Dickens. Is it worth perservering?

[alana39]

As a teenager / student I tried reading Dickens several times but just couldn't get on with him. I read lots, not usually classics but love James, like Thackeray and have read some Trollope so it's not just that I don't like Victorians!

Anyway, with all the 200th birthday stuff I feel I should give him another chance, and am reading A Tale of Two Cities mainly because I've recently read a few very good historical novels set in / around French revolution (Place of Greater Safety, Pure, Parrot & Olivier) so am in the mood for it. Haven't got far into it yet, it's not the most riveting read (yet?), but I am reading it.

So - has anyone else overcome Dickens dislike or apathy? If so, which book(s) did it for you? Or should I just stop bothering?

Oh Cheddars, I LOVED Great Expectations!

I am a mature sudent of english lit with a very high first average this year and I can't fucking stand Dickens. I have read Bleak House for Victorian Literature and am reading The Old Curiosity Shop for Monstrous Bodies. I have read the first 8 weeks of my reading list for three modules so far so am certainly not adverse to reading but Dickens is just a fucking yawn fest.

I like Dickens, but I can't sit and read lots in one go...but then, they weren't meant to be read like that; they were published a chapter at a time in weekly 'penny dreadful' magazines, a bit like a soap opera.

If I do a couple of chapters at a time and then let it digest I'm okay. I read Hard Times over Christmas and my husband read bits aloud to me which made me enjoy it more and 'get' the humour which otherwise may have been lost on me reading by myself.

I agree with Stangirl - Hardy will bore your tits off.

I don't think Dickens had a clue how to write about women, and he needed, but never got, a damn good editor. Having tried for over 50 years to "get" him, I have given up. It is very frustrating - A Christmas Carol shows what he could have done had he disciplined his theatrical verbosity instead of letting it sprawl everywhere. You can tell he got paid by the word...
P.S. I loathe Hardy with a passion too.

I disagree about him needing a damn good editor. Sure, the stories are long and could be shorter. But they couldn't be shorter without loss (of subplots, of hugely entertaining setpiece scenes, etc). There isn't excess, just plentitude.

Re women, I think that his women are largely nauseating, but I don't think that is because he doesn't write them well. It is because he is writing precisely the atrocious sentimental moralised version of conventional womanhood that his stories and audiences demanded. I think it is more a failure as a person than as a writer that caused him to write of women as he did.

I've just finished Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and a striking thing about that book is that the immense psychological realism that gives so many of the main characters such depth and interest is ultimately strangled by a need to present the two main women as being firmly ensconced in a hideously sentimental little family with the dreary mediocre male lead as its patriarch, despite the huge strength of one of the two women. It is very Dickens-like in respect of that pursuit of cosy middle-class domesticity.

Loved David Copperfield, hated everything else.
Not read Great Expectations though.

I think he's well worth reading and I would advise reading in.long sessions. I think.he's the perfect holiday read. He's not like any.modern writer and I.think.you need time to sink into his long sentences and elaborate descriptions and, just generally his world. He's often silly and he has a mawkish streak a mile wide but for size and breadth and general bounce e's in a class of his own

I'm not afraid of a long book; quite the reverse. Fact is I read very little fiction and the florid style and mawkish sentimentality just don't appeal. It's all a bit heavy for my taste, as is most Victorian fiction.

Now, where's the Dorothy Dunnett Appreciation Thread?

Finished A Tale...

Agree with earlier comments that the last third is the best but I'm not sure that it justified spending the time on the first half.

Bit extreme to suggest Hardy just to make Dickens seem more fun

Is there any Hardy worth a crack? We read 'The Withered Arm' as our short story for GCSE I think, it was brain-crushingly dull and for a short story it was pretty fucking long!

Any of the rest of it worth a go?

I've only read two Hardy novels - The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, both of which I quite liked. I read them both when I was at school and preferred them to Dickens, which I really don't like.

UnamedFemale - does you uni have an external website with those reading lists on? I love a good reading list.

I really like Dickens- Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are amongst my most favourite books, however I agree with the poster who stated that they should be read as originally intended- as small chapters each time. Any more than that is a lot to take in.

I love Dickens, Bleak House is the best. Reading Dickens is like watching a brilliant film with satisfying stories, vivid characters, funny bits and serious indignation.
Dickens is for winter, Hardy is for when you feel hopeless.

mixedmama I can c&p if you want?

Unnamed - that would be wonderful.

Oh God, Not Hardy. I would have thought it completely impossible to write about someone selling their wife and child, or illegitimate kids in the 1850s and make it stomach grindingly dull to the point of wanting to rip your eyes from their sockets in an act of mercy. But my word he manages it. I had to do him for SYS english and wrote an entire essay on the Mayor of Casterbridge without reading more than about 8 chapters. I don't know who comes out of that looking worse - me or Thomas Hardy and his effing rural idylls.

As for Dickens - my advice would be to watch the TV series - unlike Dickens the BBC have very good editors!

Kirrie it is partly awful memories of Sunday night series of Dickens and the like that put me off in the first place!

Have given up and gone back to Thackeray so now thoroughly cheered up!

Kirrie - you are making me laugh both here and the other thread.

I have Tess a la Hardy but havent approached it yet.

The 3 threads I currently have live are book threads, this may be my favourite MN section.

I did bizarrely having never read Dickens see a 1910 18 volume collection of Dickens in my local Oxfam bookshop so I feel absolutely obliged to read them.

avoid it like the plague! Tess I mean, not Mr Dickens - I have no strong feelings on him (for once).... seems like a nice bloke.

I'm reading my first ever Dickens novel - and I too am reading A Tale of Two Cities, and I'm really enjoying it, far more than I thought I would. I'm two-thirds through it now - and once you get used to CD's extremely long-winded writing style, it is very good, and I can appreciate his wonderful descriptions. (It probably helps that this one is one of his shorter novels). I'm also planning on reading Bleak House and Great Expectations this year, too.