Hard Times for Dickens

It must be a very slow day at the offices of The Times (and, for that matter, at Sordel Villas) since they've decided to devote an entire article to the decline in readership for the works of Charles Dickens.

Claire Tomalin (whom, probably quite unjustly, Sordel can only imagine as a Miss Flite character, poring over her clippings and promising a large colony of domesticated cats their liberation on the day that the royalties come in on her biography) has popped up to complain that young people have destroyed their attention span by watching television and playing videogames and are therefore incapable of sitting still long enough to sup at the whiskery nipple of her favourite author.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity." So says Claire, but she does not tell us which of those two things is a pity.

What she does tell us is the reasons for reading Dickens in the first place. For example: "You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant — the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament, how the country is run by Old Etonians, you name it, he said it."

Of course, if you want to know about any of those things, you could just read about them in some august periodical of the day (such as ... The Times) for, though far-sighted, Dickens did not actually know more details about those matters as they concern 21st Century Britain than Wikipedia. Equally, it might be felt that the little toerags have whittled their attention span to the point at which they could only tolerate a column-inch of newsprint. Is it strictly necessary to read a six hundred page novel for the benefits to the young in terms of their awareness of current affairs?

What else have you got, Claire?

"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the ‘unimportant’ and ‘peripheral’ people were just as interesting to write about as ‘great’ people."

Do we really need Dickens to make this point today when we have Eastenders? Surely you were only droning on a minute ago about the country being run by Old Etonians ... it seems to me that you are the one with a disproportionate interest in 'great' people ... but, pray, tell me more.

"He has gone on entertaining people since the 1830s and his characters' names are known all over the world."

... and his reputation is thus surely safe without being read by the lovable ragamuffins of today ..?

Sorry, Sordel's attention span just came down like the blade of the guillotine upon Sydney's Carton's neck. Even a nutshell is proving tiresomely protracted these days.

My point, though, would have been this: there is nothing innately laudable about bringing up the young to read Dickens. Dickens is actually good. Where the work would be required would be ... to get someone to read a biography of Dickens.

Or was that her concern all along?