He was the most popular novelist of the Victorian era, a convivial family man who always championed the underdog. But he also harboured dark secrets that only came out after his death. Jenny Hartley recommends the best books by and about Charles Dickens and discusses Dickens the phenomenon, past and present.
Before we discuss the books, youâve been president of the Dickens Fellowship, youâre currently working at the Charles Dickens Museum, and your academic life has focused on Dickens. My first question has to be: how did you get so interested in Charles Dickens?
He was my first love as an author and Iâve been teaching his novels all my life. Academically, Iâve always been a 19th-century person but my first research wasnât on him. Then I worked on a project â I was very interested in the âfallen women,â the outcasts he worked with. He set up a refuge for them in west London, so I researched that to see what it was like and what happened to the women when they left. His idea was that they would emigrate to Australia and start new lives. It was absolutely riveting. Itâs the best thing Iâve ever worked on. Once Iâd done that, I then moved myself into Dickens. I edited his selected letters for Oxford University Press, and that was just brilliant.
I remember being enthralled by an abridged version of David Copperfield as a child. But I was listening to A Tale of Two Cities recently and I guess I find the language a little bit inaccessible. Iâm interested in Charles Dickens, but more because of his social criticism and the historical element. Is that true for you as well?Â
The 19th century is my area so I donât find the language a block, but I know people do. I found that increasingly with the students before I retired. âThe sentences are long. The books are long.â These days people Tweet. Itâs about how you meet the written word, and it is sometimes difficult for people.
âThatâs what characters in Dickens do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world.â
The great thing people say is, âOh I was put off him at school!â which is sad. You can read authors too early. Although, when George Orwell read David Copperfield as a nine-year-old, he said he thought it was written by a child because it has that immediacy, that sense of what it is like to be a child, which I think is wonderful.
Itâs clearly full of jokes. I sometimes think if he were writing now, Iâd find it absolutely hilarious, but because itâs set a hundred years ago, Iâm missing quite a few of the references.
I donât find the humour time-sensitive in that way. There is the social critique you mentioned earlierâhe is always for the underdog, heâs a radicalâand all that is, of course, terribly moving. But the first thing that always gets me is the humour. Itâs pretty sharp, some of it.
So tell me your favourite bit, what makes you laugh the most?
In my book I start with a quote, that bit from Oliver Twist about asking for more. You think, âOh this is going to be so moving!â but then thereâs this reference to the little boy who sleeps next to him, whose father had owned a cook shop. He says he wasnât used to being hungry and that heâs afraid that one night he might happen to eat the boy lying next to him. And you think, âWhat?â Suddenly youâre in the world of cannibals. Just a little thing like that. Lots of people can write social critique and they did, but heâs got that angle: you just canât resist it. Itâs a shame that gets lost because otherwise he gets a little bit earnest and worthy. He was earnest, but he was other things as well.
In your book you refer to the extraordinary phenomenon of Charles Dickensâhe was the most popular novelist of the Victorian age. Why do you think he was so widely read at the time?
Dickens took great pains to be accessible because he published his books in cheap parts. It meant that you only had to have a shilling a month to read those huge novels. Theyâre wonderful stories as well. There were public readings, so, at a lodging house, someone would read and you would just listen. Maybe you couldnât even read yourself, but you could join in. I think the great Dickens phenomenon is about joining in, it is about being part of that whole world of characters. Itâs a sort of aura that youâre partaking of, almost.
In your book, you also put emphasis on Charles Dickensâs theatrical work.
Yes, he enjoyed being part of the group, part of the party. He loved parties. His first love was the theatre. He adored it. He wanted to be an actor. In a way, a lot of his characters are performing themselves. He starts from the outside. I think that feeling of being a live gig does energise him.
âHe used to drink sherry and egg white, all sorts of things to get himself hyped up.â
Later in life, he did these public readings that must have been electric. We call them readings, which makes them sound a bit flat. They were more one-man shows. He memorised them. He had the book there but he didnât use it. They must have been absolutely extraordinary: everybody who went said they were.
And these readings were also what killed him?
Yes, his doctor used to say, âOh you must stop this because of your blood pressure.â In fact, he did die of a stroke so, obviously, his blood pressure was way up there. He overdid it. He did this tour of America in 1867-68 which was the end for him. He died a young man: he was 58.
