Charles Dickens - Classic Or Dud?

heartened by how much the internet hates 'hard times' tbh.

just went looking for a quote i used in my leaving cert, along the lines of 'nothing can be as damaging to the reputation of a truly great author than to insist his worst work is amongst his best', but cant find it

Anyway, lol dickens, basically. I'd rather read a lifetime of douglas adams' shopping lists than another page of overstretched apostraphe-laden caricature from this lumpen hack

Maybe Hard Times is amongst his worst, idk I stopped reading after being seriously bummed out by the first chapter. Thoroughly enjoyed Great Expectations tho, Our Mutual Friend is all time yoga flame and am gonna reread soon, Bleak House and Sale of Two Titties on the to-do list. And having slogged through Dombey and Son I do know what bad Dickens is like.

Had to do Our Mutual Friend for A levels and couldn't be bothered with it, but ended up reading 5 or 6 of his novels in the Summer before starting uni and loved them. Overly sentimental but classic all the same.

hard times is the worst dickens novel i've read. he's not a hack; i'll kill you!

well i got an a+ in that exam so *somebody* agrees with me

"hard slog" as we used to call it in school. a terrible book esp. one to get students interested in literature. from what i remember it was unbearably dreary. i liked/like "great expectations" (and "oliver twist") though. his plots might be total soap opera but i cant deny that he writes really good charachters.

love love charles dickens, i've found something to enjoy in every one of the books i've read, even the ones that weren't my favorite (pickwick papers, nicholas nickleby). i don't remember much about hard times (read it in college) but i didn't dislike it. iirc his satiric and moralizing tendencies were more prominent in that one, maybe insultingly so? i can see why people might dislike it in that case.

still trying to reconcile why i hated fanny price in "mansfield park" but i love esther summerson in "bleak house." they have roughly the same personality type (victorian mary sues practically), though i guess fanny price is saddled with religiosity in a way that esther isn't.

also it probably helps that dickens has a wider range of characters and places to jump to in between esther's scenes, while austen's setting was basically the one house.

look, what we want is: facts. everything after that in HT is justified by the best opener in the world

dickens is pretty wonderful. the first two pages of 'bleak house' alone contain some of the most vivid descriptive writing in the english language.

I think his worst vices - sentimentality and overly caricatured characters - only get really toxic when in combination. Captain Ned et al in Dombey and Son a particularly bad example of this, Pip's father in Great Expectations kinda crosses the line too. WKIW any number of his pantomime villains though, since they have no interest in tugging at yr heartstrings.

xxp the opening of HT had me nodding in agreement, is the problem.....

xposts to ledge: can't really recommend Pail of Two Pities (like Hard Times, best used for beating high school students over the head with), but Bleak House is pretty crucial for an Our Mutual Friend fan. Check also Little Dorrit, starring yet another Victorian Mary Sue but redeemed by fuckloads of angst, scheming, and barely repressed rage on Dickens' part. Read all this in college with an unreconstructed old Freudian who helpfully pointed out all sorts of weird subtext--say, David Copperfield wanting to run Uriah Heep through "with a red hot poker"--that helpfully undercuts the treacle on the surface (well, when you're looking for it).

i have just read my first Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, and loved it. am about to watch the dvds starring her from Ashes to Ashes and her from Brookside.

have just bought two others (they are £2 each if you buy the wordsworth editions and free on the Kindle / web) - Bleak House and Hard Times.

(was trying to avoid things i knew the plots of, which ruled out a lot of the obvious. am hoping the above are going to be as dark as OMF was)

200th anniversary of his birth next year.

i'd go with bleak house if you liked our mutual friend

will move BH to the top of the list, chz (and to bentelec).

i just finished david copperfield, which seemed to take forever. parts of it are great (esp. the part where he has friends over for dinner, gets really drunk, falls down the stairs, and embarrasses himself at the theater) but my modern mind just has trouble with something that was so obviously written to be serialized. it's way too long and too repetitive. also suffers from a recurring character who's supposed to be overly verbose, which is theoretically funny until you have to read his intentionally overly verbose speeches and letters throughout the book. i read great expectations last year and liked it a lot more, still like the pickwick papers the best.

aw that's one of the best ones! i always recommend it to people; think it's more accessible than bleak house.

david copperfield i mean.

would read david copperfield's verbose speeches till the end of time

there's some crazy stuff in his wikipedia page, like how he was in some massive train accident where every train car except for the one he was in derailed off some train, and he got the people involved in the court case over the derailment not to call him to testify, because he had been traveling with his mistress and her mother.

i don't think i have a modern mind tbh

i wasn't referring to david copperfield as the overly verbose one, i was referring to mr. micawber

haha okay

also it was weird because david copperfield hates uriah heep basically from the moment he sees him, but heep doesn't actually do anything evil until much later in the book, so he basically just hates this guy because he's ugly and creepy for a long time.

i thought you meant the narration

wow, i was totally not expecting 10 years of concentrated dickens hate when i opened up this thread!

personally i've never actually read the guy, but my sister swears by him. but then she loves All Things Victorian so i'm not sure that actually means much

She loves corsets and not having the right to vote?

