It Was The Best Of Polls, It Was The Worst Of Polls: Dickens! The Poll!

i'm thinking of having a very Dickens winter. and reading all the books i haven't read. which, sadly, is a bunch of them. so, i thought a thread might get me excited to do this. unless the thread is filled with dickens haters. which could be the case, i suppose. as it it right now i would probably be boring and vote for great expectations cuz i really loved it as a kid.

have you read orwell's essay on dickens? that made me really enthusiastic to read all of dickens, but i haven't exactly gotten around to it yet.

have read three and a half of these, best is Bleak House by a distance

Love Dickens.

Bleak House 4eva

Tale of Two Cities is pretty great, too, though. The thing that I think puts a lot of people off Dickens is this idea that he writes with painfully, overbloated Victorian prose but that's just not the case. He really has a timeless writing style, and good gravy, he is HILARIOUS. I felt like a total prat LOLing into Tale of Two Cities on public transportation, but I just couldn't help it.

Our Mutual Friend is the only one I can actually recall reading. Enjoyed it a lot, I really should tackle some others.

everybody says Bleak House is his best, and I've been meaning to read it, but I just can't see how anything could top Great Expectations, so I'll go with that until I summon the fortitude to read Bleak House in its entirety

Bleak House is the best. Hard Times is the most underrated and has plenty of lols though. Have not yet read a Dickens novel I didn't like, although I found Oliver Twist hard to get through (I think this was partly because I was very hungover and had 2 days to do it in but also, I just didn't give a shit that this orphan did better than other orphans because he was pretty [i know thats an over-simplification blah blah blah].)

Jenny OTM about the humor, Wemmick is one of the funniest people I have ever encountered in the world of literature...also I don't know of any other author who can set up a complete living, breathing scene in as few sentences as Dickens can

I've sixteen more to read! Maybe it's one of the more obscure titles, but I dug Dombey and Son. I did recently have a hard time getting into The Pickwick Papers - stalled a few chapters in, but may get back to it.

Bleak House has sat on my bookshelf for years. It's funny how I've read all of George Eliot yet find Dickens a slog.

funny or just bloody mental?

The thing that I think puts a lot of people off Dickens is this idea that he writes with painfully, overbloated Victorian prose but that's just not the case.

Two words for you- Hard Times. I'd rather push cement out my ears than strain through any Dickens again anytime soon, which is probably a pity but life's too short sometimes.

HT had other problmes that had nothing to do with Painful, Bloated Victorian Prose, hoss.

it sure did, but it didn't help. i've read other dickens and enjoyed, but i'm definitely gonna have to leave it another few decades

Hard Times for me, but I'm not a Dickens fan. I've read 5 as an adult (Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, Hard Times) but never really warmed to him - some brilliant set-piece writing but apart from HT I've found huge chunks of every book stodgy and an effort to get through.

I tend to go for really early (Pickwick Paper) v really late (Our Mutual Friend). The opening to Great Expectations is amazing (I was down for a walk by the Romney Marshes the other day) and I really like David Copperfield as well (no plot, none whatsoever, as far as I can recall) but I reckon I'm going to plump for the Pickwick Papers - exudes great geniality and unbuttoned discourse, as potent in its episodic way for incident and rambling philosophical wit as Don Quixote or Rabelais.

Sam Weller and Pickwick are tremendous company.

it is kind of shocking to see so many ppl repping "Bleak House" - one of the first things I was ever told about Dickens was "don't bother with the bloated & overlong 'Bleak House.'" And so I haven't.

how is nobody standing up for Oliver Twist here? storytelling wise that is the stuff, though of course it's ripe with some problems that plague a lot of other 19th-century lit

Tale of Two Cities worked for me. Ripping yarn.

bleak house is amazing

Hard Times for me. He really hit his stride there.

it is kind of shocking to see so many ppl repping "Bleak House" - one of the first things I was ever told about Dickens was "don't bother with the bloated & overlong 'Bleak House.'" And so I haven't.

Who said this? Every major Dickens critic claims it's his best novel.

yeah, not really a dickens fan but reading a lot of praise for bleak house over the years made me take a chance and i'm glad i did

Who said this?

my dad :(

Of the 3 I've read, it has to be A Christmas Carol. The end of A Tale of Two Cities was great but that doesn't excuse the first 2/3 of the book and the play adaptation of Great Expectations I did in high school was horrid enough to make me never, ever, ever want anything to do with anything related to Dickens ever again.

tell me you were the guy who asked "do you know what wittles is?" please tell me that.

Tale Of Two Cities. horrific HS play makes Great Expectations unfairly the worst thing ever written as far as im concerned

hahaha xpost w dan!

you really dont want to get us started on what a bloated awful nightmare that play was aggghghhghh

"Coarse little monster, why won't you cry? Cry? Craw? Caw? CAW! CAW!!!"