He wanted to make money, and that was a relatively easy way of doing itâor so he thoughtâbut he also did get energised by it. He used to drink sherry and egg white, all sorts of things to get himself hyped up, and then he had to lie down afterwards, and completely collapse. His doctor told him to stop. He had a farewell tour in London which he actually cut short because he got too ill to finish it. I wish Iâd been there.
Another thing that I didnât know until reading your book is the importance of the illustrations in his books. He paid great attention to those, didnât he?
Yes, very much so, and he would give very minute instructions to his illustrators. He worked with a lot of illustrators, but for most of his books, the main one was Hablot Knight Browne. Pretty well all of the books had two illustrations a month â very detailed, full of character, loads of characters in them, that feeling of plenitude that you get, of a crowdâjust like the novelsâand absolutely brilliant. In a way, it links with his sense of the visual. When he started writing sketches for newspapers and magazines, he was a journalist. He is always observing, observing, observing with a very minute attention to detail.
He was based here in London, and you get that sense of what London was like. As Walter Bagehot said (in 1858), Dickens describes London âlike a special correspondent for posterity.â And he is. You can walk around London with him. How itâs changed! Some of the slum areas he describes with fascinationâaround Leicester Square and Seven Dialsâare quite posh now.
Theyâre no longer DickensianâŚ
So turning to the books youâre recommending, the first one youâve chosen is by Charles Dickens. This is David Copperfield, which was first published in 19 one-shilling instalments in 1849. This is the book Dickens himself called his favourite novel and itâs sort of autobiographical, is that right?
It is, yes. David becomes a writer, and is successful. But itâs more about the opening chapters. Just before he wrote David Copperfield, he wrote what is called an âautobiographical fragment,â which he gave to his friend Forster. Forster later incorporated it into his biography. That fragment is really the opening chapters of David Copperfield.
âThat famous Victorian imperative: âMake âem laugh; make âem cry; make âem wait.â It does all that in that spades.â
Thatâs how we know about his prison episode, when his father was in prison for debt. As happened in those days, the whole family would go to prison with you â all except the two oldest children, Charles and his sister. Charles is put to work in a blacking warehouse, pasting labels on bottles of shoe blacking. It was the most terrible experience for him because he thought heâd been abandoned. He felt completely abandoned. You would, wouldnât you? He was 12 and he just thought, âThis is it.â That trauma comes across extremely vividly in David Copperfield.
But itâs not just about that: itâs about that whole experience of the child growing up, the idyll with your mother. Then she remarries because his father dies, and she remarries this monster, Mr Murdstone. The book has got some of the most wonderful characters in it, the nastiest villains and the most charming villains, like Steerforth, who is completely charming and yet awful.
That famous Victorian imperative: âMake âem laugh; make âem cry; make âem wait.â It does all that in that spades. Itâs no surprise I would choose it because itâs consistently listed among the top novels of all time. Are you enjoying it?
Yes, Iâm listening to it with my children, because we spend quite a lot of time in the car. Itâs 36 hours! But a friend of mine, who teaches Victorian literature at Boston University, told me the Audible narrations of Charles Dickens books are really good so I thought I would give it a go. The narrator for David Copperfield is the actor Richard Armitage, and he puts on voices and accents and makes it quite fun, so the kids are enjoying it too. Do most critics see this as his best novel as well?
I think a lot of people do. His critical reception has changed over the years. During his lifetime, people liked the earliest stuff like The Pickwick Papers, which is very funny. I donât find that so funny. The later ones are the darker ones. David Copperfield is right in the middle of his career.
Freud gave it to his fiancĂŠe. Itâs about the workings of memory. It has these retrospective chapters, where he looks back. To me, thatâs absolutely fascinating.
I think itâs also a very moving book: about how he goes through life, the damage we do, how we grow up. The chapter, for instance, about Davidâs first drunken outing. Heâs drunk in London and goes to the theatre. Itâs so funny. Everybody goes through it, you have to drink too much at some point in your life, donât you? â to know how much you can take. So he goes through those phases, with a great sense of good humour.
He also found it very moving himself, didnât he? In one of his letters he says it made him cry.
Yes, he reread it before he wrote Great Expectations because he didnât want to repeat himself. He said he found it very affecting, which I still do. I remember defrosting a freezer once and I was listening to it on the radio. Tears were dripping off my nose into the freezer. It still moves me. When his mother dies it is really sad, that sense of loss and you have to move on. It is a book about survival, but it is also about what we lose.
