charles dickens appreciation post

[Samsa]

yes, appreciation

and i will use the words of others because i am not u hh whatever the word is

as moses once said, "i am slow of speech and slow of tongue"

ickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. In his enormous body of works, Dickens combined masterly storytelling, humor, pathos, and irony with sharp social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined.

Dickens was born February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth and spent most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in his novels. He started school at the age of nine, but his education was interrupted when his father, an amiable but careless minor civil servant, was imprisoned for debt in 1824. The boy was then forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory. A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life, and he later described this experience, only slightly altered, in his novel David Copperfield (1849-1850). From 1824 to 1826, Dickens again attended school. For the most part, however, he was self-educated. Among his favorite books were those by such great 18th-century novelists as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and their influence can be discerned in Dickens's own novels. In 1827 Dickens took a job as a legal clerk. After learning shorthand, he began working as a reporter in the courts and Parliament, perhaps developing the power of precise description that was to make his creative writing so remarkable.

In December 1833 Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London, using the pseudonym Boz. A London publisher commissioned a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by the celebrated artist George Cruikshank. The success of this work, Sketches by Boz (1836), permitted Dickens to marry Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture in collaboration with the popular artist Robert Seymour. When Seymour committed suicide, another artist, H. K. Browne, called Phiz, who subsequently drew the pictures for most of Dickens's later works, took his place. Dickens transformed this particular project from a set of loosely connected vignettes into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). The success of this first novel made Dickens famous. At the same time it influenced the publishing industry in Great Britain, being issued in a rather unusual form, that of inexpensive monthly installments; this method of publication quickly became popular among Dickens's contemporaries.

Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited the weekly periodicals Household Words (1850-1859) and All the Year Round (1859-1870), composed the travel books American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846), administered charitable organizations, and pressed for many social reforms. In 1842 he lectured in the United States in favor of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery. In 1843 he published A Christmas Carol, an ever-popular children's story. Dickens's extraliterary activities also *******d managing a theatrical company that played before Queen Victoria in 1851 and giving public readings of his own works in England and America. All these successes, however, were shadowed by domestic unhappiness. Incompatibility and Dickens's relations with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, led to his separation from his wife in 1858, after the marriage had produced ten children. He suffered a fatal stroke on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey five days later.

As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity. Among his fine works are Bleak House (1852-1853), Little Dorritt (1855-1857), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865). Readers of the 19th and early 20th century usually prized Dickens's earlier novels for their humor and pathos. While recognizing the virtues of these books, critics today tend to rank more highly the later works because of their formal coherence and acute perception of the human condition. In addition to those mentioned, Dickens's major writings ******* Oliver Twist (1837-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Dombey and Son (1846-1848), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished, 1870).

Contributed By:
Michael G. Sundell


"Dickens, Charles John Huffam," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

[Smiley33]

pee on charles dickens

[Samsa]

Originally posted by Smiley33
pee on charles dickens

His epitaph reads 'He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world'

[Mason R Butler]

Originally posted by Samsa


His epitaph reads 'He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world'

Thank god he's dead.

[Samsa]

Originally posted by I Hate Music

Thank god he's dead.

Dickens's biographer makes a fanciful suggestion that the fact of his having observed low life at so tender an age (from ten to twelve) accounts for the purity of tone with which that life is treated in the novelist's works. In its proper place I shall take a different view of Dickens's method in this matter; it is not to be supposed for a moment that the boy, familiar with London on its grimiest side, working in cellars, inhabiting garrets, eating in cookshops, visiting a debtor's prison (his father was in detention for a time), escaped the contamination of his surroundings. London in all its foulness was stamped on the lad's memory. He escaped in time, that was all, and his fortunate endowment did the rest.

[Smiley33]

ok, poop on Charles Dickens

[Samsa]

It is a thankless task to write of such a man as Dickens in disparaging phrase. I am impatient to reach that point of my essay where I shall be at liberty to speak with admiration unstinted, to dwell upon the strength of the master's work, and exalt him where he is unsurpassed. But it is necessary to clear the way. So great a change has come over the theory and practice of fiction in the England of our times that we must needs treat of Dickens as, in many respects, antiquated. To be antiquated is not necessarily to be condemned, in art or anything else (save weapons of slaughter); but as the result of the last chapter we feel that, in one direction, Dickens suffers from a comparison with novelists, his peers, of a newer day, even with some who were strictly his contemporaries. We have now to ask ourselves in what other aspects his work differs markedly from our present conception of the art of novel-writing. It will be seen, of course, that, theoretically, he had very little in common with the school of strict veracity, of realism -- call it what you please; the school which, quite apart from extravagances, has directed fiction into a path it is likely to pursue for many a year to come. Hard words are spoken of him by young writers whose zeal outruns their discretion, and far outstrips their knowledge; from the advanced posts of modern criticism any stone is good enough to throw at a novelist who avows and glories in his moral purpose; who would on no account bring a blush to the middle-class cheek; who at any moment tampers with truth of circumstance, that his readers may have joy rather than sorrow Well, we must look into this matter, and, as Captain Cuttle says, take its bearings. Endeavouring to judge Dickens as a man of his time, we must see in what spirit he approached his tasks; what he consciously sought to achieve in this pursuit of story-telling. One thing, assuredly, can never become old-fashioned in any disdainful sense; that is, sincerity of purpose. Novelists of to-day desire above everything to be recognized as sincere in their picturing of life. If Dickens prove to be no less honest, according to his lights, we must then glance at the reasons which remove him so far from us in his artistic design and execution

[Samsa]

i am reading hard times right now which is supposed to be one of his worst novles but even his worst novel is still like, pretty damn good

[Smiley33]

that's amazing.

