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rhiannabeth 's review for:
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens
Right.
I have feeling about studying Dickens. In our lecture, people who study Dickens at university level or above were kind of 'pooh-poohed' as an obvious and easy option. Obviously, it also comes with the whole 'male, straight, white, English, middle class author' thing, which, yeah, true, but if anybody's writing actually deserves to be in the canon (and there are a lot of authors who fit that definition who don't), it's Dickens. For a start, just because he was writing for entertainment doesn't make his work less worthwhile (and whoever started thinking like that needs a knock around the head, a book doesn't have to be 'literary' to be GOOD). He was writing for perhaps the first generation of English working-class where the majority were able to read and write, and he was popular, to the point where he essentially wrote his family out of debtors prison (worth noting - he only finished his career as a middle class writer, he started out sticking labels on bottles of shoe polish). He's easy to read, even over a century later, and honestly, there are so many people out there who just don't get that that's just as important as pushing the boundaries of literature or whatever. His stories are still popular too. They have lasting value. Who today hasn't seen A Christmas Carol? He's part of a rare phenomenon, where you don't actually have to have read his books to know what they're about. How many people have actually sat down with a copy of Oliver Twist? Writing about working class lives gave his stories staying power, and you can't sniff at that. Stories that last through time with the same popularity are rare, and there is always a reason for it. Honestly, we know a lot about the everyday lives of working class people during the era because of Dickens' writing. Historical importance there too! Furthermore, because he was writing before the conventions of novel writing were established, there's basically not a single cliche to be found folded into these pages. All of his descriptions are thoughtful and memorable, able to make you see the world in a new way. There's a lot of canon authors praised for their literary skill who can't do that.
Dickens is a good writer, and no amount of criticism is going to change that.
I have feeling about studying Dickens. In our lecture, people who study Dickens at university level or above were kind of 'pooh-poohed' as an obvious and easy option. Obviously, it also comes with the whole 'male, straight, white, English, middle class author' thing, which, yeah, true, but if anybody's writing actually deserves to be in the canon (and there are a lot of authors who fit that definition who don't), it's Dickens. For a start, just because he was writing for entertainment doesn't make his work less worthwhile (and whoever started thinking like that needs a knock around the head, a book doesn't have to be 'literary' to be GOOD). He was writing for perhaps the first generation of English working-class where the majority were able to read and write, and he was popular, to the point where he essentially wrote his family out of debtors prison (worth noting - he only finished his career as a middle class writer, he started out sticking labels on bottles of shoe polish). He's easy to read, even over a century later, and honestly, there are so many people out there who just don't get that that's just as important as pushing the boundaries of literature or whatever. His stories are still popular too. They have lasting value. Who today hasn't seen A Christmas Carol? He's part of a rare phenomenon, where you don't actually have to have read his books to know what they're about. How many people have actually sat down with a copy of Oliver Twist? Writing about working class lives gave his stories staying power, and you can't sniff at that. Stories that last through time with the same popularity are rare, and there is always a reason for it. Honestly, we know a lot about the everyday lives of working class people during the era because of Dickens' writing. Historical importance there too! Furthermore, because he was writing before the conventions of novel writing were established, there's basically not a single cliche to be found folded into these pages. All of his descriptions are thoughtful and memorable, able to make you see the world in a new way. There's a lot of canon authors praised for their literary skill who can't do that.
Dickens is a good writer, and no amount of criticism is going to change that.