You mention Great Expectations (1860-1), which is the second Charles Dickens book youâve chosen. When he first talks about writing this novel, he mentions âa very fine, new, and grotesque idea.â
He also talks about making it funny, because the novel before that had been A Tale of Two Cities. Forster must have said to him something along the lines of, âItâs absolutely wonderful of course, but not many jokes.â So Dickens starts this complete masterpiece.
I feel bad that Iâve chosen his two first person novels: none of the other ones were. In a way, itâs revisiting David Copperfield, but it is very different in tone: sadder, more complex. But he does say to Forster, âI have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funnyâ â about Pip and Joe, who is his stepfather. The opening of Great Expectationsâwith the convict, Magwitchâis striking. There have been brilliant film versions of it.
âIt is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel.â
Itâs a shorter book because it was a weekly. Dickens was running a magazine for the last 20 years of his life and the sales were not doing very well. He had planned Great Expectations as another big novel with monthly instalments. Then he realised he would have to do something to prop up sales of his magazine, so he said, âRight! Iâll change it, Iâll do it like this.â He was really thinking on his feetâhe always didâand maybe the conciseness of it suits it.
It is one of the most perfect novels ever written. Itâs got a wonderful plot. Itâs about good and bad money, you donât know who Pipâs benefactor is, youâre wrong-footedâas he isâall the time. Itâs about terrible damage. Itâs got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. Itâs sad, but also itâs got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. Itâs got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. Itâs just brilliant.
When you say damage, youâre talking about what, in particular?
Iâm thinking about Miss Havisham, whoâs been jilted at the altar. She is one of the most famous images we have of a damaged person, completely stuck at that moment when she was about to be married in her wedding dress. Sheâs completely iconic, everybody knows who she is.
Thatâs what characters in Charles Dickens books do: they step out of the novels and they roam the world. We can recognise quite a lot of them. There arenât that many writers whose characters do that. I would say maybe Shakespeare is the only other one I can think of. But Dickens is the one with the most characters who can survive outside their pages.
His idea of it being a grotesque idea, is that because Pip thinks heâs being supported by Miss Havisham and then has the shock of finding out that his newfound wealth came from someone he despised?
It certainly could be. Of course class is a huge part of that novel. It is all about class, which is one of the great themes of the British novel. Great Expectations is all about working your way up, as Dickens himself did. And, then, when you get there, was it worth it? What have I done on the way up?
Pip is always checking himself and when the blacksmith, Joe, comes to visit him in London he says, âI am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow.â Then he checks himself and says, âI know I was ashamed of him.â It is that honesty, that blurring of âI think, no, I know,â that checking into your feelings, which I think makes the book so powerful.
Do you think it has a happy ending?
It has six different endings. Dickens wrote, originally, a not-happy ending for it, which seems, to me, right. I donât want to give too much away, but it doesnât read like a book written by someone whoâs had all success showered upon him. It reads like a man who has made peace with his life.
But when he showed the ending to his friend Bulwer-Lytton, who was a much less good novelist than Dickens wasâI donât know why Dickens listened to him, but he did do that, he always listened to his readersâBulwer-Lytton said, âItâs too sad, you must change it.â So the ending that we have is deliberately ambiguous. You can read it how you like.
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Some of the great 19th century novels do that. Villette by Charlotte Bronte does that as well. I find that interesting because people always think that they have to have happy endings. Actually some of the most interesting ones donât fit into that box.
Weâve talked quite a lot about Charles Dickens as a person already. Your next choice is a biography: Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin. Itâs quite long, some 500 pages. Then I looked up a Guardian review which talked of âClaire Tomalinâs unrivalled talent for telling a story and keeping a reader enthralled: long as the book is, I wanted more.â Is it a real page turner?
Yes, absolutely. She is such a good biographer. I would read anything by her. Sheâs so intelligent. She is sympathetic to him but she is not blind to him. She had already written a book called The Invisible Woman about Dickensâs affair with Nelly Ternan, a young actress. In this book she writes about his whole life brilliantly, to my way of thinking. There are other biographies â I do think Michael Slaterâs huge one, which is about Dickensâs writing life, is absolutely superb. But Claireâs is shorter and she opens it out more.
