CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70), chronicler of cockney London, was the world’s first literary superstar.
His works sold in the hundreds of thousands. He gave huge, sell-out public readings, with people flocking to buy tickets.
Like the Beatles, he was mobbed by adoring crowds when he first set foot in America. He was feted in France and revered in Russia, too – the first country to issue a commemorative stamp to him.
Americans continue to adore him. Many of his original works are now going under the hammer at Christie’s, New York. It’s the largest auction of Dickens for decades and expected to fetch $2million (£1m). Indeed, a first edition of Oliver Twist alone has just sold for a world record $229,000 (£115,000).
Not surprisingly, George Orwell called him “a national institution”. Yet we British have a curious attitude towards Dickens.
LITERARY SUPERSTAR: Writer Charles Dickens
On the one hand, he’s our most famous writer after Shakespeare. We admire him, we talk of “Dickensian” London, we’ve all seen the film Oliver! We’ve heard, too, of many of his characters, such as Fagin, Scrooge and Uriah Heep. That famous scene where Oliver asks for more gruel in the grim workhouse is etched on our national consciousness.
There’s even a Dickens World theme park in Chatham, Kent, near his boyhood home. But when it actually comes to reading Dickens, or studying him at school, it’s a different story. Why, for example, isn’t this national icon compulsory on our exam syllabuses? The simple truth is that many of his books are too long and time-consuming for modern tastes.
Why leave it to the Americans to honour Charles Dickens?
Today’s exam books tend to be short, bite-sized, easy-to-read novels, such as John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men. In contrast, the Penguin edition of The Pickwick Papers weighs in at 900 pages – while Oliver Twist itself is nearly 500.
There’s no way teenage boys will ever pick up such tomes. So when Dickens is studied in schools, it tends to be in short chunks and chapters. One school near me is currently doing GCSE coursework on the first chapter only of Great Expectations. Few children will read the full novel.
Up to now, Dickens’ works have never been out of print. But I fear for the future.
Then there’s his much-criticised “sentimentality”. Dickens’ books are based on simple, traditional virtues – such as love, kindness, honesty, courage. His plots hinge upon heartbreaks. As Dickens himself said of The Old Curiosity Shop: “I am breaking my heart over this story.”
Scenes such as Little Nell’s death in this novel, or the cheerful poverty of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol, are sure-fire tear-jerkers. At one public reading by Dickens in Boston, there were “so many pocket-handkerchiefs it looked as if a snow-storm had gotten into the hall”.
It has become too easy for hardened cynics to sneer at such scenes. Oscar Wilde famously mocked his sentimentality (“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”). In doing so, he set the cynical tone for the ambivalent attitudes of our own age.
MOVING: ITV's recent version of The Old Curiosity Shop touched many viewers
Yet this typically-British neglect of a national treasure is startling as Dickens is, in so many ways, such a modern man, with a rags-to-riches story.
Forced by family poverty to toil in a shoe-blacking factory aged only 12, by the age of 25 he had become the most popular writer in the land.
What’s more, Dickens pioneered the publication of cheap copies of his work in monthly, even weekly, magazine instalments to maximise sales and suspense.
Full-length novels, costing around 30 shillings, were out of the price range of many readers. So the novel that catapulted him to stardom, The Pickwick Papers, was published monthly at a cost of only one shilling.
Dickens penned many classics, including Oliver Twist - famously filmed as Oliver! in 1968
Crucially, like today’s television soaps, each instalment ended in a cliff-hanger, guaranteed to leave readers eager to read more.
Famously, the report goes that when the boat from England arrived in New York, carrying the last issue of The Old Curiosity Shop (the original shop still stands in Portsmouth Street, London), crowds gathered on the quayside to hear news of the ill-fated heroine. “Is Little Nell dead?” came the cries.
Estimates say that 10 per cent of all Britons read Dickens in his heyday – more than two million people. Then there was the author’s social conscience.
He was shocked by the slavery in America on his 1842 tour and argued passionately for its abolition in American Notes. And such works as Oliver Twist helped cause many of the worst excesses of the horrific London slums to be tackled.
The infamous Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey, lair of Bill Sykes, was razed in Dickens’ lifetime.
Likewise, the debtors’ prison where Dickens’ own father was held for owing £40 and 10 shillings, Marshalsea in Southwark, was also demolished. After its closure, Dickens wrote movingly about its horrors in Little Dorrit.
So the appeal of Dickens should never die. Dickens created characters who deserve to live in our imaginations as long as English is written or spoken.
One of the great ironies of his legacy is that, because of his modest wish that no memorial to him be erected, his only life-size statue is in Philadelphia. Why leave it to the Americans to honour him?
And a Christmas Carol itself, one of his finest books, is hardly more than 100 pages long. There’s no excuse to ignore him.
