By Victor Greto
Most of Charles Dickens’ novels could be used as doorstops.
After you’ve devoured them, that is.
Many of the people who are celebrating Dickens’ 200th birthday this month – he was born Feb. 7 – are only formally recognizing the greatness of the man, which includes the length and breadth of his output.
They are mostly rejoicing in the power and humor of his stories and the characters that unforgettably peopled them, from Ebenezer Scrooge to David Copperfield and Mr. Micawber, from Oliver Twist to Pip and Estella, from Little Nell to Fagin and Uriah Heep.
“Dickens makes it very easy for us to relate to his greatest characters,” said Dr. Michael Cotsell, an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. “We like following these empathetic characters as young children, like Oliver Twist or Pip (from Great Expectations) and their progress through difficulty to some kind of adulthood.”
Dickens’ stories and characters are so good they’ve inspired more movie, stage and TV adaptations (320 and counting) than Shakespeare or Jane Austen, according to “Dickens at 200,” an exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
“Masterpiece Theater” plans on releasing several adaptations this year, and the latest film version of Great Expectations should be released in the next few months. Starring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, the new movie will duel with perhaps the greatest film adaptation of any novel, director David Lean’s 1946 version of the same perennially favorite Dickens novel.
“There’s so much about that story that is appealing,” said Cotsell, a native of England whose published work includes A Companion to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and who has edited several volumes in The Dickens Companion series put out by Routledge.
“The character of Pip, an enjoyable young man, and his love affair with Estella; Miss Havisham, the older woman walking around in her bridal outfit; and the convict Magwitch,” whose life was saved by the young Pip, who then made it rich, and rewarded Pip with a fortune and “great expectations.”
There’s one line in that novel, Cotsell said, in which Dickens summed up the history of civilization: “I lived rough so you can live smooth,” the convict tells Pip.
The quote also provides an insight into one of the great themes that runs through Dickens’ major novels: the yawning gap between the rich and poor that he both lamented and satirized.
That theme is a reflection of his background.
“He humanizes the working class and the poor, as well as other outcasts of society, including criminals,” said Dr. Jeffrey Gibson, an associate professor of English at Wesley College, who specializes in British literature.
“With as much focus in America concerning the kind of economic changes that we’ve had, his works should be more relevant today than they were in the booming Nineties.”
Dickens is a fine example of the contradictions of the 19th-century Victorian era – both in England and in the United States – of a man who earned his way out of rags to riches, and whose work ethic inspired 15 major novels and a cast of characters whose names at least sound familiar to just about everyone.
But he also was bitter about the systemic injustice of an industrializing society that allowed and perpetuated a huge chasm between the very rich and the very poor. The latter had once included himself as a small boy.
“He started to write, when he was a child, after his father went into a debtors’ prison,” Cotsell said. “While he was there, the young Dickens was put into a factory, a small factory, child labor, and he never forgot that. His whole empathy for people at the bottom of the pile, like Oliver Twist, derives from that experience.”
That theme and his prolific output hints at Dickens’ perennial power – and his problem with today’s younger generations.
“Culturally, students have a sense of who Dickens is, but they are on the one hand intimidated by him, and on the other hand, they react against it as that ‘classic literature’ that has been shoved down their throats,” Gibson said.
And then, of course, there’s the weighty nature of those doorstoppers.
“Many students find the works to be dense and somewhat difficult to follow,” Gibson said. “For them, the books don’t move along, and they give up. One student told me it was wrapped up in too much detail.”
Unless there’s a class exclusively about Dickens, it’s hard to work him in, said Gibson, who teaches a survey of British Literature.
“Teaching any novels of length with students who are resistant to reading and who don’t have the stamina to make their way through some of these longer works – it’s unfortunate,” he said.
But both teachers know of adults who have embraced Dickens.
“I know people,” Cotsell said, “and not in academia – I’m thinking of one who works in an insurance company – who sets out to read those novels at lunch and at bedtime and enjoys them very much.”
Looking at a couple of shelves-worth of his novels and stories and journalism – as well as his touring schedule during his final years, in which he read to delighted audiences who made him one of the world’s earliest celebrities – it may be easy to surmise how Charles Dickens died.
He collapsed in 1870 from a stroke brought on by exhaustion at the age of 58.
Dickens in Delaware and America
Charles Dickens visited the United States twice during his life, once in 1842, and again in 1867-68.
The first trip was a disaster – at least for his image of the United States and Americans, whom he found to be rough, dirty and rude.
The fastidious Englishman complained later that he encountered “muddy streets, people spitting, [and] no attention paid to cleanliness.” He also was upset at the country’s refusal to abide by international copyrights, as American publishers pirated his popular novels, and expressed disappointment at the country’s penal system, including the horrors he had witnessed in a Philadelphia prison. He satirized the country in his novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, which came out the year after his visit.
Dickens had mellowed by his second trip, and enjoyed himself and the crowds of people who came out to see him read.
On this trip, he visited Claymont for a couple of weeks to talk business with illustrator F.O.C. Darley, who illustrated several of Dickens’ books. Darley also has been credited by some with giving us our image of Santa Claus.