âPeople always say, âOh, he was horrible to his wife.â Well he was.â
She gets his energy, his ferocity. He could be callous. People always say, âOh, he was horrible to his wife.â Well he was. He chucked her out of the family home when the youngest child was only 6. He said she was a terrible mother, but we have no evidence of that, at all. So he did behave badly. Iâm afraid that when marriages break down, people do.
She doesnât blink that, but, at the same time, she does have this sense of a man who wants to do good, who believes that he can do good, and who, above all, is committed to his writing â which he absolutely was. She ends the book with this wonderful image of him writing late into the night. Sometimes he would ask the office boy to bring a bucket of water and he would put his hands and his head in it and then go on writing. That was his focus.
What do you think drove him?
Heâd always loved stories. Thereâs a wonderful bit in David Copperfield about his childhood reading â all the characters who came to join him in his solitude after his mother made this horrible remarriage. He was always that bookish child. I suppose I thinkâand Claire Tomalin does as wellâthat thereâs this thing called genius. You donât really know where it comes from, but it just alights.
His desire to help the poor, thatâs driven by the fact he suffered personally, isnât it?
Definitely, that sense of, âThere but for the grace of God, go I.â If he hadnât been yanked out of it, he could have been one of those children on the streets. He was a compulsive walker, and knew the streets of London like nobody else, he says. And he would see those children, those young people on his walks. He often walked at night. He knew that it was a very precarious thing. Itâs that sense of precariousnessâI could be on the streets, I could be in prisonâthat led him to help the women at Urania Cottage, which he helped set up. That sense of, âYes, that could be me.â And also, that you could help them, that itâs not irrevocable, they can be brought back.
So how much of on an impact did he have in terms of improving peopleâs lives?
His big ally in all this was Angela Burdett-Coutts. She was a philanthropist and inherited a share of Coutts bank, so she was very wealthy. They were friends. They joined forces on her causes, like the Ragged Schools, which were schools for the very poor. She was his partner in Urania Cottage. How much influence he had, you can never tell, but people said that he was one of the great influences of the time.
âHe believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people.â
If you think how popular A Christmas Carol was, and still is. Thatâs about helping the poor and the âworthy poorâ as they were known then. You should be decent.
And examine yourself at Christmas â because we all have elements of Scrooge.
Exactly so. And the idea of instant conversion, of New Yearâs resolutions, that we can turn ourselves around. Itâs a hugely popular book. He was a Christian, in a non-doctrinaire sense. He believed in the values of Christianity, of helping your neighbour and the essential goodness of people, really.
You emphasize Christmas in your own book about Dickens.
Yes, thereâs a bit about Christmas because he is so associated with Christmas. When he died, a girl who worked in Covent Garden asked, âWill Father Christmas die too?â Even now youâll find productions of A Christmas Carol everywhere at Christmas. Thereâs a wonderful muppets version.
Why are Charles Dickens books so associated with Christmas, is it because A Christmas Carol was so popular at the time?
Yes, partly. It also coincided with Christmas becoming more commercialised. Christmas trees came in in the 1840s. Prince Albert, who came from Germany, brought some Christmas traditions with him â like Christmas cards. There had always been a Christmas holiday, but a lot of the rituals we associate with Christmas really start to build up at that time. He did Christmas books after A Christmas Carol and other people did too. I donât think there was much of a tradition of it before then.
Why do you think Charles Dickensâs books have been performed so much and in so many different ways?Â
He gives you characters who are very welcoming to inhabit. They are very big. With Scrooge, you can inhabit the miser and he is melodramatic. His characters have that hugeness of melodrama, that emotional affect â because melodrama is very emotional. You root for people: the goody and the baddy. He deliberately embraces that popular form.
I think my first introduction to Dickens wasnât a book, but a production of Oliver Twist.
It goes back a long way doesnât it? I saw A Tale of Two Cities with Dirk Bogarde when I was at school. That was so exciting.
Your next book is The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, which you edited and came out in 2012. I thought he had burned all his letters?
He burned all the letters that were sent to him, but obviously you canât burn letters that youâve sent to other people â because you havenât got them anymore. But he said he would have burned those too, if he could have. He had a huge bonfire in 1860, just after his marriage collapsed. One critic said it must have been the most expensive bonfire of all time. Just think of all the people who were writing to him. He knew everyone.
