"Dickens? He's so overrated."

>"Dickens? He's one of the greatest! You youngsters just don't get it!"

Our Mutual Friend is a personal favorite.

>I read 18th century british literature

dickens is pretty cool desu

Bleak House or Great Expectations. Bleak House is probably the better of the two, but Great Expectations is shorter, tighter, and better displays how Dickens tends to work.

These idiots don't know shit from shinola. There are legitimate objections to Dickens. That his prose is bad is not one of them. Nor is the absurd idea that Dickens novels are of purely historical interest.

I once hated Dickens, but then I graduated high school.

I just disliked all the coincidences in A Tale of Two Cities.

Lol Dickens is very enjoyable. Along with Bleak House and Great Expectations, I'd recommend David Copperfield. He's a very funny writer.

Where on earth did you get such a ridiculous idea? Dickens wrote some of the best prose in the English language. He simply didn't overlean on technique. His prose tends to be most visible near the beginning of the novel but grows more transparent as attention shifts to the story.

Don't hate the man because he could write a story as well as turn a phrase. Too many authors (looking at you Pynchon and Wallace) compensate for lack of ability in the former with overeliance on the later.

Dickens is only liked by pseuds who want to appear superior to anyone who actually realizes his books are fucking soap operas

>There are legitimate objections to Dickens. That his prose is bad is not one of them.

No, that's the chief objection to Dickens among people who know what they're talking about.

>melodrama is bad

I'm really baffled to see anyone defending his prose style, the subject of mockery for more than 150 years. Compare Dickens to Thackeray and it's no contest. Of course, Thackeray is among the greatest prose stylists in the English language, so it's not really a fair fight.

If you mean Nabakov saying that Dickens "didn't write every sentence as if his life depended on it," you've misunderstood the man. Objections to Dickens prose are not that he couldn't write stylistically, but that he preferred the engine of story to that of style and so often let prose fall by the wayside as the story picked up.

The real objection to Dickens is that he is not afraid to write novels that appeal to the reader emotionally rather than purely intellectually. No author loves like Dickens loves and no author hates like Dickens hates. But to anyone with a head, this is no real objection.

If you're surprised to see anybody defending Dickens's prose then you must be incredibly unfamiliar with literature. Dickens is widely acknowledged as a canonical writer of the English language and has influenced hundreds of notable writers across the planet. His style is frequently parodied because of the popularity, sentimentality, and originality of his writings, not because of some inherent deficiency in quality.

Fun fact: the author you're awkwardly namedropping once praised A Christmas Carol as "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".

>If you mean Nabakov saying

I never mentioned Nabokov, so I don't know where you are getting that from.

Dickens was a poor writer on a sentence-by-sentence level. He did not have a way with words. Again, compare a passage from Dickens with a passage from Thackeray and the difference is obvious. Unless you have a tin ear.

>The real objection to Dickens is that he is not afraid to write novels that appeal to the reader emotionally rather than purely intellectually. No author loves like Dickens loves and no author hates like Dickens hates. But to anyone with a head, this is no real objection.

None of that has anything to do with prose style. Whether you prefer Dickens to Thackeray as a storyteller or social commentator is a matter of taste. There's no denying Dickens was a genius.

>I browse Veeky Forums and unironically consider myself a patrician

What are you even talking about? You are either illiterate or in the wrong thread.

>What are you even talking about?
The widespread critical appreciation of Dickens's prose style
>You are either illiterate
You're clearly the illiterate here since you needed my help with basic reading comprehension.
> or in the wrong thread.
This thread is about Dickens and his writing. Please explain in specific detail how anything in my previous post was off-topic.

>prose matters more than themes

pleb.

dickens is only reviled by self taught losers who fail to see the essence of drama is trivial in itself

>Dickens is garbage in both prose, message, and setting development.

Great Expectations says otherwise.

You would dislike Les Mis too then.

Reading David now. Where else can you find a protagonist who keeps innocently falling in love with different girls?

Holy fuck. Here's a verbatim quotation from your post:

>Fun fact: the author you're awkwardly namedropping once praised A Christmas Carol as "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".

If you know anything at all about the situation, you know that Thackeray appreciated Dickens - appropriately so, since he was a national treasure.

Next time try actually reading the post you are responding to, instead of strawmaning like a moron.

>I only watch movies, because books are too hard for me

>i still haven't read FW

>
The real objection to Dickens is that he is not afraid to write novels that appeal to the reader emotionally rather than purely intellectually. No author loves like Dickens loves and no author hates like Dickens hates. But to anyone with a head, this is no real objection.

Exactly. He can really get sentimental in his writing.

Okay, I didn't realize you were a troll. Nice one, you got me.

Man, I was thinking "Dickens is overrated" and then I saw a picture of a guy with a hat and a big sword and I realized I was wrong.

>i'm an illiterate simpleton. tell me a story

>melodrama isn't bad

/a/ hates melodrama though

You're obviously the troll. But keep on making shit up and replying to it, champ.

Another legit objection of Dickens is how he doesn't give a fuck at using random shit out of nowhere to end his story.

