Raise your glass in a toast to honor the creator of Uriah Heep, David Copperfield, Little Dombey, Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bill Sikes, and Fagin – the headmaster of young pickpockets. It is the 200th Anniversary for Charles Dickens!
If he were still living, we would call it his birthday, bake a two-layer chocolate, and gather ‘round for a song and many ‘best wishes.’ Given the number of his fans, the cake portions would be small and we would all be reducing to uttering the famous line of his trembling character, Oliver Twist, in the workhouse soup line: “Please, sir, I want some more…”
In his day, Charles Dickens was nothing less than what we would consider a rock star, except prose was his music. He had his own literary groupies and autograph-seekers. People bought tickets to hear him read passages from his novels. Dickens wrote his books in his native England, and many were serialized in newspapers like US soap operas.
At a time when news and merchandise from England had to travel on a slow boat across the Atlantic, people gathered at the dock to greet the incoming ship carrying the latest British goods. In the serialized novel Dombey and Son, the ‘son’ was a sickly young boy who was to inherit the family business. In a cliffhanger chapter ending, Little Dombey was gravely ill and whispering to his older sister those tender words often heard from dying heroes. When those aboard the boat arrived in New York with the news and the next edition of the English papers, passengers at the railings truthfully answered shouted questions from the dock regarding young Dombey’s fate.
He had died.
Expectations of the sentimental Dickens treatment and a miraculous recovery were dashed. The reporting of Little Dombey’s death was met with genuine tears from American followers of the story.
Despite plot devices that often featured impossible coincidences and over-the-top sentimentality, Dickens was ahead of his time as a writer and political reformer. His own experiences as a child laborer provided material for not only Oliver Twist, but the semi-autobiographical character David Copperfield, Dickens’ admitted favorite of all his characters. He upbraided outdated education systems and attacked public sanitation, prisons, poverty, and orphanages.
He was an early promoter of political correctness and – whether it has gone to extremes nearly two hundred years hence – Dickens stopped production of Oliver Twist to clean up his own language. The wife of the man who purchased Dickens’ home in 1860 wrote to the author regarding his depiction of the character of a miserly Jewish pickpocket, and Dickens took her point. The character Fagin is called “the Jew” 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him, reflecting the point at which the setting of the printing type for the novel had progressed.
Charles Dickens remains the bane of many ninth grade English students, who are required to complete the reading of A Tale of Two Cities. While I remain a steadfast fan of the works of Mr. Dickens, I disagree with present-day teachers who require reading his works at such a young age.
It is a different era, even from the time when I was forced to read it. Today, students are obsessed with videogames and cell phones and speak a language tempered by idioms of hip-hop artists. Dickens’ work, steeped in the vernacular and social mores of the time, can make no connection with present-day youth, who lack even the patience to write complete words, OMG!
I had hopes of becoming an artist, and spent my Two Cities semester reproducing in my spiral notebook the 19th century illustrations that accompanied the original text. I completed copies of most of the drawings with enough accuracy that I developed a reputation among my classmates.
I only wish I had spent the semester emulating the writing of Charles Dickens instead of whiling away my time with pencil-sketched copies of George Cruikshank’s illustrations.
Cruikshank was good at what he did, but he was no Dickens.
