Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

Beware, this is a long and nerdy post.  Hopefully it makes you want to go pick up a Dickens book, or at least watch one of the BBC/Masterpiece Theater movies inspired by his great books.

It is no secret that I am fully in love with the works of Charles Dickens.  He is, in my mind, the most brilliant writer of all time.  In honor of his 200^th birthday today, I thought it would be a great idea to write an essay.  I love to write essays, and I love Charles Dickens, so why not have some fun and write an essay about Charles Dickens?

By reading many of Dickens works, I have learned much about humanity, society, personality traits, kindness, evil, and what I do and do not want to be like.  The vast array of characters created by Dickens teaches great lessons.  Sometimes these examples are taught by major characters, and sometimes from characters that seem to be a very minor part of the story.

From Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House  I learned an important lesson.  She suffers from what Dickens called “telescopic philanthropy.”  Mrs. Jellyby had a large house with numerous children, none of which she ever interacted with our took care of.  She was too busy focusing all of her energy and efforts trying to raise money for the poor souls of Africa through various letter-writing campaigns.  The house was a mess, Mrs. Jellyby was a mess, her clothes were a mess, her kids were a mess, but most of all her family was a mess.  She lost sight of what was really important by ignoring things close to home where she could really make a difference and instead focused on make herself important by helping others thousands of miles away.  I do not want to be Mrs. Jellyby.

In Great Expectations I learned a number of lessons.  From Pip I learned to always be true to who you are, no matter how others expect you to act.  We must always be grateful to those who helped us along the way, and never find ourselves too important in social standing to be kind and gracious.  From Miss Havisham I learned to let things go.  When her fiancé left her at the alter many, many years before, she chose to destroy her own life by living the anger of that day over and over.  She left the wedding cake and feast set up for mice and spiders to devour over the years, she stayed in her wedding dress and veil, which became as yellowed as her skin, she stopped every clock in the house, she refused to let any light in or to move past what had happened.  She let the embarrassment and anger of her humiliation boil inside of her until she was so wretched that her only delight was in training her adopted daughter Estella to be a heartless, sadistic man-hater-heart-breaker so that she could wreak revenge on a poor, unsuspecting man someday.  She turned a sad situation into something completely tragic and threw her life away over one bad moment.  Get over it!

 From Joe, I learned true humility and love.  When Pip’s expectations changed and he became a gentleman, Pip derided his father figure Joe and everything that had to do with his former life.  In the end, Joe harbors no bad feelings, but loves Pip completely and fully despite the way Pip had treated him.

Another from Great Expectations is the lesson I learned from Abel Magwitch about not judging someone for what you think he or she is capable of.  He left his criminal past behind him when his heart was touched when he was shown kindness from the young and innocent Pip.  Throughout the book, Pip is mistaken about the identity of his mysterious benefactor, and is completely caught off guard when he learns that the convict he helped as a child has spent his life amassing a fortune to help out the poor boy.  Pip returns this kindness by trying to save the life of Magwitch.  We just never know who someone is until we give them a chance.

In David Copperfield I learned that sometimes what you are looking for is right in front of you the whole time where you least expected it.  David spends forever infatuated with the empty-headed Dora, whom marries and then discovers she is completely incapable of anything.  Lucky for him she dies, and he finds his true love in best childhood friend Agnes.  She has always loved him, and he realizes that he always had loved her.  He was tricked by a pretty face instead of a true beauty.

In A Christmas Carol, I learned from Marley’s ghost to never let a chance to do something nice go by.  I do not want to be fettered by chains as he was, constantly reminded of a little kindness or something “I did not share, but might have shared and turned to happiness.”  I can’t imagine anything worse that the spectral sight he showed to Scrooge:

"Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity.  He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went.  Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.  Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives.  He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step.  The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever."

I learned from Scrooge that it is never too late to change, and to never give up on anyone.  Scrooge initially was characterized by this: “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire.”   He said, “"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

 Through his interactions with the ghosts, Scrooge is fully redeemed and spends the rest of his life making amends for the wrongs he has done, and doing as much good as possible.   The end of the book describes him thus: "Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world."

Perhaps the greatest lesson of all is from A Tale of Two Cities, which is my very favorite of Dickens’s works.  While at the same time this book taught me about pure evil through the character of Mme. Defarge, it also taught me the meaning of true love through Sidney Carton. It is the best love story of all time, and the character of Sidney Carton should cause any woman to swoon.   He goes from a man who cared about nothing and no one to a man who would sacrifice his life for the person he truly loved.  He passed up his chance to express his interest in Lucie, because past deeds had left him feeling unworthy of such a perfect girl.  But when he confronts Lucie to let her know that he loves her he says, “O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!"

In the end that is just what he does, giving up his life as he exchanges places with Lucie’s innocent, but condemned, husband at the guillotine. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

The beginning of the book is very well known, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”  However, Sidney Carton’s words from the end are the most beautiful of the book.

From Little Dorrit I learned so much about injustice, poverty,  prosperity, making the best of a situation, cruelty, kindness, pride, and true love.  From Bleak House I learned that everyone has a secret, true love sometimes means giving up the thing you love, and every person carries some sort of burden or heartache.  It also is an interesting satire blasting the inefficiencies and injustices of the court system, the greed of some attorneys, and the blindness of greed, false hopes, and envy. 

Most of all, I have learned  from Dickens to not underestimate the part any of us plays in life.  Each book is full of many seemingly small characters in the background whose stories seem completely unrelated to the plot.  In the end, these small characters end up providing a crucial bit of information, or an integral interaction to the unfolding of the entire story, bringing everything together into one wham-bam-bang big finale.  We can never understand how the little things we do or say in life will affect and impact, good or bad, so many other people.  Everyone is important, and everything we do makes a difference in some way to someone.