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I distinctly remember skipping school when I was about 10 years old and stumbling across the old black and white film version of Great Expectations from the 1950s on the local PBS TV station during that day while my parents were at work.
My parents were not educated people, so that was the first time I knew there was "high art" in addition to "low art." I didn't need to have a formal humanities education or literary parents to know what the difference was exactly, it was just on a whole different level than anything else that was in popular media.
~35 years later I do have a formal humanities education, which I suppose started on that day and never really ends.
Thanks, Charles Dickens.
I think I recall being shown a black-and-white version of Great Expectations in school; it was really an enjoyable film, and motivated me to get into literature. Fiction didn't stay my curiosity for long (now I'm more interested in philosophy), but for me, it seems education at least helped point me in some kind of direction.
Funny, when I was in middle school I found an old copy of David Copperfield at the bottom of my closet. Its a 700 page novel, but the prose at the time blew me away. The drawn out scenes and vivid characters captured my imagination. I dont think I can ever get that kind of experience now, I'm too cynical.
It's fascinating that sometimes the most formative parts of real education can happen when avoiding "education".
As the saying goes, don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.
> Was Dickens’s fiction shaped by the nastiness he never consciously acknowledged?
No, as a writer he would be very aware of where his inspiration came from and would be good at creating imaginary characters for dramatic effect. Without the villain the hero could never overcome adversity and achieve redemption. Is this yet another example of judging a historical text by current standards. Will Dickens have to be rewritten to remove the bad bits. What'll be left. I can remember that scene in Oliver Twist where he asked for more soup. Completely unlikely to occur in real life. I mean they actually got soup before eating.
Maybe, but I cannot help but hate the cottage industry of tearing down anyone who ever did anything great. In the end we are supposed to think that despite never having done anything on a par with Dickens we're still better because he was a real nasty piece of work, and really the great things he did were just the symptoms of what an awful person he was.
Better to never do anything worthwhile whatsoever.
on edit: I'm probably in a bad mood right now so the negative message hit me harder than it should.
Is it tearing down when we say the truth about those people lives instead of false happy victory narratives? One problem with that is that it gives us beautiful narrative of just world in which great awesome happy people get to win the day. Another problem is that people make conclusions about history and past societies from those stories. They are not really consistent with how real world about us works. It makes opponents of famous historical characters sound like rambling idiots, where they sometimes really had good points. It also makes us expect unrealistic greatness and make us take those people as authorities in questions where we should not. It makes us miss biases those people had too.
And not all in that reflects badly Dickens himself. I mean, this is not exactly something that I would see as tearing down Dickens, that is just having screwed childhood in way we like to pretend did not happened:
> He briskly takes us through the story of the penury, the period in the debtors’ prison, the aborted education, the banishment, aged 10, to menial labour in Warren’s Blacking warehouse. [...] In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”.
The way Dickens treated his wife and kids (preventing them access to her) indeed sounds abusive, but to me, it is also indeed the way horrible treatment in childhood can end up being reproduced in adult hood in real life.
Even contemporary great artists/scientists can be abusers and what not. And we collectively seem to have problem to accept that, we seem to want to think that greatness in one area must imply greatness in other area.
>Is it tearing down when we say the truth about those people lives instead of false happy victory narratives?
what is the truth about those people, exactly? Is it this:
"The highlight of his show was Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, in which, Wilson thinks, the novelist released some demonic aspect of himself – some yen for sexual violence – on stage. Murderous villains such as the gleefully sadistic Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, or the psychopathic John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were projections of his own cruelty. "
This does more than say Dickens was a jerk who had an affair with a younger woman and was probably abusive. It ties his abilities as a writer to a yen for sexual violence and theorizes his ability to write cruel characters was due to them being projections of his own cruelty.
With this Dickens' ability becomes an indictment of his character - he can do these great things because he is a monster, which I'm sure you can see is quite a bit different than he did great things and also monstrous things. The prior reasoning means that in the end every great thing has its wellspring in something monstrous, as I said therefore - better to never achieve anything at all.
on edit: for the record I didn't downvote you, I will upvote because, although we disagree in manner outlined here I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for a simple disagreement.
I think that one aspect is that I don't see speculated yen for violence unleashed on page that you did not actually performed as something that would so horribly tarnish Dickens that I would never read Dickens again.
Wilson may be right or wrong or stretching (I did not cared enough to double check that claim). The actual seeming abuse of wife would might theoretically might make me more suspectfull of his female characters had his books been different, but there is enough ugly in his books about everyone that it is moot anyway.
So I kind of passed over that point as not all in all affecting. My impression from art tend to change when it is tied to real world acts (helping or harming real people), not merely wishes. For example, "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" is different knowing it was written by very much adult R.Kelly for his 15 years old wife. But it is tie to real people suffering in the process that make it different.
As someone noted, no one remembers the critics. If put on the spot, you can probably name 3 great painters, but not 3 great art critics, for example. So there's no need to worry. As someone (else) stated it really well, "Other people's opinions are none of my business". You go be good. :-)
> If put on the spot, you can probably name 3 great painters, but not 3 great art critics, for example.
John Ruskin, John Berger, and Walter Benjamin instantly came to my mind. And I could go on. I think that fewer people would be able to name many music critics, but because visual art is, well, a visual medium, many people learn about it through books, and those books are often written by critics.
I don't know any of those you mentioned, but I'm probably just showing my ignorance.
I think about the only "art" critic of any kind that comes to mind quickly is, um... I'm embarrassed to admit it... Roger Ebert :P
Seriously though: I'll bet money most people who know names of painters or writers don't remember the name of any critic from those fields.
