CHARLES DICKENS defies time and literary fads and has encouraged generations to read. Most who have read a Dickens novel will have read more than one and invariably reread them.
This year is the 200th anniverary of his birth and will be marked by celebrations throughout the year.
Dickens’s popularity endures because his genius is mercurial and his fictional world is a vivid universe pulsating with an unforgettable cast (Little Nell aside) of the innocent and the wronged; the villainous and the grotesque and the determined. There are tears and laughter, shocks and surprises; ingenious plots and enough coincidence to scupper a lesser artist.
The frenetic Dickens was and is many things, from shameless showman to social reformer and outraged citizen; he is above all, the supreme storyteller who mastered the art of the cliffhanger, a technique developed by writing to meet the demands of weekly instalments. Dickens lived at a time when his readers expected to be improved as well as entertained. His early life was difficult, experiencing poverty and squalor. He never forgot anything. Above all he knew all about righteous indignation because he felt it himself.
He is a uniquely British institution and is more closely consulted as a chronicler of Victorian London than historians. Yet his fiction is about more than London or England; it is about hurt and pain; loss and regret and the public reality of workhouses and factories, the ranks of the urban poor becoming swollen by the mechanisation of agriculture and always acting like a knife to Dickenss heart, the illogic of the legal system.
He looks to social class, sexual inequality, hypocrisy and pettiness. Miss Havisham is not a witch; betrayed by love, she is intent on revenge. Oliver Twist, child of a tragic mother can allow history to repeat itself or can stand and ask:“Please Sir, Can I have some more.” Fagin may wheedle and cheat, but Bill Sykes is a murderer. Dickens was unafraid of presenting exactly how corrupt humans are, without losing sight of their humanity.
Scrooge may appear irredeemable but in subjecting him to a terrifying lesson, Ebenezer gets a second chance. From Pickwick to Micawber, to Gradgrind and his love of facts, to the nasty Quilp or the doomed Lady Dedlock, to cheerful Herbert Pocket and loving Joe Gargery and Smike – Dickens created them all, the desperate, the happy, the damned and the saved. He presents readers with a world between the covers of a book. What writer has given, and gives, more?