Dr Andrew Cunningham is an English teacher, GCSE examiner and Dickens expert.
DON'T TRUST THE SO-CALLED 'EXPERTS'!!
08.04.08, 10:03am
As an English teacher of 30 years-I don't claim to be an expert on anything. I do know that we teach 'A Christmas Carol' at GCSE and have done so for the past 6 years. The exam boards, full of 'experts' are to blame for unbalanced and unpalatable syllabi. The present AQA has masses of poetry and little examined prose. Dickens is still revered in schools and still read with passion. English teachers certainly know his worth even if exam boards don't.
What a lovely post.
I also read Dickens early on in life and his books had a huge impact on my life.
I still retreat to Dickens every winter when I re read one of his books.
My favourite is David Copperfield where there is said to be much of Dickens own life contained between the pages.
I read to my grandchildren and the 5 year old reads with me now.
They are so interested in reading at this age.
If they are not encouraged to read they will most certainly lose this interest.
You have been a wonderful grandparent and I look to follow your example.
COULD IT BE THAT CHILDREN ARE NOT INTERESTED IN ANY CHALLENGING BOOK?
07.04.08, 5:12am
They are no longer inspired in any subject in the institutions that now pass for schools in England. Dickens? Perish the thought. These days it's "This is Jane. See Jane run." Then people wonder at the appalling lack of writing skills that are seen everywhere and no less in these forums.
How glad I am that I was educated in England when a school counted for something. Now it's more like a child care situation, the child care teachers are expected to take over for the neglectful parents.
Dickens - one of a kind.
People don't like to be reminded of poverty and hardship? Whatever happened to a book so well written you cannot put it down? He wrote many. Since when were books judged on their merit by their ability to whitewash life, reality?
No wonder reading is fast becoming a thing of the past, and Britain has had to come up with a Reading Scheme to try to revive it. Sometimes I think I live on another planet.
CHARLES DICKENS A GENIUS OF SUBERB SPELLBINDING MYSTERY
07.04.08, 4:00am
I am supremely grateful to my dad (not for his horrendous abuse of my person although that taught me much about the practical aspects of child abuse) but for all that was positive and right that left deep and beautiful memories on a mind that escaped from the ugliness of those events and into the classics so widely read by so many in the days of my childhood. My beloved dad read to me in my infant years, all the while becoming the colourful characters depicted in the works of Stevenson, Kingsley and Enid Blyton to name but a few. At 2 and a half to three years of age I followed along as he read and every word was imprinted upon an eager, impressionable and receptive mind. Before I entered kindergarten at the age of five I was already reading the "Naughtiest Girl in the School" with ease. Then enter Charles Dickens into my life with his suberbly constructed works of spellbinding mystery written at a time when his relationship with Victorian English society had left him disenchanted. My English literature teacher at the time chose "Great Expectations" for one of our studies. The orphan Pip, and the convict Magwitch, the beautiful Estella and her guardian Miss Havisham woven together in a work whose very title provides the foundation and insight into the pain and squalor, the pathos and irony of Victorian England. He was indeed the "superstar" and the schools today would do well to encourage children to study his work and the classics generally.
I have made the most of the times I have had my grandchildren to stay over the holidays. They struggled with their reading and comprehension. Off I went to a great second-hand bookshop and purchased a veritable pile of classics. Children of the New Forest, Little Women, Jo's Boys, A Child's Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, and heaps of "the banned by schools books such asShip of Adventure and many others written by Enid Blyton. I also purchased all the "Horrible History" books I could lay my hands on. What excellent fun we had. We read together concentrating on diction, phonetics and acted out the characters which soon assumed colour and life. Following these excursions into the wonderland of great children's classics their other school work improved out of sight and I sent them home with some more exciting novels every time they came to see me. Their written comprehension was now excellent and their teachers could hardly believe the transformation when they submitted assignments that were properly researched, carefully presented and considered. It was evident too that all this reading and acting had made a huge difference to their grammatical expression. No more "dids" and "dones" and "woulds" and "coulds" in the wrong place and their speech was a joy to hear. The kids and their teachers were excited with the approval ratings they had to provide and which were so justly earned. I felt quietly pleased with my efforts. I had proved something to myself and to their school without lecturing them about their clear deficiencies.
...and have read most of his books with the exception of The Pickwick Papers. The problem with Dickens is that he relates to a world that is no longer chic.
His detailed and heartfelt scenes are considered kitsch if not maudlin and people do not want to be reminded of hardship, poverty, orphans, destitution, and the streets.
I wonder if other realist period writers are suffering the same lack of popularity?
Video 
DON'T TRUST THE SO-CALLED 'EXPERTS'!!
