6 ms·

The Mystery of Charles Dickens

32 points by samclemens 6y ago

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Maybe, but I cannot help but hate the cottage industry of tearing down anyone who ever did anything great. In the end we are supposed to think that despite never having done anything on a par with Dickens we're still better because he was a real nasty piece of work, and really the great things he did were just the symptoms of what an awful person he was. Better to never do anything worthwhile whatsoever. on edit: I'm probably in a bad mood right now so the negative message hit me harder than it should.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  Dickens is a funny one. He’s revered as a great author today, but at the time he was the “Eastenders” of the day - his novels were published in serialised form, in newspapers, and were generally regarded as what we’d call pulp fiction. Critics and authors generally reviled him. The public adored him. After his death, he fairly rapidly fell out of fashion. We put these people on pedestals for the oddest of reasons. Dickens is revered as a result of a wartime (WW2) nostalgia for seemingly saner times, which has self-perpetuated to this day.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    Lots of people were published in serialized form, as far as his reputation it was varied, most of his bad reputation was because of critics not liking the later novels. Certainly a lot of English writers had problems with him, and also American writers, but I've always put that somewhat down to jealousy. Russian writers were quite taken with him, Dostoevsky had a pretty high opinion. So it's true that he had a variable reputation until the 1940s, but I'm not sure if it was due to a longing for saner times and not just the typical time for reappraisal some generations after a popular writer's death. If you think about it he died in 1870, so 70 years before his becoming more critically revered. Quite reasonable.
  - ginko 6y ago
    >his novels were published in serialised form So was Tolstoy.
    - Gupie 6y ago
      War and Peace is a soap opera, but has some good one-liners.
  - jhbadger 6y ago
    Dickens was a serious social reformer though, not just providing comfort food. The point of "Oliver Twist" was to make people angry at the state of orphanages, "David Copperfield" at the idea of debtors' prisons, and even "A Christmas Carol" had a lot to say about how abusive bosses could be in the era before mandatory holidays.
    - elwes5 6y ago
      This may get me some anger but I always found Scrooge to be a very sympathetic character. He starts off as a hopeful boy who just wants to spend some time at Christmas with his family and is shipped off to work as it is his time to do so. Gets dumped hard by his GF on Christmas, for she thinks he only thinks of money when he just wants to do right by her. His only friend died on Christmas. So by the time we see him he sees Christmas as a 'humbug' or trick. He is crazy rich yet spends none of it not even on himself. He is always looking for someone to play a trick on him. So when his nephew shows up and says 'come to Christmas dinner' he treats it with suspicion and blows him off hard. It takes the ghosts to show him that while some people are terrible most are just trying to get by and that his 'terrible' Christmases were mostly by his own hand. Their message share yourself with others for you do not have much time left. He gets the point. He even plays a bit of a 'humbug' on his fellow co-worker the next day when he gives him a raise.
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        I think this is pretty much the standard interpretation of Scrooge, those who know him best - Bob Cratchit, Fred (Scrooge's nephew), and Belle (his former fiance) - all feel pity for him.
  - ericmcer 6y ago
    War and Peace and Crime and Punishment were also both originally as serials. It was pretty common back then. I don't think serialization instantly makes a book pulp fiction.
    - emj 6y ago
      The serialization format still shows when you read them today, but many of the quality books today are written like screen plays. I've not read enough from that time to know if the format that I identify as serialization was apparent in other books.
- greypowerOz 6y ago
  if the reviewer is to be believed, we should be investigating Stephen King for a presumed host of past dastardly deeds or at least very serious sociopathic tendencies......
- watwut 6y ago
  Is it tearing down when we say the truth about those people lives instead of false happy victory narratives? One problem with that is that it gives us beautiful narrative of just world in which great awesome happy people get to win the day. Another problem is that people make conclusions about history and past societies from those stories. They are not really consistent with how real world about us works. It makes opponents of famous historical characters sound like rambling idiots, where they sometimes really had good points. It also makes us expect unrealistic greatness and make us take those people as authorities in questions where we should not. It makes us miss biases those people had too. And not all in that reflects badly Dickens himself. I mean, this is not exactly something that I would see as tearing down Dickens, that is just having screwed childhood in way we like to pretend did not happened: > He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors’ prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. [...] In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”. The way Dickens treated his wife and kids (preventing them access to her) indeed sounds abusive, but to me, it is also indeed the way horrible treatment in childhood can end up being reproduced in adult hood in real life. Even contemporary great artists/scientists can be abusers and what not. And we collectively seem to have problem to accept that, we seem to want to think that greatness in one area must imply greatness in other area.