(oh and no J0hn, I was Pip's annoying friend Herbert Pocket)

gonna start a petition for either video of this or a re-creation of it

I will provide you both with a stage on which to re-live this triumph

there will be free chow in the dressing room

A video exists! It spans two VHS cassettes because the show was almost 4 hours long.

btw doing it as a two-man show would be an accurate recreation of a full week of the rehearsal process, when 90% of the cast left town on a skiing trip and created a situation where John had to read entire scenes by himself and do the blocking so the one remaining tech guy could set lights

hahaha i wasnt actually even in the play, i was just dumb enough to volunteer to stand in for anyone that couldnt make a rehersal. then half the cast went on a fucking ski trip the week before opening and the rest is blighted hateful history. xpost ha agane

That was the ski trip where Pip broke his wrist, wasn't it?

Another highlight was dear departed Fluffy Bear totally missing an entrance and watching a scene he's supposed to be in backstage on a monitor, which was bad enough but the entire first part of the scene was Pip and another character downstage pointing at him and talking about him, so we had maybe a five-minute improv session where Pip and cohort talked about how inconsiderate and late his character was while I, who was supposed to be having a pantomime conversation with him, stood off by myself looking around impatiently while tapping my foot and checking an imaginary pocket watch.

Apparently the backstage conversation went:

FB: Huh, I've never seen this scene before.
Another Cast Member: That's because YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IN IT.
FB: Oh. Really? *pause* ohshit

(this was during a performance btw)

this sounds so much better than anything Dickens ever wrote tbh & I like Dickens pretty well

I actually blame this show for making me reflexively hate Bach for a long, long time due to the hideous harpsichord music that was played during the scene transitions that seemed to go on and on and on and on and on and on and gah

(this should all be in a separate thread huh)

I made u a thread!

SHIT EXPECTATIONS: rolling thread of horrible HS/College theater experiences

I read "A Christmas Carol" every year. I get scared every time Ebenezer approaches his door. Nostalgic choice, but without nostalgia we might not have Dickens.

Haven't read enough Dickens, but I'd go 'Great Expectations', which seemed to do everything right.

And I want somebody to put those VHS tapes onto Vimeo NOW!

Hard Times had some heft to it, I appreciated the focus. Maybe I'd enjoy more Dickens.

I need to read the ones I haven't. I'm gonna represent for Chuzzlewit cos it's pretty great also lol USA. I like the big fat door-stops better than the focused Leavis-friendly novels but there are no bad ones.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Great Expectations. The opening's so great - marsh atmosphere, graves, spooky events, good comedy and that sort of melancholy that clouds around Pip - and it doesn't go wrong: well constructed, decent lols, Pip's heartbreaking shitness, comparatively nice structure, mature Dickens prose. And Miss Havisham's one of his greatest... not sure the exact word I want. Sort of character, but also sort of mythic or enduring cultural image.

Little Dorrit follows for me; maybe Bleak House after that, but it would have competition: love the first 2/3 of David Copperfield, and I haven't looked at Our Mutual Friend for a long time, but remember liking it a lot despite/because of the stupidly broken structure.

By a long distance my favourite c19th British Novelist and I've enjoyed almost everything I've read by him. Exception: Hard Times. I remember it being a bit schematic-dull (though my dislike might be fuelled by anger at the earlier Leavis position on Dickens - HT his only work of art, iirc. Shocking.)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Leavis regularly gets it in the neck for disparaging Dickens. But his opinion was pretty orthodox for the more high-minded among the British literary establishment of his time. Even a writer as hostile to Leavis as Anthony Powell (who caricatured him as Quiggin in "A Dance") would have pretty much agreed with him about Dickens.

I don't like the snobberies or prejudices that made critics and writers dismiss Dickens for not being Flaubert or Henry James, but whether I like it or not - and I've read enough of his books to feel I've given him every chance to change my mind - when I read his books I end up feeling pretty much this same things as they did about his work.

Bleak House - C or D/should i invest my time in reading this 1000 or so pages?

(neber read Dickens btw)

Never a bad time to read it, but prob. especially good to get lost in through a January. Batshit tone starts early and should give you a decent sense of what you're in for, if you're in doubt. (Me, I think I blew through it in 3 days.) It's glorious watching Dickens busily gardening his resentments and sentiments into a plot as he goes - something unguarded and spooky about how he doles out punishment as he goes along.

One of Dickens's most interesting novels formally, too, from what I remember, in the tension between its two narrative voices (Esther's resignation and indirection about her own desires vs. the indignation of the nameless third-person narrator).

I really liked "Bleak House". You have to admire the ambition of the sheer scope of it. My favorite Dickens.

One of the few novels I've given up twice, no good reason. I agree that formally it's fascinating, the tension between the narrator and Esther especially.

Am I making it up or is Esther Summerson from Bleak House frequently nominated as one of the most annoying characters ever to appear in literature?

Definitely worth a read in any case, some of his most amazing rhetorical flourishes.

I don't know if she is or not but she sure should be because she is super annoying. I think she's supposed to be though? Not sure.

what about Dora Spenlow?

She is also very annoying.

TBF there are an awful lot of annoying Dickens characters, brilliant as he is.

that's why he puts all those funny people around them