The Marvelous Hater

I was forced to read Dickens as a kid and, of course, I hated him. Today, I couldn’t possibly say whether that was because I couldn’t get past all the Victorian sentimentality, or because I couldn’t figure out what Dickens was all about, or even if I just hated him because they made us read him. Really, they had us reading the likes of David Copperfield and Silas Marner (yes, I know that wasn’t Dickens) when what we wanted to be reading was Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye.

But much later in life, with the assistance of Bloom, I came to appreciate the virtues of Dickens. How his books encompass more of humanity than almost anyone else; and how the characters tell us more truthfully about human nature than almost any other writer. Almost.

After starting again with Great Expectations, which I read along with the boys, and vicariously with Mrs. Barrett (we’ll overlook her secret identity for the time being), I have been proceeding chronologically through Dickens and am now in the later books, written in Dickens’ darker and more disquieting years. Most recently, I read Little Dorrit, whose title suggests another melodrama along the likes of the Old Curiosity Shop, but which is really a broad indictment of Victorian England. However, the England skewered by Dickens in Little Dorrit is not all that different from the world in which we now live: There is a huge and impenetrable government bureaucracy that stifles and eventually smothers innovation and creativity; there are the idle rich, self-important, pretentious, and ultimately vacuous; and there are the respected captains of industry, commerce and finance, who in the end turn out to be schemers, fraudsters and forgers on an enormous scale. The only real difference from Dickens’ world is that his England still had debtors’ prison, which features prominently in Little Dorrit, but which we somehow managed to do away with.

Most importantly, from the perspective of this blog, in reading about Dickens and this latest novel, I came to understand one reason why I find now find him so engrossing, and so true. Irving Howe writes that by this time in his life, Dickens’ humor had developed a “ferocious bite”; Howe then describes Dickens as a “marvelous hater” A hater! Imagine that. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with this blog knows that we’re not only enthusiastic haters in our own right, but also admirers of great haters.Famous haters like Buck Nasty, Silky Johnson and Charles Dickens. The pantheon of haters. Now if I had only known that as a kid, I might have been enjoying Dickens at a much earlier age.