08.04.08, 10:03am
As an English teacher of 30 years-I don't claim to be an expert on anything. I do know that we teach 'A Christmas Carol' at GCSE and have done so for the past 6 years. The exam boards, full of 'experts' are to blame for unbalanced and unpalatable syllabi. The present AQA has masses of poetry and little examined prose. Dickens is still revered in schools and still read with passion. English teachers certainly know his worth even if exam boards don't.
• Posted by: Chips2008 • Report Comment
GREVILLEA
07.04.08, 10:37am
What a lovely post.
I also read Dickens early on in life and his books had a huge impact on my life.
I still retreat to Dickens every winter when I re read one of his books.
My favourite is David Copperfield where there is said to be much of Dickens own life contained between the pages.
I read to my grandchildren and the 5 year old reads with me now.
They are so interested in reading at this age.
If they are not encouraged to read they will most certainly lose this interest.
You have been a wonderful grandparent and I look to follow your example.
• Posted by: abuela • Report Comment
COULD IT BE THAT CHILDREN ARE NOT INTERESTED IN ANY CHALLENGING BOOK?
07.04.08, 5:12am
They are no longer inspired in any subject in the institutions that now pass for schools in England. Dickens? Perish the thought. These days it's "This is Jane. See Jane run." Then people wonder at the appalling lack of writing skills that are seen everywhere and no less in these forums.
How glad I am that I was educated in England when a school counted for something. Now it's more like a child care situation, the child care teachers are expected to take over for the neglectful parents.
Dickens - one of a kind.
People don't like to be reminded of poverty and hardship? Whatever happened to a book so well written you cannot put it down? He wrote many. Since when were books judged on their merit by their ability to whitewash life, reality?
No wonder reading is fast becoming a thing of the past, and Britain has had to come up with a Reading Scheme to try to revive it. Sometimes I think I live on another planet.
• Posted by: Rothaymere • Report Comment
CHARLES DICKENS A GENIUS OF SUBERB SPELLBINDING MYSTERY
07.04.08, 4:00am
I am supremely grateful to my dad (not for his horrendous abuse of my person although that taught me much about the practical aspects of child abuse) but for all that was positive and right that left deep and beautiful memories on a mind that escaped from the ugliness of those events and into the classics so widely read by so many in the days of my childhood. My beloved dad read to me in my infant years, all the while becoming the colourful characters depicted in the works of Stevenson, Kingsley and Enid Blyton to name but a few. At 2 and a half to three years of age I followed along as he read and every word was imprinted upon an eager, impressionable and receptive mind. Before I entered kindergarten at the age of five I was already reading the "Naughtiest Girl in the School" with ease. Then enter Charles Dickens into my life with his suberbly constructed works of spellbinding mystery written at a time when his relationship with Victorian English society had left him disenchanted. My English literature teacher at the time chose "Great Expectations" for one of our studies. The orphan Pip, and the convict Magwitch, the beautiful Estella and her guardian Miss Havisham woven together in a work whose very title provides the foundation and insight into the pain and squalor, the pathos and irony of Victorian England. He was indeed the "superstar" and the schools today would do well to encourage children to study his work and the classics generally.
I have made the most of the times I have had my grandchildren to stay over the holidays. They struggled with their reading and comprehension. Off I went to a great second-hand bookshop and purchased a veritable pile of classics. Children of the New Forest, Little Women, Jo's Boys, A Child's Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, and heaps of "the banned by schools books such asShip of Adventure and many others written by Enid Blyton. I also purchased all the "Horrible History" books I could lay my hands on. What excellent fun we had. We read together concentrating on diction, phonetics and acted out the characters which soon assumed colour and life. Following these excursions into the wonderland of great children's classics their other school work improved out of sight and I sent them home with some more exciting novels every time they came to see me. Their written comprehension was now excellent and their teachers could hardly believe the transformation when they submitted assignments that were properly researched, carefully presented and considered. It was evident too that all this reading and acting had made a huge difference to their grammatical expression. No more "dids" and "dones" and "woulds" and "coulds" in the wrong place and their speech was a joy to hear. The kids and their teachers were excited with the approval ratings they had to provide and which were so justly earned. I felt quietly pleased with my efforts. I had proved something to myself and to their school without lecturing them about their clear deficiencies.
• Posted by: Grevillea • Report Comment
I LOVE DICKENS...
06.04.08, 9:36pm
...and have read most of his books with the exception of The Pickwick Papers. The problem with Dickens is that he relates to a world that is no longer chic.
His detailed and heartfelt scenes are considered kitsch if not maudlin and people do not want to be reminded of hardship, poverty, orphans, destitution, and the streets.
I wonder if other realist period writers are suffering the same lack of popularity?
• Posted by: elan_d • Report Comment
DICKENS REJECTED ...
06.04.08, 1:49pm
Could it be its because he is English... !!!
• Posted by: Moronamid • Report Comment
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