Charles Dickens Bicentenary: Why We Should Care

Apart from a silly 200th birthday, a clue to why Boz matters is how well he fleshes out our capitalist world. Plus, TV auteurs on how Dickens shaped television storytelling.

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One hundred years ago today was the occasion for James Joyce to publish a piece on “The Centenary of Charles Dickens.” He was not kind; as the sign on David Copperfield’s back says, “Take care of him. He bites.” “He hardly deserves a place among the highest,” Joyce wrote. The books were “diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation.” This from the author of the forthcoming Finnegans Wake, the mother of the overload!

But Joyce had a point, never mind that palpable huff in his tone—the essay was a bother for him, written for the purpose of passing Italy’s teaching exams. Dickens’s position as a “writer’s writer” is not quite secure—at least not to the “great writers.” George Orwell was perfectly miffed: “Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?”

Surely, beyond the silly arbitrariness of a 200th anniversary, there must be reasons that his works are selling joyfully, that BBC TV and Radio have been commandeered by programs on him, including a new three-part Great Expectations, and biographies march into stores one after another—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens, a number of handsomely illustrated coffee-table books, and, best of all, Charles Dickens: A Life, by Claire Tomalin, whose sentences are as fizzy as Dickens’s own.