Is there any real reason to read Charles Dickens...

Is there any real reason to read Charles Dickens? It seems to me like he wrote books because he was getting paid to write them, and not because he wanted to create art.
If you like Dickens, what are your favorite books by him? If you had to recommend one book to someone who wanted to “get” Charles Dickens, what would it be?

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>It seems to me like he wrote books because he was getting paid to write them, and not because he wanted to create art.

This is literally all writers in the western canon.

Dostoevsky?
Joyce?
are there any you consider to be sincere?

It seems like his most famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities, is the least Dickens-like of all his works. I would recommend Great Expectations and David Copperfield

There is good reason to believe that Dickens was trying to create art. He was enormously influenced by Shakespeare and tried to give his characters similar liveliness. While perhaps more political than artistic, he also endeavored to create pathos for the lower classes in almost all of his works.

I feel like GE is surpassing Two Cities now. More kids are assigned it in school and most folks don't know much about Two Cities besides "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...". These are good recs though. Two Cities is my favorite, but mostly because it has qualities that Dickens usually avoids.

Getting paid and making good art are not mutually exclusive

Haven't read Tale, but I read some of GE and became bored of it (the writing was fantastic but it dragged out on pointless descriptions). My brother, who isn't much of a reader, read Tale in high school and loved it.

the descriptions are probably my favourite part of the book. he's constantly building this certain atmosphere. his description of miss Havisham and her house is truly haunting imo

>seems to me like he wrote books because he was getting paid to write them
is this why every 1800s book is always a tomb, being published in series?

Dickens was nothing BUT an artist. All his gifts were artistic. He was not a deep thinker. He wasn't a philosopher or a psychologist or a theologian. He was a writer, and as that he had more raw talent than anybody. He burst onto the scene at twenty-four with The Pickwick Papers and topped himself over and over until he died after finishing what might be his masterpiece, Our Mutual Friend. Like Shakespeare his career contains so many masterpieces that nobody can agree on which book is his best. Also like Shakespeare many of his characters have entered the popular imagination as archetypes. You can criticize Dickens for a number of things: Henry James said his characters lacked psychological depth (James's own strong suit) and nobody can read Dickens without rolling his eyes a few times at his sentimentality. But even as you're doing this you have to admire the skill with which he paints the scene. A master storyteller with a wild imagination and an ear for prose, he's the ultimate example of a writer who was all talent.

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this. one of the best craftsmen and best prose stylists of all time, that's two skills most writers don't have.

Dickens wrote in reaction to capitalism, not in an obnoxious commie manner but in a moral manner. He is interesting for historical context, as well as from his distinct writing styles. Also, it's fiction, it's for enjoyment, and some people enjoy his work.

Great Expectations slaps.

They aren't deep, they are just good. What is a better achievement for a piece of literature than just being a good book?

Nabokov recommended bleak house

>Dostoevsky
Yeah Dostoevsky wrote partly to be paid. Shakespeare too. Joyce had patrons but yeah, he probably would have written if it killed him but most writers aren't like that.

I love Dickens!

>his most famous novel
>A Tale of Two Cities
wtf

Victorian literature is strangely comfy because it's the oldest stuff we have that was still written in a world as close as life today but as distant in time as possible.

Just because they're are paid to write doesn't mean they don't have artistic integrity, you think Shakespeare didn't want to create something truly brilliant when he was being funded by the crown?

>psychological depth
Pffff firstly it depends what type of book you want to create, often a true psychological depth would discredit the story, do you think Wagner' Der Ring des Nibelunged would of been any better if Siegfried had sung out his deepest personal and most insecure thoughts? Or instead some unknown commentator? No of course not, they're varying story's with different placement of value. One example we could say is that Dickens tells the story through the scene and through the basic symbolic gestures and actions themselves. While Mishima places much more value on the thoughts and feelings on the individuals as playing out in the scene.

read all of dickens novels. you have to read them for the language even if other aspects don't appeal to you.

While Dosto did have to write for money, he often delayed way past the deadline until he felt it was worth publishing.
There was definitely integrity there.
In his later life he wrote Demons clearly inspired by the murder of a socialist revolutionary cell member and decided that he would even sacrifice form if it meant he could adequately say what he wanted about that kind of world. That doesn’t sound like someone who just cares about the audience lapping it up for a pay check.
He did write the gambler to pay off his gambler debts though.

Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield and Bleak House are all you need to read of him.

Dostoevsky is famous for filling his books with non story related stuff to make it to the page count.

>he wrote books because he was getting paid to write them

This is a legit criticism of a lot of the hyper-dickensian Dickens books though. That they're padded and baggy because he was paid by the page. Obviously you can wind up loving that shit for the fact he's just exercising his descriptive gift for its own sake. That's more or less what "getting" Dickens amounts to.

> Maximalist
Great Expectations
Bleak House
Pickwick Papers
fuckloads of other stuff: Nickelby, Copperfield, Twist

And now and then he kept things together and just wrote a normal book:

> Tight Tier
Tale of Two Cities
Christmas Carol
Hard Times is total shit though

I think a lot of the creative writing school virtues don't apply to him, and actually critics at the time weren't all sure he was any good. No academic is going to suggest that his structures should be applied by anyone else.

If you want to get what he was about Great Expectations is Dickens being Dickens. If you want to get how good his prose can be without meeting the real deal, Christmas Carol is objectively perfect.

basically this. definitely one of the best writers of the 19th century

Read Bleak House and see if you can defend your current attitude towards Dickens. He was a phenomenal artist. Even Tolstoy, who's often regarded as the greatest novelist of all time, was a massive Dickens fan.

Well they are the best parts of his books, so good job on the editors, I guess.

>How to read Great Expectations? With the deepest elements in one's own fears, hopes, and affections: to read as ifone could be a child again. Dickens invites you to do so, and makes it possible for you; that may be his greatest gif. Great Expectations does not take us into the Sublime, as Shakespeare and Cerantes do. It wants to return us to origins, painfl and guilty as perhaps they must be. The novel's appeal to our childlike need for love, and recovery of self, is nearly irresistible. The "why" of reading it is then self-evident: to go home again, to heal our pain

>if it's commercially successful it isn't art
No OP, you've obviously too stupid to appreciate Dickens.

>Is there any real reason to read Charles Dickens?
of course

Many great writers, like Tolstoy, thought Dickens was one of the greatest novelists of all time. Tolstoy felt he was absolutely worth reading, but you can’t see anything in him?

What is the difference between a craftsman and a good prose stylist. Isn’t style the result of good craft?

>who is Pessoa