Dickens

I read my first Dickens when I was 18 years old, the summer I graduated high school. It wasn't an assignment. I don't even remember what, exactly, made me pick up the Dickens novels I found, a set of them for only a couple dollars each, from the little San Francisco book store where I found them, but I did, and I was entranced. Addicted, even.

I went through Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and, of course, A Christmas Carol in short order. I had to slow down a bit when I got to Our Mutual Friend, and I bogged down in Great Expectations. I never bothered with The Old Curiosity Shop, and I was a mother of five children before I tried Bleak House (and then it was on audio tape, mostly when I was in the shower).

But between my first delighted taste of Dickens at 18 and the next several years I would read and reread those first four again and again. Most of my Progeny enjoy Dickens as well. Pip likes him the least of any of us, having been exposed to him too early (8 years old- she understood all she read, but she resented the fact that she could not finish Dickens in a single day).

So it was with some dismay last summer when a college educated relative who considers himself something of an academic and certainly more intelligent than the rest of his relatives mentioned A Tale of Two Cities with scorn.

"I picked it up recently and read it, and I ask you, who would give this to a high school student to read? It's impossible for a teen-ager to grasp it at all. I struggled with it, and I really don't see the point. It's just too hard..."

I didn't really know what to say to him. Pointing out that I liked it immediately after graduation or that my own children had all read several of Dickens' works before they were 16 and liked them very much only sounds obnoxious and boastful in that context. But I do not agree that it is a given that a high school student cannot understand Dickens, and insofar as that is true I consider it a regrettable injury imposed upon that student by external circumstances and defects of education. When I hear of a student who cannot read and understand Dickens, then I know that somebody, perhaps multiple somebodies, have tied a millstone around that student's neck, and I should like to see some punishment.

Above thoughts prompted when reading "Why We Still Read Dickens."

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