He adored writing letters. He said he wrote about a dozen a day. To get a letter from him was like getting a gift and you would keep it. There are letters, in that collection, from chimney sweeps, from clock menders. Theyâre always funny, with jokes in them. Weâve got over 14,000 but there must have been many more. We know of whole collections that were destroyed, in things like the Blitz, for instance. Ones to his daughter Katey went up in a warehouse fire.
âOther men in his circle kept mistresses but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Valuesâ
The first letter is from when heâs gone back to school after the blacking warehouse. Heâs only about 13, and itâs to a friend about borrowing a dictionary. Itâs got a joke about a wooden leg. Dickens adored wooden legs. There are loads of joke about wooden legs in his letters and novels. We probably donât find wooden leg jokes funny anymore because weâre too PC, but he just thought they were very funny. Itâs a bit of your body but it is not you. Where are the boundaries of the body? That kind of thing intrigues him. Theyâve got this letter at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. Itâs just a tiny fragment, but it is amazing to me that it survived â a letter from a 13-year-old school boy. Why would you keep that? Itâs just a note. But it survived and there it is.
He was writing letters continually until his death. Weâve got letters that he wrote the day he died. Apart from that autobiographical fragment, he never wrote an autobiography. He said he would one day, but he never did. He was quite a secretive person. He didnât tell his children about the blacking warehouse or the prison or anything like that.
He didnât tell them?
No, it was a secret. Well, I can see that if youâve been in prison, youâre not keen to talk about it, necessarily. So his children didnât know about it until after he died. Heâd given that autobiographical fragment just to Forster, he didnât give it to anybody else. I think his wife knew, but nobody else.
So itâs through his letters that you are given these wonderful glimpses, itâs Dickens by Dickens, if you like. Youâre really up close to his life, which is lived so intensely. The amount of invitations! You could have a selection which was just invitations. One of my favourite letters to Forster just says something like, âCome at 6, chops await you.â He was such a convivial man.
How can somebody whoâs writing a dozen letters a day be secretive?
About his personal life. He kept Nelly, his mistress, secret. Other men in his circle kept mistresses, but he had to keep that side of his life secret because he was Mr. Family Values. So he was living a double life, towards the end of his life.
So at the time, people reading David Copperfield didnât know that Dickens was writing partly from personal experience?
They had no idea. It was a novel, heâs just made it up. It only came out a couple of years after he died, when Forster wrote a biography of him. Dickens knew Forster was going to write it â heâd sort of appointed him. Forster says that now the world will know that behind this great genius lay this very precarious and difficult childhood.
Also, in Dickensâs will, the first legacy is to Ellen Ternan. So he knew that that would come out too after he died. It doesnât say âto my mistressâ but he leaves 1000 pounds to her. So people would ask, âwho is she?â For many years, Dickensians would say she was a âfamily friendâ or something like that, but gradually the evidence built up till it is, now, absolutely certain that she was his mistress.
Did he live with her after he left his wife?
It was a secret life. He had this wonderful family house in Gadshill in Kent, which heâd always wanted to buy. When he was a child, theyâd go past this house and his father said, âOh one day you might earn enough to live there.â This was the myth, anyway, that Dickens told. So he did buy this house and you can visit it in Kent. He also had a flat above the office in London.
But he also had a series of houses that he rented under the name Charles Tringham for Nelly to live in and he would visit her. They were in Slough and in Peckham. He worked the railway timetables. He wanted quick journeys up and down from London. And they had trips to Paris. They had a house they lived in outside Boulogne.
So he continued living with his wife?
No, she was expelled in 1858. From then on, Dickens lived either above the office in Wellington Street in London or in Gadshill, where his children lived. They had had a big London house, which they gave up the lease of, in Tavistock Square. It was a very divided life. In the novel he wrote in 1859, ATale of Two Cities, he talks about how we all have secret lives. He talks about how when he goes into a city, how amazing it is to think of all these secrets in every house. You bet!
He exchanges letters with Queen Victoria as well, doesnât he? Or at least her adviser.
When you think how famous he was actually, he wasnât honoured in the way that we would honour writers now. Thereâs a wonderful quote about Oliver Twist in her diary, sheâs trying to get her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to read it and he says âOh no, I donât like such things.â But much later, right towards the end of his life, her equerry arranges an audience with Queen Victoria. Heâs such a radical, but, on the other hand, he was obviously very pleased to go. There seems to have been a suggestion that he would have been given some honour, but he died quite soon after.
What do you make of the letters he writes to his children?