[Samsa]

Art, for him, was art precisely because it was not nature. Even our realists may recognize this, and may grant that it is the business of art to select, to dispose -- under penalties if the result be falsification. But Dickens went further; he had a moral purpose; the thing above all others scornfully forbidden in our schools of rigid "naturalism".

. . .

Admitting his limits, accepting them even gladly, he was yet possessed with a sense of the absolute reality of everything he pictured forth. Had the word been in use he must necessarily have called himself a Realist. This is one of the biographical commonplaces concerning Dickens. Everyone knows how he excited himself over his writing, how he laughed and cried with his imaginary people, how he all but made himself ill with grief over the death-bed of little Nell or of Paul Dombey. This means, of course, that his imagination worked with perfect freedom, had the fullest scope, yet never came into conflict with the prepossessions of his public. Permission to write as Smollett and as Fielding wrote could in no way have advantaged Dickens. He was the born story-teller of a certain day, of a certain class. Again, he does not deem himself the creator of a world, but the laboriously faithful painter of that about him. He labours his utmost to preserve illusion. Dickens could never have been guilty of that capital crime against art so light-heartedly committed by Anthony Trollope, who will begin a paragraph in his novels with some such words as these: "Now, if this were fact, and not a story. . . ." For all that, Trollope was the more literal copier of life. But his figures do not survive as those of Dickens, who did in fact create -- created individuals, to become at once and for ever representative of their time.

Gee Suze, you really like tedious things.

[Samsa]

Originally posted by Mr. Rhinoceros
Gee Suze, you really like tedious things.

"Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens's powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens's use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels."

Originally posted by Samsa


"Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens's powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens's use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels."

Well, ah, I'm going to have to go ahead and , uh, kinda disagree with you on that one. Yeah.

[Samsa]

Originally posted by Mr. Rhinoceros


Well, ah, I'm going to have to go ahead and , uh, kinda disagree with you on that one. Yeah.

you would

i do actually enjoy reading paragraphs 4 times before i've fully absorbed it. i think it has something to do with being obsessive-compulsive. i read everything 4 times anyways why nto make it worth it hm?

"Well, I don't know what's happened to you. But, I hope you're happy with the life you've chosen . . ."

"Don't quote Dickens in MY apartment!"

[RobTheGood]

Charles Dickens is one of the greatest writers of the relative modern day.

His satirical approach to London and it's society is magnificant.


I urge everyone to read Great Expectations, or David Copperfield, and indulge yourself in a world of pathos and hope... not in that particular order...

[Gwargh]

He kept building the story up for the moment that David would fuck Emily, but then it never happened. That author betrayed me.

I'm glad he died and decreased the surplus population.

[Ghetto_Squirrel]

Dickens is fantastic. All the hatas need to read Great Expectations.

[sawdust restaurants]

Originally posted by Samsa
"Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens's powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens's use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels."

That's half true, imho.

There are passages in Dickens that absolutely blow me away. But almost all his major works are marred by weak passages that should have been edited out, and the majority of them wouldn't be in the books if he wasn't trying to give a cliffhanger ending to every chapter. Like I said in the other thread, or at least implied, Dickens was a master, but he let writing for serials get in the way of his art. I don't like the fact that when I read Dickens, it feels alternately transcendent and like an episode of "Passions."

[Samsa]

well he was a true democrat, that's what he says. and he wasn't an elitist fuck or anything and i don't know, i think plot was and maybe even still is just a device to say something more. i mean it's obviously just a work of fiction i don't really care if it's lame or unbelievable but he's just so passionate all the time and you can tell he just loves his characters, i don't know. and i read something which i didn't post about how he had no desire to offend his readers, actually maybe i DID post it i forget. because he was just a democratic man and he wanted to write things the common man would enjoy reading. he was so cool and so... i don't know. and he created such great images. pip wheeling miss havisham around that decrepit dining room table

my mom says i'm like miss havisham that is not nice. but you know. he just. alanis morrissette's lame song, "i'm like estella, i like to reel it in and then spit it out" it's just so great when a writer can create images or people that stick with you. *nods*

[Samsa]

oh and he WAS uneducated. that's what they say about him he really just had to find out waht to do for himself, he never formally learned how to write or anything he just figgered it out for himself.

it's like, in english class we watched this funny documentary on the identity of william shakespeare, i was laughing the whole time just because this one shakespeare defender was so angry that people would say that duke would be shakespeare, he said, he was this old english man and he referred to the duke as a 'roooaring hohmo" ahh ha ha. and the other man with this funny hat wa sinsistent htat the duke WAS shakespeare and at the end he started to cry that this poor nobleman was never recognized or something literally he was crying. i was laughing the whole time.

anyways when the question came to like "how did this poor lower-class man write so knowledgeably about such subjects only familiar to the nobility" and the answer is just "well he was a genius, and that's what geniuses do" and maybe that's not 2,2 related but oh man. *cry*