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Charles Dickens at 200 with Simon Callow, author of ‘Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World’; Jill Lepore of Harvard University; Screenwriter John Romano; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of Oxford University; Declan Kiely of the Morgan Library; and author Salman Rushdie
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SharkswithfrikingLazers 02/21/2012 09:23 PM Report
"Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
200 years? He is immortal.
REMant 02/21/2012 01:34 PM Report
Really good discussion. Dickens appears to have harbored the rather typical European view that projected on Americans, from Indians on, all of the virtues they felt lacking in Europe, only to find they were in fact worse.
What Morgan appreciated, aside from the appreciation itself that is, is more difficult to fathom. Possibly the account of Mr Merdle's bank, the Byzantine patent office, or just the Mandevillian jabs at charitable hypocrisy. But I suspect the last eluded him as it has so many others, in this age of enlightenment.
If there's any author for whom the commonplace, characterization makes the book, is true, it's Dickens, but the cast of stock types was already very full (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_character), and I suspect he made good use of it.
Nevertheless the novels seem unnecessarily and exasperatingly convoluted, which I can't think due entirely to serialization. Still he was such an exquisite conjurer they translate directly into excellent stage plays. Just let the actors, themselves, fill in any requisite narration. Nothing more than costumes and a few props required. Or, I suppose, into audio books, nowadays. Books and magazines were often read aloud to family, even factory hands as they worked. In the time before movies and TV this was still a verbal world. Full-scale dramatizations of Dickens seem tedious and tiresome by comparison, their elaborate production values obscuring the story, and, I think, subtly shifting the meaning in a Whiggish direction.