Why Should We Read Charles Dickens? Video Essay

[appalachiablue]

For all the fun he had with human foibles, Dickens was also a social realist, the greatest influence on later literary naturalism, who “shed light on how his society’s most invisible people lived.” Unlike many novelists, in his own time and ours, Dickens had the personal experience of living in such conditions to draw on for his authentic portrayals.

Nonetheless, Dickens’ did not allow his enormous popular success to blunt his compassion and concern for the plight of working people and the poor and socially marginalized. The engrossing, highly entertaining plots and characters in his novels are always pressed into service.

We might call his motives political, but the term is too often pejorative. The "Dickensian" mode is a humanist one. Dickens’ did not push specific ideological agendas; he tried, as Alain de Botton says in his introductory video above, “to get us interested in some pretty serious things: the evils of an industrializing society, the working conditions in factories, child labor, vicious social snobbery, the maddening inefficiencies of government bureaucracy.”

He tried, in other words, to move his readers to care about the people around them. What they chose to do with that care was, of course, then, as now, up to them.

>More: openculture.com, Dec. 26, 2017

[Achilleaze]

1. Thank you for posting this

[appalachiablue]

3. I found it a good piece on Dickens' creative literary genius and his methods

of illustrating Industrial Age social ills though writing, public speaking with theatrical aspects which appealed to a wide sympathetic following.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' sold a million copies the first year in England, confirming the significance of literature in leading to social change. Same for Frederick Douglass' 1845 abolitionist autobiography for which he gave readings and speeches in the US, Ireland and England.

[Squinch]

2. This is great. Thank you.

[appalachiablue]

4. My pleasure. What a tremendous writer he was, especially of the times.

Wish I'd visited his London House Museum, somehow didn't know of it until after living & travelling there. Next time, hah!

~ Dickens Dreams and Imagination, with Characters and Stories ~

[Orsino]

5. So we don't forget what an out-of-control aristocracy means for the rest of us.

Misery.

[appalachiablue]

7. Amen. Keep it together- or it's to the workhouse, maybe Tied to the Whipping Post. No joke.

- New Castle County, Delaware Poorhouse Pillory and Whipping Post, 1897

[appalachiablue]

6. British Workhouse and Inmates

- British workhouse, inmates

- Concerning the poor at Xmas: "Are there no prisons? workhouses?.. decrease the surplus population,"
Ebenezer Scrooge, 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens.

Dickens visited New York City mid-19th century and was shocked by deplorable conditions in neighborhoods & slums.



- New York State Poorhouse/Almshouse

[bronxiteforever]

8. Outstanding! Thank you for posting. N/t

[appalachiablue]

9. For sure, happy holidays!