r/charlesdickens

I absolutely love listening to Dickens books on audio. His writing is particularly suited to being read aloud - he did a lot of readings, so he definitely wrote with an eye on that (kind of like you can tell modern books have been written with an eye on film adaptations). The dialogue is so fantastic, the wordplay so intricate and funny, the images so evocative (I can't recall weeping at death scenes harder than I've wept when children die in his novels ... ) It's so perfect for read aloud.

What is your favorite on audio? Please try to specify the narrator if you can, since there are multiple versions of all of his popular books. Conversely, are there any you remember trying to listen to but didn't like (for any reason)?

So curious to hear people's responses.

I am looking into reading Dickens, namely David Copperfield which will be my first. Having just read Pride and Prejudice, one key takeaway I took was that knowing the context of the time was crucial in understanding the subtext of the story. For instance, the importance of introductions, and the importance of connections etc etc.

So, I was wondering if there are any specific things to know about the time that might help with reading Copperfield>

The Guardian has asked more than 170 authors, critics, and academics to each provide a ranked list of the 10 best novels published in English of all time. All the lists were tallied to compile an overall top 100. Dickens has four entries, the same number as Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf with five entries, has the most. Here are the four novels by Dickens:
72. Our Mutual Friend
35. Great Expectations
33. David Copperfield
12. Bleak House
Do you think this about right? Should he have more entries? What do you think of the rank of these specific titles?

(Spoilers for Dombey and Son below)

Some time ago, I began reading straight through Dickens, having long avoided this great writer due to my preference for other Victorians and the whole sentimentality thing that is hung (not entirely unwarrantedly) around his neck.

The first four novels I ranked as follows:

1. Pickwick Papers (sublime)
2. Nickleby (fun, a full serving)
3. Old Curiosity Shop (slow start but won me over)
4. Oliver Twist (loved much of it but found it thin gruel in places - but a sublime ending)

I’ve continued on to the next three and will add them below, with some thoughts. I stopped after the first four to read some other stuff as a mental cleanser, and then breezed through Barnaby - but hit a hard wall with ol Chuz. Indeed I abandoned Martin Chuzzlewit long enough to read about thirty novels by the great Jack Vance. Once I finally tired of Vance’s irreverence, I returned to Chuzzlewit and enjoyed it, and then spend the past million years in Dombey and Son. The beginning of that book has many absolutely brilliant and hilarious turns of phrase, but it became a trial in places - still, it never lost me, and having just finished it I wanted to share some thoughts.

Dombey and Son
- Strange and endless novel that nevertheless kept me on the hook. It carries the mark of being written in sections for an audience to whom Dickens is very responsive, like a TV series veering from season to season to keep the audience guessing. The first part, about young Paul, fades from memory by the end and seems to be from some other story. The narrative climaxes a good hundred pages before ending. The first chapters had more humor and more of those perfect Dickensian lines than the rest, which were often overwritten - like today’s “fan-service”, it must have been his attempt to lean into the elements that his readers were responding to at the time, at the expense of the effect of the novel as a whole.
- The train motif is much more understated than I expected.
- If we lacked the scene between Edith and Carker, the final scene between Edith and Florence would be so much more powerful. It would place us in Florence’s position, forced to weigh our cynicism against our faith - and it would allow us to see Florence’s exceptional faith more clearly.
- The major flaw in Dickens’s representation of the human experience is his treatment of death. Characters die of nothing and commit themselves unwaveringly to attitudes that we are compelled to believe will never change - Edith will move to Italy and never see Florence again, even if both life another 30 years. Such events are forced by the narrative and let us peer behind the veil of Dickens’s thought to see the manipulation of the text.
- Nevertheless, Dombey and Son is the first novel by Dickens where I was impressed by his brilliance as an observer of inner life rather than as a parodist of behavior. Some of his choices for Paul, Edith, and Mr Dombey ring very true to me about the idiosyncrasies of human nature, although there are many characters who feel rather hollow - particularly the blandly good characters like Carker Jr, Florence, and Walter.

My updated list:

1. Pickwick Papers (sublime)
2. Dombey and Son (huge, digressive, but frequently brilliant and a really serious engagement with some well-observed paradoxes of human nature)
3. Nickleby (fun, a full serving)
4. Martin Chuzzlewit (long and foolish, often ringing hollow, but the big central conceit won me over - a jumbo jet that wobbles but he sticks the landing).
5. Barnaby Rudge (harsh, cruel, pitiless but also compelling and impactful. Enraging at times to read as it captures collective idiocy and injustice all too well).
6. Old Curiosity Shop (slow start but won me over)
7. Oliver Twist (loved much of it but found it thin gruel in places - but a sublime ending)

I apologize for the banality of the above, but I felt compelled to share these thoughts.

So, I mean a book where the MC is a child for a large portion of the book (at least 1/3). I just can't fathom how an adult man can write children so authentically.

Some of the prose just makes my inner child feel so seen! It's insane. Sometimes I'll read a few sentences and be struck by the most vivid childhood memory of feeling exactly that way. The scene where Pip is left alone in the courtyard the first time he visits Miss Havisham's and Estella abandons him and he wants to kick the walls ... I had to stop and take deep breaths after I finished that passage.

So, like Our Mutual Friend wouldn't fit this category, there's only smatterings of when the characters are small children and I believe they're only flashbacks. Same for Little Dorritt. The MC grows up quickly.

GE and David Copperfield would be examples of what I'm looking for. I know there are so many. I've read GE and DC and Oliver Twist, but beyond that I am open! (I will read them all, eventually, but I just finished a book and want to start something else today or tomorrow.)

I used to re-read Dickens' "Christmas Carol" yearly, from when I was a kid onward. it's always been one of my favorite pieces, but I never can help but be confused when Scrooge says - in his conversation with the charitable gentlemen - "Besides--excuse me--I don't know that." I've always assumed it's a genuine literary aposiopesis, somehow connected with Scrooge's immediately preceding comment about "surplus population"... then comes the response of "But you might know it" from one of the gentleman, indicating that it seems obvious to him what Scrooge was about to say. Well, the same has never been obvious to ME! What specifically are we to understand to be Scrooge's "THAT" and the gentleman's "IT"?

Am I thick? Every commentary/analysis of this dialog focuses either on the mechanism of character development, or the Malthusian socio-historical implications of the exchange... nobody addresses the actual verbiage. I just want to get a handle on WHAT is being said or implied, not WHY.

Any insights? What have I been missing?