Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens!

My love of Dickens started in 1998 after the birth of my second child. When I found myself strenuously defending my choice of a favorite Wiggle (the Yellow Wiggle, duh!) to another mother at playgroup, I realized some intellectual stimulation was urgently needed. Thus was born my Dickens of a Year. I set a goal of reading all the works of Charles Dickens in the course of a year. For the record, it took me three years to read all the novels. I still have much of his non-fiction, plays, and poetry left to read.

Anyone who stops by my office will see a book truck filled with my personal copies of all of Dickens’ works and selected biographies. The bottom shelf of the cart contains library materials – books of criticism about Dickens. I dismantled and transported my shrine from home to my office (did I mention I have a Dickens shrine?) because I need to use this material to help plan the Library’s upcoming exhibit, The Familiar Dickens: Illustrated and Evaluated. This exhibit will open March 22nd in Linderman Library. All this background information is to establish that I have been thinking a lot about Dickens lately, especially about why I love his work so and about why I think it is more important than ever to teach his works.

Let us get this out of the way from the start: Dickens wrote Big Long Books. There is no denying that. Unfortunately, in this snippet world in which we now live, Big Long Books are a tough sell. Not an impossible sell, as we can see by the popularity of the Harry Potter books, but still a tough sell. The length of the books makes them particularly challenging to fit into a syllabus. Reading and studying two Dickens titles in a semester seems ambitious to me.

There is the age of these books to consider. Really, what could a Victorian novelist have to teach us in our complicated, twenty-first century world? Could Dickens have even imagined a world in which the threat of terrorism is an everyday part of life? Well, yes, in  A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens does a shiver-inducing good job conveying the fear and uncertainly of Paris during the Reign of Terror. What about the materialism of our culture? Check out Hard Times, my personal favorite. The increasing disparity of income? That was a problem in Victorian England, too, and Dickens covers it in a number of his books, but again I am going to recommend A Tale of Two Cities because it serves as a cautionary reminder of what happens when the gap between the rich and the poor gets too wide. Dickens comes to mind even when I watch the news. When I hear politicians talk about their plans for the poor, I think of A Christmas Carol when the Ghost of Christmas Present chastises Scrooge for his earlier comment that the poor should die and decrease the surplus population. The Ghost of Christmas Present says, “forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Of God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!” That the Ghost of Christmas Present urges Scrooge to learn and practice empathy for the poor is a message that those who govern or who aspire to govern would do well to remember.

Even now, one hundred forty-two years after his death, Dickens has so much to teach us about social justice, about equity, and about just plain being decent honorable people. All of his works are available in the Library’s collection. They are all also freely available online at websites like Project Gutenberg. Today, to celebrate the 200th birthday of an author widely considered to be the greatest novelist ever to write in the English language, try one of his books. A good place to start is with A Christmas Carol. If you have seen any of the many movie versions, you know the gist of the story. Now is your chance to see what the movies left out. In particular, look for the scene in which we learn what happened to Scrooge’s former fiancée. This scene is often omitted, which is a shame since it really puts into perspective the true cost of what Scrooge has lost. Happy reading! My birthday wish for you is to find as much joy and as much pleasure as I have found in reading Charles Dickens’ works.