Charles Dickens Sucks! (Literary Fight Club) ibook

Dickens could turn a trip to the grocery store into a nine hundred page Victorian ordeal.

If he had written the grocery list, it would have had six chapters, three orphans, and a corrupt magistrate.
CHARLES DICKENS SUCKS! is the roast a hundred and fifty years overdue. It is a real argument built on real evidence, delivered by somebody who has read all of it so you do not have to.

Here is the case.

• He never met a sentence he could not make three times longer than necessary. He was paid to fill thirty two pages a month for twenty months at a stretch. That container shaped every book he wrote, and the two novels his format forced him to keep short are the only two most people ever finish.
• He did not need an editor. He needed somebody willing to tackle him. Why use one adjective when Dickens has already invented twelve? The fog in Bleak House is one of the great passages in English. The three hundred and fifty eight thousand words around it are not.
• His plots have more coincidences than a family reunion organised by fate. Two households picked at random both turn out to contain Oliver Twist's family. Every novel eventually becomes an episode of "Wait, They're Related?"
• His villains are evil, his heroes are saintly, and everyone else is inexplicably named something like Bumblewick Snodgrass. Miss Havisham, Madame Defarge and Mrs Gamp are unforgettable. Florence Dombey loves the father who hits her. Guess which ones were allowed to want something.
• It takes three ghosts, a graveyard, a dead partner and the threat of eternal misery to convince one man to buy a turkey. Three chapters on A Christmas Carol, including what actually happens to Bob Cratchit after the turkey, and why the workhouse is still open on the last page.
• Dickens loved poor children almost as much as he loved writing about poor children. George Orwell noticed that the entire politics reduces to a hope that rich men will cheer up. Attack every institution in England, then get buried in Westminster Abbey. That does not happen to a genuine threat.
• Nobody in Dickens is allowed a normal childhood, marriage, job, or afternoon. He believed subtlety was something that happened to other writers, and nobody in his books simply says something when they could dramatically announce it for three pages.
• Reading him is like being trapped in a Victorian house where every room contains another paragraph. A chapter on every famous book: Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and a dozen more.

And the receipts. Every criticism here was made to his face while he was alive and rich. Anthony Trollope put him in a novel as Mr Popular Sentiment. Henry James, aged twenty two, called him the greatest of superficial novelists. George Eliot said he rendered the outside of the poor perfectly and never once told us what they were thinking. Even G. K. Chesterton, his greatest defender, conceded he could not build a book.

Plus what to read and watch instead. George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Mayhew and Wilkie Collins. And the two family friendly film versions of A Christmas Carol that beat the source: the 1992 Muppet film, where Michael Caine plays it dead straight while Gonzo narrates the real prose, and the 2009 Jim Carrey version, the only major adaptation that keeps Ignorance and Want.

You do not read Dickens so much as negotiate with him.

For high school students and college grads who are tired of the old wind bag.