Kinda weird how everybody knows him but nobody reads him desu
>>25268433Greatest novelist in English. A profound genius.
>>25268433If Shakespeare invented the human Dickens invented the Bri'ish human
I've only read Great Expectations. In the beginning I thought it was meh, but I grew to like it. Also I didn't expect to be so humorous.I will read his other novels at some point.
if i had a nickel for everything i had to say about dickens, id have a lot to say about dickens.
>>25268433A lot of people really like Charles Dickens. I think he's okay. Not bad at all. >>25268434I'm not sure where you hang out where nobody has read Dickens.
>>25268433If you like dick and you like chickens
>>25268433A Christmas Carol is the best work of prose of all time. This is incontestable.
>>25268481Say what you have to say.
>>25268433The third best English language author of the 19th century. Behind Hawthorne and Melville. Pretty great writer and if you don’t like him you’re fucking soulless.
>>25268855Hawthorne is actually good? I'm ESL and haven't read him in school
>>25268433Too many tangents and endless dilly-dallying. Get on with the fucking story already, Chuck.
>>25268443>Shakespeare invented the humanWhat is this even supposed to mean, you prattling fool?
>>25268443Pretty damning indictment of Dickens desu
>>25268433
>>25268817give the man a nickel for each word and youll get an essay on dickens every month
>>25268938This and I just don't like his prose
>>25268433His writing is obviously beyond reproach, but I don't like his novels. He knew he was so clever and humurous that he could serve his readers the cheapest, thinnest melodrama imaginable and they'd eat it up, which is what he did most of the time. I think David Copperfield is an exception, probably because he put a lot more heart into it due to its semi-autobiographical nature. Pickwick Papers is good too. Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit.. these are grating.
>>25268954it means you should lurk moar newfag
>>25268433WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT HIM:— Amazing creative force. Produced a score of archetypal characters that transcend the books. Ditto for dramatic situations.— Wrote very good prose even if it's not to current taste. He's all about the rhythm at the paragraph and page level. Builds huge structures much as Milton does. (Not much poetry in him, but he does have one thing Milton lacks: a sense of humour.)WHAT IS BAD ABOUT HIM:— Can lurch into sentimentality.— Sometimes did just churn it out.— Quintessentially an urban writer. (I think cities are very bad and humanity needs to get rid of them.)WHAT SHOULD YOU READ:— Pickwick, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale Of Two Cities, A Christmas CarolUSA EQUIVALENT:Interesting question, but I would say Mark Twain.VERDICT:If you think he isn't the #1 English novelist the burden of proof is on you.
Dickensian!
>>25269555>Can lurch into sentimentality.sentimentalité, moralizité, petit-bourgeoisieté
>>25269555>Quintessentially an urban writeronly the Lord of Hosts and a few soldiers arent“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”“You horrify me!”“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.
>>25268938he published all his books in a magazine he owned, he drug the stories out to drive sales. that's why most of his books are 1000 pages long
>>25268855>The third best English language author of the 19th century. Behind Hawthorne and Melville.Give me a break you stupid American, Dickens is better than Melville and Hawthorn isn't even in the running.
>>25270183NTA but I’m British and I’d say Melville is leagues above Dickens, as great as the latter is.It’s fine though, because Shakespeare and Milton are leagues above Melville so we win :)
>>25270291I think Melville certainly possess a more overt vitality, his language is grand and exciting, which wins over anyone of a pubescent sensibility (the larger part of the male populace in our manchild world), but in the handling and variety of syntax and rhythm Dickens is far the superior writer. Dickens is likewise far superior in his delineation of characters and plot. Melville's strength was more in the internal than external portraiture.
>>25270119What a stupid douchebag. The people who pretend they like his books sure look like retards now. You're cheering on the equivalent of s13 of some netflix crap.
>>25268481good one
>>25268901He was so good he made Melville gay
>>25268433facetious
>>25268963>neither drunk nor insanethats how describe myself in the opening sentence of my every diary entry
>>25270312I’ll give you plot. But their characters and syntax are too wildly different for one to be “better” than the other. Melville’s pseudo-Latinate syntactic expression and his digressions reflecting the erratic mental state of his characters (well, Ahab) is something I prefer over Dickens’ admittedly skilful rhythm and anaphoric style. I think they’re equal with characters, hell, I might give the edge to Dickens for his wide array of nuanced and expressive characters.
>>25270358Don’t be disingenuous. The man could tell a story better than any netflix slop you can think of and you know it.
>>25269555This anon gets it. I'm an utter psued that's only read GE, DC, and Hard Times (I know right, Hard Times? I got it cuz I liked the title) I think most people that know more Dickens would agree Hard Times ain't great, but even in there, he creates Mr. Gradgrind, Bounderby, Harthouse, and the heroic Jupe for you, and you remember them forever and find their 'anxious influence' all over the place thereafter. Nobody, no one in the world, made a character (or makes a character) like Dickens.
>>25268481Nice
>>25270853I disagree. Although I have read A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Hard Times, I agree with F.R. Leavis that Hard Times is Dickens's best novel. It is the only Dickens novel that is "aesthetically coherent". There are no 50 side characters, no unnecessary jokes or long descriptions. Every detail, every character serves one main idea.
