If Dickens Were Writing Nowadays...
Has anyone ever told you - a parent, a teacher, even someone online, mistakenly trying to “educate” you into “better reading habits” - that what you’re reading is second-rate, and that you should be reading Dickens instead of Harry Potter?
Ever wondered what to say in defence of your “guilty pleasures”?
Well, Dickens was a product of his time. He wrote in the language of his time. If he were alive today, he would write in the language of our time. So.. what would he sound like?
It seems to me that one way to find out is to look at his contemporaries, and compare what they thought with some of the similar things written by modern critics.
G.H. Lewes: on Dickens, in 1872: “ We do not turn over the pages in search of thought, delicate psychological observation, grace of style, charm of composition; but we enjoy them like children at play, laughing and crying at the images before us.”
So, to his contemporaries, Dickens was at best a guilty pleasure, enjoyable, but to be read for fun, not education.
George Eliot wasn’t a fan, thinking him superficial and psychologically shallow. “He scarcely ever passes from the humourous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.”
Charlotte Bronte didn’t have much time for him either. She thought he was sentimental, trivial, his characters more caricatures than real people. She says: “It seems to me too often weak and twaddling – an amiable nature is caricatured – not faithfully rendered.”
And yet he was immensely popular with the readers, a hugely best-selling author with a passionate fan-base who followed everything he did with adoring attention to detail.
Remind you of anyone yet, huh?
These are rather more recent reviews of one of our current literary superstars.
The Guardian: 2000. “What I do object to is a pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style which has left me with a headache and a sense of a wasted opportunity. Rowling’s characters, unlike life’s, are all black-and-white. Her story-lines are predictable, the suspense minimal, the sentimentality cloying every page.”
The Independent: 2012. "Her writing, which can be long-winded and laborious in the clunkily satirical set-pieces, picks up passion and even magic…”
The Sunday Book review, 20012. “The novel is... crammed with scenes and set pieces that demonstrate Rowling's superlative powers of observation: the subtle ways a wife can exact revenge on a husband, the visceral urges that drive adolescent lust. At times, though, … firmer control over the material might have prevented Pagford’s inhabitants from being turned into a gallery of grotesques, with every character carrying a label: wife beater, drug addict, alcoholic, snob, gossip, fantasist and so on.
Conclusion? If Dickens were writing today, he’d probably sound a hell of a lot more like J.K. Rowling than the latest Booker Prizewinner.
Take a moment.
My pleasure, kids.
Ever wondered what to say in defence of your “guilty pleasures”?
Well, Dickens was a product of his time. He wrote in the language of his time. If he were alive today, he would write in the language of our time. So.. what would he sound like?
It seems to me that one way to find out is to look at his contemporaries, and compare what they thought with some of the similar things written by modern critics.
G.H. Lewes: on Dickens, in 1872: “ We do not turn over the pages in search of thought, delicate psychological observation, grace of style, charm of composition; but we enjoy them like children at play, laughing and crying at the images before us.”
So, to his contemporaries, Dickens was at best a guilty pleasure, enjoyable, but to be read for fun, not education.
George Eliot wasn’t a fan, thinking him superficial and psychologically shallow. “He scarcely ever passes from the humourous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.”
Charlotte Bronte didn’t have much time for him either. She thought he was sentimental, trivial, his characters more caricatures than real people. She says: “It seems to me too often weak and twaddling – an amiable nature is caricatured – not faithfully rendered.”
And yet he was immensely popular with the readers, a hugely best-selling author with a passionate fan-base who followed everything he did with adoring attention to detail.
Remind you of anyone yet, huh?
These are rather more recent reviews of one of our current literary superstars.
The Guardian: 2000. “What I do object to is a pedestrian, ungrammatical prose style which has left me with a headache and a sense of a wasted opportunity. Rowling’s characters, unlike life’s, are all black-and-white. Her story-lines are predictable, the suspense minimal, the sentimentality cloying every page.”
The Independent: 2012. "Her writing, which can be long-winded and laborious in the clunkily satirical set-pieces, picks up passion and even magic…”
The Sunday Book review, 20012. “The novel is... crammed with scenes and set pieces that demonstrate Rowling's superlative powers of observation: the subtle ways a wife can exact revenge on a husband, the visceral urges that drive adolescent lust. At times, though, … firmer control over the material might have prevented Pagford’s inhabitants from being turned into a gallery of grotesques, with every character carrying a label: wife beater, drug addict, alcoholic, snob, gossip, fantasist and so on.
Conclusion? If Dickens were writing today, he’d probably sound a hell of a lot more like J.K. Rowling than the latest Booker Prizewinner.
Take a moment.
My pleasure, kids.
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Joanne
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Oct 04, 2015 01:05PM
That's because you have no objective means of comparing the language and literary styles of two different centuries...:-)
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Thanks for that, Joanne. Well said! I had a similar conversation with an ex- teacher friend of mine recently, about the modern poetry of Mark Grist (although I realise that he's a totally different genre to J.K.).We watched him on you tube in word battle with a young "grime artist" called Blizzard, and we were blown away by the energy, the raw creativity, the sheer delight that young people are so excited and passionate about modern poetry. Many would argue that it is course, vulgar, clumsy at times, sometimes shockingly explicit and mysogynistic, and crudely patched together, but I loved the fact that young people were getting together to enthusiastically celebrate and use their brains to create such exciting, highly linguistic and modern poetry. My friend once taught Tony Harrison's V to an AS class, and had so many complaints from parents, even though the kids loved it.Shakespeare and DH Lawrence had a bad rap in their time too.
As long as a reader is inspired and excited by what they read, they will continue to read, learn and grow. J.K. got so many children reading and that is to be applauded and commended.
