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Peter Jeary / NBC News
A bust of Charles Dickens in the author's former home in London, now a museum.
LONDON – Having fallen victim to a pickpocket on my journey through London this morning, it feels curiously appropriate that Tuesday marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The great chronicler of Victorian England's underworld would probably have been amused – and literally inspired – as I was adroitly parted from my cell phone.
As the country tips its collective hat to celebrate his 200th birthday – Prince Charles is leading ceremonies by laying a wreath on the writer's grave and actor Ralph Fiennes will give a reading, among other notable events – I wonder why does this most "modern" crime feel so immediately "Dickensian" in nature? Why do the settings, such as the workhouse of Oliver Twist, and characters, such as Ebenezer Scrooge, which Dickens drew in word portraits, still resonate today?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that millions in the English-speaking world – and countless more who don't speak English as a first language – are able to conjure up a name, plot or title for something associated with Charles Dickens. But here's the rub – it is the transformation of his work into other media that has fuelled this ubiquity.
Peter Jeary / NBC News
Billboard for an 1837 theatrical production based on 'The Pickwick Papers.'
At my English elementary school, our rare cultural day-trips were reserved for worthy matters. In one case, there was a trip to the movie theater to see a black-and-white screening of Great Expectations, which opens in the bleak landscape of the Kent marshes.
Just a few years later, Lionel Bart's stage-musical-turned-Academy-Award-winning Oliver! transported me to an equally strange Technicolor world, where Victorian London encountered the Swinging Sixties.
The start and end of my teenage years were marked, like solid wooden bookends holding up a shelf-full of Dickens books, by Smike (a musical TV adaptation from Nicholas Nickleby) and Nicholas Nickleby itself – an eight-hour stage epic, in two parts, written by David Edgar and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Google pays tribute to Dickens with a special 'doodle'
And so it transpired that I felt like an expert in Dickens, without ever having read a word. The Jeary family volume of A Christmas Carol remained unopened for many years, apart from the well-thumbed pages with illustrations.
Peter Jeary / NBC News
Dickens acting the part of Captain Bobadil in an amateur production, portrayed in an engraving of an 1846 painting by C.R. Leslie.
To a large degree, the blame must lie with Dickens himself. He was a keen amateur actor, and adored his staged readings and lecture tours. His work was so "theatrical" it was often pirated – illicitly transformed into a stage rendition before the serialization was complete.
The plots and settings are quintessentially cinematic – there are around 100 known movies dating from the silent-movie era based on Dickens' novels. He is also, without question, one of greatest authors of flawed characters in English literature.
As the Archbishop of Canterbury said at Tuesday's service at Westminster Abbey to honor Dickens, "the figures we remember most readily from his works are the great grotesques. We have, we think, never met anyone like them – and then we think again."
And so it was inevitable that Miss Havisham, Smallweed and Sir Leicester Dedlock would creep in to the common psyche, as the TV mini-series became the modern-day literary periodical.
These media transformations produce incredible interest in Dickens and his literature. The London Museum has a special Dickens exhibition that's proving hugely popular and the line for the Charles Dickens Museum – right around the corner from the NBC London bureau – ran out the passage and down the street (the fact they were offering free birthday cupcakes may have had something to do with it).
Peter Jeary / NBC News
A bookcase in the author's London home, now the Charles Dickens Museum.
The trouble is, as wonderful as adaptations are, they can never recreate the complexity and density of the original. Reading Dickens is like embarking on the trans-Siberian railway-- a marathon journey encountering multiple characters in unfolding landscapes. I remember feeling punch-drunk upon completing my first full read-through of a novel (Bleak House) and still need to be in the right frame of mind before starting a new one.
But there is something compelling and inspiring about his writing that becomes infectious. I have made my own dismal attempt to adapt Martin Chuzzlewit for the stage, but it's proving hellishly difficult; so unfortunately "Pecksniff and Pinch" won't be at a theater near you anytime soon... but please keep an eye out for my cell phone.
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Happy Birthday, Chuck!!
I feel Dickens' characters still resonate because they are like us. Individuals trying to survive the hardships that come their way. It is something people in America can relate to today.
True and they are quirky just like we are.