>>25270032>only the Lord of Hosts and a few soldiers arentI don't think it's that extreme. I don't get the urban vibe off Conan Doyle for example. Sure, he has Holmes say that, but he prefaces it with "the problem with specialization is that you see everything through the one lens" or words to that effect. In other words he's admitting that view of the countryside is coloured by his profession. ACD's favourite of his books was The White Company and that is very rural.In the past it was sort of a given that the spirit of England was in the countryside and towns were an aberration. Maybe that's changing, but it's not gone completely. It's not just a matter of subject-matter or setting. For example, Philip Larkin isn't really bucolic, but you get a strong sense that he thinks "England = Countryside". Look at "Going, Going" for example.(Of course you get the opposite too — someone might write books set in the countryside, or country villages, etc but be urban in spirit. Jane Austen is a bit like this, I think.)Offhand I can think of a lot of writers I would call "country":— Chaucer— Shakespeare— Wordsworth— Thomas Hardy— Ted Hughes— Dylan Thomas— A. E. Housman— Cormac McCarthy— Robinson Jeffers— Faulkner— Hemingway— Mark Twain— Emily DickinsonNot so many big names in "city":— Dickens— Oscar Wilde— W. H. Auden (Once he was staying in the country and someone said "would you like to come for a walk?" and he said "what for?")— John Cheever (another example of urban spirit although he tends to write about suburbs.)— John Ashbery (That's four homosexuals. They tend to like cities. A. E. Housman is the only strongly pro-countryside anti-city homosexual I can think off offhand.)— Evelyn Waugh (another "urban in spirit", i would say)— Charles BukowskiThe French are more city, now I think about it:— Victor Hugo— Georges Simenon— Houellebecqor maybe that's just the ones we know?All this might be personal predilection. (I guess writers are getting more urban, but I don't read modern books much.)
>>25270891* soldiers are mammals* soldiers fight all the time* the whole point of being a soldier is to flip out and kill peoplepeople who dont have real ultimate power depend on their ability to control people who do. thats why theyre all gun grabbers, they need to ensure that real ultimate power is exclusive to vetted police, like how women want all men to have government blockchain chastity cages that only unlock when a credentialed woman enters the unlock code into the blockchain. so the intellectuals, who love their neighbors wives, say the penis mightier than the sword. with the wrong relationship to the means of production of real ultimate power comes a superstructure of attitudes, intrinsically, out of the need to feel safe, powerful, virile. thats the attitude of, if my neighbor isnt being watched 24/7, how do i know he isnt murdering his wife? i must give her a divorce so she can find herself in my bed. the proper relationship to the means of production of power for a civilian to have is subsidiarity — that i dont have as much training as a soldier, but i am a free man with the primary responsibility to defend my home
Very rare case of a British person with a soul
>>25271262I didn't think it was possible for an AI to take cocaine, since it doesn't have a nose. Just goes to show how little I know.
Trollope>Dickens
>>25271281what you notice about soldiers writing is a woman can either be a trusted family member or an untrusted sexual services contractor but the distinction is sexually explicit. it doesnt just start from a well formed concept of trust or the humility of knowing that a woman knows if she wants the d before you even notice shes there whereas civilians grab their balls and say ooga booga me alpha gorilla, it starts from the concept of honor, to know who you are and what youre doing, to say i am the frisbee of God and i am here to cause my enemies to commit seppuku
>>25271378
>>25271378.
>>25270119>People who write 'he drug out' presume to have opinions on Charles Dickens
>>25271310I love Trollope, in fact I've just finished reading his autobiography, but I think his artistic legacy would be more secure if he just wrote fewer works. Of the standalones, 'The Way We Live Now', 'He Knew He Was Right', and 'The Claverings' are absolutely fine as they are, but a lot of the others could have been combined to make more substantial works. I have a huge soft spot for 'Ralph the Heir', for example, but the plot could quite easily have been combined with something like 'Orley Farm' to create a single, more substantial work. Same with, again just at semi-random, 'Lady Anna' and 'The Belton Estate'. Several Barchester or Palliser stories could probably be combined, too, to leave only the strongest ideas on the page. He was paid a couple of thousand pounds per book and mostly conceived of them as works of entertainment rather than profundity, but as a producer of smooth prose and as a painter of complex character he was a prodigious talent, and it saddens me that he never really attempted his own 'Middlemarch'. 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' maybe comes closest.
>>25272103when I was in college this contemporary writer came to our class and spent most of it raving about trollope. you might push me into reading him. what's the best starting place?
>>25268433What inadequate subvocalizers wish they sounded/read like stylewise. It's prose you can latch on to and read aloud with ease. The audiobook performer's dream job.
>>25272568The best place to start is probably to read 'The Warden', which is practically a novella in length and should be viewed as purely introductory, followed immediately by its still-not-too-long sequel 'Barchester Towers'. If you despise the entire experience then you probably needn't continue, but will have made a valiant try.
