{"id":5229,"date":"2006-08-29T12:56:13","date_gmt":"2006-08-29T16:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5229"},"modified":"2015-05-23T20:09:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T00:09:38","slug":"thinking-about-dickens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5229","title":{"rendered":"Orwell on Dickens"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in the process right now of reading George Orwell’s mammoth (and unbelievably good) essay on Charles Dickens. It is dense, exciting – and it’s making me want to pick up all of those books again. I re-read Great Expectations<\/i> a couple years ago – but the other ones it’s been a long long time. Orwell’s observations (especially as an Englishman) are invaluable. It’s serendiptous – because I opened up one of my favorite sites today – to find this as the first item on display<\/a>. I used to have an illustrated Oliver Twist<\/i> – with similar type drawings, but I have no idea where that book went.<\/p>\n

I like Orwell’s observation about Dickens and children. Orwell was notoriously horribly treated (his essay Such, such were the joys<\/i> is pretty much an indictment of the entire education system in England – ack – it’s painful to read) – but here he is on one of Dickens’ undeniable gifts – the ability to write from the perspective of a little kid:<\/p>\n

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield<\/i>. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child<\/i>. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More great stuff, too, when Orwell basically takes down the Socialist writers who want to “claim” Dickens as one of “them”. Orwell basically says, “Uhm, no he’s not.”<\/p>\n

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