And Dickens still resonates for all the scrooges that are still out there. For all the companies who are off-shoring and outsourcing so they can make a quicker buck. Short-term payoffs. Me first. I like being able to fire people. Little poor children should take janitors' jobs so they can learn some work habits, since poor people don't have any. And don't even get me started on the blah people...
If we're still around 1000 years from now, people will still be reading 'A Christmas Carol.' The most timeless story ever written.
The great writer was just a few centuries ahead of his time.
Your iPhone should have and App or two that when neglected reports to the lost and found, I know ahead of its time.
Just like the founding fathers of the US knew the hearts of men, Dickens characters have existed throughout history.
I think that Mr. Jeary was on the right track in his opening paragraphs, but went badly wrong in attributing Dickins' continuing appeal to translatability into other media.
Jeary should hear what my Chinese wife, born in Hunan in 1952 and raised during the Cultural Revolution, has to say about what she learned of Dickens in school. His books were among the essential writings of Western culture taught after 1968 or so. They were twisted, as might be expected, in all sorts of ways (you should hear what she believed about Hamlet), but they were of interest even to the not-yet-reemergent Chinese.
The key is Mr. Jeary's own words:
"I believe the answer lies in the fact that millions in the English-speaking world – and countless more who don't speak English as a first language – are able to conjure up a name, plot or title for something associated with Charles Dickens."
This is correct. There is something essential and universal in the world that Dickens recreated in his works. This essential something is suitable to interpretation r manipulation, but the fact that this is simply because everyone can recognize something.
Frankly, I was delighted to read this news article. Clever writing, proper sentences and punctuation, proper spelling, really rare these days for news articles.
Dickens' writings tell of human failings and, of being poor and overcoming hardships and emerging ultimately victorious, the good overcoming evil. He talked of noble virtues in his heroes and heroines. He thought through the mind of a child as accurately as he did through the mind of an adult. I remember reading his novels as a child and found them thoughtful and fascinating. Now as an adult when I read them I still find nuances that a child's mind would miss but adults would catch. It is remarkable how simple his stories are that a kid can read and enjoy them yet how complex the character development is.
Because they reflect universal human characteristics. For example, Romney is the reincarnation of Ebeneezer Scrooge - a heartless vulture capitalist.
rrrrrrrr
Newt Gingrich is the spitting image of Mr. Edward Murdstone in David Copperfield and Mitt Romney is nearly a perfect copy of Ralph Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby.
Dickens was a master at creating flawed characters. To this day "Great Expectations" stays with me - offering prime examples of what type of people I don't want to become. Is it just my opinion or is everybody except Joe in that story a big, fat jerk?
Conservatives should rise up and oppose the teaching of Dickens in schools. There can be no question of where he would stand in today's political debates.
Listen to him here, speaking out in favor of government regulations in Hard Times. Why, it's practically socialist:
"The wonder was, [Coketown] was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. .... Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used — that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts — he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied."
Well it's pretty well accepted that Dickens was an early Socialist, feeling that relying on charitable institutions alone wouldn't be enough. But honestly, the only book of his I've ever read was "A Christmas Carol," and I'm much more familiar with the movie versions. My favorite was the 1951 version with Alestir Sim. I know "Oliver Twist" from a musical and a cartoon based on the Artful Dodger, and I'm pretty sure I've seen a version of "Tale of Two Cities," but no, I've never read it.
I did recently read part of an odd book, historical fiction, based on Dickens' later years. Something about a train wreck and finding dead bodies, which apparently left him deeply disturbed. And possibly an addiction - it was almost like reading about Poe. I can't remember the name of that book right now, probably because it was a little creepy and I didn't finish it. It's on a bookshelf in my house somewhere.
That's a perfect description of mega-corporations and their owners today. Dickens knew poverty first-hand. There were no safety nets beyond inadequate church-based alms. For the poor there was no upward mobility, no education to speak of, no hope beyond apprenticeship (if lucky), the workhouse, the poorhouse, and jail, then an early grave. His firsthand famliarity with these powered both his literary engine and his life. "Oliver Twist" exposed Dickens' Victorian readers to slums and corruption and criminal activity that shocked them to the core and actually led to improvements to the squalid site that served as the locale of the novel. Gingrich's suggestion that children learn the janitorial trade echoes Dickins' own childhood pasting labels on blacking bottles - at 6 shillings A WEEK, ten hours a day, when he was 12.