Book Reviews
Charles Dickens
The Flower of Victorian Literature. A Literary Reflection, By Daniel Cure.
That so many of his readers regard him with almost protective compassion, belies the fact that Charles Dickens is, in many eyes, the UK's greatest ever author and requires almost no introduction. Born into the dark murkiness of Regency England, his idyllic childhood was torn apart when his father was sent to jail for fraudulent activity, rendering the family as paupers and meaning that he suddenly found himself working long hours in a blacking factory. The combination of all these factors was to have a profound influence upon his extraordinary body of work, for the themes of imprisonment, social justice, orphans, family life and destiny were all core elements of almost every major work he completed.
Inspired by the horrors to London's squalid rookeries, Dickens was first and foremost a social reformer, something that becomes immediately apparent when dissecting his vast array of beautifully crafted characters. It is the way they relate to the injustices dealt out by life that they are judged, but the critical thing is that Dickens allowed us to make that judgement. From the obsequious Uriah Heap and the dastardly lawyer Jaggers, to the wonderfully named Great Uncle Pumblechook, Wackford Squeers and Mr Pecksniff, to the highly sympathetic lead characters: Pip, Oliver and David Copperfield; his marvellous and often eccentric approach to characterisation was deeply entrenched in the notions of right and wrong. However, this is not to suggest that there was no tone to his creations, as one has only to consider the intriguing crook Magwitch and the naive Mr Micawber as examples of deeper characters almost every virtue of whom is displaced by a fallibility. Dickens knew the world to be grey and that humans were best described by their imperfections, which meant that the story of the Prodigal Son was an element oft visited within his stories.
Beyond all this however, remains the body of work - and what a legacy it truly is. To have spanned the variation in plot and stylistic elements from the likes of A Tale of Two Cities, to Oliver Twist is a marvellous achievement in any age, but it is often to the great works that his readers are drawn. Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Hard Times and the Pickwick Papers all continue to be met with a plethora of modern day adaptations, both on screen and on stage. His Christmas Carol and accompanying stories almost single-handedly re-ignited the Victorian obsession with Christmas and it is at such a moment that we must stop to consider the fact that almost all of his works were serialised, rather than released in a single format. Quite what Dickens would have made of a 'Harry Potter' style midnight release is almost unfathomable.
The two masterpieces, Great Expectations, and his semi-autobiographical magus opus, David Copperfield will stand not as monolithic achievements (for the remainder of his completed novels are too outstanding to allow this), but certainly as almost mythical testaments to his gift of story telling. After all, it was the art of crafting his narrative that, to many, rendered Dickens a literary genius and the sheer plethora of modern day authors who point to him as being a major influence merely confirms this.
In later life, he travelled to America, where he undertook a series of public readings of his works, causing him much train in the process. It was during one such stint back in London that he suffered a fatal stroke, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished and a nation of readers in mourning.
By Daniel Cure, July 2009
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