What the Dickens

It's Charles Dickens' two hundredth birthday, hurrah! Cue lots of bollocks about literature and popular culture being spouted in the media by self-styled 'experts'. If you've ever written a book about Dickens, it apparently qualifies you to comment on the state of contemporary culture, apparently. Only the other day we had one of Dickens' more recent biographers telling us that modern children wouldn't possibly be able to read and understand Dickens because their attention spans had been destroyed by watching too many trashy TV programmes. Based on the works of Dickens, probably. This kind of ill-informed idiocy highlights the terrible cultural snobbery we still suffer from in this country, predicated on the notion that the work of a long dead author must always be superior to its modern equivalents, and that standards of education and literacy fall over time. Both assumptions are, of course, wrong. Standards of literacy and education have demonstrably improved since Dickens time and I'd even venture to say that much contemporary popular culture is at least the equal of his works. It's certainly more relevant to young readers than Dickens. The reality is that popular culture (which is what Dickens was producing in Victorian times) provides an excellent insight into the age in which it was created, but quickly dates. Whilst proponents of Dickens keep telling us how relevant his work still is, I'd beg to differ. It does provide an excellent portrait of its own era, though.

Another load of Dickens-related bollocks which has irritated me has been the media focus on 'research' which supposedly shows how virtually his every work was 'inspired' by places he lived in and local people. Apparently just because he might (or might not) have lived sevens streets away from someone called Goodge, who had a business partner called Marney, 'proves' that this was the inspiration for Scrooge (and his partner Marley) in A Christmas Carol. (It has already been pointed out that Dickens himself claimed that the character's name had been inspired by him seeing the name 'Scroggie' on an Edinburgh gravestone and the character by his misreading of 'meal man' on the stone as 'mean man'). I really do detest this reductionist approach to art, which tries to deny any artist any degree of creativity - nothing they make can possibly be the result of their own imaginations, they can only ever 'plagiarise' from real life. Only someone completely literal-minded and without a creative bone in their body could possibly subscribe to such a view. Utter bollocks.