RSSEnduring Dickens
The 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth is Tuesday. “The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters,” wrote Claire Tomalin in “Charles Dickens: A Life.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is the one everybody knows, but the one so many have actually read is this: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”
Philip “Pip” Pirrip, longtime companion of the 10th grade, an orphan with ambition and a deep conscience, in love with the brittle Estella, confused by Miss Havisham. Pip, who so many people met in high school, whether they read about him or not. Pip, a familiar name that leads to an even more familiar one: Charles Dickens, the man who wrote him.
In the pantheon of English literature, few names are as well-known as Dickens’, and even fewer writers have contributed works of such enduring familiarity to the literary canon. Tuesday is the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, bringing with it a renewal of interest in all things Dickens (and maybe a few leaden sighs from those who suffered through “Great Expectations” or “A Tale of Two Cities” in high school).
“It does not matter that Dickens’ world is not lifelike; it is alive,” wrote David Cecil in “Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation.”
“His novels are plot-driven, so the stories are right there,” explained Kristen Hague, an associate professor of English at Colorado Mesa University and director of the honors program. Students in her Victorian literature course this term will study Dickens’ “Bleak House.”
An author of tremendous energy — he walked for miles through London’s streets every day — and output, Dickens was on the vanguard of novels flowering into an art form. He created a sense of place like few authors before him could, so that readers could practically taste the foul industrial air of London during the Victorian era.
He was not without his detractors. In an 1865 review of “Our Mutual Friend,” the author Henry James wrote, “Mr. Dickens is a great observer and a great humorist, but he is nothing of a philosopher. Some people may hereupon say, so much the better; we say, so much the worse. For a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy.”
Snippy reviews aside, Dickens endures. Though “Great Expectations” is no longer required high school reading in District 51 — the introduction of Colorado P-12 Academic Standards in December 2010 prompted a restructuring of literature curricula, “finding texts that fit within the content standards,” said district spokesman Jeff Kirtland — students know Dickens’ name and at least the basics of his most familiar works.
There’s “A Christmas Carol,” of course, and Scrooge is now commonly used to describe any miser or holiday grouch. There’s Oliver Twist, the plucky orphan, and the wicked criminal Fagin. There’s the opening lines of “A Tale of Two Cities”: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” And there’s the fact that any bleak, miserable place or event can be described as “Dickensian.”
And that’s just the beginning, because there are so many reasons why we still read Dickens, including:
■ No matter how crazy or anti-social you’re acting, there’s always a Dickens character who’s gone completely around the bend and can make you feel sane. Poor ol’ Miss Havisham spent decades wearing the same moldering wedding dress. Mrs. Gamp was usually drunk, generally terrible and held fevered conversations with the imaginary Mrs. Harris. Krook was illiterate but obsessively hoarded paper, and died of spontaneous combustion.
■ He grabs you with the plot, and then he makes you cry.
The man could write: “After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked with the same meditative face into a back ante-room opening from the yard; and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years…
“There were the faces of friends and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers, peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were others that the grave had changed to ghastly trophies of death, but which the mind, superior to his power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the luster of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.” (From “Oliver Twist”)
■ He wrote not about people you’d meet at the queen’s court, but about people you’d run into at Walmart or the movie theater: “The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody,” wrote the author G.K. Chesterton in “The Victorian Age in Literature.”
“Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in his books even till today. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will say one more thing, even from the bottom of the stairs. The reader really hopes this; and he cannot get rid of the fancy that the author hopes so too.”
■ Like everyday life, Dickens keeps you guessing. Laughter turns to tears, rain turns to sunshine, good people fail, bad people succeed, justice happens, strings are tied then untied. It’s life, and he seemed to know it well.
“The voice of Dickens, offering fun and jokes, then switching to pathos, with a good peppering of indignation, seemed like the voice of a friend,” wrote Claire Tomalin in “Charles Dickens: A Life.” “He could see that there was no other writer at work who could surpass him, and that no one among his friends or family could even begin to match his energy and ambition. He could make people laugh and cry, and arouse anger, and he meant to amuse and to make the world a better place.
“The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters. ‘All his characters are my personal friends,’ said (Leo) Tolstoy, who kept his portrait hanging in his study and declared him to be the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century.”
■ He was ahead of his time in marketing his work. Most of Dickens’ novels were published serially in newspapers and magazines, which were affordable and within the reach of regular people, Hague said. Serializing left people wanting more, and there are reports of people lining up for the next installment of certain novels.
Plus, Dickens toured extensively to give readings of his work. Because he’d trained as an actor, the readings were dramatic, crowd-pleasing affairs and immensely popular.
■ He didn’t coddle the nobility, and he viciously attacked the status quo in his society. In many ways, he was a voice of the original 99-percenters, illuminating the desperate, crippling poverty of so many in Victorian England.
■ His own life was kind of a mess, which makes him more relatable. His father spent time in debtor’s prison, he had to go to work in a blacking factory at age 12, he was drawn to acting and journalism, neither of which were considered respectable professions, he was a demanding father and an unfaithful husband. He was human.
■ He’s a lot easier to read than other Victorian authors (*ahem* George Eliot), especially since he paid particular attention to plot and character development.
One of the greatest debates in art, especially in literature, is what constitutes a classic.
Is it universal themes and immortal characters? An essential truth or a profound understanding of the human condition?
The debate has existed for centuries. Regardless of the criteria, Dickens’ place among the classics is irrefutable. In telling the stories of striving orphans and kindly prostitutes, shady lawyers and ham-eating gentlemen, he has told generations of readers the story of themselves.
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