Charles Dickens - Classic Or Dud?

You get endless tour books and bus guides talking about little unspoiled pockets of Victorian London. Dickens would be appalled - after all his London was pretty much spoiled to start off with - that was partially what he was writing about. So we get little cobbled alleys with crap old shitester pubs down them being preserved instead of the march of progress which is what London is all about.

I dislike Dickens because of all of this baggage which has been dumped upon him and the fact that he was the pinicle of what my father told me to read as a child - which was rather dull to a nine year old. I like the ideas and themes within Dickens though, but I hate the idea of anyone defining London (unless that person is me).

However I think its thoroughly admirable that his face is on the back of a tenner - my favourite denomination of money.

And what's with this thing whereby you're either a Trollope fan or a Dickens fan? Kind of a Victorian Blur v Oasis, which I remember my mother and an unfortunate English teacher re-enacting one parent's day. Give me misery (Hardy) or lunacy (_Sartor Resartus_) any day.

I also didn't appreciate the fact that the awesome ending of _A Tale Of Two Cities_ was saddled with the oppressively boring first two- thirds of the book. It took me two and a half weeks to finish that book, and I read the last third in 45 minutes.

Charles Dickens = MASSIVE DUD. Give me someone witty (ie, Swift or Voltaire) any day.

I've got a whole list of "classic" authors who I think are garbage. The two biggest ones are Upton Sinclair and Joseph Conrad. I absolutely loathed both "Heart of Darkness" and "The Jungle".

(Ooh, NOW I've gone and done it!)

I've got to admit that Dickens is probably also my favourite 19th Century writer. Intensely evocative, well-written, descriptive, socially evocative, voluminous, picaresque ... all those adjectives of praise. I know what Chuck D *meant* when he wrote "Fuck you, Miss Havisham!" and I applaud his motivations of increasing knowledge of the self rather than simply an imposed official culture, but in that case he went way too far.

Yeah, classic rather than dud, without question.

Anyhow, Dickens is yucky IMO. Your mileage may vary, but I tend to hate these big sweepingly generalized class warfare "Ooh, we're so English" novels that came out of the Victorian era (and quite frankly have a tendency to come out today - what the hell? It's either overly self-concious "We're NOT so English!" stuff or very twee stuff that makes it over these shores with a big splash). Dickens is great if you read it for what it is: a glorified soap opera of the All My Children variety. Quite frankly, if I'm going to read a soap opera, I'll read VC Andrews, because at least then I wouldn't feel like I was pretending I was reading something dreadfully important. The fact that his stuff can be/has been easily made into musicals speaks greatly to why I dislike it.

And the names!!! Jesus.

As for this patience rubbish: so what you're saying is that an entire forum save apparently 3 people are attention deficit disorder victims? Nah. I've got 1,000 times the attention span of Fred, who wrote the "Is he kidding or is he not?" Dicken's Lover entry, and he will tell you so himself. He has no attention at all. So why is he the one posting he loves Dickens while I'm the one who hates him? Patience is irrelevant because I think Dickens is one of the easiest to read writers around; we aren't talking elliptical phrasing and complex structures, he wrote for the people. It's a matter of whether his particular ideas appeal to you.

Re: Influence. Influence can bite my ass. I don't care if someone inspired the greatest thing that ever occurred in my life time or anyone else's: if what you yourself write is slop, I don't care if someone else read it and got inspired to write something brilliant. All that means is you are slop and the other person is immensely talented. I feel the same way about any number of musicians and filmmakers whose work I feel is inferior. I don't care if they influenced my absolute favorite artist - and some of them have - I still think they're sloppy and overrated. Getting by on influence is like getting by on your husband's money: not a good idea.

Influence can bite my ass.

got some anxiety re influence?

He was classic before he moved to LA and started using session proof-readers. After that, Dud.

I remember having to read Great Expectations at school and it was a major slog - mainly due to teaching methods - until the plot twist and then OMGWTF!!!

