Charles Dickens' CHARACTERS

[glo]

Wow.

Don't you people think Dickens' characters are so flat and uninteresting?
Many of them anyway.

I'm so bored and unconvinced of Lucie Manette right now, in A Tale of Two Cities.

 

[glo]

Wow. No one thinks Lucie is one boring unrealistic creature? She's ruining my reading experience of an otherwise great book!

 

[Waiting for the Verdict]

Wow.

Don't you people think Dickens' characters are so flat and uninteresting?
Many of them anyway.

I'm so bored and unconvinced of Lucie Manette right now, in A Tale of Two Cities.

Lucie is terrible, but then again Tale of Two Cities is hardly Dickens best book. (Sidney Carlton was cool, though). Actually, the accusation I've heard most about Dickens is his characters are too unflat and lively. But his female characters do tend to be terribly drawn (generally, the prettier a Dickensian woman is, the more boring her character. Though I do have a fondness for Little Nell).

 

[romaneagle13]

Yeah, although not all the female characters are boring. Therese Defarge certainly isn't. But I agree, the pretty ones usally are boring. I think it isn't just Dickens though. Other writers of that time period tend to make the lovely demure Victorian ladies boring. Like cosette in "Les Miserables" or Blanche Ingram in "Jane Eyre" or Amy and Meg March in "Little Women" (the misfit Jo is the interesting one).

 

[Soulwings]

I love Dickens' characters.

Agreed, they are portrayed differently than the characters in modern novels, but that's only to be expected. But they do have a life of their own, and they are mostly steriotypes.

 

[Dragonfly226]

Dickens' characters do tend to be dull, but characterization was never said to have been his strong point. I think the only story that he wrote whose characters are common knowledge is The Christmas Carol with Scrooge and Tiny Tim. Dickens' was good at inventing interesting plots, not characters.

 

[Received]

Dickens critics usually condemn his characters as too sentimental and unrealistic. This is true a good deal of the time, but some of his characters are downright luminaries. One of the most remarkable (and most remarkably Christ-like) characters I've ever encountered is Sissy Jupe, in Hard Times -- a shorter novel that nobody really knows about, and this is unfortunate, for it is a masterpiece, and my favorite book by him.

Dickens takes effort, and is usually excellent only at particular times of one's life. He isn't an author you can force your way through -- and it is infinitely unfortunate that schools have him as required reading. Just another way of causing distaste towards one of history's greatest writers.

I say, if you like Dickens, you'll probably like Tolstoy or Dostoyevksy -- and I would say shoot for the latter two if you can't seem to stomach Dickens and still want something enormous to consume.

 

[glo]

I say, if you like Dickens, you'll probably like Tolstoy or Dostoyevksy -- and I would say shoot for the latter two if you can't seem to stomach Dickens and still want something enormous to consume.

Oh, I like Dickens. It's just that some characters just wreck the flow. It's like, "Here comes Lucie Manette, here to lovingly tuck her father into bed; beautiful and lovely as a sweet dove is young Madamoiselle Manette, yadda yadda."
I've done Dostoevesky. For him, it's the Russian names that get me fuddled.

 

[Received]

Yeah, the Russian names are almost impossible to get through, and this is what kept me from War and Peace (with the foreknowledge that there are over 400 Russian names in a single text, I couldn't help but shrink), but it didn't turn out too bad really -- actually, it turned out incomparably marvelous.

I agree with you regarding Dickens, and this is why I think he's appropriate for more of our sensitive, less critical moods. I still say you should read Hard Times.