​Classic as the Dickens

Some American high school English teachers today asperse the name of Charles Dickens, calling his works outdated and unrelatable.

We can see evidence of this disenchantment reflected in the new sets of curricula created and adopted by schools across the country.

Take Massachusetts, for instance. According to the Pioneer Institute, Massachusetts had been the leader in reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—“the nation’s report card”—since 2005. These high scores had long been attributed to the state’s remarkably strong focus on classic literature in schools; even so, when Massachusetts adopted new Common Core standards in 2012, they reduced the amount of classic literature—including the works of Dickens—by 60 percent.

Nearly every state has adopted similar Common Core standards, breaking with the tradition of instructors in the British Commonwealth who revere his novels as Classics with a capital ‘C’. However, although appealing to tradition alone is to commit a logical fallacy, traditions are often worth giving special consideration in evaluation. Sometimes, they’re traditions for a good reason.

Dickens, for instance, really does deserve his fame as a writer. Yes, he was a serial author, paid by the word as he released his works bit-by-bit, one month at a time, and, yes, he relied upon the common people to circulate and read his works in order to remain profitable. His works, as a result, are frequently attacked as being wordy and sensational, but this is a terribly arrogant and myopic view to espouse.

A careful and deliberate man by nature, Dickens was respected for paying attention to every word he wrote. His winding style and enthusiasm for his work resulted in language that was, at times, florid and meandering, full of commas and adjectives, but it is all skillfully crafted and settles beautifully into a cohesive whole.

His diction is varied and versatile, adapting masterfully to the needs of dialogue and description, vulgarism and sophistication; the phrases he uses are injected with a charming local color, turning things like shops and streets into vivid and pointed descriptors. In fact, it was not unheard of for Dickens to write multiple alternative pieces, selecting only one for publication (as he did, at his publisher’s behest, for the denouement to “Great Expectations”).

Dickens, then, was popular because his works were moving and vibrant. It was not for sheer crass pleasure that crowds lined the piers of New York in 1841 as a trans-Atlantic liner arrived from England: the people, some sobbing, were shouting to hear news of Little Nell, a beloved character from “The Old Curiosity Shop,” who was revealed in previous installments of the novel to be on the verge of death.

And this isn’t surprising: Dickens’s works are infused with a breathtakingly vast and rich background, drawing deeply from his experiences, travels and readings. They are at once history and philosophy, fairytale and politics. As a child, Dickens’s mother was severe by necessity, and his family, on account of his insolvent father, spent much time in debtors’ prisons. He could not pursue his education at leisure as he desired—something we today take for granted—and instead was forced to labor for life-sustaining income from a very young age.

He suffered many heartbreaks and tragedies, including personal losses of loved ones, and spent a great deal of time acquainting himself with the hardships and travails of others. Scenes of the French countryside, of unrequited love, of regret, of the British legal system, of child labor, of courthouses and criminal justice, of factories and the plight of the working class—all these were things that Dickens himself was or became an expert in before penning.

Dickens’s works are at once thoughtful and thought-provoking; incisive and heartwarming; teaching and beseeching. They are a joint effort between author and reader, each an attempt not only to entertain but also to inform or inspire a kinder, softer, better world. Flitting from embedded joke to embedded joke, theme to theme, subtle motif to shocking truth, Dickens’s writings are akin to a finely woven fabric: they are works of creativity, elegance, and beauty, but most of all they aim to be unified and useful.

Akanksha Sah ’21, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Stoughton Hall