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Charles Dickens is the greatest of the Victorian novelists. One of the pleasures of having reached my advancing age is that I have had ample time to read and re-read nearly everything Dickens wrote. A short list for getting started on such a project appears later in this article.
Dickens is not, to our eyes, particularly easy reading — both by reason of his extensive vocabulary and the complications of his periodic sentence structures. (By the way, diligent reading of Dickens is a far better guarantee of high verbal SAT and GRE scores than all the drilling for vocabulary tests or Kaplan prep books — take note, all students.) But the effort of reading Dickens is well rewarded, and the ratio between effort and pleasure can rapidly become heavily one-sided in favor of pleasure.
The man was a genius. Only a genius could be as funny and inventive as Dickens, as capable of generating fascinating character after character, and as deeply insightful as to how the world could, realistically, become a much better place than it was in his day and, alas, in ours. He is, among other things, a genius at naming characters: Squeers (evil headmaster of Dotheboys Hall), Mr. Veneer (a Victorian parallel to some we've heard of in our own age of financial bubbles), the snobbish Mr. Pecksniff, or the famously “'umble servant” Uriah Heep. A short comparison of Dickens' names with those of Henry James can be a quick test of which novelist is the cleverer. Dickens would never have named the lovely young heroine of James' “The Spoils of Poynton” Fleda Vetch (rhymes with retch).
Many of Dickens' novels were written in monthly installments and published alone — 32 pages, with two illustrations (themselves remarkable) and plenty of advertisements. Dickens would take a running start-say, three installments — and then begin publishing, always only three or even two months ahead of his deadline — a hectic schedule.
There are advantages for readers in the installment arrangement. Reading one of Dickens' longer novels (usually about 850 pages) can easily be broken into the divisions of the original installments. It may take a bit of calculating to find exactly where each installment ends and the next begins, but it soon becomes clear that everything any writer of serials ever learned was learned from Dickens.
Not all of Dickens' novels are 850 page “loose and baggy monsters.” “Hard Times,” “Oliver Twist,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations” are all considerably shorter. My preference is for the much longer novels, because they give full play to the almost epic proportions of the author's imagination. My favorites are “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Little Dorrit,” and (Dickens' masterpiece) “Our Mutual Friend.” For first-time readers of Dickens, however, it probably makes sense to start with “Great Expectations” or one of the other shorter ones.
Nearly all of Dickens' novels are also available in audio or CD. Several have been given superb treatment in film; my favorite is “Little Dorrit,” with Derek Jacobi.
During the course of the recent film “Hereafter,” we learn that the character played by Matt Damon has a picture of Dickens on his wall, goes to sleep listening to Derek Jacobi reading Dickens, tours Dickens' house in London, and excitedly goes to hear Derek Jacobi reading Dickens at a bookfair. I suspect that either Matt Damon or Clint Eastwood (the producer/screenwriter/director of “Hereafter”) or perhaps both mean it when the Matt Damon character says to a young woman: “He's a genius. There's Shakespeare, but then there's Dickens!”
Dickens is not, to our eyes, particularly easy reading — both by reason of his extensive vocabulary and the complications of his periodic sentence structures. (By the way, diligent reading of Dickens is a far better guarantee of high verbal SAT and GRE scores than all the drilling for vocabulary tests or Kaplan prep books — take note, all students.) But the effort of reading Dickens is well rewarded, and the ratio between effort and pleasure can rapidly become heavily one-sided in favor of pleasure.
The man was a genius. Only a genius could be as funny and inventive as Dickens, as capable of generating fascinating character after character, and as deeply insightful as to how the world could, realistically, become a much better place than it was in his day and, alas, in ours. He is, among other things, a genius at naming characters: Squeers (evil headmaster of Dotheboys Hall), Mr. Veneer (a Victorian parallel to some we've heard of in our own age of financial bubbles), the snobbish Mr. Pecksniff, or the famously “'umble servant” Uriah Heep. A short comparison of Dickens' names with those of Henry James can be a quick test of which novelist is the cleverer. Dickens would never have named the lovely young heroine of James' “The Spoils of Poynton” Fleda Vetch (rhymes with retch).
Many of Dickens' novels were written in monthly installments and published alone — 32 pages, with two illustrations (themselves remarkable) and plenty of advertisements. Dickens would take a running start-say, three installments — and then begin publishing, always only three or even two months ahead of his deadline — a hectic schedule.
There are advantages for readers in the installment arrangement. Reading one of Dickens' longer novels (usually about 850 pages) can easily be broken into the divisions of the original installments. It may take a bit of calculating to find exactly where each installment ends and the next begins, but it soon becomes clear that everything any writer of serials ever learned was learned from Dickens.
Not all of Dickens' novels are 850 page “loose and baggy monsters.” “Hard Times,” “Oliver Twist,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations” are all considerably shorter. My preference is for the much longer novels, because they give full play to the almost epic proportions of the author's imagination. My favorites are “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Little Dorrit,” and (Dickens' masterpiece) “Our Mutual Friend.” For first-time readers of Dickens, however, it probably makes sense to start with “Great Expectations” or one of the other shorter ones.
Nearly all of Dickens' novels are also available in audio or CD. Several have been given superb treatment in film; my favorite is “Little Dorrit,” with Derek Jacobi.
During the course of the recent film “Hereafter,” we learn that the character played by Matt Damon has a picture of Dickens on his wall, goes to sleep listening to Derek Jacobi reading Dickens, tours Dickens' house in London, and excitedly goes to hear Derek Jacobi reading Dickens at a bookfair. I suspect that either Matt Damon or Clint Eastwood (the producer/screenwriter/director of “Hereafter”) or perhaps both mean it when the Matt Damon character says to a young woman: “He's a genius. There's Shakespeare, but then there's Dickens!”
