Great Expectations - How & Why To Read Dickens

How and Why to Read Dickens
How to Read Dickens – 5 Tips have run stories on his relevance to the current
By Norrie Epstein from The Friendly Dickens, 1998 global economic crisis. And with the Christmas
season now only four months away, it seems that
1. Unlike with many contemporary novels, with there is no getting away from him any time soon.
Charles Dickens’ work the destination doesn’t As someone who teaches and writes about
matter; it’s the journey that counts. Savor each Dickens, the question of why we still read him is
word: don’t rush. And don’t try to think too something that's often on my mind. But that
logically! You are entering a different universe, question was never more troubling than one day,
where people are the same and yet not the nearly 10 years ago, when I was standing as a
same. And remember that truth is not always guest speaker in front of a class of about 30 high
literal. (To paraphrase a Zen proverb: Before school students. I had been speaking for about 20
you read Dickens, a bowl is a bowl and tea is minutes with an 1850 copy of David Copperfield in
tea. While you are reading Dickens, a bowl is no my hand, telling the students that for Victorian
longer a bowl and tea is no longer tea. And after readers, Dickens's writing was very much a "tune-
you’ve read Dickens, nothing is ever the same in-next-week" type of thing that generated trends
again.) and crazes, much as their own TV shows did for
2. Read like a child, i.e., allow yourself to slip into them today.
Dickens’s world completely. Let go the desire to Then a hand shot up in the middle of the
“find out what happens.” The plots are the least room.
interesting part of Dickens—the real pleasure is "But why should we still read this stuff?"
in the reading itself. I was speechless because in that moment I
3. If tempted to skip something that looks boring, realised that, though I had begun a PhD
and it’s either skip it or not finish the book, skip dissertation on Dickens, I had never pondered the
it. question myself.
4. Expect the author to make mistakes. He is not The answer I gave was acceptable: "Because
an impersonal god perfected by dozens of he teaches you how to think," I said. But lots of
editors at a vast publishing empire. He wrote writers can teach you how to think, and I knew
fast. He wrote to entertain. that wasn't really the reason.
5. Read aloud! Dickens spoke his characters’ lines The question nagged me for years, and for
as he wrote. years I told myself answers, but never with
complete satisfaction. We read Dickens not just
Why Are We Still Reading Dickens? because he was a man of his own times, but
By Jon Michael Varese, 4 September 2009, because he was a man for our times as well. We
The (London) Guardian read Dickens because his perception and
investigation of the human psyche is deep, precise,
The great Victorian is probably even more ubiquitous and illuminating, and because he tells us things
now than he was in his lifetime. How he remains about ourselves by portraying personality traits
such vital reading is an intriguing question. and habits that might seem all too familiar. His
messages about poverty and charity have travelled
It seems that you cannot turn a corner this year through decades, and we can learn from the
without bumping into Charles Dickens. So far we've experiences of his characters almost as easily as
seen the release of four major novels based on the we can learn from our own experiences.
Victorian icon's life: Dan Simmons's Drood These are all wonderful reasons to read
(February), Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens Dickens. But these are not exactly the reasons why
(March), Richard Flanagan's Wanting (May), and I read Dickens.
Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress (July). Earlier My search for an answer continued but never
this year BBC1's lush new production of Little Dorrit with success, until one year the little flicker came –
was nominated for five Bafta awards in the UK, and not surprisingly – from another high school
11 Emmys in the US. Newspapers and magazines student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing
contest. "We need to read Dickens's novels," she
1 Summer Assignments Mr. Rose

wrote, "because they tell us, in the grandest way
possible, why we are what we are."
There it was, like a perfectly formed pearl
shucked from the dirty shell of my over-zealous
efforts – an explanation so simple and beautiful that
only a 15-year-old could have written it. I could add
all of the decoration to the argument with my years
of education – the pantheon of rich characters
mirroring every personality type; the "universal
themes" laid out in such meticulous and timeless
detail; the dramas and the melodramas by which we
recognise our own place in the Dickensian theatre –
but the kernel of what I truly wanted to say had
come from someone else. As is often the case in
Dickens, the moment of realisation for the main
character here was induced by the forthrightness of
another party.
And who was I, that I needed to be told why I
was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew
who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist,
always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas
Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably
convinced that my father was watching me from
beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing
for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due
to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in
love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of
these characters, rewritten for another time and
place, and I began to understand more about why I
was who I was because Dickens had told me so much
about human beings and human interaction.
There are still two or three Dickens novels that I
haven't actually read; but when the time is right I'll
pick them up and read them. I already know who it is
I'll meet in those novels – the Mr Micawbers, the
Mrs Jellybys, the Ebenezer Scrooges, the Amy
Dorrits. They are, like all of us, cut from the same
cloth, and at the same time as individual as their
unforgettable aptronyms suggest. They are the
assurances that Dickens, whether I am reading him
or not, is shining a light on who I am during the best
and worst of times. 
2 Summer Assignments Mr. Rose

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1 Summer Assignments Mr. Rose

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