stoutfellow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stoutfellow) wrote2012-02-07 10:14 am
stoutfellow) wrote2012-02-07 10:14 am
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The Dickens You Say!
I am reminded by al_zorra that today is the bicentennial of Charles Dickens's birthday.
I have loved his work since I was in fourth grade; I wrote my first book report about The Pickwick Papers. (My mother saved it, and it is now in my strongbox. It was written in pencil.) Yes, he was wordy; but so were most English-language authors in his time. (As I understand it, it wasn't until Hemingway that short, terse sentences came in vogue. I have mixed feelings about this change....) He was a tribune of the poor during the worst excesses of the early Industrial Revolution; his spiritual children range from Upton Sinclair to Bruce Springsteen. Sometimes he was maudlin (e.g., The Old Curiosity Shop); but those works were among his most popular.
Britain, in the nineteenth century, produced a great number of good-to-excellent novelists. To my mind, Dickens belongs in the first tier of that glorious band - not alone, but with few peers.
al_zorra that today is the bicentennial of Charles Dickens's birthday.I have loved his work since I was in fourth grade; I wrote my first book report about The Pickwick Papers. (My mother saved it, and it is now in my strongbox. It was written in pencil.) Yes, he was wordy; but so were most English-language authors in his time. (As I understand it, it wasn't until Hemingway that short, terse sentences came in vogue. I have mixed feelings about this change....) He was a tribune of the poor during the worst excesses of the early Industrial Revolution; his spiritual children range from Upton Sinclair to Bruce Springsteen. Sometimes he was maudlin (e.g., The Old Curiosity Shop); but those works were among his most popular.
Britain, in the nineteenth century, produced a great number of good-to-excellent novelists. To my mind, Dickens belongs in the first tier of that glorious band - not alone, but with few peers.