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.