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >Is it tearing down when we say the truth about those people lives instead of false happy victory narratives? what is the truth about those people, exactly? Is it this: "The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself – some yen for sexual violence – on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. " This does more than say Dickens was a jerk who had an affair with a younger woman and was probably abusive. It ties his abilities as a writer to a yen for sexual violence and theorizes his ability to write cruel characters was due to them being projections of his own cruelty. With this Dickens' ability becomes an indictment of his character - he can do these great things because he is a monster, which I'm sure you can see is quite a bit different than he did great things and also monstrous things. The prior reasoning means that in the end every great thing has its wellspring in something monstrous, as I said therefore - better to never achieve anything at all. on edit: for the record I didn't downvote you, I will upvote because, although we disagree in manner outlined here I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for a simple disagreement.
- vijucat 6y ago
  As someone noted, no one remembers the critics. If put on the spot, you can probably name 3 great painters, but not 3 great art critics, for example. So there's no need to worry. As someone (else) stated it really well, "Other people's opinions are none of my business". You go be good. :-)
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > If put on the spot, you can probably name 3 great painters, but not 3 great art critics, for example. John Ruskin, John Berger, and Walter Benjamin instantly came to my mind. And I could go on. I think that fewer people would be able to name many music critics, but because visual art is, well, a visual medium, many people learn about it through books, and those books are often written by critics.
    - the_af 6y ago
      I don't know any of those you mentioned, but I'm probably just showing my ignorance. I think about the only "art" critic of any kind that comes to mind quickly is, um... I'm embarrassed to admit it... Roger Ebert :P Seriously though: I'll bet money most people who know names of painters or writers don't remember the name of any critic from those fields.
      - dfxm12 6y ago
        As is the nature of things, many artists are critics themselves. Hell, entire schools of art were founded on criticism like Dadaism. Take Salvador Dali and George Orwell. Most people could identify these people as artists, but how many people know Orwell wrote an essay on Dali's work? T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis are also famous artist/critics. In the end, I don't think it's that people don't remember the names of critics, it's that they never bother to learn them in the first place. Most people don't care, and that's perfectly fine - you have to be pretty deep into a field to care about its criticism in the first place. However, it also doesn't discredit the critics' work or criticism in general. Being famous doesn't make you right nor does it make your work more correct, after all.
- jeegsy 6y ago
  I have the same issues with this cottage industry myself. The penchant for 'deconstruction' of superior art as a substitute for actual art is disgusting no matter how valid these deconstructions are. I'm just grateful to be able to access these timeless works to read and reread, considering that very little of the contemporary stuff interests me.
- ghostbrainalpha 6y ago
  The trend that you are talking about is Fascinating to me and runs REALLY deep in the human psyche. If you watch ESPN's new 10 part documentary on Michael Jordan, you can see the same deconstruction. My interpretation of the thesis was, that despite Jordan's greatness, his success was derived from a competitive drive and massive ego that it really should qualify as some type of mental disorder. And his method for success would not result in a happy life for most people, and didn't really for him either. We should pity Jordan. All that is kind of typical, but what is really shocking is that this documentary was essentially produced BY HIM. So the desire to deconstruct our hero mythology is even present in our "heroes" themselves.
RNCTX 6y ago
I distinctly remember skipping school when I was about 10 years old and stumbling across the old black and white film version of Great Expectations from the 1950s on the local PBS TV station during that day while my parents were at work. My parents were not educated people, so that was the first time I knew there was "high art" in addition to "low art." I didn't need to have a formal humanities education or literary parents to know what the difference was exactly, it was just on a whole different level than anything else that was in popular media. ~35 years later I do have a formal humanities education, which I suppose started on that day and never really ends. Thanks, Charles Dickens.
- willismichael 6y ago
  It's fascinating that sometimes the most formative parts of real education can happen when avoiding "education".
  - nyokodo 6y ago
    As the saying goes, don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  I think I recall being shown a black-and-white version of Great Expectations in school; it was really an enjoyable film, and motivated me to get into literature. Fiction didn't stay my curiosity for long (now I'm more interested in philosophy), but for me, it seems education at least helped point me in some kind of direction.
- logicslave 6y ago
  Funny, when I was in middle school I found an old copy of David Copperfield at the bottom of my closet. Its a 700 page novel, but the prose at the time blew me away. The drawn out scenes and vivid characters captured my imagination. I dont think I can ever get that kind of experience now, I'm too cynical.
Stierlitz 6y ago
> Was Dickens’s fiction shaped by the nastiness he never consciously acknowledged? No, as a writer he would be very aware of where his inspiration came from and would be good at creating imaginary characters for dramatic effect. Without the villain the hero could never overcome adversity and achieve redemption. Is this yet another example of judging a historical text by current standards. Will Dickens have to be rewritten to remove the bad bits. What'll be left. I can remember that scene in Oliver Twist where he asked for more soup. Completely unlikely to occur in real life. I mean they actually got soup before eating.

