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Charles Dickens 4/16/2016 4:09:32 PM
The leader of one of the writers' groups I attend at the Toronto library asked me a question before our meeting started: "What guilty reading pleasures do you admit to?" If I'd been in the relaxed spirit of the question, I would have said something like -- news items on the Internet I check several times a day during breaks from my work. Of course, who ever said the news brings a refreshing break? That's another matter.
The longer I took to answer the question, the more serious I became. "Charles Dickens," I finally said. My reply provoked a brief discussion between two members of the group: Dickens portrayed his society at many levels...he is responsible for never-ending Christmas carols in our malls every year from some time in November to the end of December.
Searching my memory, I believe I read seven of Dickens' novels after I discovered his work. My parents kindly gave me a set of his fiction -- which I still have -- minus only the unfinished Edwin Drood. Reading half his novels was a liberating experience for me, for I saw in his work a wider point of view than most writers before or since have aimed for, not to mention his descriptive power and his gift for creating memorable characters.
I know that Dickens has numerous detractors who point out sentimentality, love for coincidence, and intellectual shallowness.
Who is perfect? I like Dickens' range, his courage and imagination, his good will, and his understanding of people in ordinary life. He didn't strive to escape the world or shrink it but present the whole of it, good and bad, from a sane, humorous, balanced point of view.
In later years, I haven't had so much time to read 500 page novels and I wanted to explore other writers, so my experience of Dickens lately has mostly been with audio abridgements and videos -- an old BBC Bleak House with Denholm Elliott and Diana Rigg is one of my favorites. I've been listening recently to tapes of Dombey and Son and Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens' power comes through even in truncated form.
Without knowing very much about his life, I ask if there is a common-sense explanation for how he did so much so well. Probably not. Still, we can figure our certain things without great knowledge. He was gifted with enormous talent. He had as much energy as he needed; he knew how to work hard and focus his attention; he could tell the difference between what's important and what's trivial; he had an instinct for what the public of his day liked; he received plenty of encouragement along the way. Most especially, he wanted to tell the stories he did. Anything that stood in his way wasn't there for long. As a result milions of readers have been pleased, and no doubt he was, too.
