This June marks 150 years since Charles Dickens died. Like so many of his characters, he left the world in tragic and unusual circumstances, having suffered a stroke after undertaking a mammoth series of lectures. (He delivered 87 around the UK in less than a year.) His final words were “On the ground”, perhaps a response to a suggestion that the exhausted writer should lie down. But there’s considerable controversy about where those words were spoken. The public were told that he died in his country home at Gads Hill Place in Kent, but Claire Tomalin, one of his most recent biographers, claims that he actually died at his mistress’s house in Peckham, and his stiffening corpse had to be shipped back to Kent to protect the secrecy of his extramarital arrangements.
Dickens, in short, was a fascinating man up to and including his very last moment. And I’ve been looking for an excuse to revisit him on the reading group ever since 2012, when we had the joy of reading Bleak House. I’ve also been wanting to read one of his books more than ever since the lockdown began. There are few better distractions or sources of solace in art. And his works are available for free on Project Gutenberg, which helps as the lockdown continues in many parts of the world.
Dickens can immerse you in a scene entirely. He can run you through the full range of emotions from grief to laughter via indignation, bemusement and delight. He can take you right outside your own head and make you feel what it’s like to be someone else and somewhere else. A Dickens novel is like a “machine for empathy”, to re-purpose Roger Ebert’s famous description of cinema: “It lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
Since we can’t reach out physically, it feels all the more important that Dickens can help us bridge that gap. I’m aware I’m making big claims here but hell, it’s Charles Dickens. If you can’t make big claims about one of the greatest geniuses writing in the English language, when can you?
Yes, Dickens has his detractors. He’s sentimental. He’s overreliant on coincidence. He uses 500 words where 50 would do, then slaps on a 200-page digression about living in a swamp in America. But Dickens casts such a strong spell that it’s hard to care about the normal conventions of writing when you’re actually reading him. The only thing to do it to fall back into his luxuriously upholstered prose and start dreaming.
I can’t wait to do so. But first there’s the important task of voting on which of his books to read. Because we’ve already run a Bleak House reading group, that incendiary masterpiece is out of contention. Dickens wrote plenty more – choose one from the list below. To vote, just name your preferred title in the comments. If you can also provide a reason your choice, so much the better.
Novels
The Pickwick Papers
Oliver Twist
Nicholas Nickleby
The Old Curiosity Shop
Barnaby Rudge
A Christmas Carol
Martin Chuzzlewit
Dombey and Son
David Copperfield
Hard Times
Little Dorrit
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Our Mutual Friend
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Short stories, novellas, journalism and ephemera
American Notes
The Battle of Life
The Chimes: A Goblin Story
A Christmas Tree
A Dinner at Poplar Walk
Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions
A Flight
Frozen Deep
George Silverman’s Explanation
Going Into Society
The Haunted Man
Holiday Romance
The Holly-Tree
Hunted Down
The Long Voyage
Master Humphrey’s Clock
A Message from the Sea
Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy
Public Life of Mr Trumble, Once Mayor of Mudfog
Sketches by Boz
The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton
Sunday under Three Heads
Tom Tiddler’s Ground
The Uncommercial Traveller
Wreck of the Golden Mary