32 points by samclemens 6y ago

Maybe, but I cannot help but hate the cottage industry of tearing down anyone who ever did anything great. In the end we are supposed to think that despite never having done anything on a par with Dickens we're still better because he was a real nasty piece of work, and really the great things he did were just the symptoms of what an awful person he was. Better to never do anything worthwhile whatsoever. on edit: I'm probably in a bad mood right now so the negative message hit me harder than it should.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
madaxe_again 6y ago
Dickens is a funny one. He’s revered as a great author today, but at the time he was the “Eastenders” of the day - his novels were published in serialised form, in newspapers, and were generally regarded as what we’d call pulp fiction. Critics and authors generally reviled him. The public adored him. After his death, he fairly rapidly fell out of fashion. We put these people on pedestals for the oddest of reasons. Dickens is revered as a result of a wartime (WW2) nostalgia for seemingly saner times, which has self-perpetuated to this day.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Lots of people were published in serialized form, as far as his reputation it was varied, most of his bad reputation was because of critics not liking the later novels. Certainly a lot of English writers had problems with him, and also American writers, but I've always put that somewhat down to jealousy. Russian writers were quite taken with him, Dostoevsky had a pretty high opinion. So it's true that he had a variable reputation until the 1940s, but I'm not sure if it was due to a longing for saner times and not just the typical time for reappraisal some generations after a popular writer's death. If you think about it he died in 1870, so 70 years before his becoming more critically revered. Quite reasonable.
- ginko 6y ago
  >his novels were published in serialised form So was Tolstoy.
  - Gupie 6y ago
    War and Peace is a soap opera, but has some good one-liners.
- jhbadger 6y ago
  Dickens was a serious social reformer though, not just providing comfort food. The point of "Oliver Twist" was to make people angry at the state of orphanages, "David Copperfield" at the idea of debtors' prisons, and even "A Christmas Carol" had a lot to say about how abusive bosses could be in the era before mandatory holidays.
  - elwes5 6y ago
    This may get me some anger but I always found Scrooge to be a very sympathetic character. He starts off as a hopeful boy who just wants to spend some time at Christmas with his family and is shipped off to work as it is his time to do so. Gets dumped hard by his GF on Christmas, for she thinks he only thinks of money when he just wants to do right by her. His only friend died on Christmas. So by the time we see him he sees Christmas as a 'humbug' or trick. He is crazy rich yet spends none of it not even on himself. He is always looking for someone to play a trick on him. So when his nephew shows up and says 'come to Christmas dinner' he treats it with suspicion and blows him off hard. It takes the ghosts to show him that while some people are terrible most are just trying to get by and that his 'terrible' Christmases were mostly by his own hand. Their message share yourself with others for you do not have much time left. He gets the point. He even plays a bit of a 'humbug' on his fellow co-worker the next day when he gives him a raise.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I think this is pretty much the standard interpretation of Scrooge, those who know him best - Bob Cratchit, Fred (Scrooge's nephew), and Belle (his former fiance) - all feel pity for him.
- ericmcer 6y ago
  War and Peace and Crime and Punishment were also both originally as serials. It was pretty common back then. I don't think serialization instantly makes a book pulp fiction.
  - emj 6y ago
    The serialization format still shows when you read them today, but many of the quality books today are written like screen plays. I've not read enough from that time to know if the format that I identify as serialization was apparent in other books.
greypowerOz 6y ago
if the reviewer is to be believed, we should be investigating Stephen King for a presumed host of past dastardly deeds or at least very serious sociopathic tendencies......
watwut 6y ago
Is it tearing down when we say the truth about those people lives instead of false happy victory narratives? One problem with that is that it gives us beautiful narrative of just world in which great awesome happy people get to win the day. Another problem is that people make conclusions about history and past societies from those stories. They are not really consistent with how real world about us works. It makes opponents of famous historical characters sound like rambling idiots, where they sometimes really had good points. It also makes us expect unrealistic greatness and make us take those people as authorities in questions where we should not. It makes us miss biases those people had too. And not all in that reflects badly Dickens himself. I mean, this is not exactly something that I would see as tearing down Dickens, that is just having screwed childhood in way we like to pretend did not happened: > He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors’ prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. [...] In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”. The way Dickens treated his wife and kids (preventing them access to her) indeed sounds abusive, but to me, it is also indeed the way horrible treatment in childhood can end up being reproduced in adult hood in real life. Even contemporary great artists/scientists can be abusers and what not. And we collectively seem to have problem to accept that, we seem to want to think that greatness in one area must imply greatness in other area.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >Is it tearing down when we say the truth about those people lives instead of false happy victory narratives? what is the truth about those people, exactly? Is it this: "The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself – some yen for sexual violence – on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. " This does more than say Dickens was a jerk who had an affair with a younger woman and was probably abusive. It ties his abilities as a writer to a yen for sexual violence and theorizes his ability to write cruel characters was due to them being projections of his own cruelty. With this Dickens' ability becomes an indictment of his character - he can do these great things because he is a monster, which I'm sure you can see is quite a bit different than he did great things and also monstrous things. The prior reasoning means that in the end every great thing has its wellspring in something monstrous, as I said therefore - better to never achieve anything at all. on edit: for the record I didn't downvote you, I will upvote because, although we disagree in manner outlined here I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for a simple disagreement.
vijucat 6y ago
As someone noted, no one remembers the critics. If put on the spot, you can probably name 3 great painters, but not 3 great art critics, for example. So there's no need to worry. As someone (else) stated it really well, "Other people's opinions are none of my business". You go be good. :-)
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > If put on the spot, you can probably name 3 great painters, but not 3 great art critics, for example. John Ruskin, John Berger, and Walter Benjamin instantly came to my mind. And I could go on. I think that fewer people would be able to name many music critics, but because visual art is, well, a visual medium, many people learn about it through books, and those books are often written by critics.
  - the_af 6y ago
    I don't know any of those you mentioned, but I'm probably just showing my ignorance. I think about the only "art" critic of any kind that comes to mind quickly is, um... I'm embarrassed to admit it... Roger Ebert :P Seriously though: I'll bet money most people who know names of painters or writers don't remember the name of any critic from those fields.
    - dfxm12 6y ago
      As is the nature of things, many artists are critics themselves. Hell, entire schools of art were founded on criticism like Dadaism. Take Salvador Dali and George Orwell. Most people could identify these people as artists, but how many people know Orwell wrote an essay on Dali's work? T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis are also famous artist/critics. In the end, I don't think it's that people don't remember the names of critics, it's that they never bother to learn them in the first place. Most people don't care, and that's perfectly fine - you have to be pretty deep into a field to care about its criticism in the first place. However, it also doesn't discredit the critics' work or criticism in general. Being famous doesn't make you right nor does it make your work more correct, after all.
jeegsy 6y ago
I have the same issues with this cottage industry myself. The penchant for 'deconstruction' of superior art as a substitute for actual art is disgusting no matter how valid these deconstructions are. I'm just grateful to be able to access these timeless works to read and reread, considering that very little of the contemporary stuff interests me.
ghostbrainalpha 6y ago
The trend that you are talking about is Fascinating to me and runs REALLY deep in the human psyche. If you watch ESPN's new 10 part documentary on Michael Jordan, you can see the same deconstruction. My interpretation of the thesis was, that despite Jordan's greatness, his success was derived from a competitive drive and massive ego that it really should qualify as some type of mental disorder. And his method for success would not result in a happy life for most people, and didn't really for him either. We should pity Jordan. All that is kind of typical, but what is really shocking is that this documentary was essentially produced BY HIM. So the desire to deconstruct our hero mythology is even present in our "heroes" themselves.

