to cheer and who to hiss. Thackeray is much more morally ambiguous. The virtuous characters are plodding and dull, while the disreputable are attractive. No reader falls in love with Amelia, but they do with Becky.

I've never actually met a character from Dickens in real life, but I have frequently run into characters from Thackeray.

I suspect that it is the cartoon quality of Dickens' characters, combined with the definite positions on the moral compass that has made him more popular than more ambiguous and subtle writers. And I'm not just thinking of Thackeray and Hardy, but also Eliot and Trollope and a band of others who while remembered receive far less attention.

BTW, I don't judge books on the politics of their authors, but if I did, as a liberal I wouldn't be particularly partial to works by conservatives.

Graham,
I said Thakary's characters were "moral" caricatures, at least his main characters are, good like Amelia and Dobbin or bad like George and his father and Becky. Indeed they're all bad more or less bar Dobbin and Amelia, who tend to be lost in a corrupt world. Thackary's abiding anxieties were similar to mine; he was disillusioned with a world given over to commerce devoid of principals, but also of class structures and the amoral pursuit of material gain. I agree with you about Dickens, and even that Thackary's characters have more blood in them than Dickens' inky and arabesque creations, at least to a point--though Lord Steyne is a perennial "stain" on society and like the other characters needs no more depth than that. Thackary was in fact consciously protesting against Dickens' popular sentimentality and satirising his romantic world of happy philanthropic endings.
If you're comparing Thackary's puppets with Hardy's deep but dismal set, or Eliot's thinkers and aspirants, I'd have to disagree with you. Thackary and Trollope I would be willing to compare, at least in characterisation.
But the beauty of literature is we're free to read it as we please, to a point, and I don't presume to tell you how to suck eggs.
For me as I say Dickens was a master of the language and a comic genius, even if he was shallow.

Pericles,There was an era called the Renaissance in which people,creativity and the arts prospered.Why was not the Industrial revolution an extention of this enlightenment?

The answer is Pericles the instigation of the money system of expressing increases in all of societies productivity as debt by a few elite.During the Renaissance and in the pre-Julius Caesar times,money was created by a sovereign Govt that represented all people and businesses.The Renaissance had debt free tally sticks and the Gold Smiths had very little power.

Of course you Pericles are too wedded to the present system you mistakingly think will save you.It's going down big time Pericles because it destroys the very basis of fairness ,individual freedoms and creativity.Ron Paul for President!

Arjay, that is pretty much off topic. I know you have a problem with fiat money, but it's not what this thread is about. [That's a moderatorial aside.]

I've been wondering whether there are contemporaries who are like Dickens. In a lot of ways he's as much a polemicist as a novelist, and he's twigged to the fact that it's easier to get your argument accepted if you dress it up in emotional terms.

So that makes him a bit like Aesop or Jesus who used stories to illustrate moral dilemmas and propagate solutions to them.

These days the polemical messages that become popular are dressed up as documentaries. Michael Moore, Al Gore and Josh Fox are recent documentary makers who deal in caricatures and who have captured the public imagination for their agendas.

Catch 22 is a bit Dickensian, but more in the existentialist school than the moralistic one.

Another area one might look for the Dickensian is amongst comedians. Perhaps Barry Humphries. But again Humphries is sentimental, but not interested in changing the world.

I guess this raises the question as to whether Dickens would even be successful today, or whether he would have gone into another art form.

Not really off the topic Graham.Dickens wrote about the social/economic injustice of his era.I'm just doing an analysis of why there was such injustice in an era of great creation and industrial productivity.We have the same parallels today with computer technology and industrial productivity,yet so much poverty.

You cannot isolate Dickens to an etherised Kevin Rudd view of the world.Dickens must be studied in context within the socio/economic realities of his time.

I think it may have been Dickens who managed to get public executions to be performed in private rather than make them a public spectacle.

It seemed that many poor people were committing capital crimes so they could get some sort of public acknowledgement of their own existence (their 15 minutes of fame).

The crime rate dropped as a result.

Now if they could only introduce that concept into reality television...

Or blog comment threads! ;-)

Sheeesh, Arjay. Even when I agree with you, you jump down my throat.

Dickens observed the impact of the most active phase of the industrial revolution on the citizenry. He concluded - and wrote about - the divisions it created in society, including some of the more egregious moral ambiguities created by new wealth, not only in the ruling classes but also amongst the emerging middle class.

My only observation was that the ills he described - greed, thoughtless cruelty, self-obsession and self-delusion - have changed little over the centuries. They existed in Roman times, they existed in the Middle Ages, they even existed in the Renaissance. The only real difference is the lens through which they were observed.

To Graham's question, would Dickens be successful today, I'd suggest the answer lies in the the state of society at that time. Dickens undoubtedly had a massive amount of contemporary raw material with which to work, and in creating moral tales from his observations, he was both inspired and limited by it.

Would he have the sort of material with which to work today, that he could turn into a credible story? I would suggest, probably not - at least, not to the same degree. While poverty still exists, as does injustice and inequity, the lines are not so clearly drawn as they were in the nineteenth century. It requires an altogether more subtle approach. Dickens employed the moral sledgehammer, where a scalpel is possibly more appropriate today.

Dickens would be successful in any time imo. He was a workaholic and utterly driven. And of course his fiction was a product of his milieu. If he was writing today it would reflect our world.

The world in which Dickens inhabited did present him with an abundance of material.

It's interesting to note, and Cobbett remarked on this in Rural Rides, that while Britain was busy congratulating itself on the abolition of the slave trade, that working and living conditions, especially in the northern English and Scottish mills and factories, were abysmal.(you really have to read documents pertaining to the period to understand how truly dreadful they were)

Agitation by people of a certain echelon of the upper middle-class probably had the greatest effect on galvanising government intervention in the form of Factory Acts which slowly but surely began to address the conditions and implement protections, starting with women and children. We have to realise that industrialisation in Britain initially unfolded devoid of government regulation.

Our kind of modern social democracy does mitigate the worst abuses which, as Pericles points out, are part and parcel of an unchanging pattern of human behaviour. The contrasts between the poor and the reasonably affluent "in our society" are world's away from the same in Dicken's time.