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

Watching GE again for the first time in ages.

Feel like everything about it is great, except for John Mills that is.

Alec Guinness is awesome though

Don’t care about Valerie Hobson as grown Estella. Much prefer the younger version played by Jean Simmons which was her breakout, star-making role. Don’t know what happened to the young Pip actor, Anthony Wager, who I also liked.

Jean Simmons played Miss Havisham in a later version!

i feel exactly the same about Valerie Hobson

Seems like Jean Simmons’s next role but one was in Black Narcissus!

i feel exactly the same about Valerie Hobson

Seems Valerie Hobson was also in the 1934 version but her scenes were cut.

I just found out today that Francis L. Sullivan was in it too, also playing Mr. Jaggers!

He’s the only actor from GE also in Lean’s OT, although Kay Walsh who played Nancy, at the time Lean’s wife, worked on both in a writing capacity.

Unless I missed something.

Finlay Currie’s Magwitch just dropped in from NSW it’s like a…um,er… breath of fresh air.

Wonder if I am wrong to assume that this stuff was on the telly all the time when you were coming up.

Here’s something else interesting: Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness had originally played their roles a in stage adaption by Guinness which inspired David Lean to make the movie.

Torin Thatcher’s Bentley Drummle also steals every scene he is in.

Valerie Hobson also plays Molly, uncredited.

Ha, I like the way IMDb mentions this.

They also put forward some alleged other casting choices for grownup Estella but I haven’t seen them elsewhere.

Hobson is too bland, not cruel enough i think

the film as a whole is wonderfully dreamlike in places

Yes to both.

Hobson didn’t like her own performance either and had major issues with Lean’s direction.

Also TIL that Chad is the UK version of Kilroy.

And that there was a pre-Code US version of Oliver Twist starring Dickie Moore.

And that Carol Reed was Oliver Reed’s uncle.

lol at this from Wikipedia:

but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the adding: "Reed had assumed 's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian".

Aargh, vanishing links. Need to c+p from different app, sorry.

but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the BFI adding: "Reed had assumed Robert Newton's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian

Robert Donat wanted to play Bill Sikes!

The same guy who did Alec Guinness’s Fagin makeup did the makeup for Chewbacca, Yoda and everybody else is Star Wars: The Original Trilogy.

I guess people might already know about John Howard Davies.

TIL that Notting Hill Gate used to be called Kensington Gravel Pits.

In the US you can also get audiobooks from your library through the apps Libby and Hoopla.

The BBC Radio Drama Collection seem like a pretty enjoyable in-between length from a two hour movie and the whole unabridged books. Listening to the adaption of Great Expectations right now and digging it, Pip is making up what happened at Satis House for Uncle Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe.

Here’s a nice obsolete term from NN I think deserves a comeback: cartel of defiance.

One of the audiobook readers does the voice of Fagin in a way that sounds like Gollum. I am wondering how intentional this is and if it’s kind of circular since Gollum might be based a bit on Fagin.

Using various libraries and non-Naxos subscriptions I can easily listen to multiple audiobooks of NN for each week’s reading which may say seem like overkill but I actually find helpful for absorbing.

Dickens really was a (nick)name-generating machine. It’s fun to know that before the hotblooded OMF schoolmaster was Bradley Headstone he was Amos Deadstone. He gave his kids nicknames like Lucifer Box, Chickenstalker, Ocean Spectre, Sampson Brass and Plorn.

Ocean Spectre was also Hoshen Peck and finally Little Admiral.

Sampson Brass was also Skittles

Forgot about Mild Glo’ster.

And Young Skull.

Master Floby

Plorn had many longer variations.

Plornishghenter.

Plornish-Maroon, with or without hyphen, the same way Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who Plorn was named after) used a hyphen but his estranged wife, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, didn’t.

Plornishmaroontigoonter

https://daily.jstor.org/charles-dickens-minor-characters/

Master Floby

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n15/tim-parks/how-does-he-come-to-be-mine