>that twin relevation and lightning strike at the end of Little Dorrit

The problem with Dickens is that he was a shitty prose stylist. The rest is subjective - whether you enjoy sentimental melodramas is a matter of taste.

>he was a shitty prose stylist
This claim has been refuted several times already ITT. Next time, please read the thread before replying to it.

why are you writing as if you're on /b/
you could just call it a deus ex machina
or did you stop to think that it could be an homage to the plot of the double that was present in almost every baroque novel?

you have to take the time period into account. having strong message and a strong setting were of little interest to dickens. he wrote to entertain, and created some of the most memorable characters in the process. I think his prose is unprecedented and cant for the life of me understand why you would call it garbage

Nope, nobody has even tried to refute it. It is common knowledge among anyone with a literary education. Sorry you're a pleb with a tin ear.

sry m8 but "no it's not!!" doesn't count as a refute

start with the Pickwick Papers, its the easiest way to get into Dickens. Go to his more popular stuff after you get a feel for him

i didn't particularly care too much about the pickwick papers, i dunno why, it just seemed too scattered for me at the time.

Baroque novel?

Dickens is straight-up trash -- Stephen-King-tier middlebrow claptrap.

Dickens is the second Shakespeare.

his prose being mediocre doesnt make his works any less enjoyable and important.

it'd be like calling dumas novels or la comedie humaine shit because the prose was at times awful.

on that subject, actual masters of style like flaubert , proust ,maupssant and baudelaire unanimously praised those authors as genius writers

i am gay

>his prose being mediocre doesnt make his works any less enjoyable and important.

Never claimed otherwise.

>it'd be like calling dumas novels or la comedie humaine shit because the prose was at times awful.

Dumas actually was shit. Not just his prose - everything. Balzac had some redeeming qualities.

>on that subject, actual masters of style like flaubert , proust ,maupssant and baudelaire unanimously praised those authors as genius writers

I wouldn't go that far. They found inspiration here and there, but were well aware of the shortcomings.

I'd actually like to know who constitutes this majority of educated people who find Dickens prose poor. It's very possible that I don't know what prose means, but I find Dickens's turns of phrase, word choice, sentence structure often rivals Melville, Conrad or anyone else you'd care to name. That is, when Dickens chose to make use of that faculty. Nabokov did wish Dickens would have exercised his prose abilities more (hence calling the Esther chapters of Bleak House, "Dickens greatest mistake"), but embedded in the criticism is praise for the man's prose. John Irving also believes Dickens can write with flourish as well as anyone else. I also think it's worth mentioning that Dickens represented the apex of English literature in the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses.

All that said, I'd genuinely be curious to read a counter opinion. It's really possible I am also a pleb with a tin ear.

Pynchon wrote some damn good stories, bitch.

I read Hard Times for uni and Christmas Story this past Xmas. Any recommendations, senpai? I like that b&w Great Expectations with the screenplay by Huxley. I'm sort of undecided between this or Bleak House since B.H. is also often taught in uni xD

>xD

Can you actually say something useful or r u going to talk shit

Reading David Copperfield right now and Davy and Steerforth are just as gay as Pip and Herbert were in Great Expectations.

u know what fuck u don't reply to me

>2016
>not reading the 18th century writers Dickens plagiarized

It's like you don't even want tenureship

smollett wasn't all that great desu

from David Copperfield

It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.

'That sort of people.—-Are they really animals and clods, and beings of another order? I want to know SO much.'

'Why, there's a pretty wide separation between them and us,' said Steerforth, with indifference. 'They are not to be expected to be as sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked, or hurt easily. They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say—some people contend for that, at least; and I am sure I don't want to contradict them—but they have not very fine natures, and they may be thankful that, like their coarse rough skins, they are not easily wounded.'

'Really!' said Miss Dartle. 'Well, I don't know, now, when I have been better pleased than to hear that. It's so consoling! It's such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don't feel! Sometimes I have been quite uneasy for that sort of people; but now I shall just dismiss the idea of them, altogether. Live and learn. I had my doubts, I confess, but now they're cleared up. I didn't know, and now I do know, and that shows the advantage of asking—don't it?'

This part is great.

Reminds me of the reasoning that it's okay to make black people slaves because they can handle the work and heat, unlike white people.

It just sounds like you're too emotionally immature for the ambiguous purgatory of high-postmodernism. It reflects the state the world's been in since the late 40s much more accurately than a conventional story with a clear-cut beginning and end.

Maybe. I've read Gravity's Rainbow a bunch of times, though it's admittedly the only Pynchon I've ever read. It's got a lot going for it, but I remember a line from (I think) a New Republic article on hysterical realism that said it best: Pynchon can make us do anything but feel.

There's also a line in War and Peace about people who talk about things "for our time, as if man changed from age to age." Tolstoy called those people small minded...

That said, I probably am too disconnected and emotionally immature for non-linear plots.

Nobody who supports slavery in 2016 thinks that. The reasoning isn't that slavery is okay because black people don't have feelings; the reasoning is that their feelings don't matter and black brains are too inferior to perform intellectual work

Inconclusive mishmash is more often as sign of immaturity than not.