(first part of OMF dvd very true to book. only slight diff was the lamles - first veneering party, chapter 2, is their wedding in the dvd but is later in the book. grainy and murky though)

grew up 3 miles from an old coaching inn in tewkesbury that was mentioned in the pickwick papers. is now a wetherspoons...

http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-royal-hop-pole

Dickens Journals Online (djo.org.uk) was in the papers yesterday asking for help digitising all the issues of Dickens' weekly papers that he put out (they've been OCR'd, quite well in fact, they just need the odd OCR error fixing and hyphenations removed and dashes added and the odd foreign character). anyway, i signed up, did the first 3 pages of my 20 but the 4th timed out when i submitted it and the site hasn't responded since...

actually, they just put up a message. which is odd because i've just been reading about the cause on slashdot...

"Our hosting company experienced the most unfortunate hardware failure issue (thunder strike), and by there calculations we should be back on-line in, worst case scenario, 48 hours. If you are interested in the actual event, then please follow this link: http://status.aws.amazon.com/.";

ooh, this is neat to hear about! i signed up for the crowd-sourced transcription of jeremy bentham's papers last year, but the dude's indecipherable scrawl cowed me.

done my 20 pages - http://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-iii/10183.html

bit of a story by Charles James Lever (who?)
first person report of an ostrich hunt
a bit about london 500 years ago
William Gurney (a poem)
first person report of being stuck down a crevasse
and a short story called Goyon The Magnificent

and according to the stats they are now 0 uncorrected, 969 in progress, 43 waiting for approval and 87 complete

oddly, there are no credits on the stories, only "Conducted by Charles Dickens" on every spread.

Literary detective work -

Nearby, Richardson discovered the home of a sculptor derided by locals as a miser, the premises of two tradesmen named Goodge and Marney, and a local cheesemonger called Marley – "so suggestive of Scrooge and Marley", she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/01/charles-dickens-real-character-names

ended up doing 3 whole issues of those dickens periodicals mentioned above, none of which had a dickens story in them...

just finished Bleak House as well, which is full of locations around Chancery Lane. i should go and have a walk around.

Dickens brought up near a place called Black House, so suggestive of Bleak House.

used to do a paper round for his local newsagent The Cold Furiosity Shoppe iirc

I just finished Bleak House as well funnily enough, I work just across from Lincoln's Inn Fields and a lot of it has barely changed.

Loads of Dickensian bicentennial stuff going on at the moment. Anyone seen the Dickensian London exhibition at the Museum of London yet? Apparently the art and photography are fantastic.

I've never actually read a full Dickens, but I've watched umpteen adaptations. Think the BBC adaptation of Bleak House was a masterpiece in itself, as was Little Dorrit.

How does his writing compare to say, Wilkie Collins's Woman In White?

They're completely different, it would be a bizarre comparison to make.

only because they were contemporaries and collaborators... i heard Dickens's prose is more "old fashioned" than Collins's.

Dickens is rich and leisurely and darkly funny and then just dark. Sometimes sentimental but not as much as people make out. You have to enjoy his narrative voice and be comfortable with the fact that he doesn't really deal in Flaubertian realism. But I think you can work out after 50 or so pages whether you're gonna dig him or not, and if not, well nobody's making you. Unless you're at school or something.

"Old fashioned" is a nonsense btw, imo the great 18th century prose writers read less "old-fashioned" than yr high Victorians. Dickens feels like a meeting between the two eras to me.

He means "is it difficult to read?" Collins is a lot easier to read and also creepier, but Dickens isn't exactly difficult, although his prose is a lot more florid. Don't expect great psychological insight into most of his characters.

Stephen Fry (I think) was championing David Copperfield - is that a good starting point? You can assume I like Dickens's characters/storytelling/sentiments, but I'm a slow-and-steady but easily distracted reader. Woman In White was fairly easy to read though and I made it through the whole thing, so that's why I was making a comparison.

Sometimes sentimental but not as much as people make out.