He loved them when they were little, and when they get olderâŚitâs very difficult to have a famous father. He would say things like, âWhen I was your age, I had to earn my living.â He obviously started work very early, as a solicitorâs clerk and a journalist. He sends a couple of them out to the colonies. They went to Australia. One of them was only 16 when he went. I think it was a great pressure on them, really. I think it was easier to be a daughter than a son.
I read the one where heâs writing about his son Sydney saying, âOh, heâs as good as dead.â
He was the one who went to sea. He writes about him so affectionately and so movingly when he was younger. People think heâs trying to write Sydney off but he had been ill. He did die soon after Dickens.
I got that impressionâthat he was sickâbut it was an odd way for somebody to be writing about a sick child.
He could be very callous. He was a dropper. He would drop his friends just like that. Particularly when there was trouble with Catherine, his wife. If you took Catherineâs side, youâd had it. And he dropped Thackeray, though they made up and became friends again. Thackeray was a rival, obviously.
As your last book youâve chosen a work of criticism: Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (2006), which says, in the introduction, that itâs an exciting time to be studying Charles Dickens.
Iâve chosen a collection of essays because it gives you lots of different ways into Dickens. It includes some of the best critics who are writing at the moment: the editors, John Bowen and Robert Patten are both excellent. These are some of the best Dickens critics collected in one volume. You also get all these different aspects, like âPsychoanalyzing Dickensâ by Carolyn Dever.
If you were going to read one critical book, this would be a good one to have. Some critical stuff can weigh you down a bit, but this one is written very accessibly. Each person writes very clearly. They are also excited by Dickens â and that comes across really well. Particularly, for instance, some aspects that had maybe got a bit muted, like the visual that we were talking about earlier.
Is there one essay in the book that you particularly love?
I think Rosemarie Bodenheimer is an absolutely terrific critic of Charles Dickens. Her chapter is, âDickens and the Writing of a Life.â She talks about the energy of Dickens and uses the letters as a lens to look at the novels. Sheâs done a whole book on that and she does it quite briefly here, but she writes about him really intelligently. She looks back through past critics. Some of the best ones were actually novelists themselves. George Gissing, the novelist, wrote terribly well about Dickens and so did GK Chesterton. They really get him, and I think she does as well.
Because he was quite extraordinary. It was Peter Ackroyd who wrote about âthe essential strangeness of the manâ and I think a lot of these critics get into that in different ways. He really is a novelist like no other, and, in a way, you need lots of critics to give you different angles on that and, in this book, they do.
A lot of people have criticised Dickens, because he canât do interior, he canât do psychology. Yes, he is not George Eliot, but he does it from the outside in. So he gives you peopleâs tics, their way of behaving. We talk about body language quite happily now, but Victorians didnât. We understand how to read somebody from the outside. Thatâs a great gift that he has given to us, if you like. Malcolm Andrews talks about that really well. So you can read a character by what they are wearing, how they speak, the little tics of behaviour. Other novelists pay tribute to Dickens for doing that.
I donât see why it should necessarily be better to be inside someoneâs head rather than looking in from the outside.
Weâve had a whole thing of going into peopleâs heads, George Eliot gave us peopleâs inside, as did Henry Jamesâat great lengthâthe minute turns of thought. Dickens didnât do that. Maybe now we can see it again, but of course his length is against him. If you were to give someone an 800-page novel, they would flinch.
The word âpicaresqueâ comes up quite a bit in works of criticism on Dickens.
Yes, the idea of journeying, being episodic. I actually think he had a much tighter hold on the plot than that. Sometimes the plots are a bit ridiculousâ these wills that suddenly turn up, somebodyâs third grandchild has inheritedâbut I think he wants to show that there is a plan to the world. Maybe it goes back to religion, but there is a shape and a meaning.
Dickens, I suppose, went out of fashion because he says, âNo, we are all connected. In Bleak House he famously says, âWhat can be the connection between all these people in London?â And he shows there is a connection, a moral connection. In that book, the connection is partly through disease. We can affect each other that way so we are connected in a very real way. The character at the bottom of society can infect the character at the top of society, and our actions do have consequences.
The word âpicaresqueâ suggests something that goes on and on like a soap opera. His books have been compared to soap operas. Which, in a way, is great. They do have that melodramatic aspect, itâs a popular form. But they also have shape and a universe and a meaning. Everything belongs, everything fits together.
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