For nearly three years, I’ve been revisiting Dickens, read to me through my ear-pods. I’ve listened to fourteen of his fifteen novels for over 300 hours; only a few dozen hours remain. My delight has been constant. While Dickens often writes over the top, straining too hard, almost never did I groan “Enough already” and quit listening. Of storytellers, only Shakespeare and Jane Austen beguile so dependably. Even when they’re off their game, these three can do no wrong.
What’s Dickens’ secret?
Relations with makers are like relations with people. Who knows why any two hit it off? Congruent interests, attitudes, dreads, delights, style, who knows? With some of you, I experienced love at first sight. You were my kind of person, I just knew it – from a laugh, remark, grimace, some magical mix.
Dickens is my kind of storyteller. For starters, he sees the world as funny. Events may be tragic, hair-raising, enraging, but inevitably humans are humorous.
Dickens takes life seriously. What happens here on earth matters a lot. This may sound like the opposite of humorous, but it’s no contradiction. Serious doesn’t mean solemn, it means urgent, passionate, yearning, straining to make the most of our chance.
Dickens loves – all his characters, even the blackguards. For aren’t all humans frail, feeble, fallible, each absurd in our way? And however strange, isn’t each of us capable of goodness that irradiates and redeems?
Dickens is a populist. His kindest souls are the commonest of commoners. The greater the sophistication, the greater the moral corruption. The richer, the poorer – and vice versa – as in the Sermon on the Mount.
Dickens is a generous writer. He welcomes us into his stories like a genial innkeeper; he doesn’t make his prose prickly or insist on an intellectual dress code. He doesn’t drub us with morality, like some preachers from the pulpit. He’s an ideal author to listen to because he repeats, reminds, in case your attention’s wavered.
Dickens writes to delight. His plots are suspenseful, his characters memorable, his prose sportive, his justice heartening, his tenderness reliable. We can rest easy things will come out alright in the end, though maybe in heaven. Goodness feels good. Most contemporary novelists don’t dare present a good character, lest they be mocked as naïve.
No author matches Dickens in depicting childhood pain. We ache with Oliver Twist, young David Copperfield, Pip in Great Expectations, Paul Dombey, little Nell, and many others. This empathy places us on the side of his heroes. Who of us hasn’t suffered as a child?
Because Dickens wrote to please – and sell – he was scorned by many subsequent critics, from Henry James on. In the twentieth century, a chasm widened between art, which was highbrow, and entertainment, which was lowbrow. Dickens, like Shakespeare, wrote for everybody. True, Dickens the person became a snob, but he despised that in himself. In his stories, he aspires to be good, decent, nobody’s better.
Each reads for a different reason. I read to be reminded life is worthwhile. Such abundance, variety, excitement, decency, adventure, beauty, sadness, opportunity to amend our moment! I hit it off with authors who make me feel being on earth is a privilege – for which we should all give thanks. Dickens, like Shakespeare, makes my world big and bigger still.
I read, too, for companionship. With those I love I love to spend time. But of that gleaming throng, only Jane and Henry are available to hang with. Modernity keeps everybody too busy. With writers I love – and they are not legion – I can spend my life.