Dombey and Son is lathered in the stuff.

i started with things i didn't know the stories of, hadn't seen the films of. Our Mutual Friend was recommended by people and was great, dark and with lots of depth. Tale Of Two Cities will be my 4th in under a year (the other two being Hard Times and Bleak House).

just pick one, read the first chapter online (gutenberg.org, multiple other places). then pick up the wordsworth edition from amazon (£1.99)

David Copperfield is as good a starting point as any, although it is very long it's more linear than, say, Bleak House, which goes all over the place.

(Dombey is probably after that, despite ledge's warnings)

What books haven't had any or many TV/film adaptions? "Martin Chuzzlewit"? "Barnaby Rudge"?

Can vaguely remember Tom Wilkinson as Mr Pecksniff in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. Or maybe I've got the books messed up.

dombey has some nice railway stuff in it, but not much. it's also the thickest of his books by some way.

chuzzlewit is the least filmed of his books (and historical, set in 1780s rather than the 1800s. the only other is Two Cities).

Dumbey was right there!

> chuzzlewit is the least filmed of his books (and historical, set in 1780s rather than the 1800s. the only other is Two Cities).

what i've done there is confusing martin chuzzlewit with barnaby rudge. ignore.

13th anniversary of me finishing Our Mutual Friend for the first time, according to Facebook.

Y'all are deluded about Dombey. It's really good, mostly.

i'm finally on the homestretch of Little Dorrit. it's been a gas so far, and i'm trying to enjoy myself as things are starting to fall into place and there's finally some pay off after 700 pages of insinuation and anticipation. but i can't help but feel that, at this newly brisk pace, Dickens has fumbled on one or two plot points. i feel sort of ambivalent about the book overall, although like i said it's been quite fun to read

the first few chapters were the most "i am getting paid by the word" Dickens i've read so far, but happily that sense went away before too long

i need to re-read this, and a few more. the first half is amongst my favourites.

(i walked from bleeding heart yard to the marshalsea one April, although there's nothing much of the prison left, but some of the roads around there are named after the characters)

was only today 30+ years after I first read it that I realised that I had been internally pronouncing the name of the school in nn incorrectly. I had been reading it to rhyme with Sotheby's the auction house when of course it's do-the-boys!! why this only clicked on my 3rd reading I dunno.

Have been trying to get through Our Mutual Friend for some time, with lots of stops and starts. I love Dickens but have found it less enjoyable than I was expecting...

Need to go back to Pickwick Papers, which I read every few years and thoroughly enjoy each time.

OMF is probably my favourite out of the five or six I've read (OMF, GE, DC, D&S, AToTC, maybe OT.) I want to read more, and re-read at least two of those but so many books, so little time...

OMF his last and best, apart from his most autobiographical, DC, although I haven't read them all

But it can often be a hard trek from beginning to end with plenty of longueurs along the way. Not as bad as Tolkien though

OMF also my desert island dickens, thick enough to keep you busy for a while and also not something you already know from films.

Except I saw the (excellent) BBC adaptation before I read it, and the bit where (spoilers since someone in the thread is still reading it) Bradley drowns Riderhood, saying "I'll hold you living, and I'll hold you dead" is often in my thoughts.

i'm looking to read Hard Times next (appealing because it's his shortest) or the Old Curiosity Shop (i've read his first three so it seems natural to read #4). on the other hand, i'm tempted to re-read PP before starting either of those

PP and Sketches would be the only two of the lot i don't think I'd enjoy rereading

the only major thing i think i haven't read is his children's history of England, which might actually be useful.

I recently tried to reread PP, which I had enjoyed the first time, but just didn't care enough

Hard Times is fine. Being shorter than the others has exactly the upsides and downsides that you might expect.

OMF also my desert island dickens, thick enough to keep you busy for a while and also not something you already know from films.

ledge, is the BBC adaption from 1982?

mine is the one from 1998 with anna friel and keeley hawes

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0144727/

yep that one.

Has anyone seen the Great Expectations adaptation with Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson.

never heard of it! when was it released?

in other news my friend & are trying to read The Chimes for xmas bookclub but god it is a slog. Incredibly waffly.

2012

Dickens is incredibly or maybe not so incredibly uneven.

Like all too often he really needed an editor.

yeah apparently he liked The Chimes more than Christmas Carol & it was more popular at thd time idk … i’m finding it pretty bloody impenetrable myself

that 2011 GE was the bbc's 3-parter for the 200th anniversary. it is solid, iirc, unlike the 2023 version (colman as haversham) with the added gunfights.

there's also a 2012 film with Helena bonham carter which i don't think I've seen.

havisham

I've seen the BBC one, don't remember too much about it but it was good, iirc also.

(the 2023 was also bbc. peaky blinders remix)