[lbo-talk] Who was Charles Dickens?

[Chuck Grimes]

Below is a link to a long and well written essay by Robert Gottlieb in the 
NYRB, Who Was Charles Dickens? I can't remember what I had to read of 
Dickens, but I must have read something. I confess a liking for that 
terrible middlebrow tv, masterpiece theater and would watch anything by 
Dickens. He must have been made for tv before there was any. Everything 
seems to fit so well together on a tv format, from the serialized lengths, 
to the costumes, to the outlandish and over acted characters, and to that 
most curious of all Dickensonian features, people with no genitals.

But this review which uses several recent biographies as its pretext is 
pretty damned good stuff to read. Gottlieb makes Dickens out to be the best 
Dickens novel yet and puts the donkey balls back on the donkey.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/who-was-charles-dickens/

``There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so 
fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them-you 
can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in 
the story all over again. I've never encountered a life of the Brontës, of 
Dr. Johnson, of Byron that didn't grip me.

Another such character is Charles Dickens. His history, of course, is less 
obviously dramatic than that of Byron, but the turbulence of his emotional 
life, the violent contradictions in his nature, and the amazing story of his 
instant accession, before he was twenty-five, to the highest level of 
literary fame and popularity-where he remained for thirty-five years, and 
where he still resides-are endlessly recountable, and have indeed been 
endlessly recounted.''

CG