RNCTX 6y ago

I distinctly remember skipping school when I was about 10 years old and stumbling across the old black and white film version of Great Expectations from the 1950s on the local PBS TV station during that day while my parents were at work. My parents were not educated people, so that was the first time I knew there was "high art" in addition to "low art." I didn't need to have a formal humanities education or literary parents to know what the difference was exactly, it was just on a whole different level than anything else that was in popular media. ~35 years later I do have a formal humanities education, which I suppose started on that day and never really ends. Thanks, Charles Dickens.

willismichael 6y ago
It's fascinating that sometimes the most formative parts of real education can happen when avoiding "education".
- nyokodo 6y ago
  As the saying goes, don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.
claudiawerner 6y ago
I think I recall being shown a black-and-white version of Great Expectations in school; it was really an enjoyable film, and motivated me to get into literature. Fiction didn't stay my curiosity for long (now I'm more interested in philosophy), but for me, it seems education at least helped point me in some kind of direction.
logicslave 6y ago
Funny, when I was in middle school I found an old copy of David Copperfield at the bottom of my closet. Its a 700 page novel, but the prose at the time blew me away. The drawn out scenes and vivid characters captured my imagination. I dont think I can ever get that kind of experience now, I'm too cynical.

Stierlitz 6y ago

> Was Dickens’s fiction shaped by the nastiness he never consciously acknowledged? No, as a writer he would be very aware of where his inspiration came from and would be good at creating imaginary characters for dramatic effect. Without the villain the hero could never overcome adversity and achieve redemption. Is this yet another example of judging a historical text by current standards. Will Dickens have to be rewritten to remove the bad bits. What'll be left. I can remember that scene in Oliver Twist where he asked for more soup. Completely unlikely to occur in real life. I mean they actually got soup before eating.