
The Mystery of Charles Dickens - samclemens
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/03/the-mystery-of-charles-dickens-by-an-wilson-review-a-great-writers-dark-side
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RNCTX
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
It's fascinating that sometimes the most formative parts of real education can
happen when avoiding "education".

~~~
nyokodo
As the saying goes, don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.

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Stierlitz
> 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.

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bryanrasmussen
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.

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

~~~
jhbadger
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
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
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.

