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Dickens

post #1 of 38
10/4/09 at 9:57pm
Thread Starter 
Can anybody stand him anymore? Is he readable in our time? Hopelessly padded? Maudlin? Out of date? Never was any good in the first place?
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post #2 of 38
10/4/09 at 9:58pm
I'm assuming you read this piece?: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/book...eading-dickens
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post #3 of 38
10/4/09 at 10:10pm
yes, yes, yes, ?, yes, yes
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post #4 of 38
10/4/09 at 10:19pm
I liked Hard Times.
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post #5 of 38
10/4/09 at 10:30pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manton View Post
Can anybody stand him anymore? Is he readable in our time? Hopelessly padded? Maudlin? Out of date? Never was any good in the first place?

I really TRIED to like Dickens, but just couldn't. Unrelated, but I also have the same issue with Henry James. I feel like I SHOULD be enjoying or at least appreciating them both, but when I sit down and try to trudge through one of their books, it just about kills me. And, by now, I've trudged through a lot of them.
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post #6 of 38
10/4/09 at 10:51pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by rach2jlc View Post
I really TRIED to like Dickens, but just couldn't. Unrelated, but I also have the same issue with Henry James. I feel like I SHOULD be enjoying or at least appreciating them both, but when I sit down and try to trudge through one of their books, it just about kills me. And, by now, I've trudged through a lot of them.

I loved Vanity Fair so much that I read every other Thackeray book, and they all sucked and yet I kept going anyway, hoping against hope. Man, that pissed me off.
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post #7 of 38
10/4/09 at 10:52pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manton View Post
I loved Vanity Fair so much that I read every other Thackeray book, and they all sucked and yet I kept going anyway, hoping against hope. Man, that pissed me off.
I bought Middlemarch the other day. IIRC, you are a fran.
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post #8 of 38
10/4/09 at 11:12pm
There are so many writers not worth reading; why would Dickens be one of them?
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post #9 of 38
10/4/09 at 11:57pm
I love Dickens. I read him as a kid and continue to reread him as an adult. His novels are grand entertainment with spades of the two elements readers will always need somewhere in their literature: love and redemption.

To randomly pick out a Dickens passage, he does seem all the things you accuse him of- padded, mauldlin, out of date. But if you dive into one of his great books, I think Dickens teaches you to read him by inviting in all of your own hopes and fears. Im jaded to the point where not many writers can draw me into their universes, but I get sucked into Dickens with childlike abandon.


My favorite Dickens novels are the ones written in first person- David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House.

I mean, how can you resist 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.


There's a lot more in his books than characitures and grotesques too if you're a discerning reader. Someone put the idea in my head that Great Expectations is a parody of Hamlet, that Pip's forgiveness develops as the converse of Hamlet's revenge, and I think that couldn't be more correct and Dickens must have been completely conscious of it.
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post #10 of 38
10/5/09 at 12:24am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manton View Post
I loved Vanity Fair so much that I read every other Thackeray book, and they all sucked and yet I kept going anyway, hoping against hope. Man, that pissed me off.
Yep; I have tons of those damn expensive Library of America versions of Henry James, including the tongue-swallowing essays and criticism, and I keep waiting and hoping to run across something that I can really get into. What Maisie Knew? Well, she knew that her author was a boring, mincing, snobby f*ck. That being said, I don't think I ever read Vanity Fair. As such, I think I'll go pick up a copy so we can have something to talk about on our next "dinner and a movie" date. j/k
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post #11 of 38
10/5/09 at 7:40am
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Originally Posted by dusty View Post

"There are still two or three Dickens novels that I haven't actually read; but when the time is right I'll pick them up and read them."

How does someone do a PhD dissertation on Dickens without having read everything he wrote?

A contemporary of Dickens noted that Dickens would interact with his characters in his everyday life (walking down the street, for example).

Btw - anyone able to comment on the BBC adaptions collections?

http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Dicken...4739081&sr=1-2
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post #12 of 38
10/5/09 at 11:21am
I think he's like the John Grisham of the 1800's - taking current social issues and making fiction out of them, except that Grisham can at least fabricate a reason why 3-4 characters, who have not been mentioned since the first 1/4 of the book, have come rushing back onto the scene at the end of the book.
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post #13 of 38
10/5/09 at 1:15pm
I love Dickens. I also love Dumas. Take it for what it is, enjoy it.
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post #14 of 38
10/5/09 at 1:17pm
I have already weighed in on this. Cannot stand Dickens.
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post #15 of 38
10/5/09 at 1:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manton View Post
Can anybody stand him anymore? Is he readable in our time? Hopelessly padded? Maudlin? Out of date? Never was any good in the first place?

First Shakespeare, now Dickens? In all good humor, I'm beginning to seriously mistrust your literary judgement.

Dickens is one of those extremely rewarding nineteenth-century novelists who, in this image-saturated age, bore high school kids to tears; but who, read in adulthood, are astonishing and almost embarrassingly rich in intellectual pleasures. I would also put George Eliot in this category.

Leaving aside Bleak House and the other impressive tomes of Dickens' mature phase, if you can read Serjeant Buzfuz's denunciation of Pickwick at the trial in The Pickwick Papers without being delighted, I will begin to doubt your soul.
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