As is the nature of things, many artists are critics themselves. Hell, entire schools of art were founded on criticism like Dadaism. Take Salvador Dali and George Orwell. Most people could identify these people as artists, but how many people know Orwell wrote an essay on Dali's work? T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis are also famous artist/critics.
In the end, I don't think it's that people don't remember the names of critics, it's that they never bother to learn them in the first place. Most people don't care, and that's perfectly fine - you have to be pretty deep into a field to care about its criticism in the first place. However, it also doesn't discredit the critics' work or criticism in general. Being famous doesn't make you right nor does it make your work more correct, after all.
Indeed.
In American society you could point at Edgar Allen Poe as someone who is only known for his fiction and poems, but who was a prolific critic in his day. He likely made more money as a lecturer than as a fiction writer in his later years. This has been researched a bit but sadly there are few texts that survive of those lectures, just newspaper opinions and advertisements about the lectures.
This one is one my personal favorites from the ones that weren't lost...
Very cool! I didn't know this about Poe. But that's hardly a critique or a lecture by Poe, is it? It seems to be a sketch of a kind Mark Twain could have done as well (coincidentally, I adore Mark Twain).
I'm not nitpicking, by the way, just enjoying the piece you shared.
I think it's interesting that Ruskin and Berger were the first two that I thought of too. If we'd both named three painters I think it's much less likely that we'd have picked the same ones, because there are so very many of them to choose from.
I should add (it doesn't make me look great, but does bolster the case I'm agreeing with here) that more precisely my first two names were John Ruskin and John, oh damn it, what's his name, the "Ways of Seeing" guy -- and that I hadn't thought of a third name. (Perhaps with effort I could dredge one more out of my memory, but it wouldn't be Walter Benjamin because I confess I don't recall hearing of him.)
There just are a lot more famous artists than famous art critics. (And, as you say, the same for music.)
Yeah, art was the wrong choice, but you get what I mean.
I have the same issues with this cottage industry myself. The penchant for 'deconstruction' of superior art as a substitute for actual art is disgusting no matter how valid these deconstructions are. I'm just grateful to be able to access these timeless works to read and reread, considering that very little of the contemporary stuff interests me.
The trend that you are talking about is Fascinating to me and runs REALLY deep in the human psyche.
If you watch ESPN's new 10 part documentary on Michael Jordan, you can see the same deconstruction.
My interpretation of the thesis was, that despite Jordan's greatness, his success was derived from a competitive drive and massive ego that it really should qualify as some type of mental disorder. And his method for success would not result in a happy life for most people, and didn't really for him either. We should pity Jordan.
All that is kind of typical, but what is really shocking is that this documentary was essentially produced BY HIM. So the desire to deconstruct our hero mythology is even present in our "heroes" themselves.
Dickens is a funny one. He’s revered as a great author today, but at the time he was the “Eastenders” of the day - his novels were published in serialised form, in newspapers, and were generally regarded as what we’d call pulp fiction. Critics and authors generally reviled him. The public adored him.
After his death, he fairly rapidly fell out of fashion.
We put these people on pedestals for the oddest of reasons. Dickens is revered as a result of a wartime (WW2) nostalgia for seemingly saner times, which has self-perpetuated to this day.
Lots of people were published in serialized form, as far as his reputation it was varied, most of his bad reputation was because of critics not liking the later novels. Certainly a lot of English writers had problems with him, and also American writers, but I've always put that somewhat down to jealousy. Russian writers were quite taken with him, Dostoevsky had a pretty high opinion.
So it's true that he had a variable reputation until the 1940s, but I'm not sure if it was due to a longing for saner times and not just the typical time for reappraisal some generations after a popular writer's death. If you think about it he died in 1870, so 70 years before his becoming more critically revered. Quite reasonable.
Dickens was a serious social reformer though, not just providing comfort food. The point of "Oliver Twist" was to make people angry at the state of orphanages, "David Copperfield" at the idea of debtors' prisons, and even "A Christmas Carol" had a lot to say about how abusive bosses could be in the era before mandatory holidays.
This may get me some anger but I always found Scrooge to be a very sympathetic character. He starts off as a hopeful boy who just wants to spend some time at Christmas with his family and is shipped off to work as it is his time to do so. Gets dumped hard by his GF on Christmas, for she thinks he only thinks of money when he just wants to do right by her. His only friend died on Christmas. So by the time we see him he sees Christmas as a 'humbug' or trick. He is crazy rich yet spends none of it not even on himself. He is always looking for someone to play a trick on him. So when his nephew shows up and says 'come to Christmas dinner' he treats it with suspicion and blows him off hard. It takes the ghosts to show him that while some people are terrible most are just trying to get by and that his 'terrible' Christmases were mostly by his own hand. Their message share yourself with others for you do not have much time left. He gets the point. He even plays a bit of a 'humbug' on his fellow co-worker the next day when he gives him a raise.
I think this is pretty much the standard interpretation of Scrooge, those who know him best - Bob Cratchit, Fred (Scrooge's nephew), and Belle (his former fiance) - all feel pity for him.
>his novels were published in serialised form
So was Tolstoy.
War and Peace is a soap opera, but has some good one-liners.
War and Peace and Crime and Punishment were also both originally as serials. It was pretty common back then. I don't think serialization instantly makes a book pulp fiction.
The serialization format still shows when you read them today, but many of the quality books today are written like screen plays. I've not read enough from that time to know if the format that I identify as serialization was apparent in other books.
if the reviewer is to be believed, we should be investigating Stephen King for a presumed host of past dastardly deeds or at least very serious sociopathic tendencies......