Mocking Charles Dickens is a commonplace among the commonplace. He is sentimental, they say. His prose is too flowery; his protagonists are impossibly good; navigating the intricacies of his storylines is like swimming in molasses. “Can I have a little depression with my tea?” one very American man said to sum up Dickens. And then comes the inevitable knockout blow: “Dickens was paid by the word,” the scoffer says with finality, and thereby dismisses the value of each and every one of poor Charles’ little breadwinners. Which is a damn shame, because Dickens was a genius. A “popular” one in his time, true, and marketed to the unwashed masses. But so was Shakespeare, to whose nostrils daily ascends incense from every academic (and pseudo-academic) in the West.
To have a respectful distaste for Dickens is forgivable. He was no Hemingway or Steinbeck, and those who exalt the lean muscle of the American realist as the peak of literary evolution, which drives into extinction the ancestral British dinosaurs, may underappreciate Dickens’ lovely, complicated tapestries. He was the master of twists and turns, weaving plot and subplot with the skill of a virtuoso composer. His characters were equally rich, especially the striking supporting casts surrounding Dickens’ frank, sympathetic heroes. The creeping Uriah Heep; the despairing Lady Dedlock; the brutal Bradley Headstone; the unattainable Estella Havisham; and the heartbreakingly chivalric Sidney Carton — all people who, to the receptive reader, become more real, developed, and memorable than many we encounter in the flesh. When Dickens takes fifteen or twenty of these his complex children and turns them loose to wend their circuitous ways through his thousand-page maze, he creates a volume that can feed the mind and vivify the imagination. And yes, Dickens can be sentimental, his heroes often verge on inspirational, and sometimes the body count of starving orphans is hard to stomach. But to flippantly dismiss him and his lurid, comic, joyful London is a crime, perhaps even equal to skimping on the Bard’s daily libation.
ptimmmis@hillsdale.edu