The honor of being able to play Maura is transformative. I’m 70 years old. I should be in a reading room, reading Dickens or something.
One of Dickens’ biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
It’s always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.
Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.
In his life, Charles Dickens was like the rest of us, but maybe more so: another poor and wonderful soul attempting to deal with his and the world’s pain and confusion in the best way he knew how.
I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.
I’m not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.
Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it’s not obscure, and that’s just fine.
I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer ‘Turn of the Screw.’ He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.
I didn’t want to be stuck in Dickens period dramas because then I would never know if I was any good.
I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.
There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there’s no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw ‘The Outsiders’, I knew better. It was the first time I’d realized that real people write books.
What I find really attractive is something that’s going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you’ve just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, ‘What have I done?’
I think the success of ‘Downton’ is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it’s enormously involving on many levels. But also, it’s a new story. It’s not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement.
I’ve behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven’t behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you’re a woman, you’re not in a position to behave as badly, because you don’t have the economic power.
I’m an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line – it’s George Eliot, it’s Dickens, it’s Dr. Johnson, it’s Jane Austen.
Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.
‘Joker’ was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children’s book, and that eventually became ‘Noel.’ And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol.’
Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.
Can a great artist be mean-spirited, grasping, harsh to his family, violent in his emotions, vindictive in his hatreds, an all-purpose scoundrel? If our test cases are the likes of Wagner, Picasso, and, let me say, Dickens, the answer is a resounding yes.
Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
I claim Dickens as a mentor. He’s my teacher. He’s one of my driving forces.
Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that’s why he’s still so loved today.
I won’t go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.
I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did.
I didn’t really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.
A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart.’
Writing Charles Dickens’ biography is like writing five biographies.
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens – Thackeray himself.
When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel.
When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can’t fail to love the man – so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming.
An adaptation I was working on of Trollope’s ‘The Pallisers’ has been axed by the BBC… I was also going to do Dickens’ ‘Dombey and Son’ but they’ve asked me to do ‘David Copperfield’ instead.
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.
I will fight like the dickens to protect Social Security.
A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.
When it comes to referring to Dickens’s life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.
I grew up watching period dramas, as we all did in the 1980s and ’90s – endless adaptations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens – and I loved them. But I never saw anyone like me in them, so I decided to find a story to erode the excuses for me not doing one.
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?
Capra’s great passion was Dickens. As soon as he had some money, he bought some of the rarest and most extraordinary editions of Dickens’s work, and he was very proud of his collection.
My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That’s how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
If you have this enormous talent, it’s got you by the balls, it’s a demon. You can’t be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn’t that nice a guy.